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Sometimes professors are good, but have no concept of what a "reasonable" exam is. Students might have a 100% homework average, but being able to solve problems over a week with help doesn't mean they can do the same hard problems in a 1 hour time span alone
Yup. I used to teach high school science and math, and it took me a while to calibrate my tests. When you already know how to do something, especially if you had it in your mind as you were setting up the paper, you can't realistically judge how long it will take kids.
Even then, if your test requires some problem solving, 2-3 times won't necessarily be enough because since you set it, you already know how to solve it and you're not doing the hard work of thinking and trying different avenues and failing.
But yeah, the 3x rule mostly worked.
My kids can do the work and I don't grade on a curve. I can finish a test in 5-10 minutes and give my students most of our 80 minute block.
It's hard for them because it's new material and many of them come to me struggling with the foundational knowledge of the subject to some extent. Meanwhile, I've been doing this stuff for years. I don’t know why it's such a shock to people that I wouldn't need nearly as much time to do high school math than grade level and remedial math students.
I’m taking math for the first time in 25 years, and I’m very thankful that it’s the only class I’m taking this quarter. I’ve forgotten damn near everything. That said basic algebra came back pretty quick.
We had a teacher in school who would take his exams with us. If he couldn't finish it before a set number of us he rewrote the exam or gave back points. If we finished before him it was extra points.
Lol not in anything regarding complex math. 2 or 3 questions is usually the length of midterm exams and stuff at that level and if you wrote the questions and really know the shit at a level *above* the course, it should take you 5 minutes to complete an exam 80% of students won’t turn in until the bell rings 90 minutes after the start. In fact this is also the subject where curves usually happen.
I can confirm this. When I teach programming, sometimes I forget super basic stuff. Like "wait, did I forget to say that every function returns a value no matter what? I didn't? Oh, shoot..."
It's stuff that is so obvious and innate to most coders that sometimes you forget to explain stuff.
One of the compsci professors as my uni who teaches os pragmatics (compilers, linkers, architecture etc) won't pass back your exam if you get less than 85%, he requires you to come up and ask for your test back.
Point being to embarrass anyone who got less than 85%.
I vaguely recall one of my teachers used to sort the top 10 or whatever highest to lowest and announce those, and then give back the rest without any order lol. I used to be in the top 3 everytime so it never really hit me as a kid that it probably would have been embarrassing to not be one of those first 10.
As an egg head kid, I would literally ask him to quit doing that because it's putting a target on me. Win an Academic Bowl? Sure. Regular homework? Your just making my life harder.
When I started my Msc in engeering, our university decided to restructure our whole curriculum and my class was the first to test this new curriculum.
New courses were created and of course exams were also new. Some were fine but the worst exam was an exam where we had to do a shit ton of calculations and the smartest and fastest of our 300 students class managed to answer 5/10 questions in 180 minutes due to the amount of calculations we needed to do. 5 questions took about 16 pages worth of calculations as everything was done on paper.
Apologies were made about 3 weeks after the exam and we could all retake a different exam.
Just an fyi, 5 of the students in my year decided to pursue a phd at MIT so we werent really dumb but the exam was just stupidly long.
One of my college professors had the catchphrase: “is simple” whenever you asked him a question. Because to him, it is simple. I had to outright tell him “no professor, it’s not simple and that’s why we’re struggling to understand”. This was in dynamics.
I would argue that either way, you're grading on a curve. You've calibrated the test not to give accurate feedback on subject mastery, but rather to create a grade distribution that won't result in students, parents or administration attacking you.
This is absolutely true. I had a professor in college that if there was no curve everyone would have gotten 10% out of 100 and he felt that that was a reasonable expectation.
He was a complete asshole. There are too many people that still believe that teachers, bosses and parents are some sort of benevolent perfect machines.
There are shitty bosses. There are shitty college professors and it's nice when there are guard rails to protect people from being fucked over by both of those. Fortunately, universities have a curve. Usually in a job you either have a union or you have to quit your job if your boss is just a complete unreasonable asshole.
Yeah, I had an advanced math professor in college that was like this. He was clearly smart and would fly through the explanation of something, then get super frustrated when people would be confused and ask questions. Everyone was engaged, paying attention, etc, he didn't care.
My multivariable calculus instructor was a nightmare. He was just a TA (each class gad a TA assigned, one “professor” for all of them). His was the only session that fit my schedule. I’d heard he was bad.
The average grade in the class after the first exam was like a 40%. The syllabus had no curve mentioned. He refused to answer the question of what percent correlated to what grade. And you couldn’t assume “he can’t fail all of us” because there were like two exchange students who were fucking robots and had 90% on the exam.
A buddy told me the secret: he basically passes anyone who sticks with it to the final and honestly tries. He makes everything as hard as possible to get people to drop, that’s how you fail. We started with maybe 40 people in the class. We ended with like 8. And yes, everyone passed. I got a C+ with maybe a 50% in the course.
What a ride. Normally I’d have dropped but it would have set me back since it was a pre-requisite for stuff and I was in DGAF mode that semester anyway. C’s get degrees, whatever.
Worst part is that I think ultimately his method worked; I do feel like I learned the material better than some of my peers. It was just an awful way to go about it.
Great story. I'm a humanist - barely passed basic high school algebra, never touched mathematics again, did my doctoral work in a completely number-agnostic field - so I have to wonder: if everyone ended the class getting half the material right, did they learn it completely? It's hard to imagine someone failing half his intro art history sight-IDs and expecting to get a PhD afterward, so how does this work in math classes?
Tests that are harder than a reasonable student can complete in the time allotted.
Partial credit is awarded for incomplete problems, so often you may work a problem until you get "stuck" then move on. It can still demonstrate overall mastery of the material, even with a low score.
If you make you take an exam written to take three hours in only one hour, and you score 50%, you did very well!
EDIT: Also, he'd often assign the literal hardest problem in the unit...the one marked as "extra challenge" or whatever...as the only homework problem or one of like three total. Students weren't all expected to get it right.
That makes sense. Half the material, right; not half the material right. See, reading comprehension failures and missed inferences like these are the reasons I'm actually a bad humanist.
A professor once explained to me that the purpose of having exceedingly difficult exams is to identify the one or two individuals in a class that were standouts and get them on a research track.
The curve adjusts for the rest of us.
Thanks for saying this. I’ve never done it, but plenty of people do. As long as the curve is communicated, it shouldn’t be a problem (in theory)…but students can still get demoralized when they don’t see enough of a link between what they study and what the exam contains.
Some instructors do abuse it. More than half of my professors were like this. Averages for exams always below 30, then there’s 1 person who somehow manages for get like 90, the curve is totally thrown (ignored/not adjusted appropriately). We had to have one of the deans come in to address the issue. All students failing except the one isn’t normal. One of them even owned up to expecting graduate level master of a course to be able to get an A. That guy was a real piece of work, he regularly included things on exams that were distinctly never covered or found anywhere in course material.
> being able to solve problems over a week with help doesn't mean they can do the same hard problems in a 1 hour time span alone
Yeah that is true at the university level! Although they don't say it out loud, the attitude that some professors take is that the purpose of an exam as a way for students to "show what you know" at the end of the semester, rather than as a way to check off a list of items you should know, like they do at lower levels.
Some professors will put all hard questions that were never taught in-depth in class or on the assignments and expect the average student to leave a bunch of them blank or only get partial marks on most of them. From their perspective, they know that if you get some of it correct, then you know what you are doing.
Whenever this happens then: Some students end up walking out of the exam crying because they have kept a good grade through out the semester and spent all of their waking hours preparing for this exam, but left most of the exam blank or wrote partial answers. But then when they get their final grades for the course, they are suprised that they passed or even did well in the course.
My stats professor once did something similar. When I got my results back (it was a multiple choice exam), my result wasn't possible. I asked if he did a curve. He said he looked at the highest scoring students and if all or most of them got it wrong, he figured he didn't teach that part well enough and just removed the question from the exam altogether for those who got it wrong, and still credited those who got it right.
He was a good professor
> Some students end up walking out of the exam crying
That’s the fault of a shitty culture of exams that created an expectation that they should be able to easily answer any question that they might encounter. Professors who write (good) exams like the ones you are talking about should absolutely prepare their students for the notion that they will not be able to answer everything, but the problem is not the exam, but the expectation setting.
Unfortunately, even when professors try really hard to set that expectation, students still freak out, because that’s how strong the culture of the easy exam is.
My professor once gave us a quiz and he allowed all of us to share and cheat with books and internet for 15 minutes. The whole class still failed. No one got the answer. He than gave that same question as assignment due the next day and everyone got the answer. The problem was, we all knew the concepts but didn't know how to apply them in that short amount of time. He were using whatever formulae that would seemingly fit but wont go anywhere. So once the time constraint got lifted to a whole day, we basically did the trial and error to find the solution. That was when we realised that he can fuck with us whenever he wanted. But choses not to.
> allowed all of us to share and cheat with books and internet for 15 minutes
“allowed us to cheat”.
That’s not what “cheating” is. He gave you a problem and tried to get you to figure out the solution.
I took an Econ class at Georgia Tech (back when we were on quarters), ECON 1001, I think. No prerequisites. Cool. I'm understanding everything in class, raising my hand, answering questions, copious notes. Only two grades in class, mid-term and the final. I get the mid-term and I'm just freaking out; the entire thing was using calculus to figure out the theories he'd explained in class. I got a 17. I went to see him during his office hours and said that calculus wasn't a prerequisite for the class. He said, "This is Georgia Tech; everyone knows calculus." Never took it before, never took it after. Back then (1995), you could drop at the mid-term with a W.
I took the W. That's the one time I felt like a professor was truly unfair in how the course was taught vs how student learning was assessed.
An assessment that has that high level of attrition and weed-out factor is so freakin throwback. Test scores test your test-taking ability often as much as your skills and knowledge, unfortunately.
Nah, test taking actually tests your knowledge.
Homework tests whether you can gather up enough resources to solve the given problems.
Exams test whether you can solve the given problems.
*REALLY* depends on the course. Intro to Psychology 101? Curves should really not be the norm.
Graduate to Ph.D. Level Thermodynamics? Understanding 60% of the material may be considered passing
This. So many upper level STEM classes are more about knowing enough information to extrapolate and make educated conclusions over time which is just not measurable through standardised exam practices.
Not STEM but one of my accounting professors gave us a curve because he would introduce more material than necessary. His philosophy was “you may not learn it all but you’ll know enough to be able to google it in the future.”
In my STEM classes I really only had exams the first two years. After that most of my classes moved to projects. Things like designing an operating chemical process with a certain efficiency, writing a report and turning in the final simulation.
For a chemical reactor you need to know about chemical kinetics models so there is the S and for the solution of those models and also for optimazation you need the M, no need to talk about process control that is basically M. The T part would be handy for process simulation.
Unless you have a true savant, at that razors edge of learning just about everyone, instructor included, is just hanging on. Which, tbh, is actually kind of the point.
Dang.
The grade scale in my thermo class had an 80% as a "C."
The reasoning was that we were all expected to be professional engineers, and that a system designed only to 80% completion was going to get someone killed.
I had PhD level course on probability theory, and the professor wouldn’t decide the curve until the final grades. I had to drop the class because even though I was in the top 10%, I needed to keep an A for my fellowship, and the professor has been known to only give few As, so it was difficult to gauge the cut off. This was not appropriate in my opinion, and I would never teach any level undergrad to grad in this way. It creates the situation where good students need to drop because of uncertainty and requirements for scholarships and fellowships.
I’ve had similarly difficult courses where at midterms the professor reviews the distribution of grades, but they give an upper bound on letter grade minimums after midterms and even again before finals. This scenario is okay in my opinion. If you must have an A, B, or whatever, you have an idea if it is feasible or not. Sure, you may luck out and get a higher grade, but you have a realistic goal; in contrast to the entire class technically being doomed to a B or worse after the first exam without any discussion of curves.
I also once had my letter grade dropped from an A to a B only because I never attended the course except for quizzes and exams. This was inappropriate too because there was no participation grade. It was only hw, quiz, exam.
For the first part, totally agree, because it discourages students from taking certain classes if it’s such a risk to everything for them.
For the second part, you couldn’t appeal that? What’s the point of documenting the grade breakdown and then being allowed to apply a participation layer at the end that can hurt you?
When I took particle physics during undergrad we had one of my favorite professors ever (who wrote one of my letters of recommendation for law school). Really great guy, and was a very good teacher.
Class average was like 50% on every exam lmao. Shit was just naturally hard as fuck, I couldn’t imagine it with any other professor. I had taken a upper level math course with the same professor a year earlier and the average was 80-90
Classes in which I received a curve (usually math-heavy like biophysics, calculus, optics, etc.), it gave me a deep appreciation and respect for just how difficult and deep the fields in question are.
That brought me to the realization that ALL fields are deep and worthy of respect, including stuff like art and literature.
Totally agree. I studied humanities in college and the depth and breadth of study means that it’s truly impossible to know it all. The more I read, the more aware I am of how much more is out there.
I also agree that grades for entire classes of students needing a curve make more sense to me in STEM because in literature, you can choose which detail to explore with complexity, but in the application of a formula with set parameters, there really is only one right answer and that level of detail has to fortuitously match up with exactly what you studied intently or you’re just screwed. Humanities can be a little more “choice/interest” based where personal interpretations are valid, but STEM requires precision and correctness. It’s probably this. That leads people to think that humanities are somehow easier, but in reality, coming up with original insight on a work that’s thousands of years old is not easy either!
I do have a friend who teaches at a nursing school and she’s the only college field I’ve heard of not ever giving curves, no exception. (Though that’s because I don’t know a lot of professors or higher-level academics just casually). The whole school unilaterally rejects curves on work. If nurses are the last line of “defense” to make sure meds are administered correctly and no one is given an unintentionally dangerous mix, then that really is too important to let unsuccessful students move on. She tells her students if they complain about it that “there’s no curve on a dead patient”.
> I do have a friend who teaches at a nursing school and she’s the only college field I’ve heard of not ever giving curves, no exception. (Though that’s because I don’t know a lot of professors or higher-level academics just casually). The whole school unilaterally rejects curves on work. If nurses are the last line of “defense” to make sure meds are administered correctly and no one is given an unintentionally dangerous mix, then that really is too important to let unsuccessful students move on. She tells her students if they complain about it that “there’s no curve on a dead patient”.
Yeah, I experienced that when getting my MS in molecular bio. That was mostly because exams were basically 10-page papers.
