The Rhinoceros Test
When grade abatement was being developed as a new kind of assessment, one of the central metaphors was Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros. (The first guide is here, alongside every Sisyphean High iteration up to a certain point. Dürer’s rhinoceros appears frequently, so it’s the mascot of grade abatement in the same way that the tardigrade is the mascot of interstitial teaching.) It serves the same function as saying, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees,” and it echoes the elephant test. It’s also related to Occam’s razor, or the law of parsimony.
If none of those hyperlinks interest you enough to do some ramiform reading, the basic idea (in here) is this: Often the simplest or most straightforward profile evidence is more important than everything else.
You should already be familiar with the process for assessment:
Dürer’s rhinoceros is part of this holistic assessment, which is really an evidentiary assessment. Sometimes, one piece of evidence reflects your learning profile more than a heap of others. If you consistently sneak in visits to social media during class time, for instance, that runs afoul of one of the central pillars of a makerspace:
A student earning a fourth-tier profile needs until the end of a cycle to produce evidence. It takes consistent reflection and metacognition, for instance, to fit just that single criterion for a 9. But a student who isn’t meeting the basic requirements of the course has immediately provided enough evidence for a much lower score. That’s Dürer’s rhinoceros.
It’s still a matter of growth and possibility, however. If you make a choice that would knock you down to a 60, for instance, you almost always have time to improve. Any improvements you do make will showcase amenability and work ethic, and that justifies a higher profile.
You can ask questions about this below. Meanwhile, I will hold onto the quixotic hope that this will all eventually be rendered moot1.
One more note: The use of metaphors and images like Dürer’s rhinoceros helps us avoid clichés, especially thought-terminating ones. George Orwell called them dying metaphors. Some clichés have power — a rose on Valentine’s Day is still nice — but you should try to find new images, analogies, metaphors, etc, whenever possible. Clichés don’t bring any vividness or clarity to ideas, however easily they come to us.
This and the lead image come from Little Einsteins, one of the best shows for kids. At some point, my own kids will age out of it, and I will miss it far more than other kids shows.
Two words worth knowing: quixotic and moot. The former leads us to another metaphor for teaching and learning, since we sometimes tilt at windmills; the latter is one of those words with two accepted but contradictory meanings. ↩