S2 Week 9 subject

Academic Examinations;

What do you think about the the way students are evaluated in the French system? Positives, negatives, alternatives ...

During the first semester, one of our teatcher told us that it as crazy to see how scared and stressed out we were when we had to talk in front of the class. I immedialty thought that we were actually shy and stressed out because for us, it means that we are going to be judged and marked. You even sometimes laught at us because we are constantly asking "Est ce que c'est noté ?". But in fact this is something that we are used to since we are 5 or 6 years old. We have been raised with the idea that marks make everything, that every presentations at school are marked, and that if you don't have a good mark, you do not pass, so you're not intelligent. This is completly stupid but we grow up with these ideas. I feel that nowadays, it is changing a bit, but there still a lot of progress to do. I think that the Montesori schools are a good step to progress, but a lot of french are still sceptical about them...

I have mixed feeling about the grading system. Getting marks makes everything stressful and can be damaging when you get bad ones, which doesn't make things better when you try to improve. Also, it's sometimes not really representative of a student level and their skills, you can mess up an exam for so many reasons which are not related to your knowledge or intelligence. But at the same, getting a good mark is so satisfying and can give you motivation once you start to get good grades. Nowadays the French grading systems is changing and they will soon no longer be marks, everything will be based on skills that teachers will have to judge whether the student has acquired it or not. I think this new system can help students with difficulties but it also take the satisfaction away from the students with good results.

I think that the evaluation system is overall good, I like the fact that the grades are out of 20 because it makes them really precise. When I was in Poland it was out of 5 which was annoying because I couldn't really evaluate my level and most students got between 4 and 5 but the work we did was not homogenous therefore I had trouble to figure out if I was doing good in the course or not. I feel like this evaluation system made them lower their standards but it might just be an impression on my part.
In France, the grading scale is fine, the problem is the pressure we get to be "the best" or at least not one of the worst and not fail. The way the evaluation system is made is for us, students, is to care more about not failing the course and having a good grade than actually understanding the content.
In a way it sucks, but to be fair, up until university I don't think any of the courses we have will be used in our jobs later. However, what is a bit weird is that to apply to a master's degree, they still look at your grades from high school, which I think at this point, shouldn't matter anymore.

I think in order to evaluate the student best, we shouldn't have written evaluation where have to spill the entire course, it could be nice to implement study cases in which we use the material but where it is not necessary to know it by heart, but to understand it and adapt it to the situation.
Also, maybe either giving only evaluations to do at home or giving the chance to the student to re take the exam could be a nice solution to take off some pressure and stress about failing.

This is a very complicated subject and one that brings about a lot of debate. During my degree in Education Sciences we studied the Franaçais system and there is a lot to say!
The system of notes has good and bad sides but remains very contested. If we change the system of notes we would have to change the whole French system. It would be more interesting to note the pupils on skills to be acquired rather than notes.
What I have the most difficulty with in this system is the fact of rating a student on a control table. Because it’s stressful texting to think that we’re going to be evaluated on a paper. If that day we are sick, not well, have problems... it is not taken into account and it is the note that goes in wait.
A note is extremely judgmental, thinking that you can be categorised because of a note is destabilizing and not normal for me. Based on a score set we are categorized as a bad student or a good student and it does not reflect our intellectual abilities.

I think that the French system of assessement concerning students is good but it has many negative aspects. Giving a mark creates pressure on students and stresses them out in their studies. Especially, we "judge the value" of the students by these simple marks, when it should not be the case.

Also, I think that we should use a system of points or a colour scale, as in pre-school classes (green=acquired, orange=in progress and red=not acquired). This would be just good for assessing the level of the pupils. On the other hand, I am aware that if we remove the marks, pupils may be less committed to their work.

So it is complicated to take a good decision or to say if we do review this system or not. Finally, the current system has both positive and negative aspects.

I probably won't speak much of marks in high school or else, but more especially in psychology, since i spend 3 years in it. It's actually terrible, i had really good grades, so it was cool, but let's be honest, having good grades in psychology won't make you a good psychologist, okay you will know a lot's of things, which is obviously great, but from experiences, and i've tested it lot's of times, people that had really really good grades, were actually, SO bad at talking to people, they weren't good with people, they were unable to understand basic human reactions. And actually i'm not really surprized, lot's of psychologist, psychiatrist are actually terrible at what they are doing, and i'm far away from being the only one who say that. I can't believe in field were you are supposed to have a deep understanding of human nature, pathologicaly but ALSO in normal situation, we had 0 class, 0 exams on deep understanding of humans in normal situations, it's lame.

The current grading system in France still encourages learning by heart lessons to get good grades. We are not taught how to learn our lessons correctly, whereas the method is essential to learn and retain information.
I have never managed to memorise long texts and if I do it takes me several weeks to really learn it and becomes automatic.
I have to understand in order to learn, which is not the case when you learn by heart. I only found my method when I was in higher education.
Furthermore I find that the control methods are often very superficial, and do not allow to check if the student has correctly understood what he is talking about or they do not allow him to give his thoughts.

I think that it is bad. And a lot of countries have the same grading system. I think it encourages students to learn everything by heart instead of reflecting on the subject and trying to discover more about it. I find school boring and stressful because of this. I spent the past years stressing way too much and sometimes even having mental breakdowns because I was worried I'd get bad grades.. I think that a lot of things about the education system should change not just the grading. I think it would be better if marks disappeared and if we let students study and work however they want, because a mark will never define someone's level of intelligence.

I think the education system in France depends too much on marks in my opinion and it establish a competition spirit in class that can be toxic in a group. I think that every student has something to bring to others and this thing can be lost with the system of mark or ranking. I think that the teacher's appreciation can be representative of the student level and will give to employer or other school a better idea on the level of the student. I agree to keep some test which evaluate the skills and knowledges of the students on concrete exercise or situation, but it especially depends on lesson stupidly learned and spited out. A student who don't work but have a good memory can easily have an excellent mark (good for him). The education system is a subject I don't know a lot about and it doesn't really affect me, so, all I said wasn't carry by strong convictions.