Why do professors scale marks and raise the marks of students that don't deserve it?

<p>If a student only demonstrates they have only mastered 30% of the material, why is they get to pass the course and move on to more advanced courses? For example, in my analysis class for the midterm the class average was a 30%, yet the professor scaled it to a 65% and those who failed miserably passed. Isn’t it wrong to give marks to students who clearly do not deserve it? How would employers feel if they have their employees only knowing 30% of the knowledge required to do the job competently?</p>

<p>Because nobody cares about how people do in comparison to perfection - that’s just plain unreasonable. The only thing that matters is how you do compared to everyone else. 50% perfection on a task would be undesirable if everyone else got 75%, however it would be extremely desirable if everyone else only got 25%… Scores by themselves mean nothing without comparison to some sort of average.</p>

<p>But 30% of <em>what</em> material? A professor can cover a lot of depth and breadth in a given class…what they could teach in a course called x at community college y could be entirely different than what they could teach in the same named course and level at say MIT. If I know my student body well, I can create an exam that will usually give me the average I’m looking for. All professors make a judgement, calibrate it…but sometimes they get it wrong. Professors who end up with a 30% average got it wrong, and/or they are ineffective professors. Fortunately most can adjust for their mistakes and it has nothing to do with ‘who deserves’ a particular grade or not. </p>

<p>You actually just sound annoyed so what is the real issue? Is it that because you studied 24/7 and actually did very well on this test, you feel its unfair because your classmates who didn’t work 24/7 now get to pass the course anyways? Fortunately, your professor doesn’t believe that students should be working 24/7 to do well in the exam they created. Thank god for that. I’m strongly opposed to grade inflation and college turning into a summer camp at the expense of education, but at the same time students do need to do more than study.</p>

<p>As long as your grade was also boosted, who cares?</p>

<p>

Really? How would you feel about driving over a bridge designed by an engineer who only knew 30% of the material (scored 30% on their exams)? How about a math teacher who only knew 35% of the material teaching your kids math? What about a doctor who only knew 50% but was scaled up to a 90? </p>

<p>I cannot believe you condone giving marks away for free. So you think colleges should just give away their degrees easily without students having to work for them?</p>

<p>

You are most likely a liberal arts professor (nothing wrong with that). In the sciences, however, students either know the material or they don’t. And don’t place the blame of the failures of the student body on the professor, it is the fault of the students. And yes, whether a student knows 30% of the material or 70% of the material matters. Would you feel perfectly fine with a doctor who only knew 50% of the material but still got their degree due to unfair handouts of marks? </p>

<p>

This is more proof that you are a liberal arts prof and have little clue of how it works in the sciences and mathematics. Sure, liberal arts majors shouldn’t be studying all the time, but students majoring in engineering, math, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. and are hoping to either become scientists or doctors need to know at least 70% of the material and if they only got a 30% on the exam, then they clearly need to retake it. Wouldn’t it be an outrage for an engineer to graduate without ever knowing what a determinant is? Or a math senior undergrad that could barely do the proofs out of Spivak? A physics graduate student that does not understand Lagrangian mechanics as much as they should?</p>

<p>How can you agree with giving free marks away to students who don’t deserve it?</p>

<p>It could be the professor’s fault that the exam was really hard, and not a valid measure of one’s knowledge in the subject.</p>

<p>But it could also be that the students are stupid.</p>

<p>It’s hard to say.</p>

<p>@Majjestic </p>

<p>I would be completely shocked if my mother remembered 25% of what she was taught in college. She has admitted that she’s forgotten most of the info covered in college. Yet she is still the one of the most successful physicians in a cardiovascular practice recently ranked first in the nation - so yes, I’d be completely fine seeing a doctor who remembered 30% of their training. I assume it’s the same for engineers. As long as the best in the profession are building bridges, I don’t care if they remember 1% or 99%.</p>

<p>And no, I don’t condone “giving marks away for free.” I believe the best students should get the best marks and the students 65% as good as the best students should get a grade of 65%</p>

<p>And what if they were tested on material that wasn’t actually covered in the lectures or in the textbook, or that there wasn’t any indication that they should know it? I’ve had plenty of tests where every single person in the class walked out having no idea where any of that had come from. I’ve had plenty of tests where the highest grade in the class, not the average, was in the 60’s, and these are upper level courses in chemistry. I think the problem with the most recent one in particular was that it was meshed together from submissions from four different professors who had come in and lectured us on material that was completely different from anything they put on the exam.</p>

<p>Now I might agree with you that if someone was able to get a 100 on the exam it’s not particularly fair to raise everyone else’s grade, but if the exam is so hard that not a single person in the class was able to even pass it, that’s just a poorly written test. And it’s happened to me several times, where I was maybe the second best scorer on the exam even with a failing grade, and the top scorer was not passing either.</p>

<p>Although in my situation I think the coordinator for the course made a reasonable decision. He curved it by 10% so that the top group of scores would become passing (actually only the top 25% students were bumped up into the passing range by that move, including myself).</p>

<p>Do you really think that working professionals actually remember 70% or more of the material they have learned previously? Just because someone scored 30% on an exam doesn’t mean that they only know 30% of what to do when building a bridge. You have to realize that the 90-100% = A, 80-89% = B, etc system is completely arbitrary, and does not translate out into the real world.</p>

