“Academia tends to be a self propagating system where the people who get academic jobs are most like their professors”
Never thought of it like this before, but I very much agree.
“Here is an example of a major where two students in the same major may have only one course (out of twelve required for the major) in common”
For the social sciences, how vigourous a program depends a lot on how quantitative the courses selected. In the humanities, you can probably tell as well, provided you know something about the major. In philosophy, for example, I find analytical philosophy decidedly more demanding than the others.
“if indeed there is a significant “dumb” factor in the easier major, wouldn’t employers figure it out and thus wouldn’t repeat the behavior?”
I think the employers are getting the hang of it. Notice how the economic value of an elite degree varies with the major:
Well, another real life perspective - I’m in my first engineering class for my major this semester, and we got our first test results back. (It’s a programming class.) Average was 50%, highest score was 89%. Standard deviation was 13%. I got a 66%, which I was bummed about but at least grateful that I was above the average. It’s just the way college is, I guess.
@OhMomof2 I don’t really know. The teacher doesn’t curve the tests - at the end of the semester, she “adjusts” everyone’s grade based on “how well the person with the highest score in the class understands the material.” :-S :-S >:P
Rumor has it that last semester a 50-55% in the class got you an A or a B.
Oh, I don’t enjoy the grade limbo at all. It’s annoying because I do actually enjoy the subject. And this is my second class with this language (Matlab.) I’m quite nervous about how this class will turn out. I honestly think I can get As in my other classes this semester - aka, I know I have As in them now because those teachers actually post scores and percentages and whatnot, so I just hope to pull through this with a C.
@albert69 - you are 1SD above the mean, at the very least it is a B for that test, likely an A-.
Since it is a programming class, I assume tests are only a fraction of the final grade. Do good work on your projects, HW, etc and you are likely running an A.
Hate those teachers who curve the final grade instead of the individual grades so you don’t know how you are really doing until the bitter end! My daughter had a couple and they would give out the distribution for each test and the SD and you were supposed to get an idea of where you stood. She even had one teacher who claimed he would curve the final grades down to make all the class grades fit a bell curve (what craziness).
Why, oh WHY, should other student’s grades be based on “how well the person with the highest score in the class understands the material.”? I cannot believe that these professors cannot see the flawed logic in that system. Ughh…
One guy says that she may do it that way because she did her Ph.D at MIT - according to him, that’s the way elite schools teach things - overload the students on the homework and tests and even though you only get half of it, you can pass as long as you aren’t too far behind whoever has the highest score, which could still be a failing score.
The main problem was that the test was too long. We had 50 minutes to write an entire program, comments and all, a flowchart for that program, and a litany of other questions predicting output. I don’t know anyone that finished the test.
We actually got a chance to redo the last problem, the program. The week after test (before we got it back), she brought in fresh copies of it and gave us 20 minutes to try again. Said that if we did better, we’d get that one, but if we did worse we wouldn’t lose what we already had on it. No warning, so everyone redid it cold. I apparently did worse the 2nd time around because I got my original one returned. But even with that the average was low. The teacher did say there were a few 0s from people that didn’t show up and such that skewed the average a bit.
Do most of these classes give a final letter grade? The school where my DD is working through her STEM classes gives a numerical grade only, so if you get a 3.8 in the class then that is your final grade. No letters. Is that unusual?
I have noticed that pattern with new professors whose alma mater was a top school - poor teaching ability and ridiculously hard tests, coupled with an expectation that students will against the odds perform fabulously on the exam. When that doesn’t happen, generally the students are blamed and then the prof introduces some ludicrous curve so that it doesn’t end up that everyone fails.
It’s so common that I most certainly noticed the pattern whenever I had a professor like that.
One younger engineering major friend had a CS Prof with an elite U PhD who not only had that exact attitude, but also had a strong animus against that friend a a few classmates because they happened to be engineering majors.
Things got so bad the friend and fellow engineering majors felt the need to report the issue to their engineering advisors which eventually prompted the dean of the engineering school to come to one CS class session to personally dress down that CS Prof for his anti-engineer animus in front of the class. Afterwards, the younger friend and other engineering majors had no further issues on the anti-engineer attitude and most ended up with topflight final grades despite the exceedingly low midterm class averages* and reportedly, low final class averages.
More than half the class had raw scores in the single digits out of 100 according to the posted exam results in their department.
This has always been my experience with my science/engineering/math exams. (decades ago)
I do not see anything wrong with that.
Like you, I always shoot for 1 SD above average in exams. Coupled, with good homework grade and lab grade, I seemed to be able to pull off an A most of the time.
I just do not understand the obsession with the raw numbers - college is not grade school - students should not be getting high 90s in exams all the time.
^ Fine, but I still wish she was more clear about her curving or adjustment system or whatever you call it. The class average on the my first physics test was 56%, but the teacher posted the scores promptly and has Blackboard set up so that all the homework and quiz scores are uploaded, graded, and weighted quickly. At least everyone knew their grade in the class within about a week of the exam. He also gave a 10% curve since the scores were low. The programming exam was over 2 weeks ago, though I grant you that it must be hard to hand grade all those tests alone. (There’s no TA or grader of any type, just the teacher.)
Thanks for the encouragement, everyone! :-h
Oh yes, and it’s a letter grade system - As, Bs, etc. Pluses and minus too, just no A+.
I don’t see how this differs from a high school where the teacher may throw in all kinds of “extra credit” assignments. That 75 on the midterm may be a C. Or it may not. Exam corrections? Participation? Group project? Extra credit? Presentation? Notebook check?
Perhaps if there were a quota on people who could do those “extra credit” assignments, you would have something that more or less approximates what normal distribution grading can tend to look like.
