My first introduction to this bullshit was calculus. Teacher bragged about only passing halve his students. Like my man… that ain’t the brag you think it’s is 1, 2 this is a fucking prereq for the vast vast majority of us!
State Universities lovee failing a student in an entry- level course, because the state will subsidize tuition twice for a given class per student.
They don’t like doing it a second time because the student has to pay full tuition, and when classes triple in price they’re more likely to drop.
Yeah, when a prof or teacher says “my course is so hard, only a few people pass” then I immediately translate that to “I am a shit teacher”.
So long as you do the work and aren’t a lazy ass student, you should have a decent pass.
Only exception I have seen was when the professor was kind of a troll. He was a good teacher. This was in a pretty entry level physics class at a tech school, so we basically got a high school level physics as a pre-req for our degree in whatever 2 year program we were in.
He spent the week leading up to the first big test talking about how hard it was, how people needed to take it seriously, etc.
He handed out the grades after and everyone was visibly upset, nobody had a passing grade. Then he explained, after letting us freak out for a minute, that the score at the top was out of 50, not 100 and I think everyone passed
After that the class pretty fun.
organic chem(for life science majors, the one for scientists is more harder) was brutal in my CC, surprisingly, and i found out they made stem courses extremely ivy league level on purpose, because a UC said so or they wont accept transfer students with an “easy grade” i think its bs to keep students perpetually in the school to continue paying for admission.
It’s like they didn’t even try to make the story plausible.
Yeah, I studied and taught in STEM. There are true stories about professors who are monsters, but this is pure bullshit.
Professors don’t work like that.
Yup, they have their TAs grade exams and grade on a curve so only a fixed percent passes.
With the amount of tests I had where I was the highest grade at ~60% and still got the equivalent of a D, I would have loved some of this curve you guys keep talking about.
Dang, that sucks. At the end of the day, it’s up to the professor how to assign grades.
Exactly. OP described a very different process.
I don’t think the curve goes the other way tho. If everyone for above an 80 or so that doesn’t mean 80 becomes a failing grade. Although tbh I’m not sure about that because I don’t think I ever participated in an exam that had that happen.
I have never once had an exam graded on a curve. But I’ve never done any post grad studies, although from what my PhD holding mom says, it’s more of less just a pass/fail system.
I’ve never seen or heard of that being a case.
The closest is test scores for admissions where the score is irrelevant and only the top X get in. But that’s made apparent at the outset, whereas a curve is done after the fact if people do poorly.
It’s basically just modern eugenics with extra steps.
Username checks out.
They do in conservatives’ anti-intellectual fantasies
Bullshit. I am one.
This is so fake that we managed to reach the {fake + gay} threshold without having to tap into the gay potential
“gay potential” sounds like the cutest physics term.
Gay potential is measured in homos
Please tell me it uses SI prefixes.
“They measure 1.63 x 10² megahomos!”
>anon waits until all the other students leave
>asks the professor what he can “do” to pass
this is a classic porn script, gay/10
Um, the text is green, so it is clearly the unvarnished truth
Clearly unvarnished. Left exposed to the elements to corrode
-
You forgot to fuck the professor.
-
Dean time!
-
This probably didn’t actually happen, but I did have a physics class in college where we had an exam where the highest score was 35%, so it was graded on an absurd curve
I was a physics major, and the whole department was famous for this. I think it’s just lazy. They don’t make the test for what they actually taught, they just throw shit against the wall and see what sticks.
That’s pretty common for math heavy classes, the tests are ridiculous and they grade on a curve.
My calc I class in college had a 23% average on the first exam. Later ones made it into the high 30%s. The professor was terrible, but since I had already taken calc in high school and he graded on a curve it was a breeze.
The main problem was that he would test for the stuff we had not covered yet because he “wanted people to work ahead.”
“wanted people to work ahead”
Ah yes “not fucking doing my job that people are taking loans out for and pay off for years to come”
Fuck that “professor.” A college degree is an overpriced commodity and they are falsely charging students by not teaching them the course
Now that’s an asshole move.
It’s fine to give points for “extra work”, but the regular work should give you a passing grade at least. The extra work should maybe give you the difference between a 6 or an 8.
Grading on a curve is always absurd to me: it’s a cop out for teachers who don’t know how to set curriculum/exams properly and demeans the education process.