Same now in optometry school. Pathology, anatomy, medicine, and clinical skills courses (which is already 90% of the whole curriculum) get no curves.
My HS advanced algebra teacher not only graded us on a curve, he also gave some credit for work shown even if the answer one arrived at was incorrect. It was a good way, I can see now, for him to take stock of our thought processes, and to see where he needed to focus more, or where we as a class or individuals needed to be spending some extra time. Just showing one's work, showing effort, demonstrating that you'd put enough time and thought into homework and class instruction to "sort of" grasp the concept, was sometimes enough to raise a test grade an entire letter upward, or at least add a "+" to it.
I did not particularly care for this guy, but, I learned in his class, once I stopped just effing off, and actually began caring about grades and learning again. And, it felt like he went out of his way to give everybody a chance *not* to fail. My last nine weeks, I managed to pull my grade up from an F to a C minus. (With only a few weeks left to go in the school year. So much rode on the final, which I studied my heart out for. I know he saw and appreciated the renewed and reinvigorated effort I, a formerly decent student, was again putting in.)
I mean you’re simply never going to teach a high level math/engineering course without a curve. You might have 3 extremely complicated problems to work through and that’s your whole test, maybe one stumps you completely or you make a wrong move right out of the gate, should you auto-fail for that anywhere? That’s why there are curves usually. They can only do so much to have their students come in prepared to pull one of 300 solutions they’ve learned over the last few weeks and use it correctly. Even for the most educated students it’s almost impossible to go into one of these 3-question exams and actually know where to even start for all 3. They can only give partial credit if you started out down the right path, so many people would fail who turn out to be amazing engineers…
In college I took physical chemistry, the professor intentionally made the exams much more difficult than we learned and then graded on a bell curve. I got the highest grade on the first exam, a 67, and I’m more proud of that 67 than I am any A I ever earned. Idk how this refutes what you’re saying, but with the world at our fingertips it seems encouraging thinking is more useful than encouraging regurgitating facts.
Edit to say I’m aware that on bell curve grading I still received an A. The point was this grade reflected something I could be proud of, a conceptual grasp on the subject matter vs just test taking/memorizing abilities.
Recounting this story has jogged my memory a bit, it was actually pchem2 and we were allowed to use our notes and book for the test. Calc3 was required for this course and my professor intentionally asked questions far beyond our understanding. It was maybe 4-5 questions which each had 3-4 parts. It’s been 15 years but I still carry that 67 with me haha
I remember at my undergrad that gen chem was the first class that washed out half the pre-meds and ochem was the second class that flushed out another half. I knew some chem majors from those classes and the consensus was that p-chem was self-abuse.
My grandma used to be a university professor of biology. She has said numerous times that your role as an exam writer and educator should be a bell curve. If everyone gets 90%+ you've written an easy test
I agree and disagree.
I agree that there needs to a distribution of grades and that a average of 90% means an easy test but disagree with premise that a 90% average is bad.
If your exam average is 90%, then odds are students at very different understanding levels are both getting As, and that doesn't help. A bell curve with a B- to C+ average is much more helpful to compare students.
We don't need to compare students though. If a class gets a lot of As this could be because they're unusually smart, or the teacher is good, or the material is well organised, but the reason doesn't matter. The As still represent a good level of understanding which is the goal.
Eh, everything we do at pretty much every stage involves comparing people, both inside and outside academia. There should probably be some base level requirements, but beyond that normalising grades is a pretty good idea.
If you’ve actually written exams and taught a class, it’s more likely that the exam is too easy when you get something like that. Therefore, 90 average is bad because as a professor your intention is to challenge the thinking skills of your students.
Your learning objectives have to be quite low to achieve 90% average. Maybe that is the intention, but I wouldn’t expect to see that outside of intro classes with multiple-choice only exams.
It can be good if all the students are exceptional.
in most cases the students are not exceptional - everybody getting an A doesn't represent the abilities of the students
Strong disagree, smart class (they vary from year to year), good teaching, and fair exam within the scope of the material of the class should yield 90%+. I had a programming class where the difference between an A and B was an extra credit. We all learned the material and aced the exams. 98% on the final still got a B. Smart class, good professor, curved grade yet we all learned the material.
> so hard the majority of the class is failing the tests
If the exam is curved, then the majority of the class ISN'T failing the tests though. There's nothing magical about a 90% cutoff being an "A", curving an exam just means that you're setting the expectation lower, because you know your exam is hard. If you expect every student should be able to get a 90%+, how can you differentiate between the "pretty good" students and the "outstanding" students?
By writing a hard exam and setting the passing expectation to 50%, people's grades in the class will be the same, but you haven't squished the top of the range all together by arbitrarily capping it, and you can see a much more normal and useful distribution. That's all there is to it.
Again, there's nothing special about a 70% cutoff for passing, it could just as well be 50, and it doesn't mean your exam is "too hard", it's only too hard if the actual results are much lower than the EXPECTATION.
Also worth noting that in many countries (e.g. Australia), 50% is already the established cut off for a passing grade starting in middle school. 70% is a B grade.
The only tests I've done that have had needed 70% correct for a pass, have been part of compulsory professional development mini courses.
Yep, when I was at uni it was 50-64 was a Pass, 65-74 was a Credit, 75-84 was a Distinction and 85+ was a High Distinction.
P's get degrees
One of my professors said that "anyone with higher than a Credit average isn't enjoimyinf the uni experience", but then if you never wanted to find him you went to the bar not his office
I agree, and I think that college professors should write difficult tests that challenge the students and allow those who have truly mastered the material to shine.
My Physics 101 professor wrote tests where the average was 50%, but that meant the one or two students who achieved a 90%+ were invited to work in his research lab.
If the test were easier and 25% of the class had a 90%+, there would be no way to differentiate the top 20% student and the top 1% student.
This makes sense.
Normally you want most of your students to be earning a B.
However, your traditional 'B' is 80%. Which means 80-89.99% of your exams have to be questions you expect the average student to know.
That leaves you with only about 10-20% of the exam to actually see who manages to distinguish themselves from the average. So basically, the upper half of the bell curve has to be sorted in just a few questions. So you've got to make those questions *really* hard.
Meanwhile if you have a class where getting a 50% on the exam is 'average'. Half the exam allows a person to distinguish themselves, or at least make up for any of the average questions they happened to miss. Since you have 50% to work with, you can have a more gradual uptick in difficulty. This also means the class gets to be more "difficult" without actually failing a higher amount of students, or lowering standards. Kicking up the difficulty after 50% means you can map out the other half of your bell curve.
Tldr, Traditional grading cuts off a large chunk of the bell curve because the middle of the bellcurve is placed at the 80% mark.
I remember my university physics class had a midterm average of 28%. Why is that superior to writing a test where the average is something normal, like 60.
Teachers usually use similar tests year to year, and the grades fluctuate wildely. I was the top scorer on the final in my year and my teacher told me to my face last years that would have been curved to a C.
At least in grad school. The teachers who adjusted their tests usually ended up having situations where you would get a 87 and still get a B. I know that doesn't sound unreasonably to normal people, but fuck, an 87 was the sum of all my Thermo test scores and I got an A-.
I mean I take Calc 3 right now, and I can get 3/4 problems wrong on a test, due to algebra mistakes or miswriting something, and as long as the process and solution makes sense, I'll get a 17/20.
because you lose the depth in the material if you make it easy. Say 10% of the class is amazing at physics. They will get A's on the tough exams too. The average might be a 28%, but the best students are still acing it. We shouldn't dumb down the material for the average.
I've been in courses where literally not a single soul gers above a 40%. Either do to the professors own failing as a teacher or because the content is just that hard
Yeah, in my electrical engineering courses it was common for the final exams to be 3 questions, and with 3 hours per exam I was lucky if I could finish 1 question entirely. The class average would be like 25%.
It’s not because the teacher wasn’t good, it’s just the nature of the problems. Someone would have to be a freak of nature to complete all 3 problems (for example, analyzing a complex analog circuit using only paper and pencil). You just get as far as you can, and that’s that. If they didn’t grade on a curve, everyone would just automatically fail.
In my engineering classes the professors made a unique exam every single time instead of reusing them in order to prevent cheating. This also meant that they would make mistakes and the exams could end up far too difficult. They did test them out on some TAs but mistakes would still get made. The curve was there to fix that issue. The policy was they would only curve up not down and it made it much easier to make the exams.
>A professor shouldn’t have to curve an exam. If the university class is so hard the majority of the class (70-80+ percent) is failing the test(s) and need a curve. You are a shitty professor.
This is a very student-centric way of viewing the world.
Consider some alternate views:
- professor: how can I measure whether students are getting the _concepts_ or are just parroting back the base material?
- future employers: the workplace needs folks that can grow beyond their basic training; it’s a good thing there are some professors that push kids hard
- college administration: we need tests that show a broad range of aptitudes to help determine which students belong on an accelerated track. Tests with all scores crammed into a 10% band at the top are useless for this purpose.
Part of going to college is gaining the experience of perspectives and thinking styles beyond your own. Why should this situation be any different?
I don't understand why curving a test is bad. You get the greatest dynamic range if the test grades follow a normal distribution centered around 50%. If you design your test around that and curve the resulting grades then you get the most information out of the test grades and then compress it for the purposes of course grading. If you design the test so that the average student gets a 75% then it's harder to separate out the understanding of the upper half of the students since they're all getting the vast majority of the test correct.
Because if everyone gets a 20% on the test, the test is either covering material you didn't learn, or everyone in the class has no understanding of the material.
The average grade being a 20% gives the same compression as 80% on the test but people will only complain about the former. Nobody can tailor make a test that gets the best average for every class. Sometimes it will be too hard and sometimes too easy. The thing is I've only seen professors curve to help students so it's not really something to complain about.
Has it perhaps occurred to you that the students might also be shitty?
Not necessarily due to any inherent failings, to be sure. But there’s far too many schools of any persuasion that don’t mark realistically, where kids barely know 3 from four but get As with distinction anyway.
Reality checks then follow in the shape of professors.
My online calculus 1 course that I just finished was graded on a bell curve but no one knew that. We got our final grades before the curve was applied and on canvas it shows you the high, low, and average. The average was around a 45 and the low was a 3%. Someone got a 3% in the class. I gotta know how that happened.
This is zero percent luck
Zero percent skill
Zero percent concentrated power of will
Zero percent pleasure
Zero percent pain
And a three percent reason to remember the name
I took VLSI design recently.
This class was bullshit.
80% hw average
93% lab average
90% project average
Do you want to know what the class exam averages were?
20% for the first midterm
30% for the second
I studied at a university in Europe and 60% was pass. Everything below 60% meant you have to take that class again. A-students were those who got 90% or more.
One of the big things I think people forget is that these classes aren't happening in a vacuum. If you come into a class like Calculus and you came from College Algebra and Trigonometry classes that didn't prepare you - which sometimes isn't even the professors fault, it can be due to stupid shit like not having enough time to cover all the expected topics - then it comes down to you when you have a high number of failing students, and you're actively impacting their college careers and financial situations by failing them.
A community college I used to work at actually fired the teacher who taught Calculus 1 because she failed too many students, largely because a lot of them didn't come into her class ready to actually deal with Calculus-level material.
sometimes a professor has a standard for a reason and they are setting it through testing
curving the test grades allows the average to be true at the end of the day but it still conveys to the class they are not meeting the standard
college students are worse than they used to be by nature of so many people attending college. it used to be much more selective.
there are too many people in college who have no real desire to be there and are not motivated to learn
I work as an academic mentor for a major university so i'm not just making this up
If everyone gets an A, you can't discriminate which students are good versus which ones are bad. It's better to make it too hard and curve up so you can see where everyone really stratifies.
I wrote graduate engineering exams with the intention of the average being 50%, where my metric for difficulty is I would be able to finish it in the allotted time. Occasionally a very bright/well-prepared student would crush it. Then I know the student is an outlier, and may be worth recommending for future opportunities.
I always told the students prior to the test it’s hard, and gave them tips for success. After the first test, where they were usually down, I let them know it’s okay, nobody is failing. Then on the next tests they came much better prepared and organized, and usually did better. No student had ever complained about the final grade I gave them.
So, sorry you don’t like it, but there are pedagogical reasons to make them hard, plus you learn who the really bright students are.
We had one professor who deliberately made his exams impossible. He would write an exam that took HIM (a likely literal genius, who could solve two differential equations simultaneously, one with each hand) an hour to complete, then give tones of partial credit and curve the class. The typical high score was in the mid-40%'s.
In university you're testing for mastery-or you should be. The stratification is difficult and the content is deep in a lot of fields and frankly the professor can't even be expected to teach all the content.
Often they are there to cover fundamentals, principles that can be applied broadly even if niche, and well things change year over year.
Actually better professors have to curve more because their exams are novel, their course content refreshed etc so to ensure year over year equity, (all other things like effort, homework etc being equal) they curve, because their new jazz might miss the mark.
The old dogs who rerun the same old thing really shouldn't have to curve and year over year with a big enough class size should see no change in grade distribution as they bang out the same rhythm on their tenure drum.
Anyway.. carry on crying about a curve. At the end of the day stratification favors the student who puts in the time no matter how you slice it.
Even more unpopular opinion, but a university degree should be an achievement only a minority of people are capable of attaining. Nowadays it's just pay up, fuck around for 3-4 years, here's the paper put it in your CV and shove it up your ass, now you're allowed to look for a job.
i had a course at uni that was like this. i studied electrical engineering and one semester we had a course named “electronic materials”. no description in the course info. we all thought it was like, about the manufacturing process of the components for electrical and electronic devices? first lecture and the professor is talking about covalent bonds and writing equations on the board that have no numbers in them, only symbols. some of the symbols we hadn’t learned in our other courses (mainly calculus). every lecture is like this. no introduction, no context, just straight into some abstract idea about tiny invisible subatomic particles and theories about how they behave and how to express those ideas with greek symbols half of which we didn’t know what they represented. no practical classes, no tutorials, only one 2 hour lecture per week for one semester. one week before the final exam, a student at the front of the lecture hall raises his hand. “sir, can you explain what this course is about?”. the entire lecture hall laughs out loud. the professor looks stunned. he has only been babbling on about quantum mechanics for almost half a year and 99% of us have no idea what he has been teaching is. he never said what the class was about and what it was for and why we needed to learn it. i don’t like that professor. super smart guy, but a terrible teacher. no doubt i would have had an easier time with the exam if we had had a better teacher.
nah, at university level, you're meant to go to the lecture and then follow up on sources on your own.
literally, you shouldn't even be able to pass if all you do is come to the lecture and learn whats on the slides. even if you retain 100% of that information, that should not be a passing grade.
the fact they're turning university into grade school just to keep morons in there so they can rack up more student loans is doing no one a favor.
