More on Thin Slices

I've been thinking all morning about "thin slices" and I quite agree with "NW" (see Comments to my previous post) that we always tend to worry about making snap judgements when we want to give others the benefit of the doubt. I'm a retired teacher and I think this is especially so in education. Teachers try so hard to be objective and to measure progress accurately with exams and tests and so on. They try so hard not to make snap judgements based on first impressions, but I can say this (now that I'm retired) that within five minutes of meeting a new class I knew without a shadow of a doubt who the "troublemakers" would be, who the "top" academic students would be, who would have problems mastering the material, and so on. Scary, isn't it?

Of course, to give credit where it is due, educators are not unaware of the problems involved in "subjective" vs "objective" assessments. Over my 35 year career I was involved in various experiments at times that tried to address the problem. For example there was the "Pass / Fail" report card. The idea was to focus on learning and not on exams.

In education, things seem to go around in circles!