SeaToSki
Also grading based on everything is like death by a thousand cuts - there is no space to learn the skills and information as everything gets graded, so you have to be "perfect" instantly. At least with A levels and GCSEs you have the terms to hone your knowledge and skills before the exams
I honestly never saw that pressure to be perfect right from the getgo in any of the classes my DCs were in; I don't agree with your assertion that knowledge and skills couldn't be honed before you galloped on to the next module. Students' initial work was graded as beginners' efforts, and later work was expected to be better, to show evidence of acquisition of the skills that were taught.
user1477391263
So much pressure to understand everything straight way, and then if you couldn’t and had any issues with new material, there is this grim doomy feeling of knowing that a lot of your final mark has already been determined and you’ve already lost the opportunity to retrieve yourself by doing well at the end.
In most high schools that I'm aware of, you can move to another class within a few weeks of the start of any given semester. This means that if you get that awful feeling that the class is moving too fast and you don't stand a chance of coming to grips with the material, you can choose another class, move down from AP to honours, from honours to college prep, or sideways to another class whose theme or material suits you better.
In my own observation, teachers issued notification of the grade a student needed in the final semester exam in order to achieve a certain grade in the class. They also gave opportunities to get extra credit during the course of the semester. This kept students engaged and also ensured that students came to grips with the material. In addition, teachers were always available to students and parents - they could be contacted by email and always responded promptly, so if any issues arose they could be dealt with.
I grew up in a final exam oriented system - I didn't see the advantage of final exams on which your entire future depended that were held at peak hay fever season, and always thought it unfair that students with conditions like anxiety were in effect penalised, or if you guessed wrong and spent your last week of swotting studying the wrong poem or novel or mathematics or geography topic, or period in history, you would end up in a course/city well below your top choice.
People cheated CONSTANTLY.
If you only briefly experienced American schooling then that's a broad statement that should be qualified by the disclaimer "in my brief experience". Teachers these days have access to software that detects plagiarism.
And people would cram what they needed for this current unit, then forget about it and never think about it again (whereas with GCSE stuff, revision is built into the structure of it because you need to go back and massively review stuff towards the end, which we now know is far better for long term memory - you are more likely to remember stuff long term if you learn it once, half forget it,then go back to it).
The object of education is not really to teach a set of facts for regurgitation at the end of the course of studies - it's more an attempt to encourage critical thinking, and to teach skills such as research, writing, and logic. Perhaps this is why so much of the innovation we've seen in the world for the last fifty years has originated in the US or been developed in the US.
Americans certainly don’t seem to remember much of all this supposedly well-rounded education they all get - surveys show that in general, general knowledge levels in the States are quite poor.
General knowledge isn't the same thing at all as a 'well rounded' education. The broad education is supposed to allow you to make connections between various academic disciplines.
Remind me again how many subjects the average British student studies for their GCSE? Yet many have difficulty pointing out Sheffield on a map.