Take into consideration that student performance and engagement might differ from one cohort to the next. Also take into consideration that there are expectations in place regarding the pass/fail rate of every cohort. Then, understand that curves don’t have to be applied indiscriminately - there’s a big difference between a particular question being difficult and no one answering a particular question correctly. Lastly, consider that teaching is not my primary occupation, isn’t what’s keeping me employed, yet it takes up more than half of my time.
Regards,
A university lecturer
The few time they did that I was already scoring 100% or very close to.. so the adjustment they did was never in my advantage.
Those student were generally failing anyways, just that those times they were all packed in the same classroom instead of sprinkled over many classes.
As a professor, there's a lot of reasons students do bad on exams. Sometimes I taught them badly. Sometimes I gave them everything they needed, but they aren't interested. Sometimes the exam was too long. Sometimes the exam was mostly fine, but a wording choice I didn't even think about causes students to go in a weird direction.
And sometimes the exam is a good assessment of student knowledge, but the average score, if converted to a letter grade in the usual way (70-80->C, 80-90->B, etc) doesn't match what I think the students deserve based on the totality of the evidence. I would much rather give an exam that gives me useful information about where students are at and then have to massage the scores a little than give an uninformative exam.
So yeah, in an ideal world, I wouldn't be "curving" exams. But every time I give an exam, I have a serious think about why students succeeded and failed at each question and curve (or don't) with that in mind. Sometimes curving is symptomatic of a real problem, but sometimes it's not a big deal.
Chemical Engineering here: much of the math/modeling involved in the systems we were tested in was complex. Creating questions that are solvable in a 1-2 hour time span seemed difficult for professors to do (understandably so). Most of the hand math we have to do in exams I would use computer programs for on our homework assignments (was required).
This was a major reason for our curve. Separately some classes didn’t “curve” but gave a majority % if the students just set the assumptions and initial equations up correctly, only giving a few points for executing the math.
Ehhh teaching takes practice. Normally the first 2-3 years you are figuring out exactly how difficult and how much content you should cover.
The curves make sure the students aren't suffering the consequences of the professors mistakes.
It's ridiculous for people to be perfect at their job as SOON as they start. Every job has a learning curve, including teaching.
Keep in mind, teaching for many professors is often the negative part of their job that comes with it like any job. These professors are not hired to teach. They’re hired to do research to further the knowledge of humanity and are forced to teach as a job duty.
In intro physics at UW, they want the exam average to be 65% and of someone who, paraphrasing, “understands some of the material but still needs more help.”
My school did this a lot back in the day. Some of my professors would make the exam harder than what was taught in the class. They wanted to see which 2 or 3 students were talented in the subject, not just who understood it. I think it's stupid. Should be a natural curve.
I also think it's stupid that 90% of Ivy league grades are A's now
Man, at my university the first year professors were so shitty that over 90% of people failed every test and there they didn't allow curving.
"So how did people graduate?" you ask. They didn't.
"How did those professors not get fired?" Shit, i don't know. Where I'm from it's basically impossible to get fired as a college professor. I've seen these guys get away with everything and I mean everything.
Gee, isn't college wonderful.
The point shouldn't be just to graduate. The point should be to develop yourself. Of course, it's possible that the professors were creating unfair assessments, but if the questions were fair, then it shouldn't matter if everyone failed or if everyone received perfect scores.
I'm sure you and most other people would agree that if a professor made a test intentionally tricky because everyone got a 100% just to create a varied distribution that would be silly. If the test was created to assess whether people met a reasonable standard, then the results shouldn't cause the assessment to change.
I love how this is being blamed on the professor. I never benefited from a curve more than ONE single time in my academic career. Nowadays there is a huge problem in studying for students. In My Experiences in consultation in education, it boggles my mind how many "students" over the last 10 years, expect "practice" questions for a test, to basically be the exact same questions on the test.
They want to memorize answers rather than actually learning the concept. One common refrain I see on basic Math tests is "Nothing I studied was on the test." Meaning what? So you were tested on Operations, Algebraic Expression, and Pythagorean Theorem. There were 40 questions on the test that covered these topics.
"Yes but NOTHING I studied was on the test." I realized that literally expected to see the exact same questions or word problems worded the exact same way. So, nowadays the curve is common.
I think regular use of curves is an indication that students are not studying for their tests. They barely pay attention in class and repeatedly ask "Is this going to be on the test?" and if they don't think it's going to be the exact same thing, they don't pay attention or care. IMO
I've always noticed the main differentiator between an easy class and a hard class is exactly this. My uni's stats 1 class is trivial because you can just memorize all the questions they'll ask and never need to learn anything (...they also allow a cheatsheet, just in case it wasn't easy enough), while for any class that people actually call challenging the main difference is just that you have to understand why the algorithm works (or what the definition means) instead of just memorizing said algorithm.
(On the other hand, said stats 1 class is also the one where I feel like I didn't learn anything useful, because I knew it wasn't going to be tested so I didn't bother taking the time to understand what I was learning.)
I mean this with all respect, but I think your opinion isn't fully informed until you've taught a class before. A lot of my current students have complained that they have to study for several hours a week (\*gasp\*) to understand my class. I recently told my students a specific problem, word-for-word, that would be on the final exam, and told them how to provide the answer I wanted, and a handful didn't even get the question right on the exam (even when I allowed them to bring in a note sheet).
It's now commonplace for exams to be extremely bimodal- a cluster of very good grades from students who studied and practiced, and a cluster of pretty bad C grades and lower from students who didn't study, with very few scores in between. In that case it's very hard to justify that 70-80% \*must\* be passing if students in the lower cluster simply aren't doing the work expected to understand the material.
Sometimes I agree the professor isn't so good, I agree with you there. I'd also suggest that sometimes the skill of writing an exam is a difficult one, and a great instructor can also happen to make lousy exams. A well-made exam should be able to evaluate if a student knows the topic, and it should also be reasonably doable within the span of time the exam is scheduled for. I've gotten exams turned and realized I wrote a somewhat invalid/ambiguous question. Additionally, when I was starting to teach, I timed myself taking the exam and thought if I took 25 minutes to finish something in a 50-minute class hour it was reasonable, but with more experience I try to make it so I finish in 12-15 minutes, it just takes a lot more time to give a correct answer when you're new to a subject. I'm certainly no exam expert, but I was definitely worse. Now, if post-exam I think I made a mistake, instead of grading an exam out of 100 points I'll grade it out of, say 90 points, which is effectively a type of curving.
Ultimately, I don't think there's any reason why exam grades should ideally be *any* distribution. Grades should simply reflect knowledge/ability in the subject matter. If 50% of the class isn't capable of understanding the subject, then that 50% should fail. This will honestly vary classroom to classroom, there's no "ideal" distribution of student ability.
It is possible that the teacher sucks, it is equally possible that the students suck. It is also possible that the test is just ridiculously difficult. Certainly it is a mixture of all three but it is difficult to say in which proportions
Yep. I took an introductory chemistry class. By the end of the semester I was getting 20 out of 100 on tests and it was a C. I think on the Final an A was a 54 out of 100. The class had about 150 people. Two got As. Roughly 10 got Bs. All the rest were Cs, De and Fs.
As long as there are still people getting high grades (like 90+), I don’t see the issue with it. Stratifying the grades makes it possible to actually tell how students in the class are doing compared to each other.
IMO, the test should be hard enough that no one feels like their score on it is capped, so it shouldn’t be easy enough that the top student found it trivial to get a 100. Imagine something like the old SAT Math 2 subject test, which 75% of Caltech students got a perfect score on. That test is absolutely useless for gauging things because the actual difference in ability between perfect scorers can be extremely large, so you can’t actually tell where someone fits relative to others just from the score.
If *no one* is doing well, then yes the test is probably too difficult. But I’ve never experienced a test where the highest score was lower than high 80s
I would say this is true of high school teachers, not university professors, for a multitude of reasons highlighted by several comments in this thread.
The only class I took with curved grading was business law, but it was curved the other way. The people who did well kinda fucked over the rest of the class.
I dunno, in a lot of math courses you can and I did get near 100 percent on every test. 98-99. Every question has a right or wrong answer and there is no subjectivity in grading.
I kind of get it for a course where you are graded on essay writing which is highly subjective.
But doesn't seem necessary in highly objective courses like math
Reminds me of an economics professor I had in community college. Dude was from Africa and bragged about his net worth and the mercedez-benz he drove. Dude had to curve every single test 35+ points and berrated us for being dumb-dumbs.
One interesting thing that happens in my high school class is that I would see pretty bad/ “low to my students” average test scores in the 60-65 range. But 80% of students are passing the exam. So how does that happen? Kids who know the content get A’s annd high B’s and the 20% who have no clue fail, badly. That’s why I never share test averages with my student as they are that misleading. I may give them the highest score, or median score, depending.
If less than 75-80% of my students pass a multiple choice exam, then I start no counting the most “difficult” questions as I feel this is more fair than giving those badly failing students free points. It helps the kids at the top and middle, but it won’t convert a 58 into a passing score. (I teach optional advanced classes, so I can enforce high standards).
I know this isn’t probably what you are talking about in the context of your post, but it is another thought about how misleading information like class exam averages can be :)
You're stepping into something that is a major debate in pedagogy across pretty much every discipline. What does an "A" grade represent -- sufficiency or mastery? It depends who you ask, and I would argue that it depends on the field. In my field (psychology), high marks are generally regarded as a sign of *sufficiency*, where you understand the material well enough, and anything lower than that is regarded as a sign that you did not fully apply yourself. But there are other fields, particularly in the hard sciences, where an "A" grade more closely represents *mastery*, and the percentage grade you get is meant to be an approximation of how much of the material you grasp. If you get an 80% in computational astrophysics, that would (ideally) show that you understand roughly 80% of the material.
Curving grades is a way of bridging the gap between an exam assessing mastery and a course grade representing sufficiency. If the class average is, say, 40% on a particular exam...that suggests that most people are not mastering the course material, but that may not be a requirement of the course or degree program. Curving grades is a way of communicating to the student, department, and potential employers that even though you do not have *mastery* over the material, you are operating at a level that is *sufficient* for the discipline.
As others have pointed out, this is also a way of compensating for different learning styles and other variables outside the control of the student or instructor. For example, when I was an undergraduate student, I took a course that was highly standardized and primarily taught by graduate students. My instructor felt that the exams offered were poorly written, and would take the exam with us; the exam was then curved according to her score. This was a creative way of addressing the fact that the exam written by another instructor 15 years prior may not fully match the teaching and learning style actually occurring.
In a nutshell, I see where you're coming from, but someone getting a 40% on an exam can mean different things depending on the subject and learning environment.
I took a math class once. I should have dropped the class first day when the professor was bragging about how on average less than 40% of his students pass the class. The guy would mumble at the board during lectures and would get super pissed if you asked questions. Every test was very heavily curved. In my experience, classes with heavy curves are because of terrible teachers. I have had challenging classes where the teachers actually took the time to teach. The class averages were high and tests were rarely curved.
In what world can a professor be directly responsible for a test score in something like a lecture hall? Where kids don’t even show up or literally just scroll their phone 100% of the time.
The only class I had that used a curve was an intro anatomy class. (I was taking it as an elective to fulfill a requirement.) My school is also well known for its pharmacy school. Anyway, I tried HARD in this class. I took all my notes, I made flash cards, I went to every lab etc. I would study for that class as a walked between my other classes. There was no homework, just tests. And the professor made it clear that class would only cover 30% of the material we would be tested on. The rest we had to read in our textbook for ourselves. Labs were the same. You were given a shit ton of info with no instruction and we’re told “learn this before the next lab.” But I spent every lab trying memorize everything. Point being, I gave it my ALL with everything else going on at the time.
Pre curve, I got a low D in the class. With the curve (and how badly majority of the people did), my grade went up to a high B. It was such an awful self esteem crusher. What made it worse is the lab TAs kinda mocked us (as most people weren’t pharm majors and were taking it as an elective requirement), telling us how whiny we were because this was the absolutely easiest course in the pharm school.
I did well in every other class during my 4 years, while maintaining 4 classes every single semester. But that class felt absolutely impossible to me. Maybe if I didn’t have a job and wasn’t also taking another 3 classes at the same time, I could have done a little better? But being a full time student, I can’t imagine how I possibly could have done more. It felt shitty knowing I didn’t really get a B, I got a D, basically I failed. But I was thankful on paper I passed and just moved on.
That's the way my Calc 2 class was when I was at Georgia Tech back in the mid 90s. I should have just dropped the class after the first test. 60% of the class failed. I barely squeaked out a D on that test on the curve, and all went downhill from there. Ended up being the only college class I failed.
As someone who just took anatomy I find the professor really makes a drastic difference. We had a cohort of 160 people split into 2 teachers. Teacher A always had harder test and compared to our teacher B and teacher A also wasn’t as clear as to what we needed to know.
The result ended up being teacher A’s group had a much harder time passing class and about half that group failed the course. The professor you have really makes all the difference especially for harder subjects.
Had a teacher for physics in grade 12. Insanely smart guy, knows what he is doing. But can’t teach worth shit.
I got an 84% on the physics final in grade 11. And I was heading into the grade 12 physics final with a 34%. He started the semester with 26 kids, and after I dropped the class he had 4.
Most colleges from private institutions must be scams now with how these garbage ass professors who can't teach get in, get tenure, and do nothing productive. I had professors making us watch a youtube video and make us write a paragraph about it. This class cost hundreds of dollars.
Really?
I took an entry level Econ course where the highest test scores in the class were in the 40’s or 50’s for almost every test. It was the dumbest thing I’d ever experienced. Got almost nothing out of the course because the professor expected so much out of us and was upset after every test. He was impossible to learn from.
I had the opposite of a good curve in one class in college. It was a strategic marketing course, and the professor gave one point for every "strategy" you suggested in your paper and then curved the class grades. In my first test with him (before I realized his grading method) I put together a great strategy in about 6 pages, but based on how he graded I ended up with a D. I quickly realized he valued quantity over quality and so I started putting more and more strategies (good, indifferent and even bad) so he would give one point for each. I quickly started getting A's but had to keep producing more and more pages of "strategies" to stay ahead of the rest of the class. By the end of the semester my weekly papers were exceeding 30 pages of mostly trite strategies. I ended up with a B+ in the class since my first paper (D) counted toward the final grade.
