Also, with the notification system, both parents and students see each assignment grade in a bubble, so it affects them a lot more than if they saw the whole semester grade (i.e getting an F on a homework assignment isn't a big deal)

And on a more general note, how did we manage to screw this up? (I’m talking about people in my generation, late-20s, 30s, early 40s). Why are our kids anxious? Why do they kill themselves? Why do I hear of a close friend’s niece cutting herself when she’s only 12? We weren’t like that, at least not at this magnitude/level, so the screw-up is on us.

I was a teacher last year and while I can't answer this question fully, I do know that it's a result of perverse incentives and group pressure.

Where I taught at school (a private English school in China) we also had an app that shows parents how their student is doing. They'd see test scores as soon as I uploaded the grades, and I'd get complaints from some of the parents if I was more than a day late in uploading those scores.

In the case of my school, we were competing with other private English schools. If we stopped or had never started using this app, we would get a few parents complaining "why can't I see my son's grade? [school z] does it, so I'm going to switch to their school!" We would lose some parents -- and for our student-retention team, losing too many parents means a pay for cut the following year. They would do anything to keep those parents so promises get made, and ultimately the school would certainly go back to using the app.

Meanwhile the group who built the app gets fabulously wealthy because they've built a (albeit harmful) service that their clients can't possibly get rid of.

Depressingly, the only way I see it turning back would be a force of equally-upset parents who removed their students from the school while asking "why do you use this at all? It's fostering anxiety and depression for my kid".

People vote with their wallets.

Not a parent, but as someone in that generation - I almost feel like it’s the natural evolution of how stuff was done when we were in school, just made worse with always-on technology.

20 years ago, when I was a high school freshmen, I wasn’t supposed to have my cell phone in class (or even turned on during the school day. I consistently broke that rule.) and grades were still generally handed out in person. But by the time I graduated, we had pilot online classes, were often emailed grades, and there was a database for the county that could be accessed to see GPA. None of this was in real time, which was better, but the building blocks were already there.

But to me, this isn’t really about technology. It’s about culture and society that, in my opinion, is extremely unhealthy. As another commenter says, much of this can be seen as “school X does this so we have to follow” and parents are often very competitive about their children’s performance, whether it is in school or sports or drama club or whatever. Those of us raised in the era of “everyone gets a trophy” (but the unspoken part of that is that you still know what the “real” trophies are) and lessons for everything (I was in gymnastics and drama most of my life and took golf, tennis, cheerleading, piano, and voice lessons at various times in my childhood/early teens - and that was modest compared to some of my peers), were often preconditioned or encouraged to achieve certain things — whether they were ultimately important or not. I’m not surprised that kids raised that way would also raise their own kids with similar expectations, now with the additional horror or real-time access not just to grades, but location and other stuff.

This would actually makes teaching easier, as they can use a 0 as a placeholder without having to decide about accidentally pushing a notification.

I don’t think the teacher’s goal is to cause a panic with a transient 0 that’s later replaced — so I don’t see why they’d stop using something that better accomplished their goals.

A related issue is that many parents struggle with school website logins/passwords. I bet a significant percentage never log in, all year. But they can't ignore their phones.

Could also show the average grade of the class for each assignment, to give students, parents, and teachers a reference for how well they are actually doing?

Done every homework assignment and aced every test all semester but then bomb the midterm or final? You're still in trouble. Also vice versa - if you didn't do any homework all year, but the midterm is going to be worth 90% of your grade anyway. And of course we all know there are teachers that are just notoriously harder than anyone else where no one is going to get an A in the class, so there's also an aspect of how well other people have done on the assignment/in the class as a whole.

None of that is new at all, though. The problem is that technology has now calculated out a number and displayed it and we as humans add more importance to that hard number. To me it's similar to the whole "fake news" thing - we're too inclined to glance at what the app on our phone says and not think any further.

And I personally think that grades should show how you progress. If you get better with time it’s good.

And also we all agree that one grade out of any context should’nt mean anything

You know it

It sounds to me like this is the sort of thing that needs to be fixed by each person (for themselves) at some level.

Sure, the provider can give multiple options (message with|without grade, message once a week, no message, etc.) but it's still up to the person to choose.

If you're fretting over a grade coming you're going to fret, you need to fix your own notification system.

You could get messages sent to a parent/carer instead, block the number and check them once a week, wait for the teacher to tell you, etc..

Just because food is put on your plate doesn't mean you have to eat it.

At my Alma Mater, we were always "mass-mailed" when grades were released. The email didn't have our grade specifically, but we could go on the University's portal, navigate to that class, and see whatever grade just got released - tests, exams, projects, anything we could be graded on, really. I loved this system, because the alternative was the grades being released and me not knowing about it, which would result in either having to check every X period of time, or, most likely, coding my own script to do it for me.

I've been told by family that my old High School also works similarly nowadays, as well as other high schools and middle schools in the same district. I can't imagine it working any other way, given the increasing integration of technology.

I'd like to know, though, isn't it just as anxiety-inducing to go in every morning after an assignment, knowing this could be the day it's delivered? Mine were delivered that way back in HS, sometimes at the beginning of class, others in the middle, sometimes we thought we weren't getting it that day, and the teacher would remember at the very end of class, or be reminded by someone. Is it because it's an "it could come at literally any time" thing, instead of being restricted to the class schedule?

I think that's exactly the difference. With in-class grade reporting, you know it's coming inside a 6-7 hour block of time. Even more precise if the assignment was for a given class. With real-time grading, you could receive the grades at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning.

And the real-time grading is likely tied into how unhealthy other online forums can be. The student could get in the habit of just waiting for the grade (refresh, refresh, refresh if it's a web page).

