Seems like there is a marketing opportunity for mid and lower tiered institutions. Kids will want to go to the top schools no matter what. But recruiting at other schools will be helped by promising there are no weed out classes, commitment to kids finishing chosen major, etc. Just like some schools are now advertising guarantees of 4-year graduation.
It’s important to keep some perspective. Something like 44% of all kids who start at a 4-year college won’t even graduate from the college within 6 years. The substantial majority of those don’t ever get a bachelor’s degree in any major … years of their lives and lots of their money gone. Having to switch majors, although not always pleasant, isn’t nearly as bad.
When you look at the “weedout” rates, you have to remember that colleges serve students from many different populations. A lot of the people being weeded out come to college without good preparation.
(Whether we should be sending so many under-prepared students to college just to see them flunk out is an entirely different conversation). Honestly, most people who post on CC only have a narrow slice of the student population in mind.
A lot of complaints about grades posted on CC are about getting B-'s instead of A-'s at a top 100 ranked university. These kids will do just fine. Very few paths in life are determined by your GPA or what school you attend. Your grade is not a measure of your worth as a person. If you want to become an academic, a doctor, or pursue careers like investment banking then having a very high GPA can be very important. But most people don’t really use the specialized knowledge they gained in their major once they leave college. It’s about a broader set of skills, as well as showing you are a motivated person who knows how to problem solve.
I’m a journalism major at the University of Florida, but I have a lot of friends who are STEM majors and slave over their studies only to end up getting D’s or C’s. They rely on a curve and spend countless hours at the library. I think a few of my friends may have actually moved in there. I think this makes me question a lot of things, such as why school’s are either too difficult or why the students are so unable to perform well. Is it high standards or poor foundational knowledge of the material? Weird. I think it’s difficult to compete for jobs when the margin of success is so low in these classes, and furthermore are they being able to learn and apply the knowledge they’re gaining from these classes? Hopefully it’s just the school’s raising their standards of expectation – that’s at least something that can be changed at the college level with some deliberation.
Why would you want to lower the standards?
To help the self esteem of the participation trophy generation?
Just to throw in another real life current perspective, I’m in physics 1 now, at a midwestern state university. ~25 people in the class. Our first exam’s average score was about 56%. (I got an 81%). Interesting thing though, the teacher teaches the same class but at different times, and in the other class, the average was 77%. The class with the higher scores meets twice a week for 100 minutes, whereas mine meets 4 times per week for 50 minutes. The longer class’s exam was longer, of course, and I know there’s several really bright people in that class probably pulling the percentage up a bit (one of them is my suitemate, who got a nearly perfect score.) In my class, there was one 100%, a few 90%s, a few 80%s, and lots below that, lowest I saw was about 15%. (My teacher posted a chart showing the scores.)
I must say, although I was challenged by the test, I didn’t find it unfair at all. It was relevant to what was taught in class and problems that the teacher gave out on worksheets. I just hadn’t studied effectively enough - I assumed he wouldn’t put a certain type on, and he did, so it was my fault for making assumptions. I think I can do better on future exams by studying certain questions more.
Many of the kids in these large intro weed-out type classes are freshmen. When students move to a new environment, they often don’t have the study skills required.
And are often competing against students who have already had at least a portion of the material…
Given how common it is that we see posters saying “you should repeat your AP credit no matter what” (instead of taking the more advanced class that the college allows taking after a specified AP score), we may see the indirect source of this aspect of the issue. Even if there is no actual grading-on-a-curve in the class, the students repeating their AP credit may be causing instructors to have higher expectations of student understanding of the material and ability to handle more difficult problems than they would have if students were not repeating material that they already know.
^^^ Limited perspective, I know, but I haven’t had my teacher assume we knew anything beyond the prereqs of the class to my knowledge.
While that may be technically true, an instructor of (for example) calculus 1 may observe that the students are generally understanding a given concept well enough that s/he does not have to cover it more thoroughly. But if much of the class is repeating their AP calculus credit, then those students may be biasing the instructor’s observation, while students who came in with just precalculus (the actual prerequisite) have more difficulty with that concept and would benefit if the instructor covered it more thoroughly.
Yes, that is the point I was trying to make. Uneven preparation in general is an issue.
