E is for Excellent.
I think I got learned that in third grade.
The E/VG/G/U grading system might have its place in higher education.
its done like this, JOD strikethrough with an “s” in the bracket
Not a big deal, but every school I attended or taught at used E, not F for the lowest grade. Harvard is but one example:
http://static.fas.harvard.edu/registrar/ugrad_handbook/current/chapter2/grading_system.html
If the test is really composed of problems of difficulty appropriate for the students, it could very well produce results spanning the range from 0 to the maximum possible (though certainly the grading scale needs to be adjusted appropriately).
One of the first tests I had in college had a score range of 0 to 100 out of 100 possible, with a median around 50. The grading curve had the median at B-/C+. It was not like high school when 70% of the tests were easier problems so that C students in high school could get 70% correct with an absolute grading scale that requires 70% for a C. A college test may have only one third or one fourth easier problems for C students in college (who are obviously stronger than C students in high school), with the rest being harder problems to differentiate B and A students.
My school gives E’s; it’s an F.
Shoot, I clicked on this thinking it might be a topical discussion, but obviously it doesn’t apply to MY children.
A fraternity brother of mine got a 4 on a differential equations test. We stuck it on the beer refrigerator for the rest of the semester. He later graduated #1 with an MS in engineering from a different college.
@jym626 Wasn’t “st” good enough anymore?? Must everything be simplified? 
Some schools give E grades instead of F grades:
https://students.asu.edu/grades
http://static.fas.harvard.edu/registrar/ugrad_handbook/current/chapter2/grading_system.html
http://web.williams.edu/admin/registrar/records/gpa.html
For some reason I was under the impression it was just a state of Michigan thing.
Well, you are if your goal is to create a test that separates the top 100 kids in the country from each other. A test where the average grade is an 85% or higher is not a very good test, it doesn’t separate students from each other well which is the point in having a test to begin with. Though it can go the other way. I knew a guy who had a class where their grade was determined entirely by 3 tests, and the median grade on each test was a 0%, which this guy got and said amounted to a B+. So anyone who registered for that class and did nothing at all would have gotten a B+. Which is rather humorous to think about really.
I think in terms of passing/not-passing there should be some fundamental threshold which determines it. But between As, Bs, and Cs, I don’t see why there shouldn’t be some enforced distribution. If you’re not trying to separate students from each other then there’s not much point in having grades at all, and if you’re going to have grades you should use as much of the grade scale as possible.
Well, you learned from my instruction so I must be a good TA.
Ouch. I always hated those questions that would penalize you for getting it wrong. It just seemed so cruel, and unnecessary.
At the end of the day, the students are ultimately responsible for teaching themselves. No employer or graduate school admissions committee wants to hear about the quality of teaching at your school. They don’t care. Even if this may be unfair, this responsibility transcends education.
I would recommend that students should get online reviews of their potential professors, seek help very early, and lastly suck it up. In the real world, your employer won’t care if you are suffering from cancer, have children to feed, etc. They will fire you no matter how hard you work or what hardships you are facing.
In real life many of these people would be fired, lose their licenses, or be sued. Consequences.
Lol, well it has to be, actually. Because there is only so much you can do in the time you have with them. If you are of the opinion that a student should be able to come to lecture and walk out containing all the knowledge of the course with no additional struggle, then you obviously don’t teach. Unfortunately, many of our students think this way as well.
I don’t find the OP out of line here. I teach college students as well - not a top U, but at a lower tier U, and we have our own problems there. I may not get the grade-whiners, but there is invariably someone as the semester nears the end who realizes they are not going to get the grade they “needed” to get and wants to somehow make it up with extra credit or some such thing. I have had to develop strict, stated policies to counter these situations.
Before I actually ever taught, I thought it would be very difficult for me to fail students. I got over that in a hurry.
Posters who are blaming OP for the fact that the exam average wasn’t 95 are missing the point that that’s the way IT WAS INTENDED to be made.
It depends on the purpose of the test, as others have pointed out.
