The Grade Inflation Pandemic of 2020, Part 2: The Solution

Call me Physics Oprah. Because everyone on my roster gets an A this semester. Everyone.

If you didn't read Part 1 (below), you won't realize why I have adopted this grading solution.

After you read Part 1, you may not like this solution. I do not like this solution. But Part 1 details how all the teachers in the San Juan Unified School District were needlessly and deliberately thrown into a no-win scenario. And there are no good solutions to a no-win scenario.

The object lesson provided by the highest-paid district leadership and the dues-collecting union officials couldn't be clearer:

Angry, misguided, vocal minorities operating on incorrect information are to be respected and appeased. 

You could start with a well-reasoned, correct and deliberative position. But abandon it without a fight when any opposition is mounted. Ill-informed? Misguided? It doesn't matter. It's opposition, so capitulation is the expedient response.

I don't like it. It's a policy that comforts the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. But it wasn't my call. I argued against it to no avail.

But the call has been made and I must roll with it.

It's clear that none of the decision-makers have ever been classroom teachers. If they had, they would realize that they were asking teachers to keep a double set of gradebooks: one set for students happy with the default C/NC and a second for students who were petitioning for letter grades. My god.

I am sure that after throwing teachers under the bus, district and union leadership imagined energetic and innovative teachers would find some way to thread the eyeless needle and develop a second set of online/distance learning policies that would keep students fully engaged with powerful teaching and learning.

And they may be onto something. A colleague compared his Unit 5 and Unit 6 test scores. The Unit 5 test was administered in a secure classroom setting. The average score was under 40%. His Unit 6 test administered online. The average was over 100%. He had clearly made a successful transition to online learning and his students were shining in this new environment. Only a hardened cynic would so much as suggest that elevated Unit 6 scores may have been influenced by cheating of any kind.

So yes, I'm giving all my students A's. Because I have no idea what each of them is up against, but I do know exactly what I'm up against. I will share the news of this obvious grade inflation as far and wide as I can. Admissions officers at colleges and universities need to know: I'm giving all my students A's for Spring 2020. And I'm not the only one. Check out this news from San Francisco. The angry, misguided petitioners' victory is entirely pyrrhic.

I'm giving all my students A's. Because when everyone gets an A, no one gets and A.

But doesn't that hurt students who could have distinguished themselves from their classmates with a performance-based A supported by documentary evidence? Yes it does. But in Spring 2020, we do not possess the means to assemble that performance-based documentary evidence.

That's why Credit / No Credit was the sole correct solution to the circumstances. Those are the only honest grades that can be earned this semester. But the district abandoned honesty. And so will I.

Do colleges and universities need to populate their freshman classes with appropriately capable students? Yes they do. But the Spring 2020 grades in your course (and many courses across the country) may not be an honest reflection of students' capabilities. True. Somehow, colleges will need to overcome The Grade Inflation Pandemic of 2020. I have confidence in their abilities to do so.

Primary source documentation available in the comments.

The Grade Inflation Pandemic of 2020, Part 1: The Problem

As the coronavirus pandemic began to take off, schools around the world began to close. Initially it was thought that a month-long shutdown might suffice. Student were told to take their papers and books home on our last day of school.

After a few weeks of virtual office hours paired with opportunities for students to read, review, and enrich, it was decided that more direct instruction was called for. If assignments are to be assigned and so forth, there must be a mechanism for determining grades.

The in-class lesson plans for the remainder of the year were rendered useless. Teachers had to suddenly master online distance teaching tools and techniques that most of them never had any interest in using.  "Have you activated your Google Classroom? Are you ready to Zoom with your classes? Are you hip to Flip Grid? What about Pear Deck? Do you have an Edulastic account? Have you tried Screencastify or do you prefer Screencast-omatic?" Every company with online solutions flooded teacher inboxes with free trials and promises of online instruction efficacy.

