HACKER Q&A
📣 amichail

What do you think of this grading system for high school?


A student’s yearly average is capped at 80%, but they can score higher than 80% in individual subjects. At the end of the school year, if their average is above 80%, they get to choose which grades to lower until it meets the cap.

Even with the 80% cap, it is still possible to score 100% in some subjects, and universities could focus on the grades in key subjects rather than just the overall average.

Do you think this grading system would reduce stress and encourage career planning?


  👤 jerf Accepted Answer ✓
Ask yourself: Who would want this?

Do students want this? No. They will want to distinguish themselves from their peers and trying to cap their performance prevents that.

Do institutions want this? No. They also want distinguishing power.

Do parents want this? Probably least of all. They want their kids distinguished and caps won't work.

No individual participant has the desire for this. You also can't talk them into the desire by doing things like saying "but nobody likes stress", because you don't control what is motivating people by how you squint at their motivations. Their motivations are their motivations.

As a result, even if you were King of the World and pushed the Magic Button that instantly and completely enforced this everywhere, it would immediately decay as every participant in the system worked around it, rather than for it.

I type this to encourage you to think in this way, because it is relevant to doing good engineering in general. Solutions to problems must also be implementable, and something the people with the problems actually want. And what they "should" want is pretty much irrelevant; what they do want and what the actually do are what matters.


👤 sfmz
A top-tier student would appear average to college-admissions boards. Back to the proverbial drawing board.

👤 marysminefnuf
teacher here. this is actually really really smart if you take it in a different direction. what if colleges only paid attention to the first 80-85% of a grade students get. auto admission is given for students averaging over 80 in hs. a core group of colleges willing to accept this system of grading like the uc system would change students lives. there are a lot of kids who struggle in high school but do well in college because they figure out their vocation.