This probably didn't actually happen, but I did have a physics class in college where we had an exam where the highest score was 35%, so it was graded on an absurd curve
My calc I class in college had a 23% average on the first exam. Later ones made it into the high 30%s. The professor was terrible, but since I had already taken calc in high school and he graded on a curve it was a breeze.
The main problem was that he would test for the stuff we had not covered yet because he "wanted people to work ahead."
Now that's an asshole move.
“wanted people to work ahead”
Ah yes “not fucking doing my job that people are taking loans out for and pay off for years to come”
Fuck that “professor.” A college degree is an overpriced commodity and they are falsely charging students by not teaching them the course
It's fine to give points for "extra work", but the regular work should give you a passing grade at least. The extra work should maybe give you the difference between a 6 or an 8.
Grading on a curve is always absurd to me: it's a cop out for teachers who don't know how to set curriculum/exams properly and demeans the education process.
Should just be
While I mostly agree with you, the grading on a curve idea comes from two factors On one hand, the idea that knowing some topics very well can absolve you from knowing other topics at a sufficient level. On the other, people making the exercises for the exams are experts and can easily overlook the hidden difficulties of an exercise. So it happens way too often that a professor would think “this exercise is super easy” and miss that it uses concepts from other courses the students are not super familiar yet.
A lot of professors are overworked with classes and programs too. One of my girlfriends uas a professor for anatomy who teaches two full college courses before going to her massage school to teach anatomy. She says you can tell that the professor isn't really there mentally. Sge never actually prepares for the courses she's supposed to be teaching, but you can tell us just from exhaustion. I wonder how many are like that and just forget what coursework they're currently preparing for others.
In my uni, professors are expected to teach almost 220h/years of in person teaching (correcting doesn’t count, nor preparing), on top of “being a team playing” and doing quite some extra bureaucratic work. Obviously on top of doing their own research. Good teachers (professors that care about teaching quality) look like ghosts by the end of the academic year…
Each college does it differently. Some allow professors to choose research vs teaching, some require a fixed balance.
On the first point I agree. In my country, 40-50% is a pass usually and that seems crazy for its own reasons. But a curve can make that worse just as easily as it can make it better. The education system I work in is now introducing the idea that not only do you need to hit 50% to pass, you also have to show a competency with every learning outcome on the curriculum. We'll see how it goes. My subject areas haven't been hit yet.
The second point is essentially what I said, it's a cop out for a teacher who is bad at setting exams. Easily fixed by some QA and/or collaboration. At least run it by a TA. Also they should read the curriculum before writing an assessment.
That seems so low that it makes the benefit of the class dubious. Can you really say you're making good use of the students' time when it's clear none of them are understanding the material? Maybe the material needs to be broken up into more digestible chunks.
Eh, I had a physics class like this and the test questions had so many moving pieces that missing one would give you the wrong answer, even if you remembered all the formulas and otherwise did the problem correctly. So getting 1/4 right was actually pretty good in the stressful environment of the testing center. And there were only like 4 problems anyway, and you'd get partial credit, so a 30-40% meant you probably got one right and had the right approach on the others. You also don't get full credit unless you show all your work, so even a savant probably wouldn't get 100%.
It's also possible to just write a bad question/exam and recognize you need to do better as a professor.
I had a physics professor who graded himself on whether or not he wrote/taught well by the grade distribution. He was always transparent about it and had benchmarks of how it went previous years. He was also one of the most sought after professors.
I also had s philosophy class where the best grade over the entire semester was a 30 and the professor was like yeah this is just expected. You get an A. This guy obviously derived enjoyment from not being a good teacher and for humiliating his students that they really knew nothing about philosophy. That guy sucked.