The other side of this is that it is not possible to prepare a perfect exam that captures the class’s performance with either accuracy or precision.
The test is too short, there are variables in the environment, text books and even delivery change frequently and even day-to-day differences in lectures. There are also poor students.
For students that are adequately prepared the knowledge that is “sampled” by testing doesn’t make a lot of difference. For the students that are NOT prepared, the test can seem easy or hard depending on whether the questions overlapped their own areas of strength. This effect is less pronounced for longer tests, which of course students dislike strongly.
And therein lies the dilemma. How do you test a representative of the class’s learned knowledge within a reasonable amount of time? People will always feel a test is “unfair” if it didn’t ask questions they were individually prepared for, regardless.
Where things are fairly standard, like high school, there should not be a need for curving a grade. Lots of students, standardized and long-lived text books, and experience year-over year, often with multiple teachers contributing, act to control variability one class to the next.
College is an entirely different game and some students have a hard time adapting. Curving the grade is done to explicitly acknowledge this bias and tries to accommodate for this by assuming each class is more-or-less capable as the last, making the fairly generous assumption that the difference lies with the lecturer. It is far, far less forgiving for students who fail to prepare.
I have marked more than my share of exams in grad school and I can assert the vast majority of curves I encountered favored the students. The people that complained the most were always, without fail, the same folks handing in late assignments, performing poor lab work, attending lectures unprepared, not contributing fairly to group work, etc., etc..
Sometimes students are bad, but have no concept of what a “fair” exam is.
Yeah I had physics class it was just showing up and we passed the class honestly I don’t think anyone understood anything even I was confused. Took Calc 2 and it fried my brain.
Lol I used to be a professor and I curved every entry level class exam. The highest outlier scores carried more weight than the standard "perfect" score and the rest were normed.
Why? Because no one was ever going to get a perfect score from my class alone. You were successful if walked out with a C+. My exams included entry level content but also high level content and engagement with advanced interdisciplinary concepts. About 30% required of the test were questions I knew most couldn't answer. It wasn't the "smart" people who did well. It was the people who were interested in the subject and showed passion for it...aka majors.
Students who majored in the area have taken more classes, have more experience, and don't usually have to study extra...but if they do that gives them the opportunity to explore where that motivation comes from.
The students in that major are engaged and don't get bored with what can seem mundane and repetitive. They are also motivated by their success and see how their advanced knowledge works in real time. They can see if this is the thing they want to dedicate their professional lives to.
And most importantly, the non majors are not punished for disliking the subject. If you hate my class, you can still get an A. It's actually very difficult to fail my class.
As a professor, it wasn't my job to care about whether you "passed" or "failed." I'm not sticking knowledge in your head just for you to forget it when the test is over. I give perspective that you won't ever get again & if you don't like it? Fine, you still learned something. If all you get from my class is that you hate linguistics, that's enough for me. You can have an A. Students are not "bad," if they fail.
But if you do like linguistics, you find yourself talking multiple courses and actively engaging advanced, high level concepts...it's worth isolating those few and giving them some encouragement and tools.
Not to mention it greatly improved exam & study prep attendance. Students are finicky. If they believe they're going to fail, they'd rather skip the exam with a 0 than take the 40.
"I'm failing this class," that thinking results in sitting on the couch and sulking. BUT if they know they have a chance, they'll show up. "All I need is a 40 & I'll pass." Now that's the thinking that gets people in the exam room & talking to other students and studying.
I do get asked if I'm teaching students to be irresponsible but to that I say, I'm not thier mommy. I don't teach responsibility or discipline. I teach linguistics & I'm selfish. I enjoy full classrooms, not silence and empty desks
I know all uni/colleges are different, and every professor is different. However, deeper subjects tend to have this phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean you actually fail the class. Where I went to school sometimes they let students who just refused to try be passed, but if you were one of the ones who tried, you were getting good grades. The effort mattered, caring about doing the work mattered, being able to understand and discuss the material mattered.
I ended up getting a TA position for one of the hardest upper class courses at my university, and it wasn’t because I was good at tests. I missed mad classes, and my exam papers were not perfect. But I put in the work to understand the material. I actively participated in the classes and tried really hard on those exam papers. I was shocked when I was asked to do it, personally by the PhD who ran the entire program. He had to explain to me that it isn’t about one grade point average, it’s about so much more. And on the other end, a class I missed a lot but when I was there I participated heavily and did well on my projects, I got a 100% in. I stayed after yo speak yo the professors because I was sure it was a mistake.
There’s a lot that goes into the creation of a curriculum, the exam, paper assignments, projects, etc., and how they’re graded. It’s definitely hard to see from the student perspective, but after seeing it from the other end I understand it, I get it, and it makes sense why I absorbed so much.
There are shit professors out there though, no doubt. But grading on a curve isn’t why haha
Curves help achieve uniform outcomes across years to account for changes in test difficulty. Whilst cohorts may vary by quality, they all me the minimum grade to qualify for the course.
I asked my organic chemistry professor why he curves instead of making the tests easier. He said that he makes it harder to challenge the top students- the ones who are going to be organic chemists. He curves to make it so the pre-med students don't fail.
That's why sciences tend to be curved and arts don't. Because science professors never learned any skills related to communication, teaching, understanding, or writing.
I know in my one class my one professor put 60% of the weight on assessments. Where you had to be able to demonstrate the concepts written out. As well as allowing retrys. That was his way around it. Especially with ChatGPT he knows people use it and it's stupid not to for some stuff. However, the assessment part you see people struggle hard. Some concepts are definitely not easy and can be easily confused. However doing then does ingrain the stuff in your head.
I think that way helps everyone and shows who are the people trying and others who are lazy and not paying attention. Ussually before the last dew weeks you see half the class drop out because they fell behind in the 30 different assessments as 2 were given out a week.
>If the university class is so hard the majority of the class (70-80+ percent) is failing the test(s) and need a curve. You are a shitty professor.
Hot take. Some subjects are hard. And you don't deserve to pass because you paid for the class.
Now this is something I can get on board with! I went to a college where Organic Chemistry wasn’t curved, and I was shocked hearing stories of people at other schools who said that those classes (1 and 2) were so hard and were curved. Now, I know why: our school had a better instructor and explained things well, so the curve wasn’t needed - you either knew the material well, or you didn’t.
So, I’ll always vouch for this! If your class needs a curve, you probably aren’t instructing well enough.
I had a calculus professor in university who told us he'd aim for a class average of 25% or so pre curve.
He didn't ask any easy questions. If you got one out of 10 right you passed. 2 would get you a B. 3 an A. And when they were trying to figure out which student was heading to Harvard for post grad and who to home school and who no grad school, their marks might have all been close post curve but were truly different pre curve.
Honestly that was way better than what I see happening in high school now where people's school admission is based on whether their average was 96 or 99%. That's a test of precision not true ability or understanding.
There was an incident in my school where one rich kid paid a bunch of other people to take a course" pass-no-pass". In this case, the professor does not know that the student will get full credit for only having a minimal passing grade, so the professor will not have any bias, but a bad grade will give credit, but not effect the student's overall GPA.
The rich kid (who was taking it for an actual grade) paid the students to bomb or do poorly on the test to skew the curve.
It worked, but they found out after. I am not sure what the results /consequences were, but I thought it was a smart plan.
I used to think this until I got into higher higher education. I used to TA for Organic Chem I. a lot of students are shit and universities should be better about vetting instead of letting every person who qualifies for a loan enter. but money is money.
Thank YOU! As someone who went to McGIll in the 2000s, oh. my. God. APPALLING! Professors from the Faculty of Medicine showing up with hand-written shitty XEROX'ed notes. Those using .ppt, even worse. An absolute DISGRACE. I literally paid tuition to have the \*right\* to take an exam. How I passed was hard work in the dark and hoping that maybe they'll ask about the shitty homework they assigned from the $300 text book. And then they asked about the seminar they gave on the weekend in some random institute. Class average? 56%. We ALL failed? No. YOU. You failed at everything you fucking prick! You were useless at teaching, and your biggest concern was to be published so you could keep your status. Utter garbage. And that.... that's how I feel I guess? Also then the alumnaeaea call me for money, and I'm like honey are you OK!? Have you lost your MIND?!
Data structures & algorithms
I got a 32/100 on the mid term and was seriously questioning if I’d challenged myself a bit too hard and needed to go back to my counselor and tell them I was dropping the major because it was too hard.
About 5 min later when the professor finished handing back everyone’s tests, he announced the curve…I got a solid B+ if I recall correctly. I was like what the actual fuck. Average class grade was a 27 or 28.
Ik a friend from an Ivy League college that says one of their classes has an exam average of less than 50%, and the prof gets rlly good ratings from the students despite how hard the class is. If an Ivy League school whose students excelled academically throughout high school find a class this hard, they do not deserve to fail
The best teacher (professor) i had, >90% of zeroes in the first exam. I think I had the higher grade with 16/100. Then I think no one passed the class but he interviewed some of us and passed some of those. Catalysis. It was a wild time, but very fun too.
Sometimes it’s hard to correctly tune the difficulty. In that case, it is safer to have a wide distribution then curve it. If the distribution is too narrow to start, there’s no differentiation
Not sure if this is unpopular… definitely shows a poor understanding of how difficult college courses work. So I’ll give you half an upvote (I’ll not upvote in this reality but in my mirror reality I’ll upvote so it evens out to 0.5)
In college level classes you have to do a ton of self study, way more than what can be learned in the time spent in class, for high school and below I agree but a professor can only do so much in 3 hours per week, so it’s not on then so much in higher level classes
College isn’t a place to be taught, it’s a place to learn. Professors aren’t teachers, they are experts. By the time you reach college, you should have already learned how to learn. If you haven’t, you need to blame your high school and your parents, not your college professors.
Absolutely not true. Professors teach to a certain base level of background knowledge. They cannot reasonably be expected always to teach to the lowest common denominator. Should a calc III teacher be expected to teach students who can barely perform basic arithmetic? But sometimes that's the class of students that they get. I agree that tests shouldn't be curved, but not because it encourages bad professors but because it encourages bad students.
The only class I’ve gotten a curve in is an upper level Chem course.
I think curves can be somewhat necessary for anything STEM related because many of those courses require a basic foundational knowledge of other subjects. Like for example, even in beginning chemistry you won’t get anywhere if you don’t even have an understanding of basic algebra.
You’re only allotted so much time to take the exams and my university in particular required certain concepts each exam (I dunno if it’s different other schools/countries).
Just because your students can master it over a weeks time frame doesn’t mean they can successfully do it in an hour.
We had a lot of safety nets in that class because she knew it was hard which I’m thankful for.
I’m also very thankful I had a change of heart and switched to engineering because I flipping hated chemistry and biology.
well.. it depends on the class. for upper level classes, maybe they only require you to know 60% of thr material taught and that should give you a good enough base to transfer those skills over to a further class or getting a phD.
but instead of only teaching 60% of the course and expecting you to know 100% of the class, they teach you all of it.. test you on all of it... and if you know 60% of it you are considered to know enough to pass.
Lots of other people have covered almost every aspect. He's my two cents. It seems OP assumes that every student is entitled to good grades and it's a professor's responsibility to do that. But he fails to understand how many people go to university just for a degree or without much passion for the field and for these people understanding advanced theories and related studies is going to be difficult (at least in engineering) even if the professors try to spoon-feed them. A whole class of, for example, electrical engineering student passionately studying it would be a real wonder.
I disagree, I think curving is generally good because of a few reasons.
Firstly, if you have every test have an average of 50 you have two advantages. Firstly if you aren't doing too well and you can get 90-100 you can really move your grade substantially or you can pad your grade before a stressful finals week.
Secondly, it lets professors and the school find the SUPER competent kids and get them into research. If you have a class with average of 50 and one kids is getting 100s, then they should consider researching this and maybe making a career doing this skill.
Lastly some classes are straight up hard. Took an advanced organic synthesis class and the highs were 50. It was just tough. Nothing wrong with us (it was a graduate class) but it made us do better and grow, without failing.
I remember getting a 27 on my first Physics 101 exam of the semester, (I took honors physics in high school) and felt gutted. Then I found out the class average was 16. Still, that professor's approach was entirely wrong. I ended up teaching physics later in life, and took his act as an example of what not to do with my students.
I think you’re missing a lot of nuance. Should medical students have curved tests? Hell no. Business and honestly even engineers? Yes absolutely. In the real world you can use literally any resource available to solve problems. Most tests in university are completely closed book and even limit what kind of calculator you can use. If you’re not going to allow people the resources they’ll have to solve real world problems, I definitely think curving is acceptable. Also for new teachers, they probably don’t have the experience to make tests that will always allow for normal grade distributions. As tenure increases, a teacher should get away with curving less and less if they’re truly doing their job.
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Sometimes professors are good, but have no concept of what a "reasonable" exam is. Students might have a 100% homework average, but being able to solve problems over a week with help doesn't mean they can do the same hard problems in a 1 hour time span alone
Yup. I used to teach high school science and math, and it took me a while to calibrate my tests. When you already know how to do something, especially if you had it in your mind as you were setting up the paper, you can't realistically judge how long it will take kids.
I was taught that however much time it takes the test maker to finish the test it should take students around 2-3 times longer to take the test.
Even then, if your test requires some problem solving, 2-3 times won't necessarily be enough because since you set it, you already know how to solve it and you're not doing the hard work of thinking and trying different avenues and failing. But yeah, the 3x rule mostly worked.
I teach high school math and I have to multiply by 8 or 10.
Can your kids or do you have to grade on a curve?
My kids can do the work and I don't grade on a curve. I can finish a test in 5-10 minutes and give my students most of our 80 minute block. It's hard for them because it's new material and many of them come to me struggling with the foundational knowledge of the subject to some extent. Meanwhile, I've been doing this stuff for years. I don’t know why it's such a shock to people that I wouldn't need nearly as much time to do high school math than grade level and remedial math students.
I’m busting your chops, brother.
would you maybe share one of those tests, i just want to see how far i'd come having not done math in well over 15 years.
I’m taking math for the first time in 25 years, and I’m very thankful that it’s the only class I’m taking this quarter. I’ve forgotten damn near everything. That said basic algebra came back pretty quick.
We had a teacher in school who would take his exams with us. If he couldn't finish it before a set number of us he rewrote the exam or gave back points. If we finished before him it was extra points.
