What do you think about this? Honestly, I thought it went out years ago, but it seems to be common practice at DD8's gifted magnet. They don't tell the class everyone's grades, but if a child gets a 100% (or a few children) and others don't do too well, the teacher will mention it, seemingly as a motivator or something ("Janie got a 100% and she's the only one, so the rest of you need to work harder").

I wonder if someone thinks this is the "way you handle gifted kids" or something? They did it last year as well. ??

FWIW, my kid is often the one getting the 100s.

In addition to being appalling, I believe it's also a violation of FERPA (the federal law that protects privacy rights of students). Have a look.

DeeDee

Ditto DeeDee... I am almost positive giving out students grades is against the law now.

Wow. I hadn't actually considered that. I found this:

http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/parents.html

but it isn't helping me too much--is this what we're talking about?

"Under FERPA, a school may not generally disclose personally identifiable information from a minor student's education records to a third party unless the student's parent has provided written consent."

I agree with DeeDee.

In high school I was sometimes singled out in this way, and I did not mind it. I was a competitive student who wanted to do better than his classmates. If the student being mentioned does not mind, I don't think it is a problem. The best athletes are often recognized.

I wish on student report cards that the average grade were provided. If your child gets an A in math in a class of 20 you may interpret it differently if 5 kids did than if 15 kids did.

Are there schools that don't do this, gifted or otherwise? It was pretty common in my experience. Teachers might even give some kind of small reward to kids who got 100% on a test, the best essays were regularly read aloud (and credit given to the author), etc.

I even had an Algebra II teacher who would post the recent top test scores and their owners in a corner of the board. It was one of the few classes where I wasn't regularly on the top, either. Maybe I should have been doing some of that homework after all? Nah... close enough.

I don't see any problem with publicly acknowledging good performances. I would have a problem with publicly calling out poor ones. "Praise in public, correct in private" applies here.

Yes. Colleges no longer post grades, even tagged with student ID or SSN rather than name-- it's no longer permitted. In the same way, elementary schools should not be releasing grades of any individual student to any person except that student or the parents.

DeeDee

This is actually a bit difficult to find specific, official information about--if anyone can hunt it down, I'd be grateful. It's clear that educational records must be confidential, but I'm not clear on whether grades on individual tests or assignments are considered educational records. I certainly have no plans to pursue this issue ATM, but I'd like to have the info just to have it.

Add me to the list of those that would question the school re FERPA and privacy.

I remember in college when I was taking a 300+ person psych lecture course they used to post the test scores in order to demonstrate just exactly how a bell curve worked - plotting dots for how many people got each score. I overheard people one day looking at the chart and making really disparaging - almost threatening - remarks about the "curve buster". Apparently that was me but luckily names weren't posted, only the grade. These were college students at a highly competitive university. I can only imagine how a group of pre-adolescents in a highly competitive gifted program might treat the offending "curve buster." Even if not illegal I think it sounds like a really, really bad idea.

Dude, I think this was once common (I remember top papers being posted on the bulletin board) but is no longer seen as a good thing.




I'm not sure how you would fairly determine if they "mind." Furthermore, maybe they don't mind at first but then they do very much mind later on the playground.

This time around, I actually heard about DD's 100 from another parent who heard my child's grade from her child. DD hadn't mentioned it to me! That was awkward.

Sorry, Bostonian, I'm with MON on this one. Twenty plus years later, I still recall teachers holding my work up for praise and leading me to be ridiculed in the hallways by my high school peers. The worst event involved my chemistry teacher singling me out as the only person who scored 100% on her exam. I could feel the loathing from my classmates and actually had one of the other students threaten to give me food poisoning before the next test. I don't know anyone who was motivated to do better by my academic success. I didn't learn the same way as most of my peers. They knew that I was different and every time a teacher held up my work, it just reinforced their perception. Sometimes I think that these teachers never went to high school.

Under FERPA regulations, the definition of "education records" includes those which are "(1) [d]irectly related to a student; and (2) [m]aintained by an educational agency or institution or by a party acting for the agency or institution", 34 C.F.R. § 99.3(a), with a specific exclusion for "[g]rades on peer-graded papers before they are collected and recorded by a teacher", 34 C.F.R. § 99.3(b)(6).

