Did you ask why effort was being graded? There are times to grade for effort (or improvement, which is actually what this sounds more like), and times to grade for quality. You may have jumped to conclusions by assuming that all of the grading in your child’s class was being done for effort or improvement, as opposed to that assignment or set of assignments.
Argh. I must have hit post by mistake! In practice, the curve does NOT work the closer you get to the top. I see this at work. Year end eval has to fit a bell curve. X% have to get a low rank, and are looked at hard in the next cycle to be culled. (Affectionately called “rank & yank”).
In elite schools you can get to the same level where in a class of 20 high performers, they ALL master the material. Do you give 98 the A and 90 (the lowest) the F? Seems silly if they have all shown proficiency. Do you need to yank someone?
OP is just trying to be tongue in cheek I think. In a big class, of course there will be those who fail, and of those, crybabies. But I do think profs need clear grading guidelines agreed by the college. Disparate grading between classes/departments is not fair when scholarships are on the line. No yank and rank for colleges!
And here, you’re arguing college faculty/TAs have the job of teaching these “teachable moments”. While it’d be nice if the latter group does, that’s not what most of them signed up for. Frankly, IMHO such lessons should have been learned BEFORE during K-12.
Also, there are serious negative consequences to calling up one’s supervisor or boss during family time/vacation/holiday dinner for what are non-emergency matters on par with grade disputes or in the former case…negative quarterly performance evaluations. I’ve had some colleagues at a previous workplace actually get terminated for pulling that very stunt.
In undergrad, I had a few older college classmates who had grad school/job recommendations rescinded or outright refused because they were entitled and/or socially oblivious enough to call up the Prof during family/holiday time for requests which could have waited until family/holiday time had passed.
In one egregious case, a classmate interrupted a family Passover dinner of our Prof to demand he immediately write him a rec for a grad application in a situation where waiting till the end of the holiday would still have left plenty of time to meet that app’s deadline. Not surprisingly, said Prof rescinded the offer to write the rec. Said classmate seemed to have forgotten that a Prof/teacher recommendation is a favor which could be freely offered and sometimes taken back, not an entitlement.
Unfortunately, he didn’t learn his lesson by the time grad school rolled which meant more rescinding of recommendations for PhD/job applications and grad classmates/mutual friends shaking their heads at his “social obliviousness” and “entitled bratty behavior”.
If we’re talking about a course that only had 20 students a semester there may be some floating because the student quality can vary from semester to semester. But in a course that has 100+ students a semester, it’s unlikely that unless some fundamental policy change has occurred, that the ability of the students in that course will change much from one semester to the next. So there it would be appropriate to assign a certain percentage As, Bs, and Cs. Failing grades I think should be viewed differently, and we’d consider what level of mastery of the material someone has when determining whether they pass or fail. But just assigning everyone an A because they all did a good job is useless. Might as well not even have grades.
And if the range of scores was 90% to 98% clearly the person who writes the tests is terrible at test writing.
An older cousin and a HS classmate who attended a top 30 university nearly a decade apart recounted an old-school curmudgeonly chem Prof who was notorious about curving grades even if all the students exhibited mastery of the material in a given course…whether intro or advanced. When my cousin took an advanced course with 30 other students, the grade distribution ranged from a 92 to a 99 with a mean of around a 96. Basically the ones scoring a 92 and a 94 ended up with an F and D respectively and those scoring a 95-96 with C/C-s.
Isn’t it possible they all mastered the topic? I get that in a class of 100, highly unlikely. Understood. But as your pool gets smaller, more likely. The point is to measure proficiency, not rank and yank.
I’m dyslexic, and I took Calc in college. At some point the TA had the prof call me in: he said I do the problems right in graded homework, but fill in the blank in a test? Always wrong. I had a 33 average, and you got 30 for just your name! He let me drop passing. Grateful for that!
I’m a solid part of that very liberal left and have been considered the harshest grader for every course I’ve co-GSIed for. Yet, I inevitably became the gsi that people came to in office hours even if they knew I wouldn’t be grading their papers. I’m also the only one who has been asked to write LORs.
