Periwinkle,
Can you clarify your post? I agree that HS teachers are different than college professors, and how a student is expected to demonstrate mastery of their subject matter differs as well. But why would a student in HS be expected to master more subject matter that they study than a college student in their classes?
And sylvan,
That was my point. And even as decidesomehow points out, even within the same department teaching the same class, grading standards seem to differ.
This fascinating discussion has mostly been about tests and bell curves and tending toward STEM topics. Right now I am grading my first-year comp students’ first set of essays. And in this Humanities class, for this paper, most will be getting C’s. a few D’s, some B’s. Haven’t seen an A yet, but I haven’t finished the pile yet.
I’ve already been told “I can’t get a C”, “my parents expect A’s”, “I always got A’s in high school” --and they haven’t even gotten the papers back yet. So tomorrow is not going to be fun. The writing program here truly sees A as excellent, not a reward for “working hard”; few students come into this college writing at that level (an okay school with students from okay school districts.) Beyond the rampant grammar issues, organization is a moving target, and most importantly, their critical thinking is often weak. Through three drafts of comments, peer reviews, many emails, class activities, office hours visits (only one student making use of these), and one on one conferences, I work very hard to meet each where he or she is and show them what and how they need to improve, what resources to use, and what makes good writing.
But in the end, they have to do the work. Most will improve, but that does not mean they’ll meet the A level by the end of the course, nor a B, for more than a few. But, if they work at it, they’ll be better writers.
C (for undergraduates) is supposed to mean that the student has learned enough to be solidly passing and prepared for the next course in sequence. B and A are supposed to indicate higher performance, while D is barely passing and indicates that the student may want to repeat the course before taking the next course in sequence.
Since graduate students are presumably selected from the upper end of the range of undergraduates, the minimum expectation is higher (i.e. B instead of C).
Of course, there has been grade inflation (see http://www.gradeinflation.com ), so the mindset now is that most people think of a C like most used to think of a D.
The idea that tests cover “the material” and that the per cent score a student has on a test is similar to the per cent of “the material” that a student has mastered is not necessarily applicable. This depends a lot on the nature of the test. In fields where there are professional certification exams, it might be true of the certification exam, but not necessarily of the tests leading up to it.
A test in a course might be designed to see what students can do with the understanding they have acquired. In this case, the grades need not be split along high-school percentages. To give a drastic example: at one time in Cambridge (England), the top scorer on the examinations in mathematics taken at the end of the undergraduate program often received ten times the points of the student who had the minimum score required to be classified as a “Wrangler” (corresponding to first class honors). This is to say nothing of the even smaller number of points needed to eke out some type of honors degree. (Mathematics programs have changed since then, so this may not apply any longer.)
But if you think about AP exam scoring, on a lot of the exams, a student needs only to score about 65% to get a 5. There is really nothing that ties a specific % to an A.
I prefer to have set the A boundary at about 80-85%. For one thing, this prevents a minor misunderstanding or a silly error from dropping a student’s grade, if the student can handle the rest of the exam.
And that is the biggest problem of our education system. Some seem to expect that freshmen entering college will magically erase 12-15 years of subpar education during which critical thinking is an afterthought and be able to perform at a reasonable college level! This will not change until out system finds a way to reward teachers at the lower level who are able to teach that elusive critical thinking. Easier said than done considering the level of the recruiting classes.
One has to feel for the dedicated educators who are trying to undo the deficiencies in the first months of college and have to deal with the misguided expectations of the easy grades given by incompetents in the previous decades. In fact, it is easier for them to pass the buck, revert to easy grading, and please the parents of Little Susan and Aaron with a gentlemen B+!
The use of such scales in high school means that high school teachers have to fill tests and assignments with easy problems so that C (by high school standards) students can pass. Then B and A students are more likely to be bored with busy work and see fewer challenging problems that would be more likely to contribute to their intellectual growth.