There was an expectation that teachers would flip a switch and put their in-class instruction online. Of course they cannot. And college prep / Advanced Placement lab science? Not a chance.

Even if they could, student families were in various states of preparedness. In any school community, there will be a variety of Internet accessibility. And on a larger scope, there is now a variety of economic stability/parental employment status. And a variety of direct COVID-19 impact.

Practicable instruments to asses individual student performance online do not exist. Period. Full stop. If you believe students can be honestly assessed online, it's because you are old. Well over 20. Anyone under 30 knows secure online assessment doesn't exist. (If you think you know such an online tool, type its name into your search engine and add the word "cheat" and see what happens. I'll wait.)

Given the variety of teacher preparedness and student circumstances, it was decided that the most equitable solution would be to switch from letter grades to pass/fail (credit/no credit). The decision was agreed to and communicated to the district community of teachers, parents, and students.

But some families chafed. Rather than appreciate the extraordinary circumstances and understand that everyone was affected and that colleges and universities would take this into account when evaluating applicants, they took a different tack. They behaved as if their child was going to be saddled with a D– on their permanent record (transcript) and no elite, top-tier post-secondary school would even consider them for admission. College admissions officers would gaze upon the Spring 2020 grade and wonder why it was what it was. Colleges were assumed to be completely unaware of the pandemic.

My own Next Door app feed, usually filled with tales of found and lost Chihuahuas and porch piracy now featured an angry petition to Stop the madness of Credit/No Credit being imposed on district students. Petitioners asserted that the policy would cripple the district's best and brightest students, ruining them for college admissions and beyond. The email addresses of school board members were shared and a boilerplate angry missive was suggested.

They demanded that individual students be able to opt out of Credit / No Credit into letter grades if they so desired.

When I caught wind of this movement, I did what I could to stand in opposition, as you can see in the previous post. The angry petitioners were arguing for a policy that would comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted.

Within hours of my action, the district announced it would acquiesce completely and without modification to the petitioners wishes. Word for word capitulation. My principal instructed faculty to direct their misgivings to their union (San Juan Teachers Association—SJTA) representatives.

The adoptee policy allows students to opt into letter grades, but they can change their mind on that no later than the end of the school year. So if the grade is looking good to them at the end of the semester, they can lock it in. If they don't like what they see, they can fall back to C/NC. Perfect!

The union agreed to this complete and total cave-in, 100% and without any pushback whatsoever. But they attempted to gaslight their dues-paying membership: in an email to be shared with all bargaining unit members, we were told of the pitched battle SJTA mounted.

"We did our best to negotiate, and we got what we could.  Most of our neighboring districts mandated teachers to give letter grades A—F.  Our union was able to reach the compromise of C/NC with the petition piece."

Here's what the Next Door petitioners were petitioning for.

'Instead of the misguided "Credit/Co Credit" policy, the district should allow ALL students the option to choose either "Credit/No Credit" OR letter grades."

Re-read the union's statement—they never said that our district was demanding X and SJTA battled them back to Y. In reality, the angry petitioners and their school board enablers demanded Y, and SJTA agreed to Y. No negotiation; no compromise.

UPDATE: I had a conversation with the president of the SJTA. It seems that the union had very little leverage in this decision. The school board and superintendent went forward with their capitulation and there really wasn't much the union could do about it. And the petitioners' demands were in line with CDE broad guidelines for what would be permissible. Still though, the objectively correct response to the pandemic closures was to adopt Credit/No Credit. And to then stand firm in that position. My district opted to appease the angry petitioners. That decision, expedient in the short term, will not age well.

This is the context necessary to understand my solution as laid out in Part 2.

Maintaining resolve on Credit / No Credit

[My district, San Juan Unified in suburban Sacramento, decided to adopt Credit / No Credit grading for Spring 2020. But they are facing blowback from a certain element in the community. So I wrote this and sent it to the decision-makers. How is your institution handling Spring 2020 grades? Let me know in the comments.]