<p>Teachers can give very challenging tests. In part, this allows them to truly exceptional students (who are performing at a much higher level than what is required for an “excellent,” that is, “A,” level) in order to provide meaningful feedback to grad school. I prefer tests that are written and rescaled to something other than the ten-point or graduated ten-point scale. Frankly, humanities professors don’t seem to know enough about math to use it effective (“An ‘A’ in this class is a 94; I simply do not give grades above a 95 because no one is that close to perfect”) and it also creates a concern due to ceiling error. Doubtless, there are students who are operating well above the undergraduate level in certain fields, but one or two statistically insignificant mistakes are pointlessly magnified and no additional points are given for more-than-excellent responses/solutions.</p>

<p>

To be fair, the professor tested on some advanced material that was not covered in class or the textbook, but I still managed to score an 85. Every student who did well on the exam are the students who are actually passionate about math, and research the implications of theorems presented and alternate ways of doing the proofs, while those students who did terrible studied purely out of the textbook and notes taken in class. If they were truly passionate about their program, then they would actually go the extra mile of understanding the concepts they are taught. If those that are truly not passionate about their studies fail, why should they get free marks?</p>

<p>Now that I think of it, I do think the test was quite fair. All one needed to do was apply the theories accordingly and do the easy part (proving it), yet the majority of the class thought that memorizing proofs and how the prof proves theorems would be good enough to do good on the test. </p>

<p>For physics, it’s even worse. Students seem to expect to get problems that are similar to the ones they have solved in the problem sets.</p>

<p>

The majority of my physics profs could easily solve any typical engineering physics problem, and the majority of them haven’t done this type of physics for more than 20 years and are still as sharp as ever. My math prof could prove every theorem in my textbook easily, and I suspect this is considered the standard for most math professors. Engineers need to know the concepts behind the math they use everyday. Most engineers will never compute a determinant, but an engineer who doesn’t know what a determinant is does not deserve to be an engineer and should be stripped of their qualifications.</p>

<p>That sounds maybe reasonable. My only experience with proofs is the intro to proofs course here that I took for the math minor, which I did do very well in but I know it was just the basics. I watched easily half the class fail because they were just trying to memorize the proofs he did in class but I tried to challenge myself as much as possible and I know that helped. I’ve been watching my boyfriend take analysis as well (he’s been scoring 60s-70s pre-curve, and he is passionate about it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be nearly all he talks about.)</p>

<p>The problem I have is when professors make trivia that wasn’t in the book or the lectures exam questions. Give me something difficult that I can figure out because I understand the concepts covered, fine, then everyone has a fair shot. But when a good third of your multiple choice test is specific trivia that no one had any idea where it came from or why it’s apparently more important than testing on the actual concepts at hand… that is why I hate having multiple choice tests in upper level chemistry classes. P-chem thankfully wasn’t like that. :)</p>

<p>To be fair I kind of feel the same way you do. I’m taking a grad level chemistry class right now and I’ve been getting 100’s on the exams and homeworks, but most of the class was woefully unprepared for the course (i.e. somehow getting by the stated requirement for physical chemistry, which requires calc 2, when they had never even had a calculus course) and my professor is going to curve despite me getting 100’s.</p>

<p>Curving is used so that your mark in that course demonstrates your understanding of the subject relative to the other students in your class and not relative to the difficulty of your random professor’s exams. The entire point of receiving a grade in a University class is so that potential employers may judge your knowledge relative to the other applicants. Curving the grades creates a much fairer playing field.</p>

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<p>You would think so, but I’m not so sure. I’ve gone to professors outside of class before showing them work I did on problems they didn’t assign, and some of them couldn’t figure out the answer. </p>

<p>I even worked with a professor one on one for an entire year doing two independent studies in math and there were times when we got stumped working on problems had to check the back of the book for the answer.</p>

<p>^ that.
My professors respond with “I don’t know” when I ask (or someone else asks) something beyond the scope of the class that’s not related to their research interest.</p>

<p>There’s two issues at play</p>

<p>1) Which isn’t really too important here is grade expectations have gone up. At almost every school, a C used to be standard perfectly fine grade. Now people are upset if they don’t get A’s and so average has gone from a C to a B.</p>

<p>2) Consider two examples: a professor gives a really really easy exam and everyone gets 90+, or a really really hard exams where grades are normally distributed about some mean. In the first case the professor can’t figure out who is “better than average”… maybe they’re looking for researchers to help them and this gives no info. In the second case, those that really know their stuff can be identified, but it isn’t a punishment to those that did average. I’ve had classes where the average grade was a 50 and people knew this before hand. Would they stay in the class if there was no curving? Probably not.</p>

<p>Two questions:</p>

<p>1.) Why do care? If you are as passionate about the material as you say you are, why do you care about the grades of others?</p>

<p>2.) How are you harmed by this curve? If you have the highest grade, you will still get the highest mark, so why do you care?</p>

<p>You do sound very upset about this issue, I’ll give you that.</p>

<p>However the attitude won’t do much good for your mental or cardiovascular health in the future.</p>

<p>Wait until you get in the work place and those former undeserving students are replaced by undeserving colleagues and managers getting promotions or being your boss. It’s going to be a lot more frustrating than the class average being too high.</p>

<p>Worse yet, maybe you’ll end up going to graduate school and you’ll discover it’s even less about what’s fair than your current experience.</p>

<p>Read Jeff Schmidt’s “Disciplined Minds” to find out why (academic) life sucks. :)</p>