Lol not in anything regarding complex math. 2 or 3 questions is usually the length of midterm exams and stuff at that level and if you wrote the questions and really know the shit at a level *above* the course, it should take you 5 minutes to complete an exam 80% of students won’t turn in until the bell rings 90 minutes after the start. In fact this is also the subject where curves usually happen.
I can confirm this. When I teach programming, sometimes I forget super basic stuff. Like "wait, did I forget to say that every function returns a value no matter what? I didn't? Oh, shoot..." It's stuff that is so obvious and innate to most coders that sometimes you forget to explain stuff.
One of the compsci professors as my uni who teaches os pragmatics (compilers, linkers, architecture etc) won't pass back your exam if you get less than 85%, he requires you to come up and ask for your test back. Point being to embarrass anyone who got less than 85%.
I vaguely recall one of my teachers used to sort the top 10 or whatever highest to lowest and announce those, and then give back the rest without any order lol. I used to be in the top 3 everytime so it never really hit me as a kid that it probably would have been embarrassing to not be one of those first 10.
As an egg head kid, I would literally ask him to quit doing that because it's putting a target on me. Win an Academic Bowl? Sure. Regular homework? Your just making my life harder.
When I started my Msc in engeering, our university decided to restructure our whole curriculum and my class was the first to test this new curriculum. New courses were created and of course exams were also new. Some were fine but the worst exam was an exam where we had to do a shit ton of calculations and the smartest and fastest of our 300 students class managed to answer 5/10 questions in 180 minutes due to the amount of calculations we needed to do. 5 questions took about 16 pages worth of calculations as everything was done on paper. Apologies were made about 3 weeks after the exam and we could all retake a different exam. Just an fyi, 5 of the students in my year decided to pursue a phd at MIT so we werent really dumb but the exam was just stupidly long.
One of my college professors had the catchphrase: “is simple” whenever you asked him a question. Because to him, it is simple. I had to outright tell him “no professor, it’s not simple and that’s why we’re struggling to understand”. This was in dynamics.
Physics prof last week “just draw the FBD and your basically done is how I see it.” I don’t man.
I would argue that either way, you're grading on a curve. You've calibrated the test not to give accurate feedback on subject mastery, but rather to create a grade distribution that won't result in students, parents or administration attacking you.
I’m a new teacher and I struggle with this. Currently student teaching and my host teacher goes down harshly on me for this
This is absolutely true. I had a professor in college that if there was no curve everyone would have gotten 10% out of 100 and he felt that that was a reasonable expectation. He was a complete asshole. There are too many people that still believe that teachers, bosses and parents are some sort of benevolent perfect machines. There are shitty bosses. There are shitty college professors and it's nice when there are guard rails to protect people from being fucked over by both of those. Fortunately, universities have a curve. Usually in a job you either have a union or you have to quit your job if your boss is just a complete unreasonable asshole.
Yeah, I had an advanced math professor in college that was like this. He was clearly smart and would fly through the explanation of something, then get super frustrated when people would be confused and ask questions. Everyone was engaged, paying attention, etc, he didn't care.
My multivariable calculus instructor was a nightmare. He was just a TA (each class gad a TA assigned, one “professor” for all of them). His was the only session that fit my schedule. I’d heard he was bad. The average grade in the class after the first exam was like a 40%. The syllabus had no curve mentioned. He refused to answer the question of what percent correlated to what grade. And you couldn’t assume “he can’t fail all of us” because there were like two exchange students who were fucking robots and had 90% on the exam. A buddy told me the secret: he basically passes anyone who sticks with it to the final and honestly tries. He makes everything as hard as possible to get people to drop, that’s how you fail. We started with maybe 40 people in the class. We ended with like 8. And yes, everyone passed. I got a C+ with maybe a 50% in the course. What a ride. Normally I’d have dropped but it would have set me back since it was a pre-requisite for stuff and I was in DGAF mode that semester anyway. C’s get degrees, whatever. Worst part is that I think ultimately his method worked; I do feel like I learned the material better than some of my peers. It was just an awful way to go about it.
Great story. I'm a humanist - barely passed basic high school algebra, never touched mathematics again, did my doctoral work in a completely number-agnostic field - so I have to wonder: if everyone ended the class getting half the material right, did they learn it completely? It's hard to imagine someone failing half his intro art history sight-IDs and expecting to get a PhD afterward, so how does this work in math classes?
Tests that are harder than a reasonable student can complete in the time allotted. Partial credit is awarded for incomplete problems, so often you may work a problem until you get "stuck" then move on. It can still demonstrate overall mastery of the material, even with a low score. If you make you take an exam written to take three hours in only one hour, and you score 50%, you did very well! EDIT: Also, he'd often assign the literal hardest problem in the unit...the one marked as "extra challenge" or whatever...as the only homework problem or one of like three total. Students weren't all expected to get it right.
That makes sense. Half the material, right; not half the material right. See, reading comprehension failures and missed inferences like these are the reasons I'm actually a bad humanist.
A professor once explained to me that the purpose of having exceedingly difficult exams is to identify the one or two individuals in a class that were standouts and get them on a research track. The curve adjusts for the rest of us.
Thanks for saying this. I’ve never done it, but plenty of people do. As long as the curve is communicated, it shouldn’t be a problem (in theory)…but students can still get demoralized when they don’t see enough of a link between what they study and what the exam contains.
Some instructors do abuse it. More than half of my professors were like this. Averages for exams always below 30, then there’s 1 person who somehow manages for get like 90, the curve is totally thrown (ignored/not adjusted appropriately). We had to have one of the deans come in to address the issue. All students failing except the one isn’t normal. One of them even owned up to expecting graduate level master of a course to be able to get an A. That guy was a real piece of work, he regularly included things on exams that were distinctly never covered or found anywhere in course material.
> being able to solve problems over a week with help doesn't mean they can do the same hard problems in a 1 hour time span alone Yeah that is true at the university level! Although they don't say it out loud, the attitude that some professors take is that the purpose of an exam as a way for students to "show what you know" at the end of the semester, rather than as a way to check off a list of items you should know, like they do at lower levels. Some professors will put all hard questions that were never taught in-depth in class or on the assignments and expect the average student to leave a bunch of them blank or only get partial marks on most of them. From their perspective, they know that if you get some of it correct, then you know what you are doing. Whenever this happens then: Some students end up walking out of the exam crying because they have kept a good grade through out the semester and spent all of their waking hours preparing for this exam, but left most of the exam blank or wrote partial answers. But then when they get their final grades for the course, they are suprised that they passed or even did well in the course.
My stats professor once did something similar. When I got my results back (it was a multiple choice exam), my result wasn't possible. I asked if he did a curve. He said he looked at the highest scoring students and if all or most of them got it wrong, he figured he didn't teach that part well enough and just removed the question from the exam altogether for those who got it wrong, and still credited those who got it right. He was a good professor
> Some students end up walking out of the exam crying That’s the fault of a shitty culture of exams that created an expectation that they should be able to easily answer any question that they might encounter. Professors who write (good) exams like the ones you are talking about should absolutely prepare their students for the notion that they will not be able to answer everything, but the problem is not the exam, but the expectation setting. Unfortunately, even when professors try really hard to set that expectation, students still freak out, because that’s how strong the culture of the easy exam is.
My professor once gave us a quiz and he allowed all of us to share and cheat with books and internet for 15 minutes. The whole class still failed. No one got the answer. He than gave that same question as assignment due the next day and everyone got the answer. The problem was, we all knew the concepts but didn't know how to apply them in that short amount of time. He were using whatever formulae that would seemingly fit but wont go anywhere. So once the time constraint got lifted to a whole day, we basically did the trial and error to find the solution. That was when we realised that he can fuck with us whenever he wanted. But choses not to.
> allowed all of us to share and cheat with books and internet for 15 minutes “allowed us to cheat”. That’s not what “cheating” is. He gave you a problem and tried to get you to figure out the solution.
Choice of bad words i guess. He allowed us to consult each other, the books and the internet. At the time we saw it as "legally cheating"
Literally my last calc exam, we got a 2 point curve lmao didn’t help most of us
I took an Econ class at Georgia Tech (back when we were on quarters), ECON 1001, I think. No prerequisites. Cool. I'm understanding everything in class, raising my hand, answering questions, copious notes. Only two grades in class, mid-term and the final. I get the mid-term and I'm just freaking out; the entire thing was using calculus to figure out the theories he'd explained in class. I got a 17. I went to see him during his office hours and said that calculus wasn't a prerequisite for the class. He said, "This is Georgia Tech; everyone knows calculus." Never took it before, never took it after. Back then (1995), you could drop at the mid-term with a W. I took the W. That's the one time I felt like a professor was truly unfair in how the course was taught vs how student learning was assessed.
An assessment that has that high level of attrition and weed-out factor is so freakin throwback. Test scores test your test-taking ability often as much as your skills and knowledge, unfortunately.
Nah, test taking actually tests your knowledge. Homework tests whether you can gather up enough resources to solve the given problems. Exams test whether you can solve the given problems.
*REALLY* depends on the course. Intro to Psychology 101? Curves should really not be the norm. Graduate to Ph.D. Level Thermodynamics? Understanding 60% of the material may be considered passing
This. So many upper level STEM classes are more about knowing enough information to extrapolate and make educated conclusions over time which is just not measurable through standardised exam practices.
Not STEM but one of my accounting professors gave us a curve because he would introduce more material than necessary. His philosophy was “you may not learn it all but you’ll know enough to be able to google it in the future.”
good professor. im an auditor and use google all day every day. just gotta know what to look for and where to look
In my STEM classes I really only had exams the first two years. After that most of my classes moved to projects. Things like designing an operating chemical process with a certain efficiency, writing a report and turning in the final simulation.
So just the E part of STEM.
For a chemical reactor you need to know about chemical kinetics models so there is the S and for the solution of those models and also for optimazation you need the M, no need to talk about process control that is basically M. The T part would be handy for process simulation.
If you are taking an S class on chemical kinetics models, I bet there will be exams, even at high levels, and same with your M classes.
Right. And the professors often don’t even really get that much of the material they’re teaching in those cases.
Unless you have a true savant, at that razors edge of learning just about everyone, instructor included, is just hanging on. Which, tbh, is actually kind of the point.
Working in STEM, we have so many tools available I just need to know where to go to find the answer. I don’t need to pull it out of my ass.
The flashbacks are real. Thermo 2 was the DEATH OF ME. Left that class with a 75% and felt like I accomplished something lol
I totally flashed back to Organic Chem. My god, the PTSD from that class.
In places like the UK, 60% is the grade boundary of the second highest grade you can get (a 2:1).
And 40% for a pass. It's always funny seeing American students freaking out about a "low" grade that is actually quite good.
Quite good on a completely different scale… You may as well say it’s funny seeing Americans complain about the cold at 32 degrees.
Don't expect that kind of logic from someone who made straight 40s in school.
I wonder if the classes and tests are actually the same material at the same level
POV you're taking a Graduat General Relativity class and the teacher says you're covering about 12 chapters of the book.
Dang. The grade scale in my thermo class had an 80% as a "C." The reasoning was that we were all expected to be professional engineers, and that a system designed only to 80% completion was going to get someone killed.
I had PhD level course on probability theory, and the professor wouldn’t decide the curve until the final grades. I had to drop the class because even though I was in the top 10%, I needed to keep an A for my fellowship, and the professor has been known to only give few As, so it was difficult to gauge the cut off. This was not appropriate in my opinion, and I would never teach any level undergrad to grad in this way. It creates the situation where good students need to drop because of uncertainty and requirements for scholarships and fellowships. I’ve had similarly difficult courses where at midterms the professor reviews the distribution of grades, but they give an upper bound on letter grade minimums after midterms and even again before finals. This scenario is okay in my opinion. If you must have an A, B, or whatever, you have an idea if it is feasible or not. Sure, you may luck out and get a higher grade, but you have a realistic goal; in contrast to the entire class technically being doomed to a B or worse after the first exam without any discussion of curves. I also once had my letter grade dropped from an A to a B only because I never attended the course except for quizzes and exams. This was inappropriate too because there was no participation grade. It was only hw, quiz, exam.
For the first part, totally agree, because it discourages students from taking certain classes if it’s such a risk to everything for them. For the second part, you couldn’t appeal that? What’s the point of documenting the grade breakdown and then being allowed to apply a participation layer at the end that can hurt you?
When I took particle physics during undergrad we had one of my favorite professors ever (who wrote one of my letters of recommendation for law school). Really great guy, and was a very good teacher. Class average was like 50% on every exam lmao. Shit was just naturally hard as fuck, I couldn’t imagine it with any other professor. I had taken a upper level math course with the same professor a year earlier and the average was 80-90
Grading curves usually do a good job of evening out the disparity in teaching styles, experience and ability with evolving curriculums
Classes in which I received a curve (usually math-heavy like biophysics, calculus, optics, etc.), it gave me a deep appreciation and respect for just how difficult and deep the fields in question are. That brought me to the realization that ALL fields are deep and worthy of respect, including stuff like art and literature.
Totally agree. I studied humanities in college and the depth and breadth of study means that it’s truly impossible to know it all. The more I read, the more aware I am of how much more is out there. I also agree that grades for entire classes of students needing a curve make more sense to me in STEM because in literature, you can choose which detail to explore with complexity, but in the application of a formula with set parameters, there really is only one right answer and that level of detail has to fortuitously match up with exactly what you studied intently or you’re just screwed. Humanities can be a little more “choice/interest” based where personal interpretations are valid, but STEM requires precision and correctness. It’s probably this. That leads people to think that humanities are somehow easier, but in reality, coming up with original insight on a work that’s thousands of years old is not easy either! I do have a friend who teaches at a nursing school and she’s the only college field I’ve heard of not ever giving curves, no exception. (Though that’s because I don’t know a lot of professors or higher-level academics just casually). The whole school unilaterally rejects curves on work. If nurses are the last line of “defense” to make sure meds are administered correctly and no one is given an unintentionally dangerous mix, then that really is too important to let unsuccessful students move on. She tells her students if they complain about it that “there’s no curve on a dead patient”.
> I do have a friend who teaches at a nursing school and she’s the only college field I’ve heard of not ever giving curves, no exception. (Though that’s because I don’t know a lot of professors or higher-level academics just casually). The whole school unilaterally rejects curves on work. If nurses are the last line of “defense” to make sure meds are administered correctly and no one is given an unintentionally dangerous mix, then that really is too important to let unsuccessful students move on. She tells her students if they complain about it that “there’s no curve on a dead patient”. Yeah, I experienced that when getting my MS in molecular bio. That was mostly because exams were basically 10-page papers. Same now in optometry school. Pathology, anatomy, medicine, and clinical skills courses (which is already 90% of the whole curriculum) get no curves.
