All Things In Moderation
'All things in moderation' is a worthy thought in most situations. But 'all' seems a bit extreme. I guess that moderation should also apply to moderation.
etched with acid at 4:10:00 am
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Thought of the Day
"Fortune favours the brave,
as Niccolò Machiavelli was fond of saying."
The Gnome, reflecting on economic growth.
Findings by AMC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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Of all the elements, you are most like Tungsten. You scored 59 Mass, 20 Electronegativity, 53 Metal, and 10 Radioactivity! |
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You may buy into the values of society, but you just can't seem to fit into it. You've always been a bit variable in your oxidation states. On the bright side you can withstand extremely high-energy people and environments just as easily as you can survive low-energy ones. You might do comparatively well hanging out with Phosphorus people as a result. In fact, you are probably the best-suited person to try to shape their efforts into something constructive... unfortunately, that would require your actively involving yourself with others, which you are generally loathe to do. The ideal job for you would be working within a nuclear power plant... alone. |
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10 Comments:
Phantom Commenter again. A short one this time.
You know what they say about that, sir. Mantra of fat people everywhere-"Moderation is OVER-RATED."
ah sir.. have pity on my spoilt, incorrigible juniors. after all, what is more pitiable than incompetancy or the reliance on the humour of others? yours is the err of a generous heart, i understand how easy it is to underestimate the stupidity of your charges.
hM perhaps moderation by simple adding of scores at times defeats the grading system, such as when high-scorers are prevented from going over 100% thus narrowing their lead. But isn't the concept of moderation, whereby the effects of an overly hard paper doesn't affect one's future prospects, justified?
Anyway, doesn't the T-score / bell curve system do a better job than the current grading system? ie it grades you in relation to your peers, compared to a detatched grading system... better indication of relative performance etc?
And what if the top person in a certain subject scored relatively low? Or, in the case of Pre-IB chemistry, two-thirds of the entire level failed, and Mr Chia said that the paper was hard and the teachers were marking strictly.
Perhaps it boils down slightly in part to *ahem* face *ahem* (i did not say anything), after all it does look bad if 2/3rd of a pioneer batch fails, right? even if they were to revise the syllabus or teaching method, it would still constitute a post-exam review, and the marks per se would not be changed... More importantly, if many people fail overall, kicking that huge number of them might not be so useful as compared to moderating and then focusing attention the next year...
One thing is sure though. 15 Marks Moderation for Chemistry is most certainly too much. Even more so that 2/3rds of the level fails, moderation by such a large margin will not solve the root problem.
I think the root problem is simply that EVERYONE used the exam as a benchmark and scaled appropriately re effort, expectation etc. Originally, I intended the examination to be 25%-30% of the final grade - a sort of 'mother of all term tests', to be held over 60 min. Then somebody panicked. I don't flinch, even with a loaded gun to my head - but obedience is a much-underrated Christian virtue.
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actually the problem was that this eggzam was 50%.. 50% is way WAY too high for final year percentage, coz your whole year's work hinges on just one deciding paper, and if you happen to fail horrendously, then all your work's effort goes down the drain. in this case, moderation was vital for students to pass because the paper was not only hard -.-" but also having a weightage too high.
couple this with the fact that not many of us had the impetus to study coz we were tired with other stuff that IB has given us this year...moderation in essence is not feasible, but for our paper, it had to be moderated, else everyone would have failed too, and the mark in the report book would not have been a fair judgement of the student's real aptitude in the subject.
Ah but Ian, your argument is good, but you must also realize that the nature of some subjects is just that they DO have to test you on how much you have remembered for the entire year's work, (this is especially important for maths and science) and if those kinda tests would then be of a rather large percentage if they are to really reflect how much we know of the entire year's work.
Alternatively, we get tested after we learn each topic, and each of these tests constitutes a large percentage of the final grade (relative to how much tests constitute now. Just a thought.
tsk tsk. what sanctimony and self-righteousness.
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