Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Any PG kids never skipped a grade?

The need to qualify achievement is something that is seen in everything we do. What grades we make, how much we earn. What neighborhood, what kind of car etc.... Judgement looms. You can happily stand back and say "not me" but it's a fact of life wherever you live.

I think in a perfect world, children should be allowed to test out of any class they are proficient in regardless of age. If they are proficient in all high school requirements at 10, so be it! It doesn't make sense to make a kid sit through material they already know for the sake of staying with their age peers, their social skills or maintaining lockstep with any school system mandate.

My DS8 is radically accelerated. Started middle school at 7. This year he will have 7-9th grade classes. Do I care what his grades are? Not particularly. As long as he is happy, which he is, I will let him take whatever path, at whatever speed he chooses. Will he be in college at 11? Maybe. Maybe not. He might decide he wants to take a year off to pursue the properties of Goop, who knows?

We all know that the education system in the U.S. has some serious flaws, but we have to work with what we have. The reason that we are all here is that our children don't fit the traditional path and never will. It is our responsibility to give them what they need and help them grow to who they will become. In a million years, I would have never imagined my son on his current path, but it is what it is.

I guess my point is snarking gets you no where. We're all doing the best that we can.

Yes, I agree.

I think that the focus on GPA and test scores (both in college admissions at the high end and NCLB and high-stakes testing at the low end) drives people to do unhealthy things (e.g. grade grubbing & inflation, the Atlanta testing scandal). IMHO, all this is perfectly predictable.

It's true that systems using a single set of exams to determine university admissions put a lot of pressure on teenagers. But I wonder if we may have more pressure here: in this country, there's a huge amount of pressure to be a perfect student with a long list of extracurriculars, high SAT scores, etc. And then there's the lopsided nature of admissions that confer advantages for all kinds of groups (legacies, etc.). And even so, the admissions process is still pretty opaque.

And from what I've seen of European exams, the questions they ask are much more substantial than 2-minute-max multiple choice SAT questions.

At least when everything is based on one exam, the system is transparent and it treats everyone the same way. So, that's one big source of stress that doesn't exist in places like Europe.

Interesting mixture of reactions there :-)

Of course I know more than one student can get an A! I don't think I'm inventing the concept of grading on a curve which I was first driven to look up when I was trying to understand why all the education blogs were so excited about this newfangled standards-based grading thing.

More to the point, though, I think it's a mistake for the same work to be used for learning and for summative assessment. Suppose I am a rational student and I am given an assignment that I could approach in two different ways. I'm confident that if I do X, I can do it well; it exercises skills I already have (the teacher may or may not know this). If I do Y, I don't know whether I'll do well - it'll take me outside my comfort zone (the teacher may or may not know this), I'll learn a lot from it, but this time it might not come off. If my aim is to maximise new learning, I should do Y, but if my aim is produce the highest quality work, I should do X. Now if I'm the teacher assigning and marking this work [and by the way, I have often been in just this situation], I'm in a real bind - I want my students to learn, so I should be encouraging them to do Y, but in fairness I have to award higher marks to better work; and as noted, in a large class I won't know to what extent each student is taking each strategy, because I won't have perfect knowledge of what the students know or can do, so even if I wanted to reward students who choose to go for Y, I can't reliably do it. (One student's X work will be another's Y work!) In the end I'll do some fudge (and different teachers will do different fudges). That the grades coming out of that fudge actually matter to university admissions means that it'll be very hard for me to tell my students that they should go for Y because they'll learn more and do better work in the long run: any student who sees their GPA as at risk of not being good enough now is obviously going to switch to strategy X. Risk taking and learning are reduced.

Here's another thing I don't think I'm making up. How many times have you read about someone postponing, or considering postponing, the point at which their child enters high school or takes high school classes for credit, because "the grades count". Wouldn't it be better if those decisions could be taken on the basis of what's best for the child's learning?

Of course assessing just on the basis of exams is problematic; I'm not claiming I know a perfect system. In the UK many qualifications have included elements like coursework (where a given exercise is marked by the student's own teacher against a given markscheme, with a sample being externally moderated) or variants like work that's done under controlled conditions (e.g. away from parents and the internet!) but without time limit. Those all have their own problems, and are relatively out of favour at present.

I had to google Dux Litterarum - apparently it exists, but that's how prominent a concept it is here. In contrast, I've more than once read "is it fair to deprive him/her of the chance to be valedictorian?" as a thing to take into consideration when contemplating a skip.

To try to drag this back into relevance to this forum, and in recognition that however we feel about the system we aren't generally in a position to change it, here's what I think the implications are for us as parents of gifted children. By and large our children are the ones who are going to do well anyway. Our job is to try to make sure they see the hoop-jumping GPA-game-playing for what it is: a silly game which has precious little to do with learning. It's fine if they need to follow strategy X sometimes in order to obtain their goals, but let's help them know what they're doing and be doing it by deliberate choice, not just because they can't imagine any other way. Let's tell on them if they're doing X and the teacher thinks they're doing Y! Let's encourage them to take risks - even, sometimes, risks with the GPA. If that's too hard, at least ask them, "What would be the most interesting thing to do here, if you didn't need to care what the teacher would think of the end result?"