Should just be
- here’s a list of things you learn in this class
- you demonstrate understanding and skill over about 60% of that list
- you get a grade of 60%
While I mostly agree with you, the grading on a curve idea comes from two factors On one hand, the idea that knowing some topics very well can absolve you from knowing other topics at a sufficient level. On the other, people making the exercises for the exams are experts and can easily overlook the hidden difficulties of an exercise. So it happens way too often that a professor would think “this exercise is super easy” and miss that it uses concepts from other courses the students are not super familiar yet.
Add to this that exams need to be different each year to prevent cheating and you can easily get a few bad questions.
On the first point I agree. In my country, 40-50% is a pass usually and that seems crazy for its own reasons. But a curve can make that worse just as easily as it can make it better. The education system I work in is now introducing the idea that not only do you need to hit 50% to pass, you also have to show a competency with every learning outcome on the curriculum. We’ll see how it goes. My subject areas haven’t been hit yet.
The second point is essentially what I said, it’s a cop out for a teacher who is bad at setting exams. Easily fixed by some QA and/or collaboration. At least run it by a TA. Also they should read the curriculum before writing an assessment.
A lot of professors are overworked with classes and programs too. One of my girlfriends uas a professor for anatomy who teaches two full college courses before going to her massage school to teach anatomy. She says you can tell that the professor isn’t really there mentally. Sge never actually prepares for the courses she’s supposed to be teaching, but you can tell us just from exhaustion. I wonder how many are like that and just forget what coursework they’re currently preparing for others.
In my uni, professors are expected to teach almost 220h/years of in person teaching (correcting doesn’t count, nor preparing), on top of “being a team playing” and doing quite some extra bureaucratic work. Obviously on top of doing their own research. Good teachers (professors that care about teaching quality) look like ghosts by the end of the academic year…
Each college does it differently. Some allow professors to choose research vs teaching, some require a fixed balance.
Never heard of being able to choose
Yup. Some have research-only professors, and some expect all professors to teach classes. It really depends on the university.
I knew someone who had to pass a class where the failure rate was 85%. The worst part is this was only one of a few of these classes. She was studying physics, and even though I really don’t want anything to do with her now for unrelated reasons, I still feel bad for her.
It would never happen as described in this post, but things like this are way more common than people think.
I still remember teaching >3 people a subject, because they asked me to, and then we all did the exam and I was the one who failed it. Now I’m, not error-proof but that’s kind of ridiculous. I have experienced a truckload of these things but that one illustrates very well how random and/or unfit for purpose most exams are. It’s like a coin flip +/- 5% depending on the depths of your studies beforehand.
Had a similar thing happen in an intro geology course. Highest grade on the final was 41%, my grade. I got an A in the class. I do not understand why anyone would make an intro to geology course that difficult. Very few are going into the field. Most just needed an extra science course, like myself.
That seems so low that it makes the benefit of the class dubious. Can you really say you’re making good use of the students’ time when it’s clear none of them are understanding the material? Maybe the material needs to be broken up into more digestible chunks.
It’s also possible to just write a bad question/exam and recognize you need to do better as a professor.
I had a physics professor who graded himself on whether or not he wrote/taught well by the grade distribution. He was always transparent about it and had benchmarks of how it went previous years. He was also one of the most sought after professors.
I also had s philosophy class where the best grade over the entire semester was a 30 and the professor was like yeah this is just expected. You get an A. This guy obviously derived enjoyment from not being a good teacher and for humiliating his students that they really knew nothing about philosophy. That guy sucked.
I had this one teacher in university (not yet a PhD but was working on it) that I ended up taking like 4 different classes from in university. Although he was brilliant and experienced having worked in the industry for 30 years or so, and was naturally a very good teacher and very passionate about what he taught, it’s a simple fact was he was new, but he was very humble and transparent about that. The first course I took from him was only his second time teaching that course (or any course), and the other three were each his first. All these courses he built the curriculum himself. Again, he’s an excellent teacher, one of the best I ever had, but he was still working out the kinks in his tests. He was being very transparent with us students about his process of choosing to award partial or full credit for questions and problems he decided weren’t fair, or were worded ambiguously, always taking feedback during class after getting our graded tests back.
I had a few other courses like that too, and I feel like that system (decreasing the weight of problems that aren’t fair to students) is generally a better system than simply grading on a curve. The former is more granular, differentiating poor grades due to lack of study from poor grades to a faulty test. It also provides a clear direction for improving the curriculum next semester. Grading on a curve often feels like a copout to avoid the labor involved in improving the curriculum. BUT on the other hand, if the class really went so poorly that nobody understood the material or if the test was almost totally unfair, then imo grading on a curve could be the fairest solution for the students. There’s no perfect solution there, the students time is already wasted, better to give them the benefit of the doubt in that case.