I’d be lying if I said that I haven’t said what the op said before but I say it to my fellow grad students. But, my professors say they went through the same thing when they were in grad school. I don’t think it’s a new phenomenon.
The op’s post is why I despise standard tests though. Just for my particular field, memorizing the facts isn’t nearly as important as the application of them and how the topic fits into broader historical narratives. I dread the day where I have to give tests rather than papers. It’s much easier to tease out of a paper where and how a student can improve than a multiple choice or short answer test.
If the point is only to determine if someone is proficient, then all we need are 2 grades. Proficient and not-proficient. Or pass and fail. The point is to rank. That’s why we have several grades.
Sometimes, the purpose of a given exam/course is not only to measure proficiency, but also to rank and yank. They are commonly known as “weed out” courses and are common in STEM and some highly popular majors to weed out the underprepared and/or undermotivated students.
An older cousin and a former roommate who attended Tufts around 2 decades apart(early '80s and mid-'90s) both recounted taking intro STEM courses where 60% of their fellow intro classmates flunked out with Ds and Fs.
Worse, the Prof and/or the department head would frankly tell them that their exhibited performance in the course meant they should strongly consider changing majors as they’d need to repeat the course with a C- or better grade for it to count in the major. Several friends who were CS majors witnessed similar experiences with classmates who were similarly weeded out of their CS intro classes.
Back in the glory days of cheap, easy to get in, no limited enrollment public (yes even flagships), this was the saying in engineering. Trust me, the goal of the frosh engineering classes was to drive as many people out of the major as quickly as possible. Got a D in Physics 1, let’s put you into Physics1&2 8 credit course and see if you can learn it at twice the speed. Nope, you are gone (GPA <2). We had calc grades posted for the big lecture class of -20. That carried, so with a -20 … well, you can do the math.
I guess in reality being average at a top school is really pretty dang good.
Med school selection without weighting difficulty of the college or the classes taken or major is really making the grade all that matters. Smart kids of sufficient means or FA eligibility want to go to top schools and really be pushed to excel, but then they face the death of their med school dreams because someone made up a particularly bizarre path to Dr-dom.
My new comment, is that if you really want to learn, getting an A on the test does not mean you slow down …
Ok then, if the point is to “weed out” then so be it. But otherwise, if everyone gets a 92 or higher, I see little point in a curve. It is possible to all have “mastered” the material. (I should have said this instead of proficiency).
If only 5 ppl can move to the next level, then yank away! Otherwise, I don’t see the point of giving someone who got 92% an F…
Personally, I did not get why our ChemE teacher senior year graded our projects with a C as the average on the bell curve. We had all made it through 3+ hard years and I don’t think any were terrible. One guy had a draftsman put together plans for his plant, and yes, he got an A. My colored pencils just didn’t quite cut it.
Clear grading criteria including requirements for regrading would help. Just saying not everyone here will get an A will likely not work, and most special snowflakes will feel they will be the ones on the top of the pile, at least until the midterm.
Well, if the lowest score in the class is a 92% then you didn’t really get any information about the ability of the students in the class, so now it’s very difficult to assign fair grades. If that’s what’s happened in the class then test writer needs to figure out how to write a more useful test (or if it’s a class with only papers figure out better topics or figure out better how to distinguish between papers). I didn’t have any classes that were so poorly graded that the low score was a 92% so I’ve never had to experience that.
I agree A’s need to show mastery and the “But I worked HARD!” is annoying but I disagree with this:
Considering that Princeton had to get rid of its 35% cap on A’s policy because it was too tough and negatively impacted graduates (ever so slightly since many grad schools adjusted and most employers didn’t care - and this implies about 75% grades in the 80+ range was considered detrimental), or that at Brown the average grade is a B+ (ie, average score in the 86-89 range, although granted it’s considered a high percentage), I think it’s fair to say your class with its 70-80 range for an average score has an average score and a distribution that aren’t “normal” in today’s college environment, especially at top schools.