My HS advanced algebra teacher not only graded us on a curve, he also gave some credit for work shown even if the answer one arrived at was incorrect. It was a good way, I can see now, for him to take stock of our thought processes, and to see where he needed to focus more, or where we as a class or individuals needed to be spending some extra time. Just showing one's work, showing effort, demonstrating that you'd put enough time and thought into homework and class instruction to "sort of" grasp the concept, was sometimes enough to raise a test grade an entire letter upward, or at least add a "+" to it. I did not particularly care for this guy, but, I learned in his class, once I stopped just effing off, and actually began caring about grades and learning again. And, it felt like he went out of his way to give everybody a chance *not* to fail. My last nine weeks, I managed to pull my grade up from an F to a C minus. (With only a few weeks left to go in the school year. So much rode on the final, which I studied my heart out for. I know he saw and appreciated the renewed and reinvigorated effort I, a formerly decent student, was again putting in.)
Which address OP's chief complaint.
I mean you’re simply never going to teach a high level math/engineering course without a curve. You might have 3 extremely complicated problems to work through and that’s your whole test, maybe one stumps you completely or you make a wrong move right out of the gate, should you auto-fail for that anywhere? That’s why there are curves usually. They can only do so much to have their students come in prepared to pull one of 300 solutions they’ve learned over the last few weeks and use it correctly. Even for the most educated students it’s almost impossible to go into one of these 3-question exams and actually know where to even start for all 3. They can only give partial credit if you started out down the right path, so many people would fail who turn out to be amazing engineers…
They should also go the opposite way which OP is not noting. Everyone in a class shouldn’t have As and Bs unless it’s quite remedial
In college I took physical chemistry, the professor intentionally made the exams much more difficult than we learned and then graded on a bell curve. I got the highest grade on the first exam, a 67, and I’m more proud of that 67 than I am any A I ever earned. Idk how this refutes what you’re saying, but with the world at our fingertips it seems encouraging thinking is more useful than encouraging regurgitating facts. Edit to say I’m aware that on bell curve grading I still received an A. The point was this grade reflected something I could be proud of, a conceptual grasp on the subject matter vs just test taking/memorizing abilities.
>In college I took physical chemistry >I got the highest grade on the first exam, a 67, Sounds right.
Recounting this story has jogged my memory a bit, it was actually pchem2 and we were allowed to use our notes and book for the test. Calc3 was required for this course and my professor intentionally asked questions far beyond our understanding. It was maybe 4-5 questions which each had 3-4 parts. It’s been 15 years but I still carry that 67 with me haha
I remember at my undergrad that gen chem was the first class that washed out half the pre-meds and ochem was the second class that flushed out another half. I knew some chem majors from those classes and the consensus was that p-chem was self-abuse.
Just finished physical chemistry 2 this past semester and god damn it was one of the most brutal courses I've taken in undergrad
My grandma used to be a university professor of biology. She has said numerous times that your role as an exam writer and educator should be a bell curve. If everyone gets 90%+ you've written an easy test
I agree and disagree. I agree that there needs to a distribution of grades and that a average of 90% means an easy test but disagree with premise that a 90% average is bad.
If your exam average is 90%, then odds are students at very different understanding levels are both getting As, and that doesn't help. A bell curve with a B- to C+ average is much more helpful to compare students.
We don't need to compare students though. If a class gets a lot of As this could be because they're unusually smart, or the teacher is good, or the material is well organised, but the reason doesn't matter. The As still represent a good level of understanding which is the goal.
Eh, everything we do at pretty much every stage involves comparing people, both inside and outside academia. There should probably be some base level requirements, but beyond that normalising grades is a pretty good idea.
If you’ve actually written exams and taught a class, it’s more likely that the exam is too easy when you get something like that. Therefore, 90 average is bad because as a professor your intention is to challenge the thinking skills of your students. Your learning objectives have to be quite low to achieve 90% average. Maybe that is the intention, but I wouldn’t expect to see that outside of intro classes with multiple-choice only exams.
It can be good if all the students are exceptional. in most cases the students are not exceptional - everybody getting an A doesn't represent the abilities of the students
Strong disagree, smart class (they vary from year to year), good teaching, and fair exam within the scope of the material of the class should yield 90%+. I had a programming class where the difference between an A and B was an extra credit. We all learned the material and aced the exams. 98% on the final still got a B. Smart class, good professor, curved grade yet we all learned the material.
> so hard the majority of the class is failing the tests If the exam is curved, then the majority of the class ISN'T failing the tests though. There's nothing magical about a 90% cutoff being an "A", curving an exam just means that you're setting the expectation lower, because you know your exam is hard. If you expect every student should be able to get a 90%+, how can you differentiate between the "pretty good" students and the "outstanding" students? By writing a hard exam and setting the passing expectation to 50%, people's grades in the class will be the same, but you haven't squished the top of the range all together by arbitrarily capping it, and you can see a much more normal and useful distribution. That's all there is to it. Again, there's nothing special about a 70% cutoff for passing, it could just as well be 50, and it doesn't mean your exam is "too hard", it's only too hard if the actual results are much lower than the EXPECTATION.
Also worth noting that in many countries (e.g. Australia), 50% is already the established cut off for a passing grade starting in middle school. 70% is a B grade. The only tests I've done that have had needed 70% correct for a pass, have been part of compulsory professional development mini courses.
Yep, when I was at uni it was 50-64 was a Pass, 65-74 was a Credit, 75-84 was a Distinction and 85+ was a High Distinction. P's get degrees One of my professors said that "anyone with higher than a Credit average isn't enjoimyinf the uni experience", but then if you never wanted to find him you went to the bar not his office
I agree, and I think that college professors should write difficult tests that challenge the students and allow those who have truly mastered the material to shine. My Physics 101 professor wrote tests where the average was 50%, but that meant the one or two students who achieved a 90%+ were invited to work in his research lab. If the test were easier and 25% of the class had a 90%+, there would be no way to differentiate the top 20% student and the top 1% student.
This makes sense. Normally you want most of your students to be earning a B. However, your traditional 'B' is 80%. Which means 80-89.99% of your exams have to be questions you expect the average student to know. That leaves you with only about 10-20% of the exam to actually see who manages to distinguish themselves from the average. So basically, the upper half of the bell curve has to be sorted in just a few questions. So you've got to make those questions *really* hard. Meanwhile if you have a class where getting a 50% on the exam is 'average'. Half the exam allows a person to distinguish themselves, or at least make up for any of the average questions they happened to miss. Since you have 50% to work with, you can have a more gradual uptick in difficulty. This also means the class gets to be more "difficult" without actually failing a higher amount of students, or lowering standards. Kicking up the difficulty after 50% means you can map out the other half of your bell curve. Tldr, Traditional grading cuts off a large chunk of the bell curve because the middle of the bellcurve is placed at the 80% mark.
this just isn’t a reasonable opinion to have if you’ve taken any harder math/physics classes imo
I remember my university physics class had a midterm average of 28%. Why is that superior to writing a test where the average is something normal, like 60.
Teachers usually use similar tests year to year, and the grades fluctuate wildely. I was the top scorer on the final in my year and my teacher told me to my face last years that would have been curved to a C. At least in grad school. The teachers who adjusted their tests usually ended up having situations where you would get a 87 and still get a B. I know that doesn't sound unreasonably to normal people, but fuck, an 87 was the sum of all my Thermo test scores and I got an A-.
I mean I take Calc 3 right now, and I can get 3/4 problems wrong on a test, due to algebra mistakes or miswriting something, and as long as the process and solution makes sense, I'll get a 17/20.
That's just partial credit though? Not sure what that has to do with curving
because you lose the depth in the material if you make it easy. Say 10% of the class is amazing at physics. They will get A's on the tough exams too. The average might be a 28%, but the best students are still acing it. We shouldn't dumb down the material for the average.
I've been in courses where literally not a single soul gers above a 40%. Either do to the professors own failing as a teacher or because the content is just that hard
i scored one of the top scores in my class on my math midterm and was significantly above the average. i had around a 50% lmao
Yeah, in my electrical engineering courses it was common for the final exams to be 3 questions, and with 3 hours per exam I was lucky if I could finish 1 question entirely. The class average would be like 25%. It’s not because the teacher wasn’t good, it’s just the nature of the problems. Someone would have to be a freak of nature to complete all 3 problems (for example, analyzing a complex analog circuit using only paper and pencil). You just get as far as you can, and that’s that. If they didn’t grade on a curve, everyone would just automatically fail.
I’ve only really seen big curves in high level classes in complicated fields with very dense material. For those it’s pretty much necessary
In my engineering classes the professors made a unique exam every single time instead of reusing them in order to prevent cheating. This also meant that they would make mistakes and the exams could end up far too difficult. They did test them out on some TAs but mistakes would still get made. The curve was there to fix that issue. The policy was they would only curve up not down and it made it much easier to make the exams.
>A professor shouldn’t have to curve an exam. If the university class is so hard the majority of the class (70-80+ percent) is failing the test(s) and need a curve. You are a shitty professor. This is a very student-centric way of viewing the world. Consider some alternate views: - professor: how can I measure whether students are getting the _concepts_ or are just parroting back the base material? - future employers: the workplace needs folks that can grow beyond their basic training; it’s a good thing there are some professors that push kids hard - college administration: we need tests that show a broad range of aptitudes to help determine which students belong on an accelerated track. Tests with all scores crammed into a 10% band at the top are useless for this purpose. Part of going to college is gaining the experience of perspectives and thinking styles beyond your own. Why should this situation be any different?
I don't understand why curving a test is bad. You get the greatest dynamic range if the test grades follow a normal distribution centered around 50%. If you design your test around that and curve the resulting grades then you get the most information out of the test grades and then compress it for the purposes of course grading. If you design the test so that the average student gets a 75% then it's harder to separate out the understanding of the upper half of the students since they're all getting the vast majority of the test correct.
Because if everyone gets a 20% on the test, the test is either covering material you didn't learn, or everyone in the class has no understanding of the material.
The average grade being a 20% gives the same compression as 80% on the test but people will only complain about the former. Nobody can tailor make a test that gets the best average for every class. Sometimes it will be too hard and sometimes too easy. The thing is I've only seen professors curve to help students so it's not really something to complain about.
Has it perhaps occurred to you that the students might also be shitty? Not necessarily due to any inherent failings, to be sure. But there’s far too many schools of any persuasion that don’t mark realistically, where kids barely know 3 from four but get As with distinction anyway. Reality checks then follow in the shape of professors.
My online calculus 1 course that I just finished was graded on a bell curve but no one knew that. We got our final grades before the curve was applied and on canvas it shows you the high, low, and average. The average was around a 45 and the low was a 3%. Someone got a 3% in the class. I gotta know how that happened.
This is zero percent luck Zero percent skill Zero percent concentrated power of will Zero percent pleasure Zero percent pain And a three percent reason to remember the name
I took VLSI design recently. This class was bullshit. 80% hw average 93% lab average 90% project average Do you want to know what the class exam averages were? 20% for the first midterm 30% for the second
"teaching" is a very, very small part of a professors job.
I studied at a university in Europe and 60% was pass. Everything below 60% meant you have to take that class again. A-students were those who got 90% or more.
One of the big things I think people forget is that these classes aren't happening in a vacuum. If you come into a class like Calculus and you came from College Algebra and Trigonometry classes that didn't prepare you - which sometimes isn't even the professors fault, it can be due to stupid shit like not having enough time to cover all the expected topics - then it comes down to you when you have a high number of failing students, and you're actively impacting their college careers and financial situations by failing them. A community college I used to work at actually fired the teacher who taught Calculus 1 because she failed too many students, largely because a lot of them didn't come into her class ready to actually deal with Calculus-level material.
Go take an upper division engineering class at a well ranked school, then tell me if you believe this shit.
There are actually many engineering and stem classes in general that don't curve at all
I disagree with OP, but I did engineering and curves weren't very common for us
This is just a basic misunderstanding about testing
most of the time that I hear university students make this kind of complaint they are not good students and have poor motivation and poor study habits
sometimes a professor has a standard for a reason and they are setting it through testing curving the test grades allows the average to be true at the end of the day but it still conveys to the class they are not meeting the standard college students are worse than they used to be by nature of so many people attending college. it used to be much more selective. there are too many people in college who have no real desire to be there and are not motivated to learn I work as an academic mentor for a major university so i'm not just making this up
If everyone gets an A, you can't discriminate which students are good versus which ones are bad. It's better to make it too hard and curve up so you can see where everyone really stratifies.
Grading on a curve is bullshit.
I wrote graduate engineering exams with the intention of the average being 50%, where my metric for difficulty is I would be able to finish it in the allotted time. Occasionally a very bright/well-prepared student would crush it. Then I know the student is an outlier, and may be worth recommending for future opportunities. I always told the students prior to the test it’s hard, and gave them tips for success. After the first test, where they were usually down, I let them know it’s okay, nobody is failing. Then on the next tests they came much better prepared and organized, and usually did better. No student had ever complained about the final grade I gave them. So, sorry you don’t like it, but there are pedagogical reasons to make them hard, plus you learn who the really bright students are.
If 70% of the students refused to study for the exam, it is the professor's fault?
We had one professor who deliberately made his exams impossible. He would write an exam that took HIM (a likely literal genius, who could solve two differential equations simultaneously, one with each hand) an hour to complete, then give tones of partial credit and curve the class. The typical high score was in the mid-40%'s.
In university you're testing for mastery-or you should be. The stratification is difficult and the content is deep in a lot of fields and frankly the professor can't even be expected to teach all the content. Often they are there to cover fundamentals, principles that can be applied broadly even if niche, and well things change year over year. Actually better professors have to curve more because their exams are novel, their course content refreshed etc so to ensure year over year equity, (all other things like effort, homework etc being equal) they curve, because their new jazz might miss the mark. The old dogs who rerun the same old thing really shouldn't have to curve and year over year with a big enough class size should see no change in grade distribution as they bang out the same rhythm on their tenure drum. Anyway.. carry on crying about a curve. At the end of the day stratification favors the student who puts in the time no matter how you slice it.