The feed on my Next Door app has turned from posts about lost and found Chihuahuas to angry missives about the San Juan Unified School District’s decision to adopt Credit / No Credit grades for the pandemic shutdown second semester: Spring 2020.

I am grateful that I can count on my district and especially my association to maintain their resolve on this important decision. Because it is the correct decision.

During shutdown, there is no way to assess individual student knowledge or capabilities. In functional school, in-class tests carefully designed by classroom instructors could be administered and proctored by those teachers to ensure accurate and secure results. There is no practicable way to do that online. None. Everyone under 20 understands that perfectly well. People over 30 have diminishing understanding of that, which decreases with increasing age.

That reality, alone, is enough to scuttle any hope of being able to produce letter grades for students during shutdown. But it gets worse.

As of March 13, 2020, instructors such as myself planned to make it to retirement without ever having constructed or administered an online version of their course. I teach college prep and Advanced Placement physics lab courses. No one imagines teaching or learning such a subject in an online environment. No one.

Sophisticated and specialized demonstration equipment remains locked away in access-restricted classrooms. Sophisticated and specialized laboratory apparatus for hands-on student lab group collaborative experiment activities is similarly behind lock and key. Neither demonstrations nor labs can be conducted or assessed during shutdown. And these are the core of my courses.

As of March 16, 2020, I have been bombarded with invitations and recommendations to engage in Google Classroom, Pear Deck, Edulastic, Flip Grid, Zoom, etc., not to mention online science resources. The flood of online platforms, tools, and resources is overwhelming and I am being asked to build an airplane while it is in flight. I know nothing of these things and never planned on using any of them. They do not pertain to the job I was hired to do—a job that I have been recognized for doing exceptionally well.

Could I assign copious reading, video watching, and essay writing for the many, many students on my roster? Yes. But those assignments would be going into homes with an untold variety of circumstances: high and low bandwidth, high and low economic anxiety, high an low physical space, and myriad environments—some more conducive to learning than others. At best, getting all those lengthy assignments back would require time beyond what’s available to assess.

Those who insist that letter grades be awarded during this time appreciate and understand none of this. They are worried that a Credit/No Credit grades awarded in Spring 2020 will disqualify students from admission to top-tier elite post-secondary institutions. They imagine that none of these institutions will be aware of the global pandemic that shut down the world in Spring 2020. They worry that students from districts who are awarding letter grades in Spring 2020 will have a competitive advantage over SJUSD students in college admissions. None of this is true.

In short, it is a small but vocal band of affluent families who are arguing for letter grades that cannot be determined honestly in Spring 2020. It is an argument for a policy that comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted.

I appreciate my district and my association rejecting such a policy.

Dean Baird
Rio Americano High School Physics
Presidential Awardee for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching
American Association of Physics Teachers Fellow

#GraphFail

You know it's a bad situation when the hashtag basically writes itself.

This first year of teaching AP Physics C: Mechanics and Electricity & Magnetism has had lots of lessons, one of which I was not expecting. I assumed (and you know the old saying about assuming anything) that students in AP Calculus or Multi-Variable Calculus could graph data. And I was wrong.

Well to clarify, they can graph but they often choose not to. Be it innate teenage laziness, prioritizing their overwhelming workload, or even just forgetfulness, my students don't spend the time on their lab graphs that I would expect. My expectations were laid out at the beginning of the year, as they were in regular Physics and I'm sure every science class they have ever taken. They are summarized below:

1. All plotted graphs (not sketches) should be at least a half a page in size and made on graph paper.
2. Axis and best fit lines should be made with a ruler.
3. Each axis should be labeled with the quantity and units. Each axis should have a uniform scale but it need not be the same from one axis to the other.
4. The graph should have a descriptive title (i.e. not "Graph #3").
5. If multiple data sets are plotted use different colors and/or different data point symbols. Include a legend.
6. Add a best fit line or curve to your data that gets as close as possible to all of your data points. Do not "connect the dots." If the best fit relationship is linear include a slope triangle to calculate the slope of the line.

