Why aren't students penalized for scoring too highly on an exam?
Scoring too highly is a bad sign since it could mean the student spent too much time studying or is taking a class that is too easy.
Because that makes no sense and there isn’t anything to penalize. If they spent lots of time studying that’s their choice. If they signed up for an easy class, that’s their choice. If they score well as a result of hard effort, awesome. When I teach and see a student who is breezing by I might ask them why they didn’t take something harder, but I’d never punish them. That’s an absolutely dreadful and terrible idea.
> spent too much time studying
I like this. I mean any virtuoso musician, olympic gold medalist, chess grandmaster, pulitzer prize, nobel, and fields medal winners. They should all be penalized for too much studying.
It would make me feel so much better about my own personal mediocrity!
GIVE ME MY PARTICIPANT AWARD, DAMMIT!
To the extent either of those is a problem, it would be much better to raise a flag, investigate, diagnose, and resolve it outside of scoring system. Especially since the problem with the latter could well be that the institution doesn't offer challenging enough courses.
Also, I don't think most individual exams in courses have enough test-retest validity for an individual score to be a strong signal that either of these problems exists. For a course with a large number of exams (more typical of secondary than higher ed, IMO) you might diagnose a problem by a consistent pattern of very high scores, but an individual score is too weak of a signal.
If you penalize high grades, people will try to avoid them by intentionally dropping answers if they feel too good, and then the utility of your scores for assessing anything, goes down.
I've had LOTS of students who've got almost 100% despite not studying too hard and taking the hardest classes on offer. (I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned this.) Maybe that means our grading systems are a bit weird, but it doesn't reflect badly on the students in any way.
At a certain point school is a grade competition for students and has very little to do with learning. I can't prove this but I suspect there is plenty of cheating at the upper ends of the grade spectrum. Kids know that cheating will not help them but they are competing for grades so it does not matter. Penalizing those at the upper levels of grades would do nothing since they would make enough noise that they would get their way. Also, getting high scores is rarely a problem, if at all. Very few student suffer from that problem. It's so small that it does not need a fix.
So why should the student be penalized? If it’s a signal that intervention is needed then just intervene, why the punishment?
The other students are supposed to take care of that.
Imagine being required to go over the same material, year after year, and live in fear of admitting you know it back and forth.
Is this not the public school experience many have?
This would be like creating a sports tournament and making 1st place be the loser spot. It would be like having a TV quiz show where the person with the highest score loses the game.
Optimization of any process is always a double edged sword. See the explore-exploit tradeoff.