RoryDuhMan

How does the curving at brown work (with its unique grading system)?

Do a lot of people do well?

icebox4

depends on the course instructor, really.

modestmelody

This has come up before.

I'm not sure why, but a lot of high school students get the impression that there is some larger policy on how you have to grade at college. Professors are as autonomous, if not more so, than high school teachers in determining how they want to grade.

So the answer is, however the instructor wants to. If the want to give all Cs or all Bs or all As or any breakdown, no one is going to stop them pretty much.

Some professors give harder exams and curve, others give exams where the right number of students will do well enough anyway, etc.

What I've never seen is curving down-- i.e. getting greater than a 90 is always an A no matter how many people do that well. That's been true that I've seen (though I've been in very very few classes where that was reasonable). But in theory, even that is fair game.

mgcsinc

I think the fact that people refer to deflections from a 70-80-90 grade scale 'curving' is silly. Professors have grades to give, and they assign them as they please; I don't know where the idea of 90 being an A came from, but I think of that as middle-school-type grading that I (luckily) didn't have to deal with in high school and have not had to deal with in college (at Brown). Frankly, I think that if your tests are so easy that 90 is the A/B cut off, you're not doing a good job of telling students how they're doing.

modestmelody

I have had many professors who say they've succeeded if their average is in the mid 60s to low 70s. That means there is plenty of space in either direction for people to differentiate themselves.

twothousandeight

I don't know how often it happens but sometimes classes curve down. I've at least had *one* course (Statistics) get scaled down were roughly an 85 to 99/100 was an A.

i_wanna_be_Brown

you're misunderstanding what modestmelody means by curve down. He means a situation where you get a 90 on a test, but the class average is a 97 with a standard deviation of 1. In theory, your grade is terrible because you're 7 standard deviations below the mean. If the test was on a strict curve you would probably fail. That would be "curving down"

modestmelody

i_wanna_be is right.

twothousandeight

Ah, I see, thanks for the clarification.