<p>I think the example you provide is a rare occurrence and would not change the concerns I have. The college categorized and recognized these students as graduate students. The professor has two separate curves, grad curved to a b+ and undergrad curved to a b.</p>
<p>I was curious if anybody else sees the inequity I see.</p>
<p>I do not see the inequity. I have been both a grad and UG student in mixed classes. </p>
<p>Grad students are generally, but not always, held to a much higher standard. </p>
<p>OTOH, I don’t remember the last time I was in a curved class so what do I know? </p>
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<p>In academia, a B+ in grad school is regarded the same as a B-/B in undergrad. In short, there is no effective inequity…especially considering most Profs from what I’ve seen/experienced do require much more from grad students for the same given grade level. </p>
<p>When I was in college the entire sequence of architectural history classes were also grad school classes at the School of Design. The requirements were the same. I also took an urban planning class - the undergrads wrote one less paper than the grads. I also took a number of grad level seminars - one in French, one in Chinese painting there may have been others. I don’t believe I was ever in a class with different curves for the same requirements though. Especially not one that would favor the theoretically more experienced students. That strikes me as odd.</p>
<p>I think the inequity is in having curved classes at all. IMHO, in something like Stats, there ought to be a clear expectation of the material to be mastered, and if everyone masters it then everyone should get a good grade. </p>
<p>What is the point of curving? Does it say anything whatever about mastery? No, it does not. Hypothetically, people could be getting As with an inadequate level of mastery because of the curve. (I realize that it is more common for the reverse to happen, but the point in that curving distorts assessment.)</p>
<p>When I was in engineering grad school, I took an undergrad class in the design of foundations. There was no curve for any of the students. I was taking it pass/fail, anyway.</p>
<p>Interesting thread. Usually students and parents are looking for a stronger student body.
If it is graded on a curve, the students would be separated, Im not understanding the concern.
But I agree with Consolation. It should be graded by mastery & if the undergrads are concerned about potentially not being as prepared as the grad students, why not join one of their study groups?</p>
<p>It happens at D’s university but I don’t know that grading is separate. Specifically, stats for math majors is a 500 level class which is upper level/grad level. It’s because so many grad programs require it and it has to have at least a 500 number. D’s upper level math classes are all 500 level and there are some grad students in them - mostly math education masters students.</p>
<p>Only a guess, I know years ago in my grad program you couldn’t make more than one C. Undergrad programs will let you have more. Maybe that’s the difference.</p>
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Curving helps control for different degrees of harshness in grading between different exams and between different instructors. Curving also allows professors to choose any level of difficulty on their exams, instead of being forced to choose basic questions that everyone is expected to find straightforward, and many students find boring. For example, I had a chem class where the median exam grades were often around 30%. The exam questions took the concepts covered in the textbooks and expanded those concepts to more complex applications, making most exam questions far more challenging than the textbook examples. There were also too many questions for most students to finish within class period, so speed/intuition was tested as well as knowledge. The exams were curved such that the ~30% median grade was a B/B+. </p>
<p>There is nothing about the definition of curving that prevents everyone from getting high grades. A professor could think everyone scored high enough to show mastery of the material and curve everyone to a high grade, although I’ve never seen curves applied without at least a few students getting Cs or lower. In general, more advanced classes with a higher percentage of stellar students tend to be curved to higher grades than more basic classes (more advanced classes are less likely to have a formerly applied curved at all, which partially relates to smaller class sizes). A similar pattern emerges with more selective colleges tending to curve exams such that a larger portion of the class receives high grades than at less selective colleges (in minority of classes for which a formal curve is applied) . For example, Princeton is probably the school that is most often mentioned on this forum during discussions of grade deflation and harsh grading, yet the median grades in Princeton classes are far higher than the equivalent classes at most less selective state schools.</p>
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<p>In many weeder STEM classes, it is more common for As and Bs to be granted to students who may not demonstrate full mastery of the course material than the reverse to avoid flunking out the entire class. Then again, intro courses were often taught so full mastery of the material wasn’t possible for the vast majority or necessary to continue on. </p>
<p>Harsh curves were often used by STEM departments as a way to test and weed-out the weaker students who weren’t prepared academically and/or unwilling to put in the effort necessary to stay in the major. This was the reasoning my STEM major friends and I’ve heard cited for this practice from older STEM majors and Profs. </p>
<p>In one of the CS classes I took, more than half the class had midterm scores hovering between 0 and mid 20s/100. Recalled it ended up that if one scored in the 20s-30s…that range became Cs to Bs. </p>
<p>I’ve taken undergrad classes in field B after graduating in field A, and not been graded differently than the other students in the course. I’ve also taken cross-listed undergrad/grad courses, where the graduate students had to complete more assignments/material than the undergrads. Presumably they were graded as a separate group. </p>
<p>I don’t really see the inequality here, OP. Your apparent solution would be to have the grads doing their thing in a separate classroom, but how would that really change anything?</p>
