Berkeley's Grade "Deflation" Is A Myth?

sakky
Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:56:48 +0000

In a similar sense, this seriously detracts from the purpose of an Engineering major. Its even worse than the former because a student actually has to use these skills in his career. Engineers often work in a hazardous work environment and mistakes can be dangerous.



And yet numerous ‘mistakes’ are being made on engineering exams as a matter of routine.

I knew a Berkeley engineering student who once received a 30% on his engineering exam - and celebrated. Why? Because the mean was a 25%. Furthermore, the curve distribution was tightly packed that his 30% was equal to an A. But consider what that means. He made mistakes on the vast majority (70%) of the exam and he freely admitted that he knew practically nothing about what was happening on the exam. But that didn’t matter - all that matters is that he knew more than the average student in that class, who knew even less. Heck, even the highest score of that exam was something in the 50’s or 60’s, meaning that even that student made mistakes on a large fraction of the exam.

While that is admittedly an extreme case, the fact is that many (probably most) Berkeley engineering exams have mean scores somewhere from 40-60%, which implies that the students are routinely making mistakes on large swathes of the exams, and mistake-free exams (i.e. perfect scores) practically never occur. Heck, I suspect that many (probably most) Berkeley engineering professors would concede that they themselves would not have earned perfect scores on their own exams in the allotted exam time, especially given the fact that many professors don’t write their entire exams, but rather do so in conjunction with the TA’s.

Hence, I agree that mistakes in an engineering work environment can be hazardous. Yet the fact of the matter is that engineering exams are deliberately made so egregiously difficult that everybody makes mistakes as a matter of routine. Surely we can agree that an exam in which the average student is making mistakes 75% of the time, and where an “exceptional” student would be one that made mistakes “only” 70% of the time, is a flawed exam. Either the admissions standards are simply too lax, or the exam is too hard.