Tuesday, June 9, 2009
House Points
Is there any way to look and see how the house points were distributed last year? My guess is that the results were predetermined based on the class rosters of the teachers that participated the most. I rarely gave any points to Conor last year because I had very few students from Conor on my roster, especially compared to Halcyon and Sideris.
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2 comments:
I don't have a problem with revisiting the values of points in competitions.
As for the issue of analysis, I didn't look at the whole year, but I did look at it relatively early on, when Excelsior and Halcyon pulled way into the lead and Conor fell way behind.
There were two elements to my analysis. The first was exactly what you mention here. The teachers who participated the most had an uneven distribution of students in their classes. This problem would be addressed, of course, if we had more universal participation. Although there would still be some issues that could arise if people don't use the same rules, my personal opinion is that I'd rather have people use whatever rules they decide fit their class best than force everyone into the same mold.
The other factor was the distribution of students in the Houses themselves; specifically the honors-level students. The problem is that our categories were "honors" and "prep," and did not account for the differences between the two kinds of honors students--those who pretty much automatically ace everything, and those who work really hard to pull out their A's and sometimes B's. We addressed this issue at the last minute in last year's juniors, otherwise it would have been even more skewed. (Put it this way--think of the four students in next year's seniors who are the best all-around students. Now imagine all four of them in Halcyon. That's how it originally was before we fixed it.)
However, though we addressed it in the juniors to an extent, there were still a higher proportion of high-performing honors students in Halcyon at all grade levels; and Excelsior had a disproportionate number among last year's seniors. Sideris had one or two of those students, and Conor didn't really have any of them, except the one junior we put in when we redistributed them.
So to summarize all this, from my analysis there were two problems that resulted in the big discrepancy. 1) the distribution of the Houses themselves was not as good as it could have been; and 2) the teachers who most participated in the point system had an uneven distribution of students in their classes.
So, to me, the remedy is straightforward. First, revisit the Sorting and make sure we analyze it carefully before we finalize it, rather than relying too much on randomness. I think randomness is an important element, but we have to adjust the outcome when the randomness produces inequity. Second, get everyone to participate more.
Noah, I think you lined up several nails and hit each squarely on the head. I don't think most of our teachers have even tried. I don't think they realize how minimal the work is. I enter grades into gradequick once a week. I spent about fifteen minutes typing up a "tally sheet." I added points to the sheet as I entered. I speak the truth when I say that I didn't even notice the added time it took to tally points.
I also think I need to make a bigger deal out of point availability--and maybe post MY weekly numbers in my classroom.
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