"In my cynical moments I think professors in some other departments have the right idea. Make grading a black box and give lots of A’s so the students don’t complain. "
It’s likely easier to pretend that in other disciplines they just “throw easy As” at students than to reflect on one’s own weaknesses in helping students master material.
Then you are wrong. Of course there is always a pretty strong correlation between mastery of the material and grade received, and ideally it should be 100%. In practice it’s probably closer to 90% for absolute scales because there is some noise (who had a bad day, who studied the right material, who made a mistake that happened to throw them off more, who had more exams that week, etc).
A normal distribution curve brings that correlation down to something like 60% because it magnifies the effect of noise and makes it so that luck factors may put you above people who actually properly learned the material (it could also make average students perform significantly below average if the noise factors stack against them). It also fails to measure whether everyone passed a certain level of understanding, whether no one did, or whether it’s something in between. You could have everyone know practically nothing about the material and 20% will get an A. You could have everyone know the material enough to have mastered it and 20% will get an A.
Generally a teacher who knows their material knows what should qualify as mastery. Domain knowledge generally comes with an understanding of what mastery is.
Teacher #2 just has a uniformly harsher grading scale. That’s fine if it really is uniformly applied.
This is silly. You’d no more throw someone into music composition without any music background than you’d make someone who’d never taken physics or calculus do fluid mechanics. Besides, this forced STEM-humanities dichotomy doesn’t represent reality. The first part I could indeed do, as an engineering major (maybe not with one hand tied behind my back – might make it difficult to type), because I write for fun and always have. Gasp! People can be good at more than one subject?? Even across such important imaginary lines as the one that separates “STEM people” from “humanities people”?
Pizzagirl, yes a good manager develops their people. But a manager is not a trainer or professor. Most people managers have no more than 20 direct reports and spend more time with them than does a professor. I spend more time and energy with my team than with my family. You also have significant issues in many organizations that still use the Jack Welch method of weeding out the bottom 10% on a regular basis. In that environment, you would be one of the 10% as the manager if you did not manage out your own bottom 10%. The theory (not advocating, just explaining) is that if you spend that effort on the upper 90% rather than remediating the bottom 10%, you will have better overall results. Corporate America still leans fairly heavily on the forced distribution (think ‘curved grades’) system of employee evaluation. Even if you do not fire them, the bottom 10% (number may vary) get poor ratings and little or no raise…they tend to quit rather than get fired. Again, not advocating, just explaining how it works in the real world. If your employer is not like that, consider yourself part of the minority on that point.
Also known as stack ranking or by any other number of names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
General consensus is that it was a widespread disaster that severely crippled the future growth of every company to which it was applied. I read Mr. Welch’s book and I can say that he was remarkably blind to the fact that the managers of his company were trying to tell him that his methods were dangerously suicidal for the company in the long term.
Many people seem to think that all students are working and want to learn.
False premise: here’s an example. I am research faculty currently auditing a graduate course in one of my university’s professional schools. The topic is related to my next research project. The professor, internationally respected, has a great syllabus, but about 1/2 the students–adult, prior graduate work, etc.–aren’t doing the reading. I am shocked. This doesn’t happen in my classes because I’m a bit of a martinet, but really these adults are in professional school with professional aspirations. More than a few students do not want to climb the food chain; they just want to survive with minimal work. They are engaging in some kind of magical thinking about what their future holds.
Now this isn’t a STEM field, but it is shockingly clear that preparation, commitment, and ability have already created a grade spread that would require major, major effort on the part of the prof to change. As a professor, I can see nothing wrong with spreading out the grades so that consequences of commitment and ability are visible to all.
I think the point was that “humanities” are not blow-off classes by nature. Of course anyone who gets this assignment would have proper training in completing it. Even with that training it’s not something that you can just easily coast through.
STEM, humanities, and every other subject are as difficult as they are made to be.
No. But if it is true that they all do want to learn and do learn the material, then they should all get high marks.
No one is saying that they should get a high grade. In fact, if they are all terrible students, then they should all get a terrible grade instead of getting good or bad grades on a normal distribution.
This imposes an assumption about the quality of your students that you are not, in general, justified in making. It also serves as an example of lazy teaching in which you do not define the cutoffs for what you feel qualifies as an (A,B,C) level of competence and instead claim that some people have to be A level, some people have to be B level, etc. This is not a justified generalization and is generally a sign of laziness in teaching and evaluating.