I love the correction system we have at my university. All the exams are pseudonymized with a sticker you receive during the exam and scanned after completion. About 10 to 30 people are involved in correcting the exams for one course. We don’t know who the exams belong to as we only see the scanned version on our tablet or computer. Each task is corrected by a different set of people. We can select to see only a single task or subtask to streamline the process of correction, too. Furthermore, all the tasks are checked twice independently. Once done, the system can assign the exams back to the students. I love how it’s fair and “anonymous” by design.
Wait… are there universities that don’t have an anonymous exam system?
I was a university student around ten years ago and we usually wrote our names and student identification numbers right on the exam. For the most part our professors didn’t really know us very well anyway (due to the number of students), so I never questioned why it should not be so.
In early 2010s I had a TA give me an A without grading. When I confronted him he said “Why do you care, you know you’re getting an A anyways?” Lol. He got reprimanded though.
i think multiple-choice-exams* are even better because they’re corrected by a machine by scanning the checkboxes and saying either “yes” or “no”. it’s 100% fair and also really effective.
* where applicable
I had so many horrible multiple choice tests where the number of correct answers was stated and I was 100% sure that that wasn’t correct, but there was no room for additional remarks to explain my thoughts.
Multiple choice often fails to allow full demonstration of understanding, and especially at college level, that matters much more.
Our exam system supports multiple choice and, indeed, collecting that part automatically. (We can still go through the boxes recognized as tick or blank en-masse to check for recognition mistakes.) However, they’re only allowed to make up 20% of an exam according to university-wide rules.
suuuuurree
I have had teachers try to grade on a strict bell curve distribution, but if your goal as a school is to accept promising talent then train them better you should expect your students to fall within a part of a bell curve and not spread across the whole damn thing.
Sorry, can’t pass you cause my morals oblige me to give 2 As, and 2Fs, and I’m all out of everything but FS (no matter how many points you were away from someone with a better final grade).
Anon is just making a fake post. Literally no college would authorize this type of shit and I’d argue there could be grounds for a civil lawsuit if they did. Paying them tens of thousands of dollars and one of their professors admits to just auto failing students because there’s too many in the class? Nah, I’ve attended 3 different schools before I graduated (I moved a lot), and every single one would drop you before class even began or within the first week if the class was too full.
If this did actually happen to OP, I can guarantee there’s more to the story they’re not telling us. But I’m going to assume it’s made up or extremely exaggerated/altered.
Yeah, it’s way too easy to prove that the exam was graded wrong. Given the economic incentives, some of the failed students are definitely going to sue if you’re going to be that blatant about it.
I keep reading about people grading on a curve and I still can’t grasp what that means. Do those teachers have like a set number of A B C, or whatever, they can give out? And if they’ve run out of A then you get a B? And if the B run out you get a C and so on? That seems a completely intellectually bankrupt practice! If you don’t want more than X people passing, then just grade people with percentages and let only the first X highest through and that’s it, but don’t lie with fake grades! How insane…
Grading on a curve is indeed that, and it should be criminalized because of how much it harms students
How does it harm students? A curve is only used if the grade distribution is below expectations. All it does is cover for a bad test or something.
Because if the next cohort is simply performing better you force some students to be graded below their performance, which is unfair punishment, and if they’re worse then some will be graded higher. It’s especially unfair when the composition of students changes rapidly or when used over very mixed groups of students.
Grading should be decided based on achieved learning targets, not group rank. It’s not a fucking sport.
I’ve never heard of a curve being used to adjust scores downward, only to adjust them upward.
I’ve seen dozens of examples
At my uni they’d take the highest grade of the class and reset that as the max points and grade from there.
So if max points on an exam was 120 and no-one scored higher then an 85, then an 85 would be an A, 75 a B, etc.
I’m a mediocre student but an amazing test taker and used to compete on math teams. So some of the math heavy engineering courses I would get perfect exam scores and sometimes the prof would ignore me as the highest grade. I was frustrated at first because my A didn’t mean the same as someone’s but I realized later it was to stop me from getting beat up by a bunch of 30 yo guys.
I still think the ABCDF system sounds so… childish? But presented like that I can see how it makes sense. I always thought about more absolute systems as more, eh, honest? More of an absolute value of our worth, but in truth it depends completely on our teachers, so it’s not really any “truer” than the letter system. Just a different bias.