I don't feel that any of these requirements are too extreme, strict or beyond what they are being taught in math class. Yet as the year has progressed I have seen the graph quality decrease. The occasional student "forgets" to do it on graph paper; I may let it slide. Once in awhile someone makes the graph too small and I'll draw an unhappy face on it in red pen. The mistakes were becoming more common but due to drowning in curriculum development I kept ignoring the growing problem.

But then it became too big. Last week I collected student lab notebooks with two labs in it. One required several graph sketches (just a variable labeled axis and a general shape, no plotting) with two plotted graphs and the other only required two plotted graphs. Students had begged for additional time for lab notebooks and after agreeing I joked that I was expecting perfection.

I did not get it.

It started with one unbelievable graph. Bad enough that I snapped a picture and posted it on my Twitter feed. Then there was another. And another. I collected enough of the "worst" that I decided that I had to have a little "talk" with my classes about quality of work. I assembled them into a powerpoint and planned the reckoning.

The big day was today and I had it all set up to make the big points in an amusing way, but letting them know I was serious. I started each class with, "I graded your lab notebooks. We need to have a bit of a chat. What math level are you in again?"
Students warily reply "Calculus..." because they know they're getting set up.
"Oh that's right," I reply, "So you should be able to make a graph right?"
They nod.
"Well, I thought so too, but we need to talk about that."
In one class a student said, "Oh man, she made it into a powerpoint, that can't be good."
I assured students that these contributions were anonymous, and that if their graph was included I still care for them and I know that they can do well in Physics. They just had a big "oops" with this graph. 

We proceeded to flip through the examples, with a mixture of roaring laughter (to the point of tears for some) and absolute disbelief.
They had questions:
"Someone turned that in?"
"Is that a hole in that paper?"
"What is that line even supposed to be doing?"
"Were these all from that one assignment?"

One student at the end said, "Wow, and we had extra time so you wanted them to be perfect." Yeah kid, I was shocked too.

In the end it was a funny way of reminding them of my expectation, and now I have a collection of some of the worst graphs I've ever seen. Of course I would rather not have had the situation at all but at least we can all benefit. The collection is available as a pdf and individually below. Feel free to use in your classroom for the same purpose, hopefully they help you avoid your own #GraphFails.

Only one data point really? No ruler used for the axis, not made on graph paper, no slope triangle and the best fit line doesn't even go through the single data point!

One of my students said that this apparent best fit line (that completely missed every data point) might be a Z-axis. I don't know if that makes it better. And no, seeing the grid through the back side of a blank piece of graph paper doesn't count. 

Not on graph paper, not made using a ruler and made a thicker line (potentially to hide poor data). Actually I don't even know if these data points are even properly plotted. We decided this was more of an artistic representation of someone else's graph than a graph itself.

Students often ask to use Excel, and they can, as long as they can use it right. This is not right. I have no idea how that best fit line worked with that data. 

These are supposed to be sketches, not plots, with a variable on each axis. That pen tip is for scale. Yes they are that small.

If you're asked to make a slope triangle on your graph it will probably be linear. When in doubt, the student apparently thought drawing a slope triangle would help anyway. 

When I said a "uniform scale on each axis" I didn't think I need to be specific and say you need more than one number to establish a scale.

Of course having no scale is worse. 

The large data points on this were annoying but not terrible. It was the sneaky breaking of the graph that they tried to slip past me.

When your data doesn't seem to have a trend, I guess plugging it into a calculator is one way of finding a best fit line. 

Then again, even if the best fit line seems obvious maybe you should use your calculator to double check. 

Sigh.

Making engagement visual

At semester's end, it's possible to look back and see how student engagement in the course manifested itself into semester grades.

