<p>I’ve got a story. Took my AP Lit final yesterday. 50 questions, it was incredibly difficult, he gave us lines from works we read (stuff like Song of Myself and Leaves of Grass by Whitman, miscellaneous Dickinson poems, Why I Went to the Woods, Civil Disobedience, and Walden by Thoreau, Nature and Self-Reliance by Emerson, and Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne and Billy Budd by Melville) and we had to identify the author. All of the answer choices were the same - Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson. </p>
<p>Hardest test I had ever taken. Hardest test most of us had ever taken.</p>
<p>My goodness, we all walked out of there stunned by that test. It was just terrible - he had told us that the -highest- grade in the previous two classes was 44/50. So today, my classmates and I are checking our grades on school computers and phones throughout the day to see our test score.</p>
<p>Turns out I got 195/195 in the gradebook. I assumed that it was out of 200 initially, 4 points per question, and he decided to curve it by 5 points for whatever reason. I guess I did much better than I thought!</p>
<p>We get to class today. The teacher says “So let’s talk about your tests.” We stare at him.</p>
<p>“My initial reaction to the tests was to can it. But I played with some students’ grades, looking at what putting in the test would do to their grades and what keeping it out would do to their grades. And I found that not putting in the test would hurt the people who did well on it just as much as putting it in would hurt those who did poorly.”</p>
<p>We keep staring at him.</p>
<p>“So instead, I decided to curve the HELL out of it.” We still don’t say anything. “Let me repeat that - I curved the HELL out of that test. Instead of taking it out of 50, I took it out of 39.”</p>
<p>Doing the math in my head, I realized that he curved this by 11 questions - 55 POINTS. I didn’t get 49/50. I got 39/50, and so did my friend behind me. We were talking at the start of class about our grades and were surprised by them, and we find that we actually did really poorly, saved by the curve.</p>
<p>“The highest across all three classes was a 46/50. Only about 6 people got more than 39/50, so those people just got some bonus points in the gradebook. These tests were awful, and I know that many of your grades were saved by the massive curve I put on it.”</p>
<p>We were really shocked by this. Some people had managed to fail spectacularly and get 115/195 - 59% with the curve applied, less than 50% without it. Their grades tanked. </p>
<p>I had to tell that story. It was really shocking to us how difficult that test was and how poorly we all did on it.</p>
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