Scaling grades et al

thedoverdemon
Thu, 05 Apr 2007 20:10:47 +0000

Does anyone else get ticked off by classes or departments where grades in a class must be scaled in order to ensure that certain people don’t as well as they otherwise would? Or, that TAs are essentially forced to give out bad grades, by, for example, being coerced by the administration to ensure that the class average is consistently at around 70% (a B- at my school), regardless of whether that is what the students in the class actually deserve?

I find this grossly unfair as this has been happening with several of my classes. Apparently, this is what regularly happens to first-year classes so that they can hit people hard and say, “this is college, not high school.” There was a person who got an 85% (A) brought down to a 73% (B) because of grading policies employed.

I don’t know if this is typical of other colleges, but this in general seems to be a trend in Canadian colleges. I go to UBC, by the way, which is somewhat known for grade deflation. Does this happen at your school and what do you think of it?