ColinsMum, I, too, think this is a great post -- it definitely addresses the issue a little more squarely than your first effort, which stressed the idea that straight As and Valedictorian awards can only be achieved if enough other kids fail.

I have no argument that our educational system -- like every other one on the planet -- needs improvement. I do, however, vehemently oppose the notion that one person's academic success is somehow tied to or dependent upon the failure of others.

When everything is based on "one exam", presumably for all the colleges in the country, who determines what that exam is? I don't trust the federal government to do so. In the U.S. there colleges can look at the ACT, SAT I (reasoning), SAT II (subject tests), A.P., and I.B. exams, and there also prestigious contests such as the AMC (math) whose scores some colleges ask about. Most of these exams have essay components. Multiple choice questions do have the advantage of permitting broad coverage of a subject.

In predicting college grades, both high school grades and SAT/ACT scores matter. Why shouldn't high school grades count?

I'm a staunch defender of tests on this site, but even I don't think tests and grades should be everything, even if they are of primary importance. A college could value business experience in a business major, research experience in a science major, hospital volunteering in a pre-med, and music and artistic achievement for arts majors. They could (and do) value these achievement even when unrelated to students academic plans, taking them as signs of hard work and ambition.

There is no consensus on this among the researchers or administrators. Noncognitive variables play increasingly more important role in admission processes at many universities and in predicting college success.

Which researchers have found that high school grades and SAT scores are not predictive? Below is one of many studies confirming what I wrote. High school grades have a larger noncognitive component than SAT scores -- smart but lazy students may have good scores but mediocre grades.

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/cb/validitySAT08-predicting_1st_year
Validity of the SAT for Predicting First-Year Grades: 2008 SAT Validity Sample
Krista Mattern; Brian Patterson
02/11/2011
The findings for the 2008 sample are largely consistent with the previous reports. SAT scores were found to be correlated with FYGPA (r = 0.54), with a magnitude similar to HSGPA (r = 0.56). The best set of predictors of FYGPA remains SAT scores and HSGPA (r = 0.63), as the addition of the SAT sections to the correlation of HSGPA alone with FYGPA leads to a substantial improvement in prediction (Δr = 0.07). This finding was consistent across all subgroups of the sample, by both institutional characteristics and demographics (Δr ≥ 0.06). All correlations presented here have been corrected for restriction of range, but the same basic patterns hold for the raw correlations.

The exams are very different overseas. First, no multiple choice. Second, students often get to choose the questions they want to answer; the paper may have 8 questions, and you only have to answer 5 (or whatever). The exams are graded by humans who are subject experts, using guidelines created by the examination commission (here's an example from a recent mathematics exam in Ireland). If you look at that exam, you'll see that it's light years ahead of our SAT or AP exams in terms of what it measures and how it measures it.

There's typically a national curriculum and all students take the same exam. I understand that many Americans are used to the idea of local control, but this approach wastes a lot of money by repeating effort and doesn't guarantee quality anyway. A national curriculum is also transparent.

As far as I know (in Ireland and the UK anyway), the exams are written by subject experts (university academics, possibly teachers). I recall that my university tutor (in Ireland) wrote questions for the O or A levels (in the UK).


With respect, that's a very US-centric view of how things ought to be (and it's not backed up by evidence; I also think there are questions about the predictive value of the SAT. Not to mention the effects of grade inflation.). The goal of the overseas exams is to measure how well you learned the material overall, not how well you learned as it came, in small pieces.

Obviously, European students get grades every year, but as ColinsMum said so well, it's a mistake to use the same work for learning and summative assessment. What counts is eventual mastery, not the steps taken getting there. A parallel is athletic competitions. We don't pick Olympic competitors or medalists based on how well they did throughout the duration of their training. Nothing matters but the "test:" how fast you ran the 100 in the qualifier race, how good your axels looked, etc.

One thing about US schools that really bothers me is that the percent of correct problems on homework often counts toward final grades. Students aren't even allowed to make mistakes when they're learning! To me, that kind of constant pressure has got to be worse than one set of exams that you can repeat next year.

Okay, but this study found that the SAT I is a poor predictor compared to grades. Also, that article you cited was written by the College Board. They don't seem to be in a position to be objective about the value of the SAT!

We have avoided skipping our daughter. The first school she entered had so many gifted children and they were ability grouped (although called other things). I realize now just how much she learned through this.

We moved and it was different, but she was in fifth grade. Kids have sex much earlier here and I am not comfortable with her being with older children. She is in advanced classes and has always done well with learning more.

She ended up one grade ahead here just based on their school cut-off date, but she is way ahead of any of them.