<p>In one of my high classes, a teacher would consistently have (out of a 22 person class) ~16 D/Fs, 4 Cs, and 2 Bs on tests. The material wasn’t hard; she just couldn’t write a test everyone without making it confusing. She wouldn’t curve; most people failed. Great class to take senior year, huh?</p>
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Because, it’s WRONG that I worked so hard to earn my grade while those students who barely worked at all were still able to pass the exam. </p>
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That’s not the point. I worked hard to earn my grade, and if the other students worked just as hard, they wouldn’t need the curve to do well. People who barely passed with a 50 were curved up to a B-. Unless, of course, you believe in giving out grades for free? If that is the case, do not bother responding to my post.</p>
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I plan to remain in academia, so I won’t ever have to deal with idiots who clearly are not competent to do the job they have been assigned.</p>
<p>When I was in South Africa a couple of years ago, I helped an engineering professor grade some of his exams (just figuring out the scores after he marked up the tests). He asked how it was going, and I said, “Well, the students didn’t do too well. Most of the scores are in the 70s, and no one scored above 90.” It was a BIG class, too. He said, “Actually, those are really good for an exam here.” Apparently, they grade much tougher over there!</p>
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<p>Oh boy are you going to get a rude wake up call when you reach academia. 
[hint: Tenure is infamous for keeping around people that are no longer competent.]</p>
<p>^True.</p>
<p>Also, Majjestic, you clearly believe that your professors are incapable of doing their jobs now, so why should it be different when they are your colleagues? If you end up being the only prof who grades “fairly” (i.e. no curve,) why should anyone take your class?</p>
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<p>Would you prefer getting a B while everyone else fails, like in my last examples? It seems not…</p>
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<p>If you state they’re incompetent at doing their jobs, what makes you sure that they’ll be competent in grading (since it is, after all, part of their job)?</p>
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<p>If you feel like your passion, dedication, work, etc., aren’t valued to the degree that they should be in your classes (because nearly everyone passes, irrespective of effort), then I would suggest finding a domain where your work will feel valued in a way that makes you satisfied/happy. </p>
<p>College courses are only one place where one can put effort in and feel rewarded. Friendships are another ;). Sorry this has troubled you so much.</p>
<p>Instead of complaining to a bunch of strangers on the internet, why don’t you go complain to your professor? </p>
<p>Come back and tell us what they say. I’m sure you will make a lot of friends in your class!</p>
<p><a href=“http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/section/learning/general/onthisday/big/0506_big.gif[/url]”>http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/section/learning/general/onthisday/big/0506_big.gif</a></p>
![http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/section/learning/general/onthisday/big/0506_big.gif[/url]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/section/learning/general/onthisday/big/0506_big.gif%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
<p>I disagree. I’ve had one or two college classes (including a higher-level physics class this term) where the professor could not write a fair test. In my physics class, for example, we have lab either on Tuesday or Thursday afternoons, and we could self-schedule our exam any time on Thursday. Sixty six percent of the content of the midterm (I’m not exaggerating - 40/60 points) was based directly on knowledge of an equation that we had derived in the most recent lab, so those who took the test and had lab on Tuesday (which fortunately included me) were able to easily do it and did fine. However, for the students with lab on Thursday afternoon, most of them took the exam Thursday morning, before doing the lab. The rest of the exam was also difficult. As a result, the exam was completely polarized. Our professor was shocked: about half of the class got 80% and above, and the other half got a 30% or below. It didn’t help that he’d told us that the the exam <em>would be</em> just like the problem sets that we’d done. I know students in the other lab section who had studied upwards of 20 hours and still failed. In the end, when someone pointed out the discrepancy, he refused to acknowledge that the different lab sections were the reason for the bizarre split in the grades, and just curved the test so that most people within one standard deviation passed (C/C+).</p>
<p>My point is that sometimes despite the amount of studying you do, and despite your understanding of the material, professors do not make tests that reflect what you’ve been learning in class. If the point of grades are to reflect your mastery of the material, and only 30% of the test is material from the course, then a 30% looks pretty good.</p>
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Yes, I definitely would. It shows one is an exceptional student to a graduate school if they received a B in a class with a class average of a 30. </p>