I had this one teacher in university (not yet a PhD but was working on it) that I ended up taking like 4 different classes from in university. Although he was brilliant and experienced having worked in the industry for 30 years or so, and was naturally a very good teacher and very passionate about what he taught, it's a simple fact was he was new, but he was very humble and transparent about that. The first course I took from him was only his second time teaching that course (or any course), and the other three were each his first. All these courses he built the curriculum himself. Again, he's an excellent teacher, one of the best I ever had, but he was still working out the kinks in his tests. He was being very transparent with us students about his process of choosing to award partial or full credit for questions and problems he decided weren't fair, or were worded ambiguously, always taking feedback during class after getting our graded tests back.
I had a few other courses like that too, and I feel like that system (decreasing the weight of problems that aren't fair to students) is generally a better system than simply grading on a curve. The former is more granular, differentiating poor grades due to lack of study from poor grades to a faulty test. It also provides a clear direction for improving the curriculum next semester. Grading on a curve often feels like a copout to avoid the labor involved in improving the curriculum. BUT on the other hand, if the class really went so poorly that nobody understood the material or if the test was almost totally unfair, then imo grading on a curve could be the fairest solution for the students. There's no perfect solution there, the students time is already wasted, better to give them the benefit of the doubt in that case.
Had a similar thing happen in an intro geology course. Highest grade on the final was 41%, my grade. I got an A in the class. I do not understand why anyone would make an intro to geology course that difficult. Very few are going into the field. Most just needed an extra science course, like myself.
I knew someone who had to pass a class where the failure rate was 85%. The worst part is this was only one of a few of these classes. She was studying physics, and even though I really don't want anything to do with her now for unrelated reasons, I still feel bad for her.
It would never happen as described in this post, but things like this are way more common than people think.
I still remember teaching >3 people a subject, because they asked me to, and then we all did the exam and I was the one who failed it. Now I'm, not error-proof but that's kind of ridiculous. I have experienced a truckload of these things but that one illustrates very well how random and/or unfit for purpose most exams are. It's like a coin flip +/- 5% depending on the depths of your studies beforehand.
I was a physics major, and the whole department was famous for this. I think it's just lazy. They don't make the test for what they actually taught, they just throw shit against the wall and see what sticks.
My 3 terms of intro to o physics were like this. The mechanical engineers that suffered through statics couldn't even bring the curve up too much.
Even with that, it I didn't have two friends in those classes I never would have passed.
This is so fake that we managed to reach the {fake + gay} threshold without having to tap into the gay potential
>anon waits until all the other students leave
>asks the professor what he can "do" to pass
this is a classic porn script, gay/10
suuuuurree
I love the correction system we have at my university. All the exams are pseudonymized with a sticker you receive during the exam and scanned after completion. About 10 to 30 people are involved in correcting the exams for one course. We don't know who the exams belong to as we only see the scanned version on our tablet or computer. Each task is corrected by a different set of people. We can select to see only a single task or subtask to streamline the process of correction, too. Furthermore, all the tasks are checked twice independently. Once done, the system can assign the exams back to the students. I love how it's fair and "anonymous" by design.
Wait... are there universities that don't have an anonymous exam system?
In early 2010s I had a TA give me an A without grading. When I confronted him he said "Why do you care, you know you're getting an A anyways?" Lol. He got reprimanded though.
This post doesn't pass peer review
If the story was about peer review it would probably be more believable. No way a professor does that to a fee paying student less still admits it to them. But do it to a competing prof where they are anonymous... Much more tempting.
I keep reading about people grading on a curve and I still can't grasp what that means. Do those teachers have like a set number of A B C, or whatever, they can give out? And if they've run out of A then you get a B? And if the B run out you get a C and so on? That seems a completely intellectually bankrupt practice! If you don't want more than X people passing, then just grade people with percentages and let only the first X highest through and that's it, but don't lie with fake grades! How insane...
Wait until you hear that universities are just literal paywalls to seperate social classes so poor people can’t get good jobs that once were apprenticeships.
I mean, not the whole world is the US. Plus, at this point you'll get a better paying job if you go into trades.
There's a trade school near me that is fucking free. They have a huge endowment and that pays for everything, even room and board for the on-campus students. They still have to advertise and meanwhile kids go $300K into debt to get a degree in English Lit. I'm all for a classic Liberal Arts education but god damn.