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<p>The test was probably too hard if all of the scores were compressed to the bottom end of the scale. One test in a frosh level course I had managed to hit what is probably the ideal score distribution for “curve” grading: min = 0, max = 100, median = 50 (or very close), and a close to uniform distribution.</p>
<p>In any case, back to the original question, it is not unusual for graduate and undergraduate students to be in some of the same courses, as the graduate students may be in undergraduate courses to “make up” course work that they may not have taken as undergraduates, while advanced undergraduate students may be in graduate courses.</p>
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<p>I also take a dim view of the idea of deliberate “weeder” classes. I think they are short-sighted and counterproductive. The idea that perfectly capable students should be deliberately discouraged from pursuing a subject is nonsensical.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s at all unusual for grads and undergrads to be in the same class. I think most<br>
classes my kid took junior and senior year had both grads and undergrads in it. I’ve never heard of a separate curve though. </p>
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<p>“Weeding” happens by default in subjects with sequenced prerequisites, particularly at schools with relatively low admission selectivity. Instructors teaching calculus 1 do not want to hear from instructors teaching calculus 2 that the students who just completed calculus 1 there are not prepared to learn the calculus 2 material.</p>
<p>My son is currently a freshman taking a 400 level music class and he told me there are seven grad students in his class. I don’t know anything about grading for the class because I don’t ask him about his grades.</p>
<p>Not unusual. As a 16-17 year old UW-Madison college freshman son took an elective Linguistics course that was cross listed with Anthropology and had both 101 and 301 course numbers (different discussions). Four ways of signing up for the same lecture. Son took the 301 version- why not? 100s and 20’s level courses are not allowed to be taken by grad students there and I believe grad students might not get grad credits for 300 level courses. Courses in the 400s to 600s can be taken by both. 700s are entry grad level courses but Honors students can satisfy the thesis requirement by taking those- useful for math majors especially. 800s are strictly upper grad level. As you can see there is quite a bit of overlap. </p>
<p>I doubt the upper level/numbered courses are “weeder” courses anywhere. Some students will attempt them and not do well simply because they are not ready for the material, not because of any harsh curve. You expect the upper level courses to be more focused and require a lot more background. I suspect there a lot of “wanna be” students in many general/introductory courses who just can’t handle the course material like the majority of students. Chemistry and premed students come to mind, especially at a school that doesn’t have 3 or more intro Chemistry courses that allow the best prepared/possible majors to separate out. Just because students want to take a course does not mean it has to be watered down to accommodate everyone.</p>
<p>You do not march through college with your age/class peers like you might in HS. You choose the classes you need and want. For undergrads by the time they take their top level major courses there will be overlap with grad students who didn’t get the course material as undergrads. Eons ago I recall some upper level Chemistry courses with both grad and undergrad students in the major- no idea who was who of those I didn’t already know, nor any different grading mentioned.</p>
<p>In DS’s major when he was an UG, UG students are required to take at least one class that is beyond the UG level (likely offered as an UG/Grad level class) before graduation.</p>
<p>DS once told us that, in one mid term, the UG students led by a TA actually had a higher average than the average of the grad students in the same class.</p>
<p>I am actually not surprised by this for this kind of class. This is because the grade is more important and “useful” for these UG students than for the graduate students and UG students may spend much more time on studying for the test. This class DS referred to was taken by most competitive UG students who are interested in going to a professional school. It is often the case that the GPA requirement of these students is generally much higher than that of the students heading to the PhD or MS program. The focus of the latter students is more on research than on the “grind” for the grade.</p>
<p>The only part of this that is unusual to me is that the undergrad curve is tougher - normally, one would expect it to be the reverse. I still don’t see the unfairness - or at least, it seems no more or less fair than any other situation in which there is a curve. The presence of grad students isn’t an issue; think of it as two separate classes sharing the same space.</p>
<p>Even the easier curve for grad students may, as others mentioned, make sense in certain circumstances. Perhaps these are graduate students whose work is tangential to the subject of the course but who nonetheless need to take it to fulfill a requirement, or because it is helpful for their work to have some grounding in the subject. For instance, students in a government program might need to take one non-intro statistics course even if they aren’t doing a quantitative track, but might be relatively weaker math students than the undergraduates likely to sign up for the course.</p>
<p>In that case, it would be counterproductive for the graduate program to hold their students to the standard of the undergraduates. Even once a student pick a major, a university has some interest in an undergraduate getting a broad education. In graduate school, students are being pushed to find a focus and specialize, so while you might want someone studying government theory to get a reasonable grasp of statistics as well, you don’t want to force him or her to devote copious time and energy to what should be a sideline course - the goal isn’t excellence, as it is for the undergraduates, it is proficiency. Still unusual that the curve would be harder for undergrads in any course with enough graduate students for there to be a curve for them at all, but not inexplicable. </p>
<p>In curve-graded undergraduate courses with some graduate students, is it sometimes done so that the grading curve is set using the undergraduates only, and then assigning the graduates in the course based on where they fall in the distribution of grades (i.e. so that the graduate students do not affect the curve, but are graded on the standard set by the undergraduates)?</p>