In college, it is perfectly reasonable for a test to have three problems, each worth a third of the test: one easy problem that C students should solve, one medium problem that B students should solve, and one hard problem that A students should solve. But then the grading scale would be such that 33% would be a C and 67% would be a B.
Good luck, garland! Agreed that its a real challenge when students are masters of excuses. I am reviewing a student’s work today who brings the art of excuse-making to a new level. I will expect a lot from him, and encourage him to put in the needed time and the effort, and will put the role/responsibility of doing the work back in his lap (which is now under a time pressure for him). But. like you, I will try not to shame him. They need to own their responsibility to do the work and avail themselves of the resources available to them. The choices they make are theirs. But will try not to mock them for their choices, even if I disagree with them.
@Zeldie --I am not ready to condemn their teachers. They are teaching what the current system expects and rewards-- formulaic five paragraph essay form. They are grading as they are being told by administrations–keep the grades high. The students are pushed into AP’s they’re not really qualified for because schools are judged by numbers in seats, not true mastery. Instructors are told to give second and third chances, or more; failure is not an option.
AS in all professions, there are different levels of teaching ability, but it’s very obvious to me that the problem really is a top-down systemic destruction of public education, not the sudden inability of teachers to teach.
True, but the reality is that the formulaic essay should not preclude critical thinking. They are not mutually exclusive. On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to teach a concept when one has not mastered it! The current situation did not start yesterday but is a result of decades of abdication to mediocrity. Our system is based on creating hordes of poorly trained generalists and few subject teachers who possess the skills and adequate training. In simple words, we are long on pedagogy and short on subject matters. Our kids shine with their confidence and self-esteem and can walk the shores of Lake Wobegon with a smile. And they are the products of their environment and mostly a product of an education system that is suffering from its monopolistic and myopic organization.
Although teachers should not shoulder the blame for the abject destruction of a rich education system, it’s time to realize that we have been relying mostly on the wrong people for the job, and exceedingly so in this century as we keep on scraping the bottom of the barrel to find the weakest and worst trained candidates to replace the more competent albeit ageing teachers.
As always, if one expects their children to learn critical thinking (and master subjects) the best option is to look outside the four walls of that free school, and take over the task of educating their own. The system will not!
These students have been taught that anything less than perfect means they will never get accepted to college, never be hired by an employer, etc. They are working within the rules others have set up for them.
At my kid’s university, one math/CS class, student has to have minimum 60% of the final to pass the class. My kid was shocked when this were told at the final exam. Professor has PhD from MIT, the class is notorious for flunking out students, but this professor is the most reasonable, she wants them to learn but not to slack off.
^What precludes students in public education from learning critical thinking at home also? and if parents think that thiis was something that should have happened in school and was not their responsibility, I have a problem imagining them successfully now teaching it on their own.
Not to mention, the present atmosphere of “my kid works hard, why isn’t he getting all A’s?” is a problem of parenting, not something that teachers can cause or fix.
This is NOT to attack parents! But the idea that “free school” is the problem is pretty much against everything I believe or have seen to be true.
But an awful lot of people these days are making a fortune by selling that idea.
Where I went a C was the minimum passing grade for any course in your major. So if the average was a C, that would mean something like 45% of the class would fail the class. That would be ridiculous for a course as a policy to fail 45% of the students in it.
A B average makes sense to me. And the average where I went was somewhere in between a B and a B+.
Anyone have insight into the current grading rubric at RPI? When I went there, all introductory courses were graded on a 2.4 normal curve regardless of test average. Points were cumulative, as in tests were worth 100 points, each graded homework 10 points, the final anywhere from 240 to 300 points, so the course had a total possible of, say, 800 points. The top 14% got an A, the next 24% got a B. 50% of the class got a C. The bottom 12% got a D or failed. The median kid in each class got a C. All that mattered was how you performed compared to your classmates.