I’m glad there are so many interesting answers in this thread :)Grades in the US are on a 4 point scale, with decimal values between:
- 3.5-4.0 - A
- 3.0-3.5 - B
- 2.5-3.0 - C
- 2.0-2.5 - D
- 1.0-2.0 - F
A “good” grade in a class is 3.5 or better, and 2.0 is usually barely passing. Letter grades are used through high school, and high school and college use the 4 point scale on transcripts, and people translate to the letter grades for talking with friends.
In assignments, you get a percent rating, with 60% being barely passing. There’s a lot of granularity there.
Grading on a curve means the professor expects a certain distribution of scores, so of everyone scores poorly, the test is bad, so the scores are readjusted according to that expected curve. If people outperform, then there’s no curve and you get the score you get.
The curve means the class’s scores is fit onto a bell curve. X% pass, Y% fail, etc all according to the predetermined standard bell curve. Doesn’t matter if the class is full of Einsteins or dunces. If 30% is the highest mark in the class then that’s an A+, and so on.
Usually if everyone gets high scores, a curve isn’t used. The curve is only used if most people score poorly to make up for a bad exam or something.
You still “need” people to fail, so
No, you don’t. That’s not how a curve works, the curve merely improves scores. If a curve would lower scores, it’s not used.
Not what they did for us.
Do you have more details? Because I’ve never heard of a curve being used to hurt students in a class, only to help make up for a bad exam.
Wait until you hear that universities are just literal paywalls to seperate social classes so poor people can’t get good jobs that once were apprenticeships.
That’s a pretty jaded way of thinking about it.
Universities don’t exist to train you for a job, they exist to teach you how to learn. That’s why you take a bunch of seemingly irrelevant classes, such as history, science, and English before you get into your specialization. Basically, half your education is unrelated to your specialty, and much of the rest is theoretical since you’re expected to learn what you actually need in the field.
At the end of the day, most jobs don’t require formal education and they’re happy with practical experience. But most companies won’t hire you wlfornyour first job without some indication you know what you’re doing, and companies trust university degrees as that form of evidence. After your first couple jobs, they really don’t care as much about your formal education.
There are other ways to get that experience, they’re just a lot harder than going through formal education. I’ve hired self taught people that have been fantastic, it’s just a lot harder to prove yourself.
That said, I wish there was a better way to tell kids what other options are. Everyone seems so focused on traditional university education that they don’t consider alternatives.
I assure you that’s not how it works in Europe. Nowhere near as bad as the US, in any case.
I guess that’s what happens when education is deeply ingrained in the culture.That’s not fair, they’re also debt slavery scams where they sell false hope to people. They even have entire military boot camp lite night release prisons where they brainwash you into going
I mean, not the whole world is the US. Plus, at this point you’ll get a better paying job if you go into trades.
Haha, yeah, if you actually look at how much you earn vs how much you actually work (quality of life), some trades like electrician or plumbers are so much better off than my doctor wife, it’s not even funny :/
I remember that my statistics professor was so smug about grading on a curve because it was using statistics. It was also a class that he gloated about as a class where you “needed an a” if you wanted to get into grad school. In other words, the asshole was making sure only a certain number of people even had a chance to get into the graduate programs. It was rumored that he even ran tests on students in the different labs, telling the grad students teaching the labs to teach in certain ways and seeing if there were any differences. Wouldn’t put it past him.
My major in college for my BS included all but 2 credit hours of a physics minor, so my final semester, I took Thermal Physics to complete that minor. I’ve never met a physics course I didn’t ace, so I figured “easy A”.
I’m quite certain I was the highest scorer in the course and was a solid B+ before the final. I took the final and felt really good about how well I did. I thought sure that professor would curve (or otherwise adjust the grades) and I’d be the one that threw off the curve.
I got my grades back. I got a C. My only C ever, in fact. An A (what I expected) would have gotten me summa cum laude.
The same semester, I took a statistics class. Paid exactly zero attention in class. The class took place in a computer lab for no good reason other than I’m guessing the other classrooms were booked. I played a fast-paced Quake-like FPS every class all class. Got an A in that course.
But that fuckin’ thermal physics class.
Years later, a coworker of mine who was an alum of my alma mater told me that they’d taken the professor who taught that thermal physics class off of teaching permanently due to his completely unreasonable grading practices.
I feel kinda bad for anyone ADHD sat behind you, because there’s one data structures class where I don’t remember a damn thing except the dude in front of me 1CC-ing Einhander.
This post doesn’t pass peer review
I hope you were smart enough to record that interaction, anon.
