My older son is a Electrical Engineering major at a state school. This has been the typical experience in all of his engineering classes:
Midterm tests are the first graded assignment. Class average is 30-45%. Professor curves the grades, so the best of the “failing” students get A’s. My son is usually in the middle of the curve, with a C, occasionally a B. After midterms, the bottom 1/3 of the students drop the class. By the time finals roll around, with 1/3 of the class gone, my son finds himself now near the bottom of the curve, even though he thinks he is doing better and has a better grasp of the subject. Class average on the final is not much better, so the curve is the only determining factor for a grade, and 1/3 of the class gets a D or F. The only option has been to immediately drop any class where you fall in the middle or lower of the curve on the first test. And they wonder why it takes so long to graduate from that college as an engineering student.
Is this common? If it was one or two classes, I would blame it on the professor. But at his school, this seems to be the norm. It makes it very hard to judge how well / poorly you are doing in a class. I have an issue with any class in which literally no one passes a test (judging by actual test %). It also creates a horribly cut-throat mentality. Those who do understand the material better do not want to join a study group with others since their grade depends on the grades of those around them. One of his classmates even handed out a “study guide” that was intentionally wrong, just to better his position on the curve.
My younger son is now awaiting admission decisions for Fall 2016, and also plans to major in engineering. He did not apply to the school in question, but I’m worried that this scenario might be wide-spread in the engineering field.
I also see this as an issue when deciding whether to attend a “reach” school vs. a match or safety school. As a student, do you want to be the one who barely got in, and now you are competing for grades with those who were better qualified than you were? Would it be better to attend somewhere that you are closer to the top of the heap as far as admittance qualifications?
I think the type of school matters, too. I’d be very surprised if a small school would consider it an acceptable outcome to have somewhere around half of the class drop out before the end of the term.
When I was in college decades ago (when there was less grade inflation), one generally did not get a D or F unless one deserved it (i.e. only a few D and F grades for those who did very poorly on an absolute scale). However, grading curves were often used for passing grades in larger classes.
I think it pays to investigate this with the schools that your child is considering. Ask current students. I know of this type of situation for intro courses in bio and chem (those with low grades drop), and this may persist into other mid level or even upper level sciences (dropping if the grade is low). I have heard of this for engineering as well. I think there are schools that probably don’t use the grading on curve method, but I think in large universities it is common for science and engineering. Also if 1/3 of the class gets a D or F, this is something that I have not heard of in the places that I am familiar with. In the sciences I have heard of multiple classes where the test mean is perhaps 55% on the test, and that the overall class mean is a B or B-. In such a scenario, the low end has perhaps 5% that are D and F. I have heard of engineering classes where C+ is the median grade. They may pass out quite a few C-, but still not many D or F. Engineers often have a lower gpa than other types of majors.
I don’t think it is uncommon in engineering, math, physics, etc. Just my opinion, but I think a lot of the profs in those areas are divas – THEY aren’t going to soften up their testing materials just because the material is hard. And they aren’t going to admit that maybe they aren’t teaching it very coherently, or that the pre-req classes aren’t covering what they need to, or that there is so much material it should be split into more than one class. So their compromise is terribly hard tests, but with a curve. My kid says her major (one of those listed above) has pretty much all profs who are divas you can stand and divas that you can’t stand. But they are all divas.
OP - Grading polices in engineering vary a lot. Even with grade inflation, I’d say that at most schools the grading policies for the first year engineering core classes range from centering the average grade around a C/C+ at the low end to being centered around a B+ at the high end. But what you’re describing is definitely par for the course at many schools.
Here’s a typical pattern at many schools (particularly large state schools with decent engineering departments that do not practice selective admissions into the engineering program but instead have more of a “let’s give lots of kids a chance and see who makes it” philosophy). They’ll curve the first year engineering core classes around a C+ and then they’ll weed out the kids who don’t have at least a C+/B- average from becoming engineering majors. Their goal is to get about 40% to 60% of potential engineering majors to switch out. In fact, they’re pretty much required to do this since they don’t have the resources to teach that many upperclass engineering majors. One bright spot is that the curve for juniors and seniors is usually set higher (but the students are also better).
I don’t think this weeding out is entirely bad since it lets a student find out that they’re not suited for this major relatively early on when there’s still time to switch to another major. Of course, some students would be able to make it if they had a little more time to catch-up or to adjust, but at $30K a year that’s very often not possible.
(BTW - I wouldn’t worry too much that the average uncurved grade is only 30-40%. The curve and the targeted weed out rate is all that matters. It varies by the type of class and the caliber of the students, but I generally always aimed to write tests that would have a mean uncurved grade of about 60-70% for regular students, 45-55% for an advanced course or an honors class.)
D and I specifically looked for schools that didn’t do this. It wasn’t easy info to come by, we pretty much had to ask students, in addition to web site department research and seeing if major department has too many prospective majors or encourages students to switch.
There’s a kind of similar thread about collaboration vs competition in the Parent’s Forum.
Yes - this was my experience in an intro physics class at a mid-sized research university (one that has a reputation for small classes, engaged teachers, non-competitive students…) It was almost 30 years ago, but I still remember that I made a 52 on the first test and thought I was going to have a heart attack.
The 52 was an A. Lots of kids dropped, but lots of kids stayed in and scraped by with a D or a C. The final was brutal; you were allowed to use your notes and textbooks but it was only one question – something like “if your shadow is 4.4 feet tall at 11:36 a.m. on October 2, then how much does your mother weigh? Please show all work.” Not exactly, of course, but something like that.