It’s not that they “have to be”. It’s that they are.
"You also have significant issues in many organizations that still use the Jack Welch method of weeding out the bottom 10% on a regular basis. In that environment, you would be one of the 10% as the manager if you did not manage out your own bottom 10%. The theory (not advocating, just explaining) is that if you spend that effort on the upper 90% rather than remediating the bottom 10%, you will have better overall results. Corporate America still leans fairly heavily on the forced distribution (think ‘curved grades’) system of employee evaluation. "
No, they don’t. NeoDynium explained it well. The theory of “curving” employees has been pretty much discredited.
Not as a general rule. You could have a class of all A students or a class of all F students based on a reasonable objective standard. That’s why it’s important to properly define such a standard.
There’s nothing wrong with having a steeper standard if, say, the university wants to establish a higher standard of minimum competence, as long as it’s understood that anyone who meets that standard gets the grade, with no quotas for who should get what grade, and that it is a fair, even if tough, standard.
Re the “curving” of employees: There was an expose of Amazon’s practices, published in the New York Times in late 2015. It looked to me pretty much like “curving” of employees, with rather exorbitant demands on the time of someone who is not absorbed in their work. I think there are places where this sort of thing is still practiced, even though it tends to be counter-productive.
Not every one who is a legal associate makes partner. Ditto for other firms, such as accounting firms. Not all Assistant Professors gain tenure. Not all Adjunct Professors gain a tenure-track position. Not all post-docs who would like to stay in academia get any variety of professorship. Not all writers get their work published. Hardly any of the students in the screenplay class would be identified as the “next big thing.”
I think the practice is still moderately common overall. If it does not apply to firing people, it still tends to apply to the distribution of raises.
I am not an advocate of curving grades, except to help students (as posted above). I appreciate some of the comments by people who don’t like the grading practices in a lot of STEM courses–I don’t like some of them, either.
However, some posters have been mentioning “the material,” as if a STEM class is equivalent to a set body of knowledge. That’s not really how upper-level science or math classes run, and probably not engineering either. In the science and math classes, there are concepts (and in math, theorems) that can be acquired and then a complete zoo of possible applications. The ability to apply the concepts is key, because that is what the students need to be doing in the future–not simply using methods they have been taught to solve problems they have seen before. I would regard just changing the numbers in a problem as yielding the same problem back again. That category of problem solving is good for a technician–and it is great if someone wants to be a technician (there are advantages)–but it is not enough for an actual science career.
One or several posters above mentioned “internalizing” the concepts. I think that is really important for a student to do. Internalizing them means that they affect your way of approaching new situations–in fact, the concepts really become part of you. I suspect that new neural connections are formed in the process.
This generalizes to areas outside of STEM. For example, in Oxford, the faculty (professors, fellow, dons, etc.) give “tutorials” on their subjects to all students, usually meeting with the students 1 or 2 at a time, roughly weekly, to cover one subject. I have read of a Philosophy tutor’s report that said, “Mr. Jones has been walking out with Philosophy, but he has not yet taken her to be his wedded wife” [with apologies for the gender bias in the content].
Besides working the problem sets, successful STEM students spend a lot of time thinking about the concepts in their courses, and thinking about what they can do with them–just as successful philosophy majors would presumably spend a lot of time thinking about the concepts in their courses, and how/whether they resolve different issues.
Finally, one comment about the grading in science vs. engineering, in case it might affect anyone’s thinking about a choice of major (theirs, or their son’s or daughter’s):
Someone posted above that grades in engineering tended to be higher than grades in science, which were more or less the bottom of the barrel.
This is a bit deceptive. In many science majors, a student just needs to keep a GPA that will permit the student to graduate with a 2.0 average, or above. In many universities, there are GPA minima to be allowed to major in engineering. Often these cut-offs hover around 2.8 or 3.0. Only students with that GPA or higher are allowed to take the higher-level (junior and senior) engineering classes. The grades in these classes may well come out higher, because the students have been pre-selected.
The GPA cut-offs in engineering are not based on an ego-trip or anything similar. They are established because the student: faculty ratio has to be kept within the bounds prescribed by accrediting agencies [students = students majoring in any engineering field, or a specific field], and engineering faculty are expensive to hire and equip. If the budget goes up, or if demand in a field goes down, then the GPA cut-offs would drop.