Students who perform well on tests and labs naturally percolate to the top. But those who don't excel in those objective measures have alternate routes to good grades in my courses.

During the semester, "extra credit" (credit toward the final: CTF) is awarded in dribs and drabs for various tasks and in-class competitions. Completing paperwork associated with the beginning of the school year and team performance in our egg-toss competition are typical first-semester sources. The credit is accumulated through the semester, but only becomes active as an addition to the final exam score. Some teachers add in extra credit as it comes in. That leads to disappointment when final exam scores are low. Adding it to final exam scores at the end of the semester leads to delight similar to finding money under the cushions of the sofa/couch/davenport.

More importantly in my Physics (PHY) and Conceptual Physics (CP) courses, students can earn back points lost on unit tests. The process is called Test Correction Journal. Students write "journal entries" for each item they missed on a unit test and reflect on why they were drawn to a wrong answer over the right answer. Later, a quiz is given consisting of questions from the original test. If they get 10 out 10 on the quiz, they earn back half the points they missed on the test. If they 9/10, they get 90% of half the points they missed, etc.. A 60 can turn into an 80 and 40 into a 70. A 90 can turn into a 95. The more help you need, the more help TCJs provide.

Neither CTF nor TCJs depend on rapid assimilation of course content. But they do depend largely on engagement. Sometimes students who miss many items on a unit test cannot finish the journaling process that we begin during class time. They need to come it at lunch or after school during an approximately two-week window to finish the journal. Only students with completed journals are allowed to take the quiz that will earn their missed test points back.

Students who disengage from TCJs create and expand a gap between themselves and those who are engaged. My engaged students earn only As and Bs. But Cs, Ds, and Fs are given every semester, as many students elect to disengage.

The listings below are actual student data. Each is a period, sorted by points earned. I used Excel's conditional formatting to color the cells in a spectrum from top-score green to bottom-score red, with yellow in between. The next column colors CTF points on a same basis (green good; red bad). Then (for PHY classes), it's the TCJ column with the same color scheme. The last column shows the final exam raw score out of 50. The top number in each column show the maximum value possible.

The pattern is fairly consistent, with anomalies here and there. Nothing to shatter the Earth here. I just wanted to see how well the seemingly nebulous "engagement" tracks to overall class performance. Teachers know this pattern is really the only one that's possible. Students don't always have an intuitive understanding of it. Some will see the evidence and reject it nonetheless.

Those students believe it's possible to get a top score with minimal engagement. It's mathematically possible. It just never happens. They may also fear that investing in full engagement will not be rewarded in a top score. Yet we don't find a red Points value followed by green CTF and TCJ columns. That's actually much less mathematically possible, given what TCJs do.

Evolution of Physics Curriculum

As I NGSSify my curriculum I find myself removing some pieces of my curriculum that I've done for a long time. Sometimes they are replaced with better activities, sometimes they were dead weight, sometimes I'm sad to see them go. I'm not there yet but it is a process for which we still have several years as the NGSS assessments might be ready by 2018. You've got some time.

While making these curriculum choices I ask myself:
- Does this activity align with NGSS in content (addressing a Discipline Core Idea or Performance Expectation)?
- Or does it align with the Science & Engineering Skills?
- If not is it an essential skill to support NGSS acquisition? (i.e. graph making)
- Is it content that they need to support late NGSS content? (i.e. Newton's 1st and 3rd Laws)

As we approach the middle of the 2nd quarter I find that I am "behind" my past self by almost two weeks. This has meant moving Energy, Work & Power to second semester rather than cram it in first semester. My time crunch is due to a few big changes in my classroom that are still getting the kinks worked out:

1) This year I do not have required homework other than finishing labs. There are some "suggested homework" each night and the problems that I really like are worked into the class period. I suggest that struggling students do the homework each night, it is very briefly reviewed each day because less than a quarter of the students do it nightly. A lot of my students are in more than one AP class, sometimes I am their only non AP class, so if they are understanding the material they don't have to "waste" time doing homework if they don't need it.

