Karen Allendoerfer (ravena at cco.caltech.edu)
> When you win the competition, or at least
> see that you have a chance at winning the competition, then it can be fun.
> But when you're seriously overmatched, and just lose, badly, over and over
> again, it can be demoralizing. So I think one thing that is important is
> to target the competition appropriately. There ought to be some segregation
> by ability among classes, I think, so that the competition is fair.
<Devil's Advocacy On>
THis is a perfect description, not of school, but of real life--certainly
of real life doing science. It's not so much a matter of being overmatched
in terms of raw ability, as simply lacking the network and the
politics and the "in" with the crowd that gives you a chance to
get your foot in the door and do your work, get the grant, publish the
paper....
Well, admittedly, I'm in a glum mood these days, but I grow weary of
carrying around competitive shackles compared to some of my peers.
In real life there IS no segregation by ability or by connections,
and competition is far from fair. But would you want to be segregated
apart from the Golden Boys of science and judged differently?
To hasten to clarify, I'm not advocating this for school children, but
am thinking about where this thread started.
Alan Shutko <ats at acm.org> writes
>Would you rather students strive to learn and
> understand the material, or students strive to get the best test scores.
Obviously any teacher would like their students to learn, but there
has to be some objective assessment of their learning.
>If test scores are made that important, students will stop helping
>their peers, because now it's a competition.
Only if you grade on a curve! ;-) If you grade on an
absolute scale, rather than a curve, then students are only competing
"against the clock", not against each other. 95% is an A for everyone
who gets it, and hurrah if they all do! (Fortunately I teach graduate
students where this is feasible!)
<Devil's Advocacy OFF>
--
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