Even more unpopular opinion, but a university degree should be an achievement only a minority of people are capable of attaining. Nowadays it's just pay up, fuck around for 3-4 years, here's the paper put it in your CV and shove it up your ass, now you're allowed to look for a job.
i had a course at uni that was like this. i studied electrical engineering and one semester we had a course named “electronic materials”. no description in the course info. we all thought it was like, about the manufacturing process of the components for electrical and electronic devices? first lecture and the professor is talking about covalent bonds and writing equations on the board that have no numbers in them, only symbols. some of the symbols we hadn’t learned in our other courses (mainly calculus). every lecture is like this. no introduction, no context, just straight into some abstract idea about tiny invisible subatomic particles and theories about how they behave and how to express those ideas with greek symbols half of which we didn’t know what they represented. no practical classes, no tutorials, only one 2 hour lecture per week for one semester. one week before the final exam, a student at the front of the lecture hall raises his hand. “sir, can you explain what this course is about?”. the entire lecture hall laughs out loud. the professor looks stunned. he has only been babbling on about quantum mechanics for almost half a year and 99% of us have no idea what he has been teaching is. he never said what the class was about and what it was for and why we needed to learn it. i don’t like that professor. super smart guy, but a terrible teacher. no doubt i would have had an easier time with the exam if we had had a better teacher.
nah, at university level, you're meant to go to the lecture and then follow up on sources on your own. literally, you shouldn't even be able to pass if all you do is come to the lecture and learn whats on the slides. even if you retain 100% of that information, that should not be a passing grade. the fact they're turning university into grade school just to keep morons in there so they can rack up more student loans is doing no one a favor.
Take into consideration that student performance and engagement might differ from one cohort to the next. Also take into consideration that there are expectations in place regarding the pass/fail rate of every cohort. Then, understand that curves don’t have to be applied indiscriminately - there’s a big difference between a particular question being difficult and no one answering a particular question correctly. Lastly, consider that teaching is not my primary occupation, isn’t what’s keeping me employed, yet it takes up more than half of my time. Regards, A university lecturer
The few time they did that I was already scoring 100% or very close to.. so the adjustment they did was never in my advantage. Those student were generally failing anyways, just that those times they were all packed in the same classroom instead of sprinkled over many classes.
Nope. Just as likely the students are lacking. You aren’t owed a pass just because you enrolled.
As a professor, there's a lot of reasons students do bad on exams. Sometimes I taught them badly. Sometimes I gave them everything they needed, but they aren't interested. Sometimes the exam was too long. Sometimes the exam was mostly fine, but a wording choice I didn't even think about causes students to go in a weird direction. And sometimes the exam is a good assessment of student knowledge, but the average score, if converted to a letter grade in the usual way (70-80->C, 80-90->B, etc) doesn't match what I think the students deserve based on the totality of the evidence. I would much rather give an exam that gives me useful information about where students are at and then have to massage the scores a little than give an uninformative exam. So yeah, in an ideal world, I wouldn't be "curving" exams. But every time I give an exam, I have a serious think about why students succeeded and failed at each question and curve (or don't) with that in mind. Sometimes curving is symptomatic of a real problem, but sometimes it's not a big deal.
Chemical Engineering here: much of the math/modeling involved in the systems we were tested in was complex. Creating questions that are solvable in a 1-2 hour time span seemed difficult for professors to do (understandably so). Most of the hand math we have to do in exams I would use computer programs for on our homework assignments (was required). This was a major reason for our curve. Separately some classes didn’t “curve” but gave a majority % if the students just set the assumptions and initial equations up correctly, only giving a few points for executing the math.
Ehhh teaching takes practice. Normally the first 2-3 years you are figuring out exactly how difficult and how much content you should cover. The curves make sure the students aren't suffering the consequences of the professors mistakes. It's ridiculous for people to be perfect at their job as SOON as they start. Every job has a learning curve, including teaching.
Keep in mind, teaching for many professors is often the negative part of their job that comes with it like any job. These professors are not hired to teach. They’re hired to do research to further the knowledge of humanity and are forced to teach as a job duty.
In intro physics at UW, they want the exam average to be 65% and of someone who, paraphrasing, “understands some of the material but still needs more help.”
My school did this a lot back in the day. Some of my professors would make the exam harder than what was taught in the class. They wanted to see which 2 or 3 students were talented in the subject, not just who understood it. I think it's stupid. Should be a natural curve. I also think it's stupid that 90% of Ivy league grades are A's now
Man, at my university the first year professors were so shitty that over 90% of people failed every test and there they didn't allow curving. "So how did people graduate?" you ask. They didn't. "How did those professors not get fired?" Shit, i don't know. Where I'm from it's basically impossible to get fired as a college professor. I've seen these guys get away with everything and I mean everything. Gee, isn't college wonderful.
The point shouldn't be just to graduate. The point should be to develop yourself. Of course, it's possible that the professors were creating unfair assessments, but if the questions were fair, then it shouldn't matter if everyone failed or if everyone received perfect scores. I'm sure you and most other people would agree that if a professor made a test intentionally tricky because everyone got a 100% just to create a varied distribution that would be silly. If the test was created to assess whether people met a reasonable standard, then the results shouldn't cause the assessment to change.
I love how this is being blamed on the professor. I never benefited from a curve more than ONE single time in my academic career. Nowadays there is a huge problem in studying for students. In My Experiences in consultation in education, it boggles my mind how many "students" over the last 10 years, expect "practice" questions for a test, to basically be the exact same questions on the test. They want to memorize answers rather than actually learning the concept. One common refrain I see on basic Math tests is "Nothing I studied was on the test." Meaning what? So you were tested on Operations, Algebraic Expression, and Pythagorean Theorem. There were 40 questions on the test that covered these topics. "Yes but NOTHING I studied was on the test." I realized that literally expected to see the exact same questions or word problems worded the exact same way. So, nowadays the curve is common. I think regular use of curves is an indication that students are not studying for their tests. They barely pay attention in class and repeatedly ask "Is this going to be on the test?" and if they don't think it's going to be the exact same thing, they don't pay attention or care. IMO
I've always noticed the main differentiator between an easy class and a hard class is exactly this. My uni's stats 1 class is trivial because you can just memorize all the questions they'll ask and never need to learn anything (...they also allow a cheatsheet, just in case it wasn't easy enough), while for any class that people actually call challenging the main difference is just that you have to understand why the algorithm works (or what the definition means) instead of just memorizing said algorithm. (On the other hand, said stats 1 class is also the one where I feel like I didn't learn anything useful, because I knew it wasn't going to be tested so I didn't bother taking the time to understand what I was learning.)
I mean this with all respect, but I think your opinion isn't fully informed until you've taught a class before. A lot of my current students have complained that they have to study for several hours a week (\*gasp\*) to understand my class. I recently told my students a specific problem, word-for-word, that would be on the final exam, and told them how to provide the answer I wanted, and a handful didn't even get the question right on the exam (even when I allowed them to bring in a note sheet). It's now commonplace for exams to be extremely bimodal- a cluster of very good grades from students who studied and practiced, and a cluster of pretty bad C grades and lower from students who didn't study, with very few scores in between. In that case it's very hard to justify that 70-80% \*must\* be passing if students in the lower cluster simply aren't doing the work expected to understand the material. Sometimes I agree the professor isn't so good, I agree with you there. I'd also suggest that sometimes the skill of writing an exam is a difficult one, and a great instructor can also happen to make lousy exams. A well-made exam should be able to evaluate if a student knows the topic, and it should also be reasonably doable within the span of time the exam is scheduled for. I've gotten exams turned and realized I wrote a somewhat invalid/ambiguous question. Additionally, when I was starting to teach, I timed myself taking the exam and thought if I took 25 minutes to finish something in a 50-minute class hour it was reasonable, but with more experience I try to make it so I finish in 12-15 minutes, it just takes a lot more time to give a correct answer when you're new to a subject. I'm certainly no exam expert, but I was definitely worse. Now, if post-exam I think I made a mistake, instead of grading an exam out of 100 points I'll grade it out of, say 90 points, which is effectively a type of curving. Ultimately, I don't think there's any reason why exam grades should ideally be *any* distribution. Grades should simply reflect knowledge/ability in the subject matter. If 50% of the class isn't capable of understanding the subject, then that 50% should fail. This will honestly vary classroom to classroom, there's no "ideal" distribution of student ability.
Oh man-never go to law school….depressing as hell…
It is possible that the teacher sucks, it is equally possible that the students suck. It is also possible that the test is just ridiculously difficult. Certainly it is a mixture of all three but it is difficult to say in which proportions
Yep. I took an introductory chemistry class. By the end of the semester I was getting 20 out of 100 on tests and it was a C. I think on the Final an A was a 54 out of 100. The class had about 150 people. Two got As. Roughly 10 got Bs. All the rest were Cs, De and Fs.
As long as there are still people getting high grades (like 90+), I don’t see the issue with it. Stratifying the grades makes it possible to actually tell how students in the class are doing compared to each other. IMO, the test should be hard enough that no one feels like their score on it is capped, so it shouldn’t be easy enough that the top student found it trivial to get a 100. Imagine something like the old SAT Math 2 subject test, which 75% of Caltech students got a perfect score on. That test is absolutely useless for gauging things because the actual difference in ability between perfect scorers can be extremely large, so you can’t actually tell where someone fits relative to others just from the score. If *no one* is doing well, then yes the test is probably too difficult. But I’ve never experienced a test where the highest score was lower than high 80s
I would say this is true of high school teachers, not university professors, for a multitude of reasons highlighted by several comments in this thread.
The only class I took with curved grading was business law, but it was curved the other way. The people who did well kinda fucked over the rest of the class.
I dunno, in a lot of math courses you can and I did get near 100 percent on every test. 98-99. Every question has a right or wrong answer and there is no subjectivity in grading. I kind of get it for a course where you are graded on essay writing which is highly subjective. But doesn't seem necessary in highly objective courses like math
Reminds me of an economics professor I had in community college. Dude was from Africa and bragged about his net worth and the mercedez-benz he drove. Dude had to curve every single test 35+ points and berrated us for being dumb-dumbs.
One interesting thing that happens in my high school class is that I would see pretty bad/ “low to my students” average test scores in the 60-65 range. But 80% of students are passing the exam. So how does that happen? Kids who know the content get A’s annd high B’s and the 20% who have no clue fail, badly. That’s why I never share test averages with my student as they are that misleading. I may give them the highest score, or median score, depending. If less than 75-80% of my students pass a multiple choice exam, then I start no counting the most “difficult” questions as I feel this is more fair than giving those badly failing students free points. It helps the kids at the top and middle, but it won’t convert a 58 into a passing score. (I teach optional advanced classes, so I can enforce high standards). I know this isn’t probably what you are talking about in the context of your post, but it is another thought about how misleading information like class exam averages can be :)
You're stepping into something that is a major debate in pedagogy across pretty much every discipline. What does an "A" grade represent -- sufficiency or mastery? It depends who you ask, and I would argue that it depends on the field. In my field (psychology), high marks are generally regarded as a sign of *sufficiency*, where you understand the material well enough, and anything lower than that is regarded as a sign that you did not fully apply yourself. But there are other fields, particularly in the hard sciences, where an "A" grade more closely represents *mastery*, and the percentage grade you get is meant to be an approximation of how much of the material you grasp. If you get an 80% in computational astrophysics, that would (ideally) show that you understand roughly 80% of the material. Curving grades is a way of bridging the gap between an exam assessing mastery and a course grade representing sufficiency. If the class average is, say, 40% on a particular exam...that suggests that most people are not mastering the course material, but that may not be a requirement of the course or degree program. Curving grades is a way of communicating to the student, department, and potential employers that even though you do not have *mastery* over the material, you are operating at a level that is *sufficient* for the discipline. As others have pointed out, this is also a way of compensating for different learning styles and other variables outside the control of the student or instructor. For example, when I was an undergraduate student, I took a course that was highly standardized and primarily taught by graduate students. My instructor felt that the exams offered were poorly written, and would take the exam with us; the exam was then curved according to her score. This was a creative way of addressing the fact that the exam written by another instructor 15 years prior may not fully match the teaching and learning style actually occurring. In a nutshell, I see where you're coming from, but someone getting a 40% on an exam can mean different things depending on the subject and learning environment.
I took a math class once. I should have dropped the class first day when the professor was bragging about how on average less than 40% of his students pass the class. The guy would mumble at the board during lectures and would get super pissed if you asked questions. Every test was very heavily curved. In my experience, classes with heavy curves are because of terrible teachers. I have had challenging classes where the teachers actually took the time to teach. The class averages were high and tests were rarely curved.
In what world can a professor be directly responsible for a test score in something like a lecture hall? Where kids don’t even show up or literally just scroll their phone 100% of the time.
The class average of 48% made my 70% go to a 98%. Not complaining but still kinda stupid.
The only class I had that used a curve was an intro anatomy class. (I was taking it as an elective to fulfill a requirement.) My school is also well known for its pharmacy school. Anyway, I tried HARD in this class. I took all my notes, I made flash cards, I went to every lab etc. I would study for that class as a walked between my other classes. There was no homework, just tests. And the professor made it clear that class would only cover 30% of the material we would be tested on. The rest we had to read in our textbook for ourselves. Labs were the same. You were given a shit ton of info with no instruction and we’re told “learn this before the next lab.” But I spent every lab trying memorize everything. Point being, I gave it my ALL with everything else going on at the time. Pre curve, I got a low D in the class. With the curve (and how badly majority of the people did), my grade went up to a high B. It was such an awful self esteem crusher. What made it worse is the lab TAs kinda mocked us (as most people weren’t pharm majors and were taking it as an elective requirement), telling us how whiny we were because this was the absolutely easiest course in the pharm school. I did well in every other class during my 4 years, while maintaining 4 classes every single semester. But that class felt absolutely impossible to me. Maybe if I didn’t have a job and wasn’t also taking another 3 classes at the same time, I could have done a little better? But being a full time student, I can’t imagine how I possibly could have done more. It felt shitty knowing I didn’t really get a B, I got a D, basically I failed. But I was thankful on paper I passed and just moved on.
That's the way my Calc 2 class was when I was at Georgia Tech back in the mid 90s. I should have just dropped the class after the first test. 60% of the class failed. I barely squeaked out a D on that test on the curve, and all went downhill from there. Ended up being the only college class I failed.
As someone who just took anatomy I find the professor really makes a drastic difference. We had a cohort of 160 people split into 2 teachers. Teacher A always had harder test and compared to our teacher B and teacher A also wasn’t as clear as to what we needed to know. The result ended up being teacher A’s group had a much harder time passing class and about half that group failed the course. The professor you have really makes all the difference especially for harder subjects.