That's not fair, they're also debt slavery scams where they sell false hope to people. They even have entire military boot camp lite night release prisons where they brainwash you into going
I assure you that's not how it works in Europe. Nowhere near as bad as the US, in any case.
I guess that's what happens when education is deeply ingrained in the culture.
basically that, yes.
though in my experience, they'd make the tests so hard that everyone would get failing or nearly failing grades, then curve up so that more people pass and some get As
only issue for them is if the average is 36% but 3 students got high 90s.. makes the curving math a lot more awkward
In Delft, corrections of the curve are only ever used upwards, in case the passing rate is very low. If everyone completes the test without mistakes everyone gets a 10.
At my uni they'd take the highest grade of the class and reset that as the max points and grade from there.
So if max points on an exam was 120 and no-one scored higher then an 85, then an 85 would be an A, 75 a B, etc.
I'm a mediocre student but an amazing test taker and used to compete on math teams. So some of the math heavy engineering courses I would get perfect exam scores and sometimes the prof would ignore me as the highest grade. I was frustrated at first because my A didn't mean the same as someone's but I realized later it was to stop me from getting beat up by a bunch of 30 yo guys.
Grading on a curve is indeed that, and it should be criminalized because of how much it harms students
It's only ever worked to the benefit of the student in my experience
The curve means the class's scores is fit onto a bell curve. X% pass, Y% fail, etc all according to the predetermined standard bell curve. Doesn't matter if the class is full of Einsteins or dunces. If 30% is the highest mark in the class then that's an A+, and so on.
I hope you were smart enough to record that interaction, anon.
My major in college for my BS included all but 2 credit hours of a physics minor, so my final semester, I took Thermal Physics to complete that minor. I've never met a physics course I didn't ace, so I figured "easy A".
I'm quite certain I was the highest scorer in the course and was a solid B+ before the final. I took the final and felt really good about how well I did. I thought sure that professor would curve (or otherwise adjust the grades) and I'd be the one that threw off the curve.
I got my grades back. I got a C. My only C ever, in fact. An A (what I expected) would have gotten me summa cum laude.
The same semester, I took a statistics class. Paid exactly zero attention in class. The class took place in a computer lab for no good reason other than I'm guessing the other classrooms were booked. I played a fast-paced Quake-like FPS every class all class. Got an A in that course.
But that fuckin' thermal physics class.
Years later, a coworker of mine who was an alum of my alma mater told me that they'd taken the professor who taught that thermal physics class off of teaching permanently due to his completely unreasonable grading practices.
I remember that my statistics professor was so smug about grading on a curve because it was using statistics. It was also a class that he gloated about as a class where you "needed an a" if you wanted to get into grad school. In other words, the asshole was making sure only a certain number of people even had a chance to get into the graduate programs. It was rumored that he even ran tests on students in the different labs, telling the grad students teaching the labs to teach in certain ways and seeing if there were any differences. Wouldn't put it past him.
You forgot to fuck the professor.
Dean time!
I have had teachers try to grade on a strict bell curve distribution, but if your goal as a school is to accept promising talent then train them better you should expect your students to fall within a part of a bell curve and not spread across the whole damn thing.
Sorry, can't pass you cause my morals oblige me to give 2 As, and 2Fs, and I'm all out of everything but FS (no matter how many points you were away from someone with a better final grade).
Anon is just making a fake post. Literally no college would authorize this type of shit and I'd argue there could be grounds for a civil lawsuit if they did. Paying them tens of thousands of dollars and one of their professors admits to just auto failing students because there's too many in the class? Nah, I've attended 3 different schools before I graduated (I moved a lot), and every single one would drop you before class even began or within the first week if the class was too full.
If this did actually happen to OP, I can guarantee there's more to the story they're not telling us. But I'm going to assume it's made up or extremely exaggerated/altered.
This is a certified this totally happened moment
But he didn't write anything
gay: anon was fucked by the professor
fake: anon left the house
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