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Don’t misinterpret what I said. My professors are quite exceptional teachers, it isn’t their fault if 75% of the class doesn’t know how to study for their tests and thus fail.</p>
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I don’t understand why you are bringing up friendships, which is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.</p>
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The problem is, the other students earned their grades as well. It is wrong to deny them of a passing grade when they understand the material to a level that the professor deems sufficient.</p>
<p>Why do you keep insisting on relying on a completely arbitrary grading system that cannot account for wide discrepancies in test difficulty? </p>
<p>Suppose you have two test scores of 70/100. One is for an exam in a “physics for poets” course where most people could already pass before even setting foot into the class. Another is for a upper division quantum mechanics course. Should the result be the exact same grade? Does that reflect equivalent amounts of understanding and proficiency in the respective courses?</p>
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<p>oh the problem just seemed to be that you don’t feel valued enough for what you do. Which doesn’t seem very out of the ordinary to me - it’s a common human longing to feel valued. </p>
<p>friendships are just another way in which one can feel valued (success at college doesn’t seem to be achieving that for you very well - at least not in this one class). Of course there are many other avenues too :). That was just a salient example that came to mind (and also I happened to remember this long fruitless exchange we had on some other thread, where you were distraught over me comparing homelessness to friendlessness, so I couldn’t help but reference that :p).</p>
<p>Not to mention, you can’t assume the students who got below a B on the tests didn’t study. They could have studied a week in advance with study groups and gone to office hours, and yet still ended up doing poorly. In my Bio class, when we had our first midterm, I began studying the moment the professor put the study guide for it up online. My classmates and I worked on it together through Google Docs, writing down our answers or explaining why another person’s answer would be incorrect. I still ended up with a high C on the test, and nearly everyone who had collaborated on the study guide via Google Docs got the same question (worth 9 points) wrong (and yes, ironically, the study guide we worked on via Google Docs was essentially THE midterm itself, although the midterm had fewer questions than the study guide, so if you did the study guide, you were set for the midterm) because we didn’t interpret a graph correctly.</p>
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So you believe scaling a student from a 30% to a 65% is fair and the right of the student? What an awful entitlement complex you have. If the majority of the students failed with a 30%, they clearly demonstrated they did not understand the material, and if it wasn’t for department requirements and the fact the university needs students to take the course in the future, they would not have curved it. It isn’t about students who deserve the grade, unless you believe a 30% should be considered a pass in a course? </p>
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Grading is not entirely arbitrary; you must be a liberal arts major. If you haven’t noticed, grades are what decide if a student becomes a doctor, lawyer, engineer, mathematician, physicist, etc. </p>
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Why not? If a student demonstrated they understand 70% of the material that is tested on, why do you believe they are entitled to a higher grade?</p>
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<p>I believe it is fair if the test was not representative of the material. If only 40% of the material on the test was actually representative of what was covered in the class, and most students scored a 30%, then I see no problem with it. You seem to think that all professors write fair tests, but in my experience that isn’t the case. I had a prof who intentionally made the tests so hard that people rarely scored above 60%, and usually they were the people who were intuitively good at the subject, so their grades were curved up to As, and the median was set at a C.</p>
<p>I’m saying that saying 90-100% = A, 80-89% = B, etc (or whatever system you use) IS arbitrary. It does not reflect at all how much you learned. </p>
<p>Since you can’t seem to understand my already extreme analogies, let’s make them even more extreme. Suppose you have a college introductory chemistry class of 200 students. You evenly and randomly divide them into two groups. One group takes a middle school science test, while the other group takes an exam for a graduate level course at MIT. The average for the first group is 97%, while the average for the second group is 3%. Would you say that the second group only understands a small fraction of introductory chemistry compared to the first group? Did the second group “clearly demonstrate that they did not understand the material?”</p>
<p>If you manage to find a way to get a 30% (or higher) success rate in cloning animals, you’ll be lauded as a hero by the scientific community and will probably be given a Nobel prize. However, if you have a 95% success rate in manufacturing screws, you have completely failed.</p>
<p>And FYI, I’m a biology major.</p>
<p>^Aha! You are a liberal arts major!</p>