I finished high school before there was any automatic grade reporting (for assignments). And report cards were sent on a known schedule (and received a day or two later in the post). It wasn't stress free, but at least you could mentally prepare for the bad news.

Perhaps a solution would be for these school portal systems to take this into consideration, allowing students to pick how they prefer their grades to be 'released'/delivered - 'unexpectedly', or on a timed schedule.

Watching my son and his peers go through high school (he finished about 5 years ago) in the DC suburbs and the stress level is insane. The good state schools have become increasingly selective since the 90s (when I attended UVA). And it shows in the kids mental health.

I would like to hope that grades delivered in class also come with some modicum of qualitative assessment and psychosocial support. You might be giving Johnny a D grade, but you also tell him that he's making good progress and you know he'll do better next time if he keeps trying. You know that a B grade feels like a catastrophe to Anne, so you remind her that she's a good student and this is just a minor blip. John barely scraped a C, but for him that's a damned miracle and he deserves a resounding attaboy.

All too often, we in tech find a more efficient way of facilitating the core function, but we strip out vitally important secondary functions. Automating the process of grade delivery removes or substantially defers the opportunity for interaction between student and teacher at a critical psychological moment. The grading app doesn't know if a student is pleased with their grade or devastated. It can't see the pride in their smile, it can't see the hope drain out of their eyes. That simple human interaction is infinitely complex and vitally important, but we've reduced it to a couple of bytes of data.

Just wait to release grades until a set time (maybe at the end of class), so students can all check their grades together? It could still be all online and tech savvy.

This topic opened my eyes a bit - and that feature is definitely something I'd push for, if ever given the opportunity to work in that kind of system.

Our grades and weekly averages were posted on a schedule for certain classes, and I would obsessively search the sheet for my student number to make sure I hadn’t fallen below my personal threshold of acceptability (which was often far too high), but at least I knew the date/time grades would be posted.

If I was especially freaking out, I could sometime cajole a teacher to grade an exam or something early — but having that “you could find out at any time your world is still spinning or perilously out of balance” would have been awful. And my parents weren’t even part of this —- if anything they actively tried to make me care less —- but plenty of parents when I was in middle/high school were obsessed with kids grades and just the thought that my mom would get a text the same time as me as to my grades is flat-out horrifying.

Letter grades were given at the end of the semester to the parents in a session with the teacher. Up to the parents if they shared that with their kids. Many didn’t.

According to the Cambridge dictionary agonizing means: 'causing extreme physical or mental pain' or 'causing extreme worry'. Horrible means 'very bad unpleasant or disgusting'.

These are very strong words, when I hear agonizing I think of a crushed leg, or seeing your daughter tortured, I would use horrible for similar circumstances, not a kid getting a bad grade in a notification..

And I personally think learning your kids to grow a thick skin to cope with the adult world is a good thing, so in conclusion I don't really see a problem here and people are way overreacting.

That perspective isn't particularly rational, but it's not entirely baseless either; if you come from a disadvantaged background, your statistical life prospects really are very poor if you don't get a decent credential. The difference between scraping a C and flunking a class might have a real and meaningful impact on the rest of your life.

I can fully understand why some people might experience a bad grade as "agonizing" or "horrible". If you don't have a great deal of confidence in your academic abilities or you have an underlying anxiety disorder, that notification on your phone might feel like confirmation that you're worthless and useless and completely doomed. It might feel like another dash of salt in an old and purulent psychic wound.

What does this actually mean?

My reading of it is- "as adults kids will be stressed, so don't try to keep them from being stressed when they're kids or else they won't be able to deal with stress later."

Fair?

If so, I have a modest proposal for you. Instead of providing the grades immediately, delay them by a random amount- weeks or months. Then, immediately notify both parent and child, at a random time of day. Perhaps weight it more heavily during mealtimes.

Additionally, grade a small fraction of assignments- say, 5%- as zeroes regardless of actual performance- this will ensure that academically gifted children, even those whose parents don't pressure them- are also stressed.

Since children are likely to outlive their parents, we should also randomly select some children, tell them their parents have died suddenly, and let them start to come to terms with that loss before it happens.

Finally, all shoes and socks must surely be banned, to ensure the proper development of calluses on children's feet.

Surely this will help make kids more resilient. Suffering is part of life, so children must suffer early and often or they'll be too weak.

Banned sounds kind of harsh, but in moderate climates going barefoot as much as possible is a good idea, especially for children.

Instead of a ban, it would be better to run a public education campaign, do more serious research about the effects of wearing shoes, etc. In particular it would be nice if people were better educated about the possibility of using thin flexible shoes and ditching stiff-bottomed shoes, which are quite terrible for foot development.

Development of calluses is one minor effect of going barefoot, but also the bottoms of the feet do not become hyper-sensitized (as they are for the habitually shod), the feet do not become deformed into a weird shoe shape with the toes crushed inward (as sadly happens for most people in our society), and perhaps most noticeably the muscles of the feet and lower leg become much stronger and more coordinated and motor control develops quite a bit better. Kids who habitually walk around barefoot learn to move quickly, efficiently, gracefully, with good balance.

Source: my 2.5 year old kid has 1.5 years of experience walking around the city, about 90% of that barefoot, and is about as fast and coordinated as the typical 3.5 year old around here. (I’m sure he would be below average among some hunter–gatherer tribe; surpassing typical American city kids is a pretty low bar.)

Also, isn’t the physical world and your experience of a crushed leg a product of your brain?

Chronic stress and anxiety are also a product of the brain and in the physical world it ends up shortening your life span. It could be equally reasonable to say, “This bad grade is killing me.” - because with modern science we know there is possibly a literal truth to that.

An example they give for this definition of the word is: “She went through an agonizing few weeks waiting for the test results.” — which is how the GP used it.

Within the range if the average American student, these things are a big deal.