Now, that’s the distribution in that class and the students knew it right away. They knew there were going to be many B’s (and, apparently, many C’s, and quite a few D’s and F’s) but they probably expected it wouldn’t apply to them, that the B’s, C’s, D’s would be for someone else. It’s going to be a wake up call, which I suppose it was meant to be - along the lines of “yes, you can get a B. Kick it up a notch or, if you can’t/won’t, drop.” Some students probably needed that to realize whatever subject this is isn’t for them and it may be the first time they’ve encountered a subject they can’t be good at even if they work hard.
It also means 80+% kids in that class didn’t get a med-school worthy grade and are stuck with either dropping it or giving up on med school. Because the class isn’t required for med school, all the premeds are likely to drop it, which in turn will give you less work. If it’s an engineering class, the engineering students will stick it out because engineering GPAs aren’t evaluated in the same way as other GPAs and getting a C in engineering doesn’t “close off” anything unlike for many other majors.
As I wrote in number 76, mastery, competence, proficiency are not the only point of a college exam. This is high school thinking and licensure thinking, not the kind of thinking faculty particularly value. Problem solving, creativity, innovation, strategy, and risk taking: there are so many things we can do with our minds. Repeating the textbook problem set and mastery are a B at best.
The complacency of learning to pass the test, not understanding the discipline’s methods, is what gets college students in trouble.
The 92-98 distribution was using the example in # 105. Sounds not too common tho!
@mamalion I would suspect the “do XYZ = A” kids who expect the same in college are the same ones who cry bc the colleges didn’t admit them despite all the As.
It isn’t and I agree with Vlad that it’s a sign said Prof has written a poor exam even if his purpose was to enforce a curve. Part of it might be his inclination to being an exceedingly ornery jerk with his students.
Then again, students like an older cousin and HS classmate still opted to take his courses despite the extent of his decades-long notorious reputation on campus. Fortunately, said cousin and HS classmate both lucked out by being near/at the top of the weirdly set curve.
I always thought tests that were easy to get a C in with mastery of most materials, a B in with mastery of all class taught materials and problems reviewed in class or through homework, and an A if you could apply the concepts in class to a new type of problem or make that creative, strategic leap … were fair. Some of these had averages in the 30s. Basic test taking strategy was to skip anything that made you wonder WTF and solve everything that made sense. Some of the B or even A discriminators could be done in 5 minutes or less if you could make that leap. Some of the C discriminators required a good amount of drudgery. Ideally there was some partial credit so if you made an arithmetic error in part 1 you did not lose all credit (one prof did that which plunged a lot of A people to Cs).
There were people with Ds, they had not mastered the class. I don’t remember hearing about Fs after freshman year, but I could have missed a few people who just disappeared after a few more semesters …
Re: post #77 – indicating that having received his/her degree 2 years ago without any multiple choice or fill in the blank tests on technical material, thus implying that such testing is not as widespread as I make it out to be…
I’m happy for you and for the students where you went to school – I think online homework and automated grading of tests in technical classes is horribly counter to the goals of a solid technical education, and I’m quite insulted that with classes no larger than mine were 25 years ago, TA’s and profs are lazy enough to use it while I’m paying tuition that is at least 10x what it was 25 years ago. But I know that NC State, University of MD, Virginia Tech, Penn State, and University of DE rely heavily on online homework and multiple choice testing in the first two years of their engineering curriculum (e.g., calc, physics, chemistry, engineering courses). I know this because these are the schools we either visited with my DS or about which I’ve inquired of current students on this topic. Students from NC State invented the bane that is WebAssign, which has plagued my kids in both HS and college physics and calculus classes. When we visited that campus and I saw the WebAssign building on NC State’s campus, I specifically asked about it, and oh yes, all the classes use it heavily. So at big engineering schools, it is quite prevalent … at least on the east coast. I know a friend whose son attends Bucknell, and he has not had this experience … but that is a much smaller school. But school size is no excuse, IMHO … because the big engineering schools are not significantly bigger now than they used to be.
I’ve never understood why certain professors think it’s so wonderful that they should have some perfect bell curve with a certain percentage always failing a test. I would hope that good teachers would make everyone want to excel. I don’t think a test needs to be harder than the material presented. Either you know calculus or you don’t. Either you’ve learned enough to identify a bunch of art objects and write sensibly about them or you haven’t.