The continuous evaluation: a contribution to how to correct some negative effects

Abstract

The continuous evaluation supposes that the student must realize an important amount of activities that, in most of cases, is translated in grades that orient students, along with the observations realized by the teacher, on the result of said activities, in order to direct the student towards the intended learning. In the continuous evaluation, one of the possible actions is to allow the student to recover the unsatisfactory activities, amended their errors, so that the qualification passes to approved. Thus, each student ends up obtaining a large number of grades throughout the course, which means that the average obtained will be mostly approved. The law of large numbers and the central limit theorem, each in its own way, points that when the number of grades of each student is sufficiently high, its distribution tends to a normal distribution. Therefore, the continuous evaluation has suffered some negative observations in relation to his inability to sufficiently discriminating students from their final grades and, at the same time, does not allow the brightest students to obtain excellent grades. In this paper, it is proved that, in effect, the distribution of ratings in a continuous evaluation system follows approximately a normal distribution; also, a correction mechanism based on a diversified qualification polynomial and a corrective function is established.