Accreditation in science fields tends to be based on the curriculum and the qualifications of the faculty. Although the student: faculty ratio does figure into things, the bounds are less restrictive than in engineering, so we can and do “take all comers.” This may include students who could not meet the GPA cut-off to major in engineering.
But a student of any given overall caliber and effort level should do equally well in science or engineering (if the student can get into engineering). No one should be scared off from science, due to the GPA distribution being lower in science than in engineering (if that is the case at their university).
“Cool! So if I gave you the assignment of - from a blank sheet of paper, write a screenplay to be performed at the end of the year. Make it so that it touches people’s emotions. While you’re at it, write and arrange original music for it. … Are you saying that you, as a STEM major, wouldn’t find that hard? You could do it with one hand tied behind your back, it’s that easy? Because I don’t buy it for a minute.”
There is no doubt that there are some amazing liberal arts majors with lots of talent. Especially at Northwestern. I know that George R R Martin, Steven Colbert and many truly talented people went to Northwestern. In my mind the big differences show up in average students.
In many STEM majors today you will find a large number of students with reading and writing scores that are higher that the students actually majoring in English. I think you will find many fewer liberal arts majors with higher math and science scores than the STEM majors.
The reality is that the run-of-the-mill liberal arts student who is majoring in humanities, or English, arrives with lower scores, puts in less effort, and ends up with a higher GPA. That is not true for the cream of the crop, but it is true on average.
“But if it is true that they all do want to learn and do learn the material, then they should all get high marks.”
This reveals part of the tension. It is not simply a matter of learning “material.” Learning material or, in my example, doing the reading is step one, but it is just the basic requirement, perhaps a C. What universities require and professors are teaching are analysis and synthesis of the material, perhaps a B. What is valued most is creativity. In too many high schools, students learn the material and regurg it on tests. That passes for knowledge some places, but it is just training to be a cog. There are many scholarly studies of how schools filter students to jobs by curriculums based in socioeconomic class, but here is a respected and telling one by Jean Anyon. http://www.udel.edu/educ/whitson/897s05/files/hiddencurriculum.htm
It is very easy and trite to write that people who don’t hand out A’s are lazy teachers, but in fact, if there is a tendency, harder graders are more committed to challenging and teaching their students. The blowback they take on grades alone demonstrates that they are willing to spend more time. I never had a student complain about an A, but give out C’s and they are at your door. Once they are at the door, then you can help them develop intellectually.
@Quantmech I dont know how my ds does things now that he is at college, but when he was in high school,he could spend hours thinking about how to solve a single AoPS problem. He might put down his pencil and go for a run to think about it some more. Then he might sit and work some more on paper. Then in the middle of dinner he might excuse himself bc he suddenly had a break through. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night with a solution that he must have gone to bed puzzling over.
As I sit and read these forums, I frequently recognize that we have different high school objectives than many posters on CC. What standardized tests actually illustrate is just one of them.
(Of course, I type this as the parent of kids who do things like keep thought-experiment notebooks. ;)) )
“There was an expose of Amazon’s practices, published in the New York Times in late 2015. It looked to me pretty much like “curving” of employees, with rather exorbitant demands on the time of someone who is not absorbed in their work”
Amazon is a horrible example of “good HR practices.” I know no business person in HR who desires to model themselves after Amazon.
Why would it be a goal to designate how many A’s a professor could give out?
This mischaracterizes the problem by shifting the definition of “learning the material.” Truth is that that definition can mean anything, and depending on the school it could mean anything from “being able to regurgitate the material on an exam” to “apply the material to unique problems using the same principles.” The issue here is with establishing a standard ahead of time as to what qualifies as what letter grade of understanding.
What’s lazy is not, “handing out A’s vs not handing out A’s,” but creating a forced normal distribution instead of establishing an absolute, rather than relative, standard for what passes for any given grade. That doesn’t evaluate people based on how well they actually learned the material, but on how they rank relative to their classmates.
In a proper system, if they all meet the standard for an A then they should all get A’s and if none of them do then none of them should get A’s.
Give people grades lower than they deserve to prove a point and they will generally stop giving you genuine consideration. If they have a C then there better be a good, fair reason why it’s not a B or an A that is more than just “there’s no particular reason why but I liked what your classmates did better than what you did.”