Yes, I saw that there was actually a Supreme Court case on peer-graded papers--interesting. So apparently you can completely circumvent this if you just have the kids grade everything. (I very much doubt this test was student-graded.)

I'd like to see something in plain English from a state educational authority saying that student grades on all assignments must be kept confidential. I suppose this may not exist because we all know that students do share their grades (not the same as a teacher sharing them, but I wonder how they handle that legally).

I can easily think of another instance where this school violated FERPA, if this is the law. I now understand some odd teacher behavior in that instance.

When my son was moved from private school where all of his peers were pretty much on a par with him academically to a public school where he stood out immediately as smarter, teachers singled him out for what they thought was praise. Instead he climbed into a shell of mediocrity and hiding his gifts. It has taken him until his sophomore year in college to regain his confidence and willingness to show his intelligence in a classroom settings.

It may be a well-meaning policy, but it can have devastating and long-lasting effects both on those who are singled out for high performance and for those who are reminded that they haven't met the mark yet again.

Truly effective teaching inspires students to compete against themselves and to collaborate and support each other. My kids have had maybe three or four teachers who knew how to do this, and the effect on the entire class was impressive.

I'm impressed that you see the problems with this despite your child being the one singled out for praise. You're right that it will also have effects your own child - both in creating envy and resentment with peers and the risk of your child's personality being one that causes a negative reaction to public praise pointing out that they're different and better.

Maybe there is a sex difference here. I think more boys than girls may be motivated by competition. My classmates did not loathe me for being one of the best students. Instead I was often the person they asked for help from, especially in math and science.

There are likely cultural differences regarding the value of competition. In many countries class ranks are displayed publicly, with little regard to students' feelings. The Tiger Mother famously wrote, only half joking, that her children were not allowed to

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

Yeah, I read her book and I am not striving to be her.


I found it interesting that DD did not mention the grade or the public acknowledgement to me. After the embarrassing conversation with the other parent, I asked her how she did on her math test (we had studied a bit the night before) and she said, "Fine." Fine? "I got an A." I hear you got a 100%. "Who told you that?" She seemed satisfied about the grade, but clearly sheepish/bewildered/weirded out by what had happened. I need to talk to her about it again, perhaps.

Good grades ARE valued and admired in her current school. Culturally, it's different from a regular public school. However, I feel like that can only go so far.

Exactly. My kids were all in sports so that they learned to use competition to their advantage as a motivator.

The tiger mom is an extreme example of our society's over-emphasis on industriousness. IMO, we overvalue this quality and undervalue the idea of slowing down to think a bit and get it right. Don't get me wrong: it's great to get stuff done, but overdoing this approach can lead to problems (e.g. crushing homework loads, crazed test prep lasting for months or years, and inferior textbooks being rushed to market to beat the competition).

In the process, perceiving industriousness as all-important allows us to undervalue giftedness.

Individual results will vary.

I mentioned how I was not motivated at all by the posted Algebra II scores, so I guess I'll go ahead and mention how having my essays read to the class on a regular basis (and the teachers asking for my permission to read them to their others) said there was a lot more to my writing abilities than the letter grade itself could communicate. This motivated me to become a novelist. Life had a way of derailing that plan, but I still have every confidence in my abilities, and there's a project sitting on the shelf for the day when the kid is grown up and I have more time on my hands.

If someone was angry at me for doing better than them, my personality is not one that would ever internalize that. That's their problem, not mine.

:nodding: A thing of beauty, this post. No need for me to add anything-- save-- I know that this is true. From a teacher's perspective, I know that it is, because I noted the difference that this one change made (making student grades on assignments completely anonymous)-- since that change largely happened while I was teaching at several universities. My colleagues who saw no problems with the practice had very different classrooms than I did.

My top students frequently HELPED their less-able classmates, and their classmates didn't feel THREATENED by those top performers.

