Our middle school uses the traditional 90-80-70-60 as the cut for A-B-C-D. I do think that grade inflation is definitely an issue but at the same time many assessments (other than unit tests) and daily classwork tend to be less than 10 points so to achieve 90% average means that you often need to earn all the points (4/4, 5/5, 6/6, ...).
Another reason why frequent assessment sucks.
Hmmm.... I'd argue that in addition to what Bostonian posted, this is actually a problem with
high-stakes and low-VALUE summative assessment practices.
It's not the frequency of assessment which is the problem-- it's that mistakes are so COSTLY in some schema.
It's no better to have just two graded assessments for an entire class, really-- because if you have one bad day... well.
Suppose that there are two extremes:
1 class teaches with "daily" formative quizzes and eight weekly take-home exams to be completed in a student's own handwriting-- 50% of the course grade is those daily quizzes, worth 5 points each (or so) and by design, are not difficult. The other half is from the summative exercises which are by intention more difficult. The key is this, though--
this kind of scheme has a LOT of points in it-- maybe 1000. The other has a final exam only-- 100 points, and what you score is your percentage.
Now, someone who has never seen a very bright child that cannot
test well might not immediately see the problem with option two, but speaking as someone who has counseled a lot of struggling college students, that segment of people is real, and they aren't all just failing to master the material. Some of them simply have anxiety re: exam performance. I think that some of THOSE students deserve an A which reflects their mastery of the material.
I also believe that some students who simply "test well" probably
don't deserve that A, but an A-, B+ instead.
The combination of formative/summative and exercising more LOW-STAKES, high-difficulty assessment does lead to a more equitable distribution of grades. Students also tend to retain more of the material.
I know this one because I've done things both ways. (I was forced to do it the latter way when I was teaching a course
for another professor.)
Apples to apples comparison is that some students find the relentless grind of daily work to be a pain and they whine about it, but it's still better than having a single bad day mean that you can no longer hope to "demonstrate excellent mastery" of the material in a class.
Th problems that I'm seeing now are that "efficiency" and "high throughput" are being confused with high quality in teaching and assessment practices. Those may be mutually exclusive concepts, quite frankly, when one is discussing real students and authentic learning. There may just not be any non-labor intensive means of doing teaching
right.So teachers/faculty don't assign much graded work because
they don't want to spend so time grading it, students who most need it lack formative assessment feedback which is meaningful, and the result is rather predictably that students tend to focus on testing well rather than learning well.
It's also true that human beings all write assessment items a bit differently from one another, and those quirks
matter a great deal when you offer summative assessments. Students have to have some way of knowing what it is that you're going to ask, HOW you're going to ask it, and what you're going to look for in their responses. Without that information, it's really a bit unfair. KWIM?
College professors have generally gotten round that one by being extremely generous with partial credit and by avoiding over-reliance upon test bank questions and cloze/multiple choice/true-false testing. Offering more open-ended testing is a great way to see what students
actually know and understand. If they get a short-answer question wrong, odds are good that they have
some parts of the concept right, just not enough of them to be "correct."
It's not just about the top end of the distribution, though that tends to take care of itself in this kind of grading philosophy as well. I prefer that because it promotes growth mindset in students who can see that NO mistake is ever catastrophic in terms of their grade. The grade is just a reflection of learning/mastery, ideally.
Personally, I'm of the belief that
infrequent assessment sucks even more than the frequent variety.
