Employers are obviously interested in grades that reflect the objective skill level of the to-be-employed.

The problem is people subconsciously build up explanations for their observed performance. If a kid routinely has a hard time with maths, its more probable that they develop a causal model that puts themselves in a static role: "I'm just not good at maths". What inter-subjective grading does is strengthening this belief: Imagine this kid learning really hard for a test, then still getting a bad grade. Lesson learned: Effort makes no difference.

What you want school to archieve is the exact opposite. You want to build up a mental model where the personal effort is the differentiator between good and bad results: "I just didn't learn well enough" instead of "I'm just bad at maths."

Grading that way makes it hard to assess objective performance, but it enables the kid to get nearer to his/her optimal performance.

(The opposite is probably more fitting for HN: Kids who didn't develop this model in school because they were "just good in maths" often didn't learn to learn and later have a hard time in college and beyond. Me included :))

Ideally schools would allow for both: Relative grading all the way up to the last school year, then a final test assessing objective performance. That way you maximize the development of a mental model of self-efficiacy while also allowing employers and universities to decide wheter the person is good enough for the position in question.

(I'm an educational scientist by trade)

Employers are hardly interested in grades at all. Do you know anyone that does? Society uses grades as a selector for higher education pretty much exclusively. This is a goal for which we can objectively measure its relevance. I suspect there's a thing or two to learn from that.

An invididual's letter grades are not important, but selecting from a cohort of individuals that outperform others is important (also why it's important to be from that cohort). You're not aiming for every single hire to be successful (probably not practical or possible to invest enough resources to be able to evaluate that), but you can make the odds tilt in your favor.

Couldn't the lack of absolute feedback lead to uncertainty and therefore overcompensation? I'm thinking of my school colleagues who were set on entering college courses with very high entrance requirements. Without a clear idea whether they were doing enough, I could see them absolutely burning out.

The problems, however, are multifold.

I remember a high school art class where I just had a complete writers-block - or maybe artists-block - and was not able to do much on a large pencil drawing while sitting in class. I just couldn't work while seated in rows with everyone else sketching away, for some reason.

But as the deadline came due, I sat down at home and sketched for 16 hours straight, barely even stopping for eating. It required so much shading that my hand hurt like never before. It ended up looking quite good, from what everyone told me.

When the grades came back, I had a D, while others who had much worse looking and mostly unshaded drawings received Bs. Naturally, I asked about this, and I was told that I must not have put in much effort, because he didn't see me putting in effort.

My burning rage at this event and the entire logic behind it all has been permanently seared into my memory.

You can't really sustain what you did long term. You have to learn how to draw in every situation over a longer period of time to do well. You can't binge draw like this over the long term and be healthy; you could very well have not been able to overcome the drawing by talent alone and have been unable to seek the teacher's help through technique.

Teachers don't just care about the result, they also want you to learn good process too.

I have to write code in an open plan office which I find uncomfortable, noisy, distracting and without any sense of personal space. I'm vastly more productive at home. But I can't mess around at work all day, and then do all my productive work in the evening; I have to force myself to get to it.

Unfortunately, employers as a whole would rather see the appearance of productive work rather than create an environment that fosters actual work. It's alleged that saving money is the reason, but I struggle to see how the huge waste of human capital makes any rational sense.

It's important that you tell people how much effort you spend on things when they don't see it happen. It's true in so many ways; you learned it early.

Also I'd add that something like art class is particularly hard to grade because you don't want to let the naturally gifted coast through. You want to hold everyone to higher individual standards. The teacher may have thought this must have been easy for you and if you put in more effort it could have been way better. Not always right, but sounds like that was the info available to him.

As someone who isn't in the arts field at all, so please bear with my probable ignorance: why do you not want to let them coast through?

Each class has a set of requirements that need to be passed and the pupil's level of performance at it graded; if someone is gifted at it then they're already at a high performance level.

To put it in a way that's more related to me: I'm a software engineer and lets say that I decide to go take some first year software engineering classes again, particularly the ones related to learning how to program: I will blow through the classes in 1/5th of the time while playing a game on another monitor and still do very well. Shouldn't I get a high grade despite the fact that I put a lot more effort into my invasion of the Soviet Union while playing Japan on Hearts of Iron while I was also developing?

However, teaching people life lessons in the form of a permanent black mark on their record isn't exactly for their own good. For better or worse, those high school grades do actually matter for college admittance.

Yet, maybe they did me a favor. I was able to underachieve to my heart's content at a college full of dummies. Who really needs a prestigious college anyhow.

Rather than make this a long comment, here is what I think should be done:

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158

Effort should be praised, but not rewarded if it's result did not get anyone further than they were before.

Getting all B's is not a very good indicator of anything...

This has caused some issues later in life...

It seems to me that having parents and teachers praise hard work are different things. Kids likely aren't looking for the same kind of emotional support from the two.

Relatedly, even evaluating the hardness of hard work would be difficult if you don't observe it. I've had (university) students occasionally tell me that they have spent implausibly long hours studying for my classes. Hey, maybe they aren't lying about the time spent, but my general suspicion is that "studying" consists of opening the textbook and placing it to the side while they play around on Facebook or some such nonsense.

I had some horrible teachers in high school (one IT and physics teacher comes to mind). Most people flunked both subjects. I passed both, but only because I liked both subjects and had some affinity for them.

But he was definitely to blame: he understood the subject matter well, but was horrible at teaching and arrogant about it. I think they fired him a few years later.

If you have 85-90% of students failing your subject, something is probably wrong with the teaching (or the subject matter is too hard).

I think any kid should at least be able to pass a subject if he is of average intelligence + puts in some effort. Not too hard, but not too easy either. But perhaps also account for the fact that some people will always be horrible in one or two subjects.

EDIT: People, I said nothing about children paying parking tickets or about poor people. My comment is an example of a self-inflicted problem that is exacerbated by self-inflicted delay, to which the consequences must be borne by the individual as is the nature of life - NOT a dissertation on poverty. These distractions do little to serve the debate.

For instance, I was fined for not displaying a parking ticket. But I took a picture of the machine that wasn't able to process my payment. I emailed picture to the appeals process and was forgiven the fine. Which essentially meant I got to park for free (shiny sticker)

If someone is trying, even if they fail, that means they are more likely to improve if they receive the right sort of feedback or support. Someone who isn't trying lacks even the basic motivation necessary to try.

Instead, if you treat someone who tries and fails the same as someone who doesn't and fails, then there is an incentive for the person to not even try!

For your parking ticket, if you geniunely tried to pay a parking ticket but couldn't (for example because you didn't have the money at the time) it totally doesn't make sense to charge you double. It would make more sense to do something like put you on a payment plan, or otherwise take into account that you have legitimate difficulties. Financial, organizational, or otherwise.

Zero tolerance policies do not "solve problems" because they ignore the individual contexts.

I, an adult of sound mind and stable finances, occasionally forget to pay parking tickets on time. I am punished by a doubling of the fine. I deserve that punishment by breaking the law a second time, and I pay for that violation of the law by paying the double fine. It sucks but I move on.

These edge case straw-men are not a productive retort to my statement.

Many Americans spend basically their entire adult lives with outstanding fines against them, if only because it's not possible for them to ever pay the cumulative fines + subsequent punishments. Throw on issues like bail and you've built a system someone can fall into and never get out of

The judge or magistrate reduced the fine by the maximum amount they could when I explained that I had made a simple error while trying to follow the parking rule.

There are different purposes to different activities. Teaching kids how to learn, for instance, anticipates a different outcome than chastising people for antisocial parking.

Or do you believe yelling at sick children until they get healthy is the proper approach?