FAVOURING YOUNG EINSTEIN (27 may 2004)
If a student is exceptionally talented, there is still a chance that this student will not complete the school successfully.
Suppose a student is a genius at mathematics, he or she could still fail the exams if the marks were like this:
| Mathematics: | 9 |
| German language: | 4 |
| French language: | 2 |
| ----- | |
| Average | 5 |
You could suggest to increase the weight of the mathematics mark. But that wouldn't that create a problem for students who are good at languages, but poor mathematicians.
Probably the best solution would be to give the highest mark more weight. But can this be done objectively?
To make it possible to calculate school marks in such a way that the high marks are given more weight than the low ones, I made a Java applet that calculates marks according to the BMD principle, BMD meaning Best Marks Dominate.
In the applet below you can enter marks (no more than ten). Mistakes can be corrected by manually changing the number and filling in the correct mark.
All marks are entered by pressing the Enter-key. To communicate to the program that all the marks have been entered, only press the Enter-key. The program sets out with 'normal' averages (extra=0.0 ). If you want to see BMD-averages, you can choose another value than 0.0.
If you want to enter a new set of marks, please click the applet's reset button and the new marks can be entered.
If your Internet browser does not support Java, you can go to this link .
I won't say this is the ideal system. But in many cases it will work better than the linear average that is now being used at schools.