Yeah. NO good can come of this. None. All my classes ever knew what what the top score was-- and that stats associated with individual assignments and also with the class total. That is, unless they shared, which of course some of them did-- but the difference is that this is VOLUNTARY-- the student controls the information, which is appropriate.

I agree with this. And even if praising the 100 WERE an effective form of motivation (which I don't think it is), there is no need to name the person who received the grade. Just say one person received a 100, they know who they are and will still feel the praise. Once, in college, a professor observed that one person got a 100% and if they'd like to identify themselves they could. I chose not to. I saw no benefit to myself in doing so.

Alternatively, in high school I got a certain sense of satisfaction, I admit, by NOT disclosing my grades to my more highly competitive classmates. Drove them nuts that they couldn't tell if they had "beat" me or not. They got no real info on my grades until class ranks came out. I admit to enjoying that a bit, particularly because my approach to academics was to compete with myself and not others. It did not really matter to me what THEIR grades were, so I saw no valid reason to share mine with them. Not sharing did have some entertainment value, though!

I can still recall how sheepish I felt when in graduate school, I hit an O-chem exam out of the park (like, 96% raw score, which is insanely good for this class)... and my DH, our future best man, and a couple of our other close friends were all in this class together...

I wanted to sink into the floor when they found out that I was the one who had earned that 96. The mean was 68 on that exam. I felt AWFUL. And everyone involved was clearly an adult with little to prove at that point. We were all "smart like that."

This felt awful to me because I am not a competitive person, but some of the people who got low scores on that exam were/are. I made them feel bad, and I didn't even get any satisfaction from doing so since it didn't matter to me-- I'd have been thrilled if the low score had been my 96, truthfully.



Finally, yes, yes, YES-- student grades on assignments are covered by FERPA. This was still being sorted while I was in the classroom, but most of our legal advice was to err on the side of caution on that score. My guess is that this runs afoul of the law unless students (and parents) have given explicit permission to have grades shared.

That's interesting b/c, carried to its end, it seems that this law would disallow posting honor rolls as well, which all of my kids' middle and high schools have done. They put the 4.0 honor roll, etc. in the newsletter, hang it on the walls of the school, hold ceremonies for kids who are on the 4.0, 3.75, 3.5, etc. honor rolls...

I would have felt good since I did so well. We clearly have different personalities. In high school chemistry class my (male) friend and I were far ahead of the class. What kept us motivated was seeing who would get a higher score on each test. Why should schools be geared to non-competitive personalities rather than competitive ones? Maybe this another argument for school choice, so that schools can better match the personalities of students and parents.

Many people oppose gifted programs and ability grouping because the children not selected for the gifted program or the "top track" will feel bad. Our middle school no longer publishes an honor roll for this reason, and many high schools have discontinued class ranks or made them almost meaningless by not weighting honors and AP classes. The desire to spare students' feelings can be taken too far.

I agree with Dude on this one. As long as it's in elementary school. In Middle schol and High School, the other kids might ridicule you for being so smart but most of the teachers are doing it for motivation. As long as the teacher is not sharing everyone's grade, I would be OK with that.

If your kid does not handle well with praise, you should talk to the teacher. And talk to your kid too that nothing's wrong with being smart and it's something to be proud of. (My DD wants to know who gets 100 if not her and that gives her motivation. She would relish on being the smartest one in her class. I do not want that in middle school tough because it will put undue pressure on the kid.)

Bostonian, I agree that you and I clearly have different perspectives here. My DH is highly competitive-- like you. So I respect that your perspective is valid.

But my experiences as a teacher would indicate that practices which support competitiveness rather than cooperative learning environments-- on balance, I mean-- leave a greater percentage of students WORSE off than before.

Another reason to support change to a more cooperative model is that students don't wind up viewing future colleagues as "the enemy" when they need to learn how to work in teams. This is really crucial in engineering and science disciplines, and it used to be an area where future employer stakeholders and professional organizations were telling colleges that we were FAILING our students in a pretty much EPIC fashion by setting them up to "compete" with one another rather than viewing learning as a potentially collaborative experience without winners and losers. While someone has to lose a football game, that is NOT the case in a biology lab. Nobody "has" to get an F in order for someone else to get an A-- unless we're talking about pure Gaussian grading, which has also fallen out of favor for the same reason-- its arbitrary nature and artificiality.