The rub is that every kid I graduated with came from the top 10% of their HS class, but the average graduating GPA was a 2.7. Our 4 year graduation rate was 50%, 6 year about 60%. Last time I saw a CDS their rate was up to 64/82%. I’m guessing that some of the changes in curriculum and grading policy have made it more survivable.
I wouldn’t be so quick to judge your students’ ability on the result of one test. I go to a bottom tier US MD school and we have many people who have had to claw their way out of poor undergrad grades. There are some quality people in the mix. You’d be lucky if they worked on you some day. It sounds like you need some perspective.
And chances are, your students are far above average if they are a top college. I’d venture to guess you have forgotten what average looks like because you haven’t been around it for so long.
Back to what Sylvan asked - my daughter had a professor whose grading policy forced the grades into a curve (which meant a student’s curved grade could be lower than their uncurved grade.) So in that class if 90% of the class had gotten above a 90 on a test a 95 could end up being a B or C. In that case, I think the teacher is not really interested in having their students succeed, since although the student would have appeared to have mastered the material (by getting 90% of it correct) their grade would not reflect it.
A few pages back someone commented that my view that not all TA’s were planning on academia was wrong. I still disagree. Someone could figure out the percentage of grad students that go into academia- it could easily be less than 50%. I know industry uses a lot of STEM PhD’s. Many good programs only admit students they are willing to support and being a TA is usually the first job. So- there will be many TA’s who are doing it because they want to be at that school but have no intention of ever teaching. btw- Teaching assistants assist, ir conduct labs and discussion groups, they would be instructors if they independently handle a course without a professor in my experience.
I don’t get the point of this. Why aren’t students being graded based on how well they know the material?
Not many but I had a couple classes where a low 90s score was a B+ or a B. Kind of annoying but not that big of a deal, and in these getting 95%+ kind of score was pretty easy. Though these kinds of classes are basically a manifestation of test writers not knowing how to write tests.
It varies hugely but in many of my classes a 80% would have been good enough for an A or A-. In a few 70% might have been enough.
Some confusion on bell curve … C’s should make up a good percentage of your grading if you use like mean+/- one standard deviation.
http://www.fctl.ucf.edu/TeachingAndLearningResources/CourseDesign/Assessment/grading.php has the bell curve and some other grading methods. Here the average score is the divider between B and C.
As and Fs rarely affect the grades of most students.
Probability theory can get pretty complex, and I am not a statistician. But in a large class, many times there is a bell curve shape to the raw scores. Professors who teach a lot and give sort of similar tests will get the same distribution year after year. They can still choose to decide whether 1 SD is the right breadth of the C or B/C band and if average is a C, a C+ or a B. And, if this years class is smarter than last years, maybe they will give more Bs and As (I would argue maybe they should). And yes, sometimes a problem is just too hard, so you either toss it out, or it just floats up there as the magical difference between a 80A and a 100A.
The 3 problem test projected above can be turned into a nice bell curve if you put just the right number of basic, advanced, hard problems on the test.
And despite students hating this idea, the bulk of people in a class fall right on the part of the curve where you expect them to, based on ability, effort, and engagement in the class. Lots of effort can make up for ability, unless you just start out too unprepared.
One myth that also leads to disappointment is that there are a lot of people with high ability that don’t do much work. Typically that is not true (maybe one or two people per class), so people of medium-high ability feel they deserve a B when they really deserve a C. They are not only not as able (prepared, gifted, whatever) but not working as hard as the As and Bs.
And honestly, at some point in your life you need to be able to think critically and solve problems that are not exactly like what you have been taught. It is hard to justify a high wage for someone who needs to be walked through their work (I guess by someone “smarter?”) and stumbles when asked to do something new. The world changes too, so what you learn in a formal setting can only take you maybe 10 years past college. Past that, you need to be able to extend yourself … and also to teach yourself (which is also an issue if the professor is no good or whatever you blame for your lack of comprehension).