2) So how do students know they should try the optional homework? Each week students take a low-stake weekly quiz based on the homework. That way they and I know how they well they are understanding the concepts. I grade their notebooks at the same time so that I can look over their labs for the week. Timing has been an issue so far. Sometimes the quizzes are too long and take most of the period. Absences have also delayed getting the quizzes passed back so in the future I think I will excuse the absent kids. This mean I don't have a chance to see how they are doing before the big assessment and the other quizzes in that category count more but it should improve the pass back time. I want students to have near immediate feedback on these formative assessments. I have been crudely tracking the standards addressed in each quiz in an Excel sheet but they have not been in a way that can be easily shared.

3) Students complete problems on whiteboards in small groups. This has been successful but sometimes not universally so depending on a few things. Some students dominate whiteboards just as they do labs so now I ask students to pass the marker on after each problem. Some students don't feel confident enough in their abilities to problem solve while others are watching. If the group is motivated to be "done" as fast as possible then they miss out on the conversations and growth to get something written ASAP. Yet some of the best problem solving think-out-loud collaborating discussions my students have ever had have taken place this year. They correct each other by citing previous activities, "Remember when she said this? Remember that one lab we did?".

Overall I like the changes and will be keeping them, with some revisions. I need to focus on making sure the weekly quizzes tackle common misconceptions just as much as calculation practice. I need to emphasize and normalize doing the suggested homework without making it seem required. It should feel like an opportunity for students; I want struggling students to want to do it to improve themselves. For whiteboards we have to set up community expectations that include all the students of the group at once and makes it a safe space for all of them to try, make mistakes and try again. And I have to work on my timing by probably further cutting some material. But that will be a topic for another post ...

Return of the Student Opinion of Teacher Survey

High school teachers in the college town of Ann Arbor were required to undergo anonymous student evaluation at the end of each semester back when I did my student teaching there. The Ann Arbor School District developed a generic Likert scale and open-ended questionnaire that allowed students to rate teacher performance. The front of the questionnaire was devoted to 24 Likert (five-point) scale performance assessments. The back was devoted to open-ended prompts.

Students were not to include their names on the surveys. Completed surveys were collected by a student in the class and delivered to the teacher's evaluating administrator before the teacher could see them. The teacher could not access the completed surveys until semester grades had been turned in.

I brought the form with me to Sacramento. San Juan Unified had no such instrument or program. I was too chicken to use it my first year. In retrospect, I have reason to believe the results would have been much better than I expected. Oh well.

I started using it my second year, 1987-88. I was knocked out by how kind the students were in their assessment of my performance. It might have helped that I was young and they could see that I really was trying. It didn't hurt that Rio's Class of '88 was a truly exceptional group. (I perceived it even then, but my perception was verified by more veteran teachers at the time.)

I continued to administer the survey until 2006. In the early years, I learned a thing or two. And I changed a thing or two about how I conducted the class. But after a while, the annual results started to merge into a certain sameness. My stock would rise or fall within a certain range. The comments--good and bad--changed little from year to year. I lost interest.

I revived the old form this year. To make it somewhat interesting and useful to me, I changed some of the questions.

Here is the survey instrument.

Here are my results. (The graphs will be meaningless without the instrument; the graphs don't show the text of the questions.)
1. Summary Graph by Period (Physics 1 only)
2. Summary Graph (Physics 1 and AP Physics 2)
3. The Data

No plusses or minuses: pointless chromatic variants

Students in my courses earn academic grades. They can earn an A, B, C, D, or F. I don't add the "chromatic variants" of + or -.

In my district, chromatic variants make no difference in the calculation of a students grade point average (GPA). A grade of B+ has the same value as a B-. So I don't bubble the chromatic variants. Many teachers throughout the district do.

I was never able to figure out why.