This isn't about student "feelings" so much as a pragmatic view that suggests that making learning a situation where the 'finish line' is not arbitrary, but has a well-defined set of expectations, makes it fine for a lot MORE students to cross that line with success. Some won't, of course. I'm no suggesting that "we're all winners here" is a good thing, either. I feel that student grades SHOULD reflect to what degree an individual has demonstrated mastery of the subject. But that's all that they should do.


Again, I was witness to that sea change. It's been a very hard sell in the physical sciences, and most of the old guard was never able to accept the truth of it-- in spite of evidence that it was true and that changing it didn't lead to "dumbing down" anything or to making students "soft."

It has led to better retention of women and minorities in those disciplines, however.

Competing on grades misses the entire point of learning.... it completely degrades the experience of learning. My husband and I think grades are bogus. We're also in a homeschool group that caters to gifted children and I believe they opted to leave grades entirely out of the classes.

My parents were always proud when I made the honor roll and they didn't fight to get me into the gifted program because they thought it'd be better for me to be the best in the class, instead of possibly struggling in the gifted program (I was close to the cut-off)

When I found out I made 1 of 2 As in a difficult college biology class (where half the kids failed out each year), I didn't feel proud. (I actually felt disgusted because of the low standards in the class. I hadn't attended a single lecture and read the book the night before the test.)

I despise all of it. If you're getting 100% on a test, it means the work isn't challenging enough, imo. I am a competitive person, but grades don't mean much.

(And if tests just show what you've retained so far, it's great to be able to get 100%, but it still means nothing beyond that you are further than you were than when you first starting learning about the subject. The style of the test matters, too.)

Amen!

This is always my point with competition. It just made me alienated and anti-social.

It really didn't help me to view my classmates as existential threats.

It's pretty anti-social and tends to viewing the world as a conflict of all against all.

http://gcq.sagepub.com/content/34/3/111.short
so that article was from 1990, but when I first read it, I though, yup, that reflects my memory of my personal experience.

I would share with the teacher that you, the parent, prefer that your child not be publicly identified for her test scores. You don't have to explain why, but you can say that you are getting social pressure from the other parents and you don't like it.

Remember what the companies say about the numbers of letters they get about their products, that each person who comments represents hundreds who feel the same but don't comment.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Another problem is that you view superiors in the company hierarchy as threats because the goal is to become CEO as fast as possible and those people are in your way.

There is healthy competition, and there is unhealthy competition. This is what I was trying (and failing) to say in my last post.

I took a really tough chem exam once. Everyone, including me, walked out of class with our brains dripping out our ears. We all thought we failed. When Mr. D. handed back the tests, I saw that I got an A. It turned out that I got a tough 20-point problem correct. I had made an educated guess on how to start it and then followed through logically. The grader wrote VERY, VERY GOOD!!! on my paper.

Everyone else actually did bomb the test. I turned my paper over and refused to discuss it with anyone after class.

IMO, posting my grade publicly or telling everyone that I got an A would have just added to everyone else's misery and may have made them resent me. Why would I want to do that? It wouldn't have accomplished anything positive.

I've held leadership positions at work for a long time now. IMO, if you want to be a good leader, you can't always be competing to be the top dog. If you do, you end up being a bad leader because you tell people that you don't care about them, and the example you set is to look out for yourself and not for anyone else or the organization's goals. This lesson is taught in school.

I'm reminded of something Iucounu said in another thread:


IMO, this is a better way to go.

Sure, maybe there's a correlation between competition and gender, but that doesn't mean that someone should blindly accept uber-competing as being okay because it's part of being male. Humans are intelligent enough to know that we can analyze our behaviors and consider the idea that an approach that feels good personally may not be the best one generally.

I once physically attacked someone for being an academic threat, so that's always something to watch out for.

I had a very similar experience with an advanced materials engineering class - I had a 95, and class ave was a 45 (and the professor pointed out that it would have been quite a few points lower if my score was not counted - but he did not disclose my identity). The professor was pissed about the results of that exam, too, and pretty much reamed out the whole class when he handed it back.