I know Harvey Mudd takes this issue very seriously (you can’t squib out to an easier major there, so they have a strong interest in helping students with less prep catch up with their peers, otherwise their retention rates would be lousy). They have tons of tutoring sessions, some pre-freshman year (1st & 2nd semester) opportunities for students in at risk categories, extra mini courses in evenings for students with light prep in some subjects. They house students of all ages together and encourage mentoring & informal tutoring. The profs are very involved in identifying struggling students and reaching out to them.
In at least one area (Comp Sci) they separate inexperienced students from the more experienced ones for the intro course (funny thing – that has resulted in a huge increase in students picking the CS major – could it be that an ENCOURAGING intro course without “sandbaggers” helps students gain confidence to move forward in a major??).
All things that other colleges COULD do. But most don’t.
The one for those with experience is one course (CS 42) instead of two courses (CS 5 and 60). https://www.cs.hmc.edu/program/course-descriptions/
It probably is not unusual for other schools to offer different entry level CS courses or different entry points in the CS sequence. Examples:
CMU: 15-122 is the start of the CS major sequence, but students with no experience can take 15-112, or 15-110 and 15-112, before 15-122.
Stanford: Experienced students can take CS 106X instead of the two quarter sequence CS 106A and CS 106B.
Berkeley: CS 61A is the start of the CS major sequence, but students with no experience can take CS 10 before CS 61A.
Several of the so called weed out classes are math/science based. Experience (in terms of AP classes in college or other experience) will be relevant. Though I remember weed out classes decades ago when AP classes were nowhere near as common. Math and science classes are such that some kids just won’t be able to handle them no matter how hard they try or what their experience.
When people talk about the average of a class being failing, what are the high grades? Are kids getting 90%+? Seems to me you don’t want tests to be easy enough for averages to be higher but then have a large number of kids who get 100%.
@saillakeerie you ask “when people talk about the average of a class being failing, what are the high grades?”
This question actually gets to two main points. One, as you note, that with a high average, and many 100s, the teacher gets less data about who knows what. (And that if there are indeed many kids doing extremely well, that kids whose scores are extremely low, should perhaps reassess their fitness for that course.)
But the second question is why the title of this thread annoys me every time I see it - who determined that “failing” meant a certain number? I’m a HS teacher, and I understand why we have certain grades set as “failing” - but why in the world is that a commandment set in stone for all places and all times? There’s no reason that a number below 60 is “failing” by definition.
I’ve never actually heard of a class where most kids in the class earned an F. Once I heard of a seminar where there was only one kid left in it by the end and he got a B. 
The paradigm shift that would be helpful for STEM majors in college, at least, is that “no, a grade below 60 is not necessarily failing”. I’ve already mentioned that in my HS, we try to prepare kids for this idea ahead of time.
The idea being presented in this thread that somehow the professor is artificially pushing the grades into a curve where kids with no meaningful difference in grasp of the material are being artificially separated and some being given poor grades is really not the case in any situation I’ve seen. Those tests with medians of 60 often do have kids scoring 90 and kids scoring 30.
The variability in the professor’s ability to write a test of a given difficulty each time is far greater than the year to year variability in the ability of the kids taking a large class. Even the college board, with far simpler questions, a wealth of information gained via pre-testing them on thousands of students, and a house staff of statisticians to analyze the results, still can’t write tests of exactly the same difficulty level from exam to exam. High school teachers are often using canned questions provided by the textbook makers, or old AP questions in the case of AP classes. These have already been vetted for difficulty level.
In a smaller class, the grades will fall into natural clumps and it seems more fair to give the students whose scores cluster around a point that represents essentially the same performance level the same grade rather than drawing an artificial line between them at 70% or what have you.
Yes, I agree the high school standards are arbitrary–not even the same between high schools (an A is a 90 at some schools and 93 at others), and often subject to curving via simply adding points or by various extra credit or do-over policies by teachers.
I think an awful lot of the issues we are talking about ARE about uneven preparation among incoming students. Lower quality high school educations, schools with limited AP offerings, students who maybe didn’t develop an interest in STEM until near the end of high school and haven’t been living/breathing it their whole lives. I know my research university did zilch, squat, nada to deal with this issue, and it probably was a big factor in me washing out of STEM many years ago. It seems to me that EVERY department offering STEM classes at universities and colleges should be talking about this, strategizing, and figuring out action plans (course offerings, tutoring services, etc) to help with this. But I don’t think they are.
