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
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)