I am a competitive person, and I was very worried about having my identity disclosed. I begged the TA to please not tell anyone (which really surprised my boyfriend).

I appreciate all the thoughts on this. Keep them coming.

It may give you an idea of our teacher situation this year when I say that this was actually near the bottom of my list of current concerns. (Most of which have nothing to do with level of challenge, btw.)

Intimidation purposes and to explain that you *did* consider yourself superior to them and that this simply reinforced it?

Yes, I am aware that my approach to life back in the day was completely insane and non-productive.

Is there any wonder why I have absolutely no leadership skills?

Thinking to another thread here about posted behavior levels causing anxiety... I remember grades being announced in school more as a form of shame-based manipulation than almost anything else. By high school there were many curve teachers who posted all the grades by way of showing the distributions. By third grade I had mostly checked out of grades as being relevant to anything.

Did you really believe that you were superior to them, or were you just trying to prove it to yourself?

I think it was more that I had no identity except that I was superior (read more intelligent) to others, so it was pretty much my core identity at that time (in school). I used my intelligence like a sledgehammer.

My father was always annoyed that I thought I was better than other people, although he helped to create that in the first place.

I discarded that identity, but never replaced it with anything else. Life as competition really doesn't work in the adult world since there really isn't anything to "win" anymore.

My confidence in myself was pretty complete given that I was significantly more intelligent than my age-peers (and my own family) and that's generally who I interacted with.

I'm a very good example of someone who had limited resilience when confronted with actual challenges in college, which ultimately resulted in internal collapse and dysfunction.

And, in my opinion, the answer to the OP is that "No, grades should not be publicized."

Grades are pretty meaningless in DS8's HG 4th grade, but the kids all seem to know each other's MAP scores. They share them with each other. I think the teachers may let the kids know what the high scores on the MAP are, but I don't think they give out names.

I'm not sure if it would matter if the teacher gave out the names -- the kids share this info themselves. I'm sure they'll stop doing that in a year or two.

Personally, I kind of liked flying under the radar being a smart person, but I also was kind of competitive, so I probably wouldn't have minded if my grades were known by all.

Your responsibility was to learn the material, and do your best. You did that. You are not responsible for how other people feel... and you have no control over that, anyway. They do.

This behavior is the same as when we minimize our children's accomplishments in front of other parents, in order to try to protect their feelings.

- Often times it fails/backfires.
- It teaches the child to be ashamed of their abilities.
- It teaches the child that they're (wrongfully) responsible for the feelings of others.

If the schools are implementing a policy where grades are never disclosed, they can be unintentionally having the same effects as above.

Furthermore... how are the students supposed to know which of their peers to seek out for help if they don't know who the top students are?

This is tough, I know of MS teachers that post the top 5 by month, no grade. It is used as a motivational tool, but I see how it can be used against a student by their peer group. What about HS where they post the highest GPAs (They do this in our public school). I work in sales so maybe my take is different, our production is posted. I have been the curve breaker and have suffered some from it. But wether I was presented in front of the class, they all already knew. DS8 is the youngest in his Algabra class, they all know he does well, and overall scores at the highest. He (at this time) has no problems, maybe because they are not his age peers, and do not see it as him being competative, but rather thats just him. I have no easy answer, other then if someone does not want their name put up, dont put it up. We have a person in our office that does not want his production shown (He is very private) so its not shown. I believe friendly competion is good (Math Counts, AMC8-12, olympiads, spelling bees, and baseball) learning how to deal with it is very important. DS8 will never be a pro ball player, but he can play and have fun, win or lose, and do his best and try to get better.

People certainly are apprehensive when faced with somebody much more intelligent than they are, so this certainly isn't necessarily true in a workplace.

If you're intimidating to your co-workers, and it's because of who you are, the responsibility is on you to manage their emotions through your actions or you are going to be in trouble.

Hello, human nature!

