Ryan650

It disappoints me when I hear students tell me that they got a "C" then follow that up with "but it was graded on a curve so I got a 92".

This is a common practice in my local high school though it is usually reserved for freshman and sophmores. As if this weren't padding enough they also allow students to retake tests.

I question whether or not this is self defeating. In life you don't get second chances very often and performance must meet more objective standards.

I was speaking yesterday to a happy go lucky student who was cruising through high school with straight A's then ran into a huge speed bump in his junior year. Out of the gate his grades dropped from A's to C's and D's. The difference? No more grading on the curve. Seriously, isn't this a cruel way to set them up for failure later?

halcyonheather

I've had two assignments in health class that were graded on a curve, but that's it.
If a C is a 92% then most of the class did worse, which probably means that the test was unnecessarily difficult. Or it was a really lazy class.
Grading on a curve teaches you to always try to be better than everyone else, which (for better or worse) is a valuable skill in the real world, possibly more so than meeting objective standards. You really don't need to do extremely well at anything to succeed. You just have to be better than your competition.
I don't like curve grading, though.

Cowboy112

In my AP world classes most of our tests are graded with a curve. Most of the time if you get around a high 50 then you will pass easily with the curve

AlexHarper

No Curves. No rounding up grades (a 93.5 is still a B). No retakes.

Ryan650

I assume you mean AP World History? I would be curious to know what kind of AP scores the students in your class receive given the significant curving.

CE527M

No, but sometimes if a test was particularly hard, it is. In my AP class, we have to take weekly chapter assessments, and it`s curved (and my teacher really doesn`t curve much) because it`s different than the AP test format, and my teacher doesn`t expect us to get them all right by any means, because it`s so detailed.

Hannahbanana69

Only if everyone does badly. In that case, it's either graded on a curve or regiven to the whole class.
And my chem teacher last year let us correct tests for half credit, up until an 85. God, that saved my LIFE.

goodnoodle

No curve this year from what I can tell. But in Freshman year , the highest test score in most classes would become 100%. Ex. (If I got a 95 percent then that's counted as 100 and everyone else goes up 5 points.)

TickGrey

Nope. Even if not a single person taking the course gets an A, my school refuses any sort of curve, extra credit, or bonus points.

superstarlala

Some teachers do, some don't. MY AP US Gov teacher last year usually had 25 pt tests but graded them out of 23 or 24 pts instead. My Physics teacher last year curved if not a single person in any honors Physics class got an A. And in most classes we can retake quizzes but not tests. The most common retake policy is one per unit, but in Math it's one per quarter and my history teacher lets us retake as many as we want (for now). Teachers round up peoples grades at the end of the quarter sometimes though ike an 89.5 is an A, but I ended with an 89.4 in one class so my teacher bumped me up. Though my math teacher last year refused to round up on anything and instead, at the end of the semester, if you were close would average all your grades out because our semester grades aren't based on numbers but just based on the letter grades

cchanged

My AP Bio class is graded on a curve. The highest grade is always in the A range anyway. We get two short paragraphs, about forty multiple choices, and five short responses on every test.

cchanged

It's harder to get 100% on the paragraphs because sometimes you miss a few details.

MutaRiSC

None of my classes are curved although certain physics tests are curved.

cchanged

I forgot to say that only tests are curved, not the grade average.

FantasyVesperia

There are rumors going around in my school saying that the AP Biology tests are graded on a curve. The evolution test was SO, SO HARD and biology is like my main subject, and my teacher said that she graded some sad tests in our class. I don't like everything being graded on a curve, but it sure helps a lot. I just hope that the test we took was curved lol.