Confidence assessment marking

Despite his anti-guessing rhetoric, my opponent wants to reward guessers even more than I do. Take, for instance, a multi-choice quiz with 5 options and 20 questions. Guessing randomly, a student should receive an average mark of 4/20, or 20%, under the status quo. Obviously some students will be lucky and get a higher mark, and some unlucky and get a lower mark, but 20% would be the average. Now let's add in confidence ratings. The maximum mark is now 60, but the minimum is -120, giving a marking range of 180 points. Assume the student puts a confidence rating of '2' for every question (+2 or -2 on my opponent's round 1 rubric). 4 questions were correct, giving the student 8 marks, and 16 questions were wrong, giving the student -32 marks. The student ends up with -24 marks, or 96/180. Therefore, my opponent proposes that randomly guessing students should receive an average mark of not 20%, but 53.3%! Now let us suppose you are a clever student who studies hard and gets above-average grades. You score 16/20 in the quiz. Under the status quo, your mark would be 80%. Again, let's add in confidence ratings to see the difference. The marking range is still 180 points. Assume the student puts a confidence rating of '2' for every question (+2 or -2). 16 questions were correct (32 marks) but 4 questions were wrong (-8 marks) giving a sum total of 24 marks, or 144/180. Put another way, your score would still be 80%. Therefore, you do not benefit at all from my opponent's model. The people who benefit from my opponent's motion are dumb, not clever. Since more people are getting higher grades (even guessing randomly gives you more than 50%), the average mark will be higher under my opponent's model. That's mark inflation. If the problem he wants to solve is mark inflation, he should suggest a solution to the problem, not a way to make the problem worse. The second problem he identifies is that confidence is important in real life. Sometimes, however, taking risks is also important in real life. For a doctor, the time it takes to find and call a specialist may be the difference between life and death for a patient. Medical students are already taught that taking risks is a bad idea except in emergencies. Their understanding of when to take risks and when not to is already being assessed. Currently the education system is doing a fair job of this - we do not have an epidemic of new doctors taking un-necessary risks with their patients. Therefore this is not a problem with the status quo we need to solve. Third, my opponent states that smarter students will choose higher confidence intervals. Come back to my original example. If the guessing student who scored 4/20 had chosen '1' for every confidence rating, he would have gotten 4 marks correct (+4) and 16 marks wrong (according to my opponent's rubric, -0). His score is 124/180, or 68.9% (a 15.6% improvement). Now let's assume that the clever student who scored 16/20 answered everything with a '3' confidence rating. He scored 16 correct (48 marks) yet 4 wrong (-24 marks). He ends up with 24 marks - exactly the same as last time (80%). Again, only the stupid improve. If my opponent was planning to argue that smarter students will better know which answers they know well and which answers they don't, he should think again. Stupid students frequently only study that portion of their courses which is required to "pass". The questions that they have studied, they will know well and thus answer with a confidence of '3'. Other questions they will guess and answer with '1' since they don't know them at all. Smart students, however, attempt to study the whole course. Since my opponent's own evidence notes that smart students will likely answer with the "maximum" level, they will answer 3 for everything, whether they actually know it or not (because they think they know it, because they have studied for it). In this way, students who don't know so much can gain an extra advantage, since they know when to take the risks. The other alternative would be to score all negative marks a zero (not suggesting that this is what my opponent is doing, it's just an alternative way of looking at the mark range). The problem with this is that others assessing the student's quality cannot know how badly they failed. That model would essentially be a really complicated way of changing the present 'D+' 'D' 'D-' and 'F' grades into a single 'F' grade. The biggest injustice of that system is that while a lazy guessing student can get a positive grade by choosing only '1' for confidence, a hard-working yet dimwitted student who bravely took the risk to choose '2' can get a negative mark, despite the fact that the hard-working student got many more questions right. The guessers pass, but many who make a good attempt will, unfortunately, be lumped together with the worst of the failures under this system. It just doesn't add up. The model that my opponent has proposed will only exacerbate the harms he has given you. It gets worse, however. The model that he has proposed will compound additional harms to our education system. First, the harm of putting extra pressure on students. Science and Medicine are actually tough degrees, taking many years. Only the best of the best survive. Exams, therefore, are suitably difficult already. Asking students to assess their confidence only adds to their in-exam nervousness. It's perfectly normal to be not confident in an exam because . .. well, it's an exam. Every college student will know the feeling of walking into an exam room after months of study, only to forget everything. No student deserves to be penalised for doing something perfectly normal - freaking out during an exam of one of the hardest courses at the university. Not only will they be punished through having less of a confidence "multiplier," but they will lose valuable time and concentration on deciding how confident they are on a 1-3 scale. That means that either students won't do the exam so well (in other words, standards at the university drop) or the exam is made easier to accommodate the new marking scheme (in other words, the university's standards drop). Both are harmful for both the university and the wider student body. Second, the harm of complicating the system. Whenever there are additional steps for markers (human or machine) to process, there is also additional room for marking error. Since the process is also more complicated, it is also less likely that students will check their answers against their result to see if there has been an error. That's harmful to students because it means they don't get the grades they deserve, but moreover it's harmful to the faculty staff who will suffer the consequences of a reputation for lax standards. Clever people in high schools may therefore be less inclined to study things such as science and medicine, the result of which (in the long term) is an even worse shortage of qualified scientists and doctors than what many countries around the world are facing already. Furthermore, the increased administrative costs of filing twice the number of responses are significant, costing students more money for a worse service. There are other harms that I will be glad to elaborate on in later rounds. Good luck to my opponent for round 2!