The grading dilemma

The grading dilemma

When it boils down to it, one of the most insidious problems with our education system is its emphasis on grades. Every year, thousands of students are reduced to a letter or number that is not really a reliable indicator of caliber or intellect. How can one diminish a student’s two year effort to one mark earned after a two or three hour exam? Yet this is precisely what we do. The negative impact of this grading on the way our students think, operate and see the world is becoming increasingly obvious.

–Photos by Fayyaz Ahmed/Dawn.com

Educationists and psychologists argue that a reliance on grades as a tool to motivate students is actually detrimental to the process of learning. Having taught for over three years myself, I agree. I cannot make a student love to read by brandishing a -10 at him. To force students to study a subject out of fear is to make it a drag for them. Bonus marks or failing grades serve only to increase anxiety and resentment; they do nothing to motivate students to take an earnest interest in the subject that they study.

Moreover, since grades are the only thing that students are taught to care about, they put in just enough effort to scrape by. I have seen students harass university professors to ‘narrow down’ the scope of a literary text and tell them which ‘five questions’ they should study from so that they can do well in an exam. Ideas such as research, the joy of discovery in critical thought and delving deeper into the book just because it is a profound read leave these students cold. Will all this extra effort be graded? No. Then why do it? So much so, that end of year examinations with their selective studying and cheating do nothing to promote learning or education: many rote learners will proudly boast a first division on their university degree and yet be unable to string a coherent sentence together.

Perhaps the most detrimental effect that our emphasis on grading has had is to kill the spirit of creativity. Most of our A/B graders are not risk takers. They like to play it safe. They don’t like to waste time studying anything ‘outside the syllabus’. Most of all, they hate to make a mistake, a quality which, according to Sir Ken Robinson, is the very antithesis of creative thinking. Solutions to a problem are acquired only after trial and error. But a schooling based on tests, quizzes, evaluations and exams does not reward but rather punishes any ‘out of the box’ approaches. 

This is not to devalue all our A-graders. Rather, it is to say that the A grade devalues students who are intelligent, hard working, and passionate about learning, because it gives no credit to the extra work they put in over the course of their study. The system does not motivate them to take on anything that will challenge them – if they can get an A while sitting within their comfort zones, then so be it. A system based on grades rewards the very mediocrity that we complain is seeping into our national character.

Lastly, grades just aren’t reliable. Some of my most brilliant students are not good exam-takers and it is monumentally unfair that the work they put in during two or more academic years is completely disregarded in one examination session. Many universities and even schools have to resort to interviewing applicants and potential students, despite their excellent grades, because their results do not necessarily indicate work ethic, diligence or intelligence for that matter.

If education is the route to success and the foundation of society, our system seems to be creating a nation that is lazy, apathetic and which cuts corners. There is no joy in learning here. There is cynicism with statements like ‘So what if I didn’t attend school, I got an A didn’t I’? A society where the end justifies the means and a single grade determines a student’s fate is a society bound to stagnate. Not only do we need to re-think the amount of emphasis we give to education in this country, we also need to focus on how to educate our youngsters and what we are teaching them in the process.

IBM unveils brain-like chip

Computer chips with worm-like intelligence were unveiled today by researchers at IBM, a breakthrough, they say, on the road to creating computers that function like the human brain.
For now, achieving the goal of human-like intelligence in a computer with the size and power needs of our brains is a long ways off, Dharmendra Modha, the researcher leading the project, told me, but the chips he held as we spoke were proof that a "new generation" of computers are in the offing.
"It is IBM's first cognitive computer core that brings together computation in the form of neurons, memory in the form of synapses and communication in the form of axons," he said.
Such chips, he said, could form the basis of computers that are able to monitor real-time traffic-light cameras, notice an anomaly and dispatch an ambulance in time to save lives.
Other potential applications include lining the ocean with sensors for everything from temperature, humidity and wave height to acoustics and turbidity. The computer would constantly monitor all that data and detect patterns such as rogue waves that could interrupt shipping or a tsunami that could wipe out coastal villages.
A glove instrumented with sight, smell, temperature and other sensors and put on the hand of produce handlers at the grocery store could identify fruits and veggies that are contaminated, again saving lives.
The chips do this by integrating memory and processing, unlike today's computers, which separate the functions. It's a difference, he said, between growing food in one part of the world then eating it in another and a farmers market where you buy and eat locally grown food.
The silicon cores unveiled today aren't at the level of the human brain yet. They have 256 neuron-like nodes. One has what the company calls 262,144 programmable synapses, the other contains 65,536 synapses. They can drive a car through a simple maze and reconfigure a triangle from just a fragment, Modha said.
It can also play Pong, the 1970s arcade game. "It might beat you, I don't promise, but it might," Modha said.
The next step is to take these tiny brain-like circuits and weave them into a system that eventually has 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses that consume just 1 kilowatt of power and occupy the same volume as a shoebox.
The technology, Modha added, is a departure from the way computers have evolved over the past 100 years and allowed the development of machines such as the question-answering maverick Watson that won a well-publicized game of "Jeopardy" earlier this year.
"Watson represents the epitome of artificial intelligence today, I would say," Modha said. "And we are trying to emulate the brain. They are yin and yang, salt and pepper, they may work together and complement each other, but they are not the same."
The project has keen interest from the U.S. government. As IBM unveiled the chips, they also announced $21 million in new funding from DARPA for the project, which is named SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics).
The goal of the project is a system that not only analyzes complex information from multiple sensory modalities at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment — all while rivaling the human brain's compact size and low power usage.
We are still years away from such a computer, Modha said, and when it arrives it is likely to complement other computers and humans, not outsmart us or our machines.
"The human brain is so darn bloody awesome it shames me," he said. "The thing is, today's computers are so darn bloody bad in terms of power, space and functionality ... you pick a problem with so much room to play that you improve it slightly, you look like a hero."

New Pacific eel is a 'living fossil', scientists say

A newly discovered eel that inhabits an undersea cave in the Pacific Ocean has been dubbed a "living fossil" because of its primitive features.

It is so distinct, scientists created a new taxonomic family to describe its relationship to other eels.
The US-Palauan-Japanese team say the eel's features suggest it has a long and independent evolutionary history stretching back 200m years.
Details appear in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The animal used as the basis for the new study was an 18cm-long female, collected by one of the researchers during a dive at a 35m-deep cave in the Republic of Palau.
But the scientists also mention other examples of the new eel species in their research paper.
At first there was much discussion among the researchers about the animal's affinities. But genetic analysis confirmed that the fish was a "true" eel - albeit a primitive one.
"In some features it is more primitive than recent eels, and in others, even more primitive than the oldest known fossil eels, suggesting that it represents a 'living fossil' without a known fossil record," write the scientists.
In order to classify the new animal, the researchers had to create a new family, genus and species, bestowing on the animal the latin name Protoanguilla palau.
The team - including Masaki Miya from Chiba's Natural History Museum in Japan, Jiro Sakaue from the Southern Marine Laboratory in Palau and G David Johnson from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC - drew up a family tree of different eels, showing the relationships between them.
This allowed them to estimate when the ancestors of P. palau split away from other types of eel.
Their results suggest this new family has been evolving independently for the last 200m years, placing their origins in the early Mesozoic era, when dinosaurs were beginning their domination of the planet.
The researchers say the Protoanguilla lineage must have once been more widely distributed, because the undersea ridge where its cave home is located is between 60 and 70 million years old.