I disagree. Waving one person's success at a group as a way of reprimanding the ones who didn't do as well is guaranteed to create resentment and other types of negativity. It's a way for an authority figure to say, "You guys are such stupid losers, but Joey here just so amazing and brilliant. He's a winner." You can't make a statement guaranteed to make people feel rotten about themselves and then blame them for feeling exactly the way that was intended.

And this approach is very different from Joey doing his best and honestly admitting that he's good at some subject if asked. If he didn't ask to have his grades brandished in front of the class, teacher has no business doing it for him. Everyone has things they'd rather other people wouldn't know about them, and it's up to each individual to decide what those things are. Is there anything about yourself you'd prefer not to see advertised to a room full of people (and some may have an axe to grind with you)? If so, now you know how Ultramarina's kid feels.

Not human nature. Personal nature.

In my experience, you're not talking about the ones who are significantly smarter, just the ones who think they are. They intimidate coworkers not because they're smarter, but because they're obnoxious egomaniacs who never stop talking long enough to listen to people who are trying to communicate to them how very wrong they are.

I've worked with both, and I definitely prefer the first group. They're awesome.

I don't think it's so black and white.

Very smart people intimidate or otherwise engender negative reactions in people who aren't as smart without even being aware of it. Using "big words," long or complex sentences, and showing signs of nuanced thinking can all be interpreted as being an obnoxious egomaniac who's out to prove you're better than everyone else. So can arguing passionately about something.

The smart person may have no idea that s/he's using "big words" because they're just everyday words to the speaker. And likewise, no clue that making a point based on evidence or logic may not be appreciated by others who have trouble following the logic.

There was nothing in HowlerKarma's anecdote that indicated "brandishing" by the instructor. She doesn't indicate HOW the friends found out at all. If they were as close then as they eventually ended up, they probably would have found out whether the instructor revealed it or not. If I were in a class with my significant other, I'd want to know how she did.

FWIW, I'm intimately familiar with the kind of negativity and resentment that can come about from public test scores, and the stakes were a heckuva lot higher than grades or class ranking. I'm talking about military ranking here. I was promoted, and others, with a lot more experience, who thought they were more deserving, who were more personally invested in their careers, were not, and this was due almost entirely to my test score. There were even people higher up the food chain who were upset, and did take it out on me in some interesting ways.

I got over it, because being promoted was still better than not being promoted, and ultimately I proved that I truly did deserve it.

The military is not like most corporate situations.

I'm going with Val on this one.

I never said it was black and white. I was obviously generalizing, and I prefaced it with "in my experience." Obviously, my experiences with people who are "significantly smarter" are different from the norm. They're rarer, and less significant.

With that said, there are a number of ways a very intelligent person can communicate that are effective in avoiding negative feelings. First and foremost among them is remembering to have respect for each other, rather than assigning a personal value to an individual based on perceived intelligence.

I don't care how "dumb" someone may seem, they know something that I don't. As an IT worker, I often have to extract some useful information from a clueless end user who doesn't even know they have the info I need, what "useful information" even looks like, etc. So I approach it from the perspective that they're the expert in their particular application or process, please educate me. The other guys I mentioned would generally have a different approach: "What did YOU do?!"

You didn't answer my point.

If you read my message carefully, you'll see that I didn't make claims about talking DOWN to others and assuming that the others are dumb.

I said that very intelligent people often don't realize that they're talking over other people's heads (e.g. big words) or try to apply logic to a discussion in a way that doesn't make sense to others. The effect is to be seen as arrogant or egotistical, when this was not at all the case.

We're talking in a circle, then, because I've already addressed this point:

Hmm-- my apologies, I guess I was implying (but not overtly stating) that this was announced to the class as a whole. I didn't appreciate it. For the reason that Val touched upon earlier-- it was MY test score. MINE. Mine to share-- or not-- when, where, and in what manner I chose.

I had that choice taken away from me.

School systems generally think that your grades are their property since they are trying to sort you into the proper industrial category so that widget production can be maximized.

I guess I never gave it much thought. However, it has been a pretty common practice in all my children's elementary classrooms. My kids don't really care one way or the other. I think it may be more of a problem in middle school and possibly in high school.