The schools are already offering a lot of help. I feel my daughter got a lot of support in her STEM classes–TA’s were good and ranged from very available to heroic, some professors and TAs offered extensive office hours, study groups were encouraged, classmates were cooperative and helpful–but I also feel that did not make up for the fact that some of the kids in her classes were from tippy top schools and clearly had better backgrounds. And her background was undoubtably better than some others. Once the classes are in progress there is only so much supplementation that can be accomplished–she was working very hard and would not have had time to take advantage of more support even if it were there.
I suppose the best that could be done would be for colleges to offer summer boot camps to incoming freshmen.
I agree that many of the issues have to do with uneven preparations among incoming students. Many colleges are simply not setup to do remediation. It certainly isn’t cost effective to do it at $40K/year.
Anyone who cares about the education of underprepared, low-income students (particularly in STEM subjects) in America should know of Dr. Freeman Hrabowski III. He’s a mathematician who’s been the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) for the last 20 years.
He was born in the segregated south; he was arrested and jailed at the age of 12 during the “Children’s March” organized by Dr. King (Freeman Hrabowski is African-American; his last name “Hrabowski” was the name of a Polish-American slave master; his first name “Freeman” comes from his grandfather, who was the first person in his family born a free man).
I’ve worked with Dr. Hrabowski as part of efforts to help talented low-income students. I’ve also gotten to see some of the work he’s done at UMBC. He’s an incredibly respected voice when it comes to STEM education - I’ve been in rooms full of leaders from academia, business, and government, and when he spoke, we all simply shut up and listened.
Here is what he thinks are the key ingredients for helping make underprepared students successful in STEM subjects (edited and with apologies for any distortions I may have introduced)
One thing I especially admire about his approach - he insists on setting very high expectations even for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds:
I also think there is much truth to the perception that it’s a student’s relative standing in a group that determines whether or not they switch majors, not their absolute standing (Malcolm Gladwell has written about this – he presents a few interesting data points, though I caution that much of his analysis is criminally awful.)
Among the more selective private colleges we typically emphasize on this site, it’s extremely common to have multiple levels of intro STEM courses to accommodate students with a variety of different HS math/science backgrounds. Harvey Mudd and Caltech are the only selective colleges I’ve heard of that even assume students have taken calculus. Many do not even assume a pre-calculus background. For example, Stanford offers the following math starting points for different incoming freshman. They also offer multi-level intro science and CS courses, among other fields.
“No or little precalculus” – Precalculus Resource Portal during first quarter instead of standard class
“No or very little Calculus” or poor placement / AP exam scores – Math 19 (slow version of intro calculus), Math 41 (fast version of intro calculus), Math 41A (includes extra lectures with more engineering emphasis)
Recommend for students who score 4 on AB calc exam or 3 on BC calc exam – Math 20 (2nd course in slow intro calc sequence), Math 42 (2nd course in fast intro calc sequence), or Math 42A (includes extra lectures with more engineering emphasis)
Recommend for students who score 5 on AB calc, 4+ on BC calc, or 5 on IB Math HL – Math 51 (linear algebra and multi-variable calc), Math 51A (includes extra lectures with more engineering emphasis), Math 51H (more rigorous version of linear algebra and multi-variable calc), CME 100 (Linear algebra with emphasis on using Matlab and applied math) or CME 100A (includes extra lectures with more engineering emphasis)
Students with Transfer Credit – Often start at higher levels, even graduate level math in some cases
One can crudely estimate the distribution of number of students in different starting points from the number of sections during Autumn quarter. It appears that most choose to start in more advanced courses instead of repeat what they already know well, with implications on curving grades.
Math 19 – 4 sections
Math 20 – 2 sections
Math 41 – 6 sections
Math 41A – 2 sections
Math 42 – 6 sections
Math 42A – 2 sections
Math 51 – 18 sections
Math 51A – 2 sections
Math 51H – 2 sections
CME 100 – 3 sections
CME 100A – 2 sections