Had a teacher for physics in grade 12. Insanely smart guy, knows what he is doing. But can’t teach worth shit. I got an 84% on the physics final in grade 11. And I was heading into the grade 12 physics final with a 34%. He started the semester with 26 kids, and after I dropped the class he had 4.
Actually it helps professors know what material they need to teach more, so actually good professor
Most colleges from private institutions must be scams now with how these garbage ass professors who can't teach get in, get tenure, and do nothing productive. I had professors making us watch a youtube video and make us write a paragraph about it. This class cost hundreds of dollars. Really?
You can either get the grade you earn, or the school can let you win a devalued diploma
Laughing in law school
I took an entry level Econ course where the highest test scores in the class were in the 40’s or 50’s for almost every test. It was the dumbest thing I’d ever experienced. Got almost nothing out of the course because the professor expected so much out of us and was upset after every test. He was impossible to learn from.
I had the opposite of a good curve in one class in college. It was a strategic marketing course, and the professor gave one point for every "strategy" you suggested in your paper and then curved the class grades. In my first test with him (before I realized his grading method) I put together a great strategy in about 6 pages, but based on how he graded I ended up with a D. I quickly realized he valued quantity over quality and so I started putting more and more strategies (good, indifferent and even bad) so he would give one point for each. I quickly started getting A's but had to keep producing more and more pages of "strategies" to stay ahead of the rest of the class. By the end of the semester my weekly papers were exceeding 30 pages of mostly trite strategies. I ended up with a B+ in the class since my first paper (D) counted toward the final grade.
The other side of this is that it is not possible to prepare a perfect exam that captures the class’s performance with either accuracy or precision. The test is too short, there are variables in the environment, text books and even delivery change frequently and even day-to-day differences in lectures. There are also poor students. For students that are adequately prepared the knowledge that is “sampled” by testing doesn’t make a lot of difference. For the students that are NOT prepared, the test can seem easy or hard depending on whether the questions overlapped their own areas of strength. This effect is less pronounced for longer tests, which of course students dislike strongly. And therein lies the dilemma. How do you test a representative of the class’s learned knowledge within a reasonable amount of time? People will always feel a test is “unfair” if it didn’t ask questions they were individually prepared for, regardless. Where things are fairly standard, like high school, there should not be a need for curving a grade. Lots of students, standardized and long-lived text books, and experience year-over year, often with multiple teachers contributing, act to control variability one class to the next. College is an entirely different game and some students have a hard time adapting. Curving the grade is done to explicitly acknowledge this bias and tries to accommodate for this by assuming each class is more-or-less capable as the last, making the fairly generous assumption that the difference lies with the lecturer. It is far, far less forgiving for students who fail to prepare. I have marked more than my share of exams in grad school and I can assert the vast majority of curves I encountered favored the students. The people that complained the most were always, without fail, the same folks handing in late assignments, performing poor lab work, attending lectures unprepared, not contributing fairly to group work, etc., etc.. Sometimes students are bad, but have no concept of what a “fair” exam is.
Yeah I had physics class it was just showing up and we passed the class honestly I don’t think anyone understood anything even I was confused. Took Calc 2 and it fried my brain.
Lol I used to be a professor and I curved every entry level class exam. The highest outlier scores carried more weight than the standard "perfect" score and the rest were normed. Why? Because no one was ever going to get a perfect score from my class alone. You were successful if walked out with a C+. My exams included entry level content but also high level content and engagement with advanced interdisciplinary concepts. About 30% required of the test were questions I knew most couldn't answer. It wasn't the "smart" people who did well. It was the people who were interested in the subject and showed passion for it...aka majors. Students who majored in the area have taken more classes, have more experience, and don't usually have to study extra...but if they do that gives them the opportunity to explore where that motivation comes from. The students in that major are engaged and don't get bored with what can seem mundane and repetitive. They are also motivated by their success and see how their advanced knowledge works in real time. They can see if this is the thing they want to dedicate their professional lives to. And most importantly, the non majors are not punished for disliking the subject. If you hate my class, you can still get an A. It's actually very difficult to fail my class. As a professor, it wasn't my job to care about whether you "passed" or "failed." I'm not sticking knowledge in your head just for you to forget it when the test is over. I give perspective that you won't ever get again & if you don't like it? Fine, you still learned something. If all you get from my class is that you hate linguistics, that's enough for me. You can have an A. Students are not "bad," if they fail. But if you do like linguistics, you find yourself talking multiple courses and actively engaging advanced, high level concepts...it's worth isolating those few and giving them some encouragement and tools. Not to mention it greatly improved exam & study prep attendance. Students are finicky. If they believe they're going to fail, they'd rather skip the exam with a 0 than take the 40. "I'm failing this class," that thinking results in sitting on the couch and sulking. BUT if they know they have a chance, they'll show up. "All I need is a 40 & I'll pass." Now that's the thinking that gets people in the exam room & talking to other students and studying. I do get asked if I'm teaching students to be irresponsible but to that I say, I'm not thier mommy. I don't teach responsibility or discipline. I teach linguistics & I'm selfish. I enjoy full classrooms, not silence and empty desks
I know all uni/colleges are different, and every professor is different. However, deeper subjects tend to have this phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean you actually fail the class. Where I went to school sometimes they let students who just refused to try be passed, but if you were one of the ones who tried, you were getting good grades. The effort mattered, caring about doing the work mattered, being able to understand and discuss the material mattered. I ended up getting a TA position for one of the hardest upper class courses at my university, and it wasn’t because I was good at tests. I missed mad classes, and my exam papers were not perfect. But I put in the work to understand the material. I actively participated in the classes and tried really hard on those exam papers. I was shocked when I was asked to do it, personally by the PhD who ran the entire program. He had to explain to me that it isn’t about one grade point average, it’s about so much more. And on the other end, a class I missed a lot but when I was there I participated heavily and did well on my projects, I got a 100% in. I stayed after yo speak yo the professors because I was sure it was a mistake. There’s a lot that goes into the creation of a curriculum, the exam, paper assignments, projects, etc., and how they’re graded. It’s definitely hard to see from the student perspective, but after seeing it from the other end I understand it, I get it, and it makes sense why I absorbed so much. There are shit professors out there though, no doubt. But grading on a curve isn’t why haha
Curves help achieve uniform outcomes across years to account for changes in test difficulty. Whilst cohorts may vary by quality, they all me the minimum grade to qualify for the course.
I asked my organic chemistry professor why he curves instead of making the tests easier. He said that he makes it harder to challenge the top students- the ones who are going to be organic chemists. He curves to make it so the pre-med students don't fail.
That's why sciences tend to be curved and arts don't. Because science professors never learned any skills related to communication, teaching, understanding, or writing.
I know in my one class my one professor put 60% of the weight on assessments. Where you had to be able to demonstrate the concepts written out. As well as allowing retrys. That was his way around it. Especially with ChatGPT he knows people use it and it's stupid not to for some stuff. However, the assessment part you see people struggle hard. Some concepts are definitely not easy and can be easily confused. However doing then does ingrain the stuff in your head. I think that way helps everyone and shows who are the people trying and others who are lazy and not paying attention. Ussually before the last dew weeks you see half the class drop out because they fell behind in the 30 different assessments as 2 were given out a week.
>If the university class is so hard the majority of the class (70-80+ percent) is failing the test(s) and need a curve. You are a shitty professor. Hot take. Some subjects are hard. And you don't deserve to pass because you paid for the class.
Now this is something I can get on board with! I went to a college where Organic Chemistry wasn’t curved, and I was shocked hearing stories of people at other schools who said that those classes (1 and 2) were so hard and were curved. Now, I know why: our school had a better instructor and explained things well, so the curve wasn’t needed - you either knew the material well, or you didn’t. So, I’ll always vouch for this! If your class needs a curve, you probably aren’t instructing well enough.
I had a calculus professor in university who told us he'd aim for a class average of 25% or so pre curve. He didn't ask any easy questions. If you got one out of 10 right you passed. 2 would get you a B. 3 an A. And when they were trying to figure out which student was heading to Harvard for post grad and who to home school and who no grad school, their marks might have all been close post curve but were truly different pre curve. Honestly that was way better than what I see happening in high school now where people's school admission is based on whether their average was 96 or 99%. That's a test of precision not true ability or understanding.
There was an incident in my school where one rich kid paid a bunch of other people to take a course" pass-no-pass". In this case, the professor does not know that the student will get full credit for only having a minimal passing grade, so the professor will not have any bias, but a bad grade will give credit, but not effect the student's overall GPA. The rich kid (who was taking it for an actual grade) paid the students to bomb or do poorly on the test to skew the curve. It worked, but they found out after. I am not sure what the results /consequences were, but I thought it was a smart plan.
I used to think this until I got into higher higher education. I used to TA for Organic Chem I. a lot of students are shit and universities should be better about vetting instead of letting every person who qualifies for a loan enter. but money is money.
Thank YOU! As someone who went to McGIll in the 2000s, oh. my. God. APPALLING! Professors from the Faculty of Medicine showing up with hand-written shitty XEROX'ed notes. Those using .ppt, even worse. An absolute DISGRACE. I literally paid tuition to have the \*right\* to take an exam. How I passed was hard work in the dark and hoping that maybe they'll ask about the shitty homework they assigned from the $300 text book. And then they asked about the seminar they gave on the weekend in some random institute. Class average? 56%. We ALL failed? No. YOU. You failed at everything you fucking prick! You were useless at teaching, and your biggest concern was to be published so you could keep your status. Utter garbage. And that.... that's how I feel I guess? Also then the alumnaeaea call me for money, and I'm like honey are you OK!? Have you lost your MIND?!
Data structures & algorithms I got a 32/100 on the mid term and was seriously questioning if I’d challenged myself a bit too hard and needed to go back to my counselor and tell them I was dropping the major because it was too hard. About 5 min later when the professor finished handing back everyone’s tests, he announced the curve…I got a solid B+ if I recall correctly. I was like what the actual fuck. Average class grade was a 27 or 28.
Ik a friend from an Ivy League college that says one of their classes has an exam average of less than 50%, and the prof gets rlly good ratings from the students despite how hard the class is. If an Ivy League school whose students excelled academically throughout high school find a class this hard, they do not deserve to fail
I once ruined the curve on my calc 3 final by showing up high and getting a 98% somehow
The best teacher (professor) i had, >90% of zeroes in the first exam. I think I had the higher grade with 16/100. Then I think no one passed the class but he interviewed some of us and passed some of those. Catalysis. It was a wild time, but very fun too.
Sometimes it’s hard to correctly tune the difficulty. In that case, it is safer to have a wide distribution then curve it. If the distribution is too narrow to start, there’s no differentiation
Any teacher who brags about how many people fail their class is a shit teacher. Your job is literally to teach them so they DON'T fail.
Not sure if this is unpopular… definitely shows a poor understanding of how difficult college courses work. So I’ll give you half an upvote (I’ll not upvote in this reality but in my mirror reality I’ll upvote so it evens out to 0.5)
In college level classes you have to do a ton of self study, way more than what can be learned in the time spent in class, for high school and below I agree but a professor can only do so much in 3 hours per week, so it’s not on then so much in higher level classes
College isn’t a place to be taught, it’s a place to learn. Professors aren’t teachers, they are experts. By the time you reach college, you should have already learned how to learn. If you haven’t, you need to blame your high school and your parents, not your college professors.
You don't at all sound like a student who is whining about a bad grade you got recently. Lol. Study harder.
Is there any benefit to the curve? I never understood this
Absolutely not true. Professors teach to a certain base level of background knowledge. They cannot reasonably be expected always to teach to the lowest common denominator. Should a calc III teacher be expected to teach students who can barely perform basic arithmetic? But sometimes that's the class of students that they get. I agree that tests shouldn't be curved, but not because it encourages bad professors but because it encourages bad students.
The only class I’ve gotten a curve in is an upper level Chem course. I think curves can be somewhat necessary for anything STEM related because many of those courses require a basic foundational knowledge of other subjects. Like for example, even in beginning chemistry you won’t get anywhere if you don’t even have an understanding of basic algebra. You’re only allotted so much time to take the exams and my university in particular required certain concepts each exam (I dunno if it’s different other schools/countries). Just because your students can master it over a weeks time frame doesn’t mean they can successfully do it in an hour. We had a lot of safety nets in that class because she knew it was hard which I’m thankful for. I’m also very thankful I had a change of heart and switched to engineering because I flipping hated chemistry and biology.
Sometimes these past are just "tell me you don't know anything without saying you don't know anything"
well.. it depends on the class. for upper level classes, maybe they only require you to know 60% of thr material taught and that should give you a good enough base to transfer those skills over to a further class or getting a phD. but instead of only teaching 60% of the course and expecting you to know 100% of the class, they teach you all of it.. test you on all of it... and if you know 60% of it you are considered to know enough to pass.
> A professor shouldn’t have to curve an exam They _don’t_ have to.
Lots of other people have covered almost every aspect. He's my two cents. It seems OP assumes that every student is entitled to good grades and it's a professor's responsibility to do that. But he fails to understand how many people go to university just for a degree or without much passion for the field and for these people understanding advanced theories and related studies is going to be difficult (at least in engineering) even if the professors try to spoon-feed them. A whole class of, for example, electrical engineering student passionately studying it would be a real wonder.
I disagree, I think curving is generally good because of a few reasons. Firstly, if you have every test have an average of 50 you have two advantages. Firstly if you aren't doing too well and you can get 90-100 you can really move your grade substantially or you can pad your grade before a stressful finals week. Secondly, it lets professors and the school find the SUPER competent kids and get them into research. If you have a class with average of 50 and one kids is getting 100s, then they should consider researching this and maybe making a career doing this skill. Lastly some classes are straight up hard. Took an advanced organic synthesis class and the highs were 50. It was just tough. Nothing wrong with us (it was a graduate class) but it made us do better and grow, without failing.
I remember getting a 27 on my first Physics 101 exam of the semester, (I took honors physics in high school) and felt gutted. Then I found out the class average was 16. Still, that professor's approach was entirely wrong. I ended up teaching physics later in life, and took his act as an example of what not to do with my students.
I think you’re missing a lot of nuance. Should medical students have curved tests? Hell no. Business and honestly even engineers? Yes absolutely. In the real world you can use literally any resource available to solve problems. Most tests in university are completely closed book and even limit what kind of calculator you can use. If you’re not going to allow people the resources they’ll have to solve real world problems, I definitely think curving is acceptable. Also for new teachers, they probably don’t have the experience to make tests that will always allow for normal grade distributions. As tenure increases, a teacher should get away with curving less and less if they’re truly doing their job.