The discipline-based hundred mark system and A-through-to-F scale are two main grading methods, which are used widely in higher institution. In this essay, it presents the advantage and disadvantage of hundred mark system and A-through-to-F scale.
Hundred mark system is one main assessment method used in college. The traditional paper-pencil test is used more common to evaluate learning in higher education(Alquraan, 2012). The score under the hundred mark system is not ambiguous. It can increase teachers’ and students’ attention to the results of study to a certain extent and cause competition. Its purpose is to accurately quantify the educational process and outcomes, and to integrate the advantages of differentiation, precision, and ease of statistical analysis.
However, this type of recording is very easy to produce a phenomenon that as long as the score is high, the students and teachers are successful. Thus, many teachers, students and parents lacks a comprehensive evaluation of a student’s performance. The result is that schools and teachers focus on scores and test design teaching plans, while ignoring the goals of quality education and hindering the students’ all-round development. Although the appraisal structure also lists evaluations of students’ ideological, moral, emotional, and personality aspects, the evaluation method for the cognitive domain has been overweighted by the strict scoring method.
As for the evaluation of non-cognitive areas, it has become an embellishment. Even if there are evaluations, students and parents will not take it seriously. This kind of evaluation has a tendency of giving priority to testing, which causes the teaching to focus on improving the test scores, which virtually obliterates the development of other aspects of the students. The hundred mark system makes students often to be blamed for a mistake in a question, and even a punctuation mistake. Students will attribute diverse meanings to different grades(Eiszler, 1983). Some students feel distressed and is filled with regrets if their score is not high. Students do not learn autonomously based on their own interests, rather than passive learning for scores. Students are wasting energy in pursuit of a few points of improvement, rather than focusing on more interesting and meaningful things.
The A-through-to-F scale system changes the tendency of simply evaluating the level of knowledge or thinking about the development of intelligence in isolation. It proposes the improvement of non-intellectual psychological factors as an important goal of quality education. It proposed operational problems in emotional areas and explored them in practice, changing the structure and mode of evaluating students. The grading system influences students’ motivation to exert effort(Paredes, 2017). A direct effect of the implementation of the A-through-to-F scale system as a way to grade score is to weaken the competition over score and free students from the shackles of the score.
Since there is no percentage problem, the qualification rate is substantially increased. Also, the phenomenon that teachers only pay attention to the top students and ignore or even eliminate backward students is avoided to some extent. The evaluation of student’s personality leads teachers to respect students’ diverse hobby. The purpose of the test is not only measurement, but more emphasis on its own education. This provides a good educational environment for the overall development of students.
However A-through-to-F scale system is also marked with some disadvantage. The measurement under the system are fuzzy in the cognitive field. The graded scores have their own deficiencies as a basis for analyzing teaching quality and teaching problems, although the assessment of students in terms of non-intellectual factors has been greatly strengthened. In fact the objective evaluation has become more difficult. It poses the challenge to the teachers as well. Teachers should observe and record students’ learning behaviors at any time. The number of operations and the workload increase.
The grade system reduces the burden on students by reducing the burden on students’ examinations. The students’ interest in learning and the content requirements for learning must be more extensive. This requires adjustments in the teaching content. Many schools need to adjust the teaching activity in classes and divided the activities into disciplines such as science and technology, labor and technology, arts, arts and crafts, sports, and many other disciplines. Students volunteered to participate in their activities according to their own preferences. Under the guidance of a teacher, they should use their own brain.
This raises the demand for teacher’s classroom teaching quality. All of these must be guaranteed by a highly qualified education team and high quality teaching. Therefore, this grading system seems to be just a change in the form of scores, and the actual implementation is not simple. This reform involves both theoretical problems and those problems closely related to educational practice; it involves both teaching and education management; it involves both internal and external factors of schools.
It can be said that the hundred mark system has a qualitative difference from the A-through-to-F scale system as a graded system. The fundamental difference is that the latter breaks the limitation of single-factor evaluation by only fractions, and uses the idea of comprehensive evaluation to include intelligence and non-intelligence factors, education and teaching, and in-class and after-class. Teachers in colleges of science and engineering and colleges of nursing employ diverse methods to evaluate learning(Alquraan, 2012).There is supposed to be coordinated use and development of those two methods in the educational system of higher education.
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