A third effort to improve the situation is being tried in the high school of Kansas City, Kansas.[83] In each classroom is posted a conspicuous chart telling students what they must do to get high grades. One may pass with a C if one does the required work taken up in a sixty-minute combination recitation and study period. If one is to receive B, it is required among other virtues that one be sufficiently well prepared to recite without prompting from the teacher. Furthermore, one must do outside work and report on it. The C pupil does his work in the class, but that is not enough for a B. The A pupil must fulfill even higher requirements. Each department is allowed to post, in addition to the general statements made for the whole school, special regulations which obtain for the work of that particular department.
This system is a kind of public definition of the marks, and has the great advantage of clearing up in the minds of the students what often seems to them to be an unjust and mysterious scheme.
The Study of Marks as an Introduction to a Study of the School System
The study of grading systems has attracted much attention of late among the students of the science of education. It is an excellent subject with which to illustrate scientific methods, because the records being in quantitative form lend themselves to easy and exact statistical comparison.
There is no better body of material for a principal to employ in arousing his teachers to a recognition of the fact that they are factors in a system. Marks are a kind of technical language used in the school system. Their successful use calls for some comprehension of the meaning and problems of the system as a whole.
EXERCISES AND READINGS
Let members of the class make up a school program. Let there be in a certain high school eight teachers, one well qualified in each of the following subjects: English, mathematics, Latin, physics, biology, modern languages, domestic science, and manual arts. There are seven classrooms and a study room. There are 400 students, distributed as follows: 140 freshmen, 110 sophomores, 90 juniors, and 60 seniors. The school is in session from 8.45 A.M. to 12 noon and from 1.30 to 3.30 P.M. Make up a program of classes. Record all the questions that are not answered in the above statement of conditions. Supply answers yourself, recording explicitly the answer which you give in each case. Let the members of the class then compare programs.
What is the difference between such a problem as above defined and the problem of making out a program for an elementary school?
A very good exercise under this chapter is to give a written exercise to the class and then ask the writers to mark each his own paper after the question and its possible answers have been discussed by the class. In like manner let each member of the class mark a certain English composition or a recitation made by some member of the class. Let the members of the class rate the various members of the class in regard to their work. After each of these markings make a general table showing the distribution of grades and note the differences between the different markers.
There is very little written on detailed administrative problems. A very good reading exercise at this point can be made up by referring to Monroe’s “A Cyclopedia of Education” (Macmillan) and requiring the student to find ten strictly administrative topics and ten which have to do with methods. For most of the articles in the “Cyclopedia” reading references are given.