Using & Teaching Educational Technology
Three cheers for failure
By Terry Freedman
Tue, 16 Sep 2008, 23:41

Nobody is allowed to "fail" these days, because telling someone they are mistaken is either life-damaging, if they are young, or just not nice. But the result is that people are generally reluctant to offer any kind of criticism, or offer it in such a way as to render it useless.

Let's suppose. for example, that you have set a class the following assignment:

Create a spreadsheet that will enable a person to see what would happen to their savings if the rate of interest doubled.

Now, there may be a whole range of criteria against which the students will be marked, such as ease of use, attractiveness, inbuilt help and so on. But the bottom line is that the spreadsheet has to actually work. It has to:

(a) let you see what happens to a sum of money over time under different prevailing rates of interest, and

(b) be accurate.

If it doesn't do (a), then it is useless. If it does (a) but not (b), it is useless.

So, here is a question: how many teachers would have the honesty, and the courage, to award a grade of "Fail" to a student whose spreadsheet was, according to one of these criteria, useless?

Would you?

In my experience, most teachers would give marks for all the other criteria, which is, in fact, the correct thing to do. After all, if a student has made the interface exceedingly clear and easy to use, she needs to be told that and commended for it. Nevertheless, the final grade should still be "Fail".

If this sounds draconian, and unfair, consider this. You discover a wonderful clock in an online catalogue, so you order it. It arrives, and then you discover that it does not work at all (similar to (a) above), or it runs slow, fast or erratically (corresponding to (b) above). How likely are you to keep the clock on the grounds that its face is so clear you can see it from the other side of the room without your spectacles? Pretty slim, I would suggest.

By the same token, if we are really serious about preparing students for life beyond school, we need to be honest about the feedback we give them about their work.

This logic applies in other areas too. For example, if a student loses all his ICT coursework because his 3 year old brother deleted it, and he does not have a backup, should you:

(a) give him a mark of zero, or

(b) give him the benefit of the doubt?

My answer would be (c): fail him altogether. After all, anyone who did not think to take a backup of his ICT work does not deserve to be awarded a pass, since that implies that he has actually understood the subject.

I know that I sound like I am somewhere to the right of Attila The Hun, but again, let me present you with an analogy.  I recently put in a bid for Government money for a £500,000 (approximately $1,000,000 at the then-prevailing exchange rate), on behalf of a client. The bid was successful, not only because it addressed all the criteria in the right way, but also because it actually arrived! Would it have succeeded if I had lost the file on my computer, and phoned them up to say,

"Sorry, I seem to have accidentally erased the file, but why not give me the benefit of the doubt?"?

I don't think so.

Is this approach likely to alienate students? The "obvious" answer is "yes". I am not so sure.

When I started teaching, there was one boy in my class of 16 year olds who was bright, but preferred to mess around the whole time. Consequently, his essays were poor, and he scored badly on tests. At the end of the first term, I wrote on his report,

"John (not his real name) has the ability to do well in this subject, but has chosen to direct his energies elsewhere. If this continues he will fail the final examination, and therefore it is a waste of time for him to continue."

His mother came to see me on parents' evening, and I told her the same thing, adding:

"If there is not a significant improvement over the next 6 weeks I will take him off the course."

John came to see me the next day. He said:

"I know you were not with my mother for long, but she was impressed by your honesty and directness. I'm going to be different from now on."

And he was. And he passed the final examination with flying colours. Honesty really is the best policy.

© Terry Freedman Tue, 16 Sep 2008