Anyway, my background is in chemistry, and yes, this situation is fairly common in my experience (ancient as that experience may be.) Some of it is diva professors, some of it is just the difficulty of the subject matter. I’d say that at least half of my undergrad science courses had uncurved grades where everyone failed. And I don’t think that fostered a cutthroat atmosphere - in fact, I think it fostered a certain esprit de corps among those taking the class. Perhaps the reason for the cutthroat mentality comes from something else?
From reading Reddit posts for our two flagships, I have seen a similar pattern. Some classes don’t curve until the very end. Everyone (or the majority of everyone) is failing until the end of the semester and the curve is applied based on whoever is left to final grades. Many posts of upperclassmen reassuring people that a 50 at mid term is likely an A or B. The only way to judge is to compare yourself to the median. This seems to be in the physics and calculus classes.
In that large flagship public university (which I won’t name) in CA, any majors (whether it is health profession, engineering, computers or business) that lead to good jobs are very competitive. There are a lot “weed” out courses which grading is on a bell curve. For example, in a test of 100 points, the highest score might be 60 and that would be the starting point for an A. In this system maybe 10% would get A’s (say, scores of 50 to 60), the next 10% or so B’s and the rest of the class would get C’s, D’s or F’s. The professors make the test very difficult to weed out students. This might be true for other state flagship schools. Many students are “A” students in high school and they get admitted to these flagship schools. Like an university official said while speaking to parents in an orientation, “everyone who was admitted were “A” students and not everyone can be “doctors””. Therefore, the school grades on a bell curve to weed out students. Some schools are more notorious for this.
My experience at such a “large flagship public university (which I won’t name) in CA” was that grading in engineering and its prerequisites was as described in reply #4. D and F grades were few, and given to those who earned them. About half or a little less of the passing grades were C grades. Somewhat more than half of the rest were B grades. A grades were less numerous than B grades, but more than 10%. I expect the grading curves to be more generous now since there has been grade inflation since then.
Looks like it is more common than I hoped. In our case, these are upper division classes, far beyond the “weed out” stage and the change-majors stage. It is also not helpful that almost 100% of the upper level professors are foreign, adding language barrier issues to the already difficult-to-process information.
I don’t understand setting up a test where the planned median grade is 45-50%. What purpose does that serve? To me, in my ancient way of thinking, any professor who has only taught the class well enough for students to know 45-50% of the material is not adequately doing their job. Is the point of a college class to rank the students or to teach the material? I would prefer to think that students are actually learning the curriculum. If they are not, I feel something is wrong either with 1) the students; 2) the professor, or 3) the curriculum. Are we satisfied that the “best” students only really grasp 50% of the information?
I don’t understand the concept of success in a class being determined by comparison to others in the class vs. mastery of the subject matter. It makes me feel like I should encourage my younger son to attend one of his safety schools so that the chance of him being at the top of the curve would be greater than if he stretched himself by attending a school filled with academic peers (or betters).
My daughter is a sophomore engineering major at a public university(UF), and we see the same pattern in the large, core classes. Most do poorly on the first test (which gets curved to an “ok” grade), then they adjust and do fine on the rest. A significant amount of freshman and sophomores may even drop the class (juniors and seniors are much less likely, UF limits them to only 2 drops before graduation). I don’t think this is planned, but simply a case of the professor doing a better job of adjusting the test rigor (and students adjusting their study habits and figuring out the professors/TA’s).
Even with core classes following that model, the average GPA for engineering majors at UF was a 3.28 (Fall 2014).
It does tend to freak out the student. I attempted to prepare my DD for the “experience”, since it’s the same one I had in the 80’s. She’s still freaking out about it (and yet she still ends up with A’s and B’s).
Actually, that can be seen as ideal for a large class graded on a curve, since it allows differentiating students of different mastery of the content, rather than having all of their scores bunched together. The instructor could make a test with some easy problems that C students should solve, some more difficult ones for B students, and some most difficult problems for A students. Unlike in high school, where 70% of the test needs to be C student problems, the percentage of the test devoted to more difficult problems can be greater.
Of course, if 50% is an A on the curve, perhaps there are too many hard problems on the test. But we know that, between various students in the passing range (C to A), some students will have problem solving skills at an acceptable level (C), some will have better than acceptable level (B), and some will be able to solve the most difficult problems (A).
At the risk of being flamed as a “diva,” I want to comment on calmom2016’s view of exams. At least within math and physics, the exams are not directly designed to test students’ knowledge of the material. They are designed to test whether the students can solve unfamiliar problems using what they know. The students might have grasped 100% of the information content of the course, and they might be successful in applying their information to totally new problems 50% of the time. That’s actually quite good. That is why 50% can be an A, in this situation. Engineering exams may be similar in this regard–I’m not sure.
The percentage scales used in many high schools are really quite arbitrary, and they are not in use in some other parts of the world. So “failing” on a high school scale does not mean anything, necessarily, with regard to college.
In my classes, I provide a guaranteed grading scale–so if a student achieves an x% average, the student knows that the grade will be at least y, regardless of how the rest of the class does. However, the grade might be curved up to be higher than y, depending on the difficulty of the test questions. I sympathize with the problems faced by a student who starts out at the average of the group, and then finds him/herself below average, after a lot of students have dropped the course.
The curriculum is a separate issue–students have to be able to fit the required courses into four years (or sometimes five years, in engineering). This means that it may not be possible to add another course or courses, to split up the topics and make the coverage per course more manageable.
What you describe is fairly common in STEM classes–difficult tests curved. 1/3 of class getting D or F seems harsher than what I have seen, but I could believe depending on student preparation that it happens. After all some majors do have very high weed out.
Keep in mind also that it can be difficult to judge how well the students will do. The students are being asked to apply concepts and solve new problems, not just solve a problem of type A and a problem of type B just like the ones in the textbook and on the homework but with different numbers. Better to have a low median and curve up than an easy test where everyone gets a 90.
