The Blue Board

While getting my daily dose of Internet humor from Cracked.com, I was reading through an article about things we hated in school but were right to hate. Now, Cracked isn't exactly a trusted news source (so I'm not all that familiar with the "facts" the author used in this particular section) but an interesting point was brought up and I thought I'd bring it over here, since I rather enjoy the discussions we have on tBB about stuff like this. I'm namely referring to this:

"For those of us who weren't big into organized sports, being graded and getting scored on standardized tests were our first experiences with the stress of competition. The only students who enjoy being ranked are those at the top, and the valedictorian is the only student not imagining a swarm of flying ***** choking him to death on graduation day.

But competition clearly works in the real world, so most likely all of us non-valedictorians are just sore losers. After all, the modern world runs on competition. It's what made America great. The free market is all about pitting worker vs. worker, company vs. company, and idea vs. idea. The best comes out on top, and everyone pushes themselves harder out of fear of falling behind. Kids just need to man up and see how the grown-ups do things.

But You Were Right ...

Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development conducts a survey of the world's educational systems, called PISA. 2001 was the first year they managed to pry Finland away from playing air guitar long enough to be included in the study, and they absolutely crushed it, scoring at or near top marks in every category. No one was more surprised by this than the Finns themselves, since academic excellence isn't something they give one steaming sh!t about.

Finland has no standardized tests. They don't rank their students, select valedictorians, or even care all that much about grades. Teachers give individualized grades to each student and develop their own tests for their specific classrooms without any input from some central authority. There's no competition in Finnish education, and no private university scholarships to compete for. It sounds like the BSiest hippie wet dream ever conceived ... and it works better than any other educational system in the Western World.
How is that possible? Well, competition may make perfect sense when it comes to grown-ass men fighting over a leather ball, but in the classroom, it appears to just distract kids from the important business of learning. Denise Clark Pope, a lecturer at Stanford's School of Education, followed five high school students around for a year, and while a stunt like that would have landed us in a very special sort of prison, her outcome was much more productive: She found that high achievers spent more time "finangling the system" than they spent gaining knowledge. Meanwhile, students in Finland don't worry about maximizing their GPA or collecting enough extra credit hours to impress [College X], and as a result they end up actually learning stuff.

And don't just take Finland's word for it. Professor Hall Beck of Appalachian State University found that students who focused mainly on their grades tended to have lower GPAs and shittier mental health than the kids who focused on learning. So what should replace grading? "Nonthreatening, task-related evaluation," otherwise known as correcting kids when they mess up without penalizing them for it.

Again, it sounds like a load of rancid hippie crap, but it gets results.

Although to be fair, grades get results, too -- results that equate to kryptonite for our kids' brains. The mere knowledge that their work is being graded is even more effective than track day in PE at making them avoid school."

Source of the article aside, thoughts?