Another thing: I’ve said it before on these fora, but the best thing that ever happened to me in my professional life was flunking—not an exam, or a course, but flunking out of college entirely. I was one of those students who had sailed through high school and hadn’t realized I’d have to work hard. Flunking out taught me that continuing as I had been had consequences—and sometimes it takes a shock like that to wake you up.
As I now point out to selected students who come in for advising (since I’m a faculty advisor for a good chunk of my department’s students), I flunked out of college and have an ivy league PhD. This isn’t the most common pair of accomplishments for a single person to have, but since receiving my doctorate I’ve learned that there are more of us than you’d probably expect. It isn’t necessarily what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.
Hopefully the OP’s students can figure this out quicker than I did.
A few thoughts here… No, I don’t think the TA should adjust grades, but I’d like the TA to go through the exercise of thinking about the purpose of the test: Is it to “separate the men from the boys”, or is it to test mastery of the material? Are you testing technical material via sudden death fill in a value (e.g., value is right or wrong, no partial credit for work) or multiple choice, or are you actually grading a students’ work? A test for a class full of high achieving students that tests mastery of the material could easily result in a much tighter/higher grade distribution. Start testing technical material via multiple choice or sudden-death fill in a value, and your assumption that distribution in grades accurately reflects distribution in concept and process mastery starts to fall apart.
Are students receiving their first less-than-stellar grade likely to be shocked/disappointed? Yes. That was true 25 years ago too. Are they more likely to voice it now than in the past? Probably … because we’ve created a culture where everybody feels entitled to air their every emotion without regard to how it might affect others’ perception of them. And, there is no longer any concept of polite boundaries for the timing of communication – people text/email at all hours, and truly expect a response, whereas prior to email and cell phones, profs/TAs were unreachable after office hours, and even good friends didn’t dare call after 9 PM unless there was a really good reason to do so…
But I also have noticed that testing itself has changed in in the past 25 years, with more of a tendency toward multiple choice or sudden-death fill in the blank (via online testing). Multiple choice is easier for some students to “game” for a grade better than they would get on the same test, “working it out,” and significantly harder for some students with equal/better mastery of the material, depending on their learning style. I don’t know if this is the situation here, but if it is, I think it is easier to complain about such tests being “unfair” than if tests include the problem solving process in the grade.
I received my EE degree 25 years ago, and I never once had a multiple choice or sudden-death value test in any of my technical classes; all my tests were hand-graded/commented by TA’s and professors, and partial credit for correct process yielding an incorrect answer due to dropping signs, etc., was always given. The university I attended numbered 25,000 at the time; my classes were typically 50 - 100 until my senior year. So the idea that increasing enrollment drives the use of automated test grading is wrong; this same university is no bigger today, but relies almost completely on automated test grading and online homework for the first year or two of the engineering degree. And, while of course, engineers need to be able to get the correct answers, the idea that dropping a sign or making an arithmetic error should be graded as harshly as an incorrect problem solving process is ludicrous – but that is what this type of testing does.
Save us from fill in the blank.
Mastery is not the primary goal of university learning. Yes, the nursing student must learn certain things for her license, but she had better be able to problem solve and triage when situations are complex. Not all disciplines require creativity ( there is a certain danger to the creative pharmacist), but most expect and reward some appropriate innovative thinking. There are very real changes in the educational outcomes of college and high school. Probably we should all be more explicit about those differences.
I received my degree less than 2 years ago and my experience was pretty much the same. I don’t think fill in the blank and multiple choice is as prolific as you may think it is.
One thing I find odd is that the students know which TAs grade their tests. (If these scores are test scores that we are talking about.) I know who some of the TAs are, mainly the ones that teach the labs, but I don’t know if they grade the tests and quizzes for the class or if those are other TAs. The only grade I could argue with a specific TA about would be my lab grade since I know which TA grades those.
Besides, TAs sometimes make mistakes in your favor - whoever graded my first quiz didn’t pick up on an error I discovered later. 
I remember on one test I took I had one point taken off for a pretty trivial mistake I made on one of the easy questions. It was clear I knew what I was doing but it was fair to take a point off there. After the whole test was graded, it looks like they decided since that was the only point that I missed and I got the hard problems perfect, they just gave me the point back so they gave me a perfect score.