Anon studies Organic Chemistry
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Yup, they have their TAs grade exams and grade on a curve so only a fixed percent passes.
With the amount of tests I had where I was the highest grade at ~60% and still got the equivalent of a D, I would have loved some of this curve you guys keep talking about.
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Gay potential is measured in homos
Please tell me it uses SI prefixes.
"They measure 1.63 x 10² megahomos!"
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My first introduction to this bullshit was calculus. Teacher bragged about only passing halve his students. Like my man... that ain't the brag you think it's is 1, 2 this is a fucking prereq for the vast vast majority of us!
Yeah, when a prof or teacher says "my course is so hard, only a few people pass" then I immediately translate that to "I am a shit teacher".
So long as you do the work and aren't a lazy ass student, you should have a decent pass.
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How does it harm students? A curve is only used if the grade distribution is below expectations. All it does is cover for a bad test or something.
Because if the next cohort is simply performing better you force some students to be graded below their performance, which is unfair punishment, and if they're worse then some will be graded higher. It's especially unfair when the composition of students changes rapidly or when used over very mixed groups of students.
Grading should be decided based on achieved learning targets, not group rank. It's not a fucking sport.
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It's basically just modern eugenics with extra steps.
Username checks out.
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Ah, I misunderstood. Yeah, that’s common, but not a choice, they are different types of positions, with different fundings usually. You can’t switch between them
Right. I meant "choice" as in professors can work it out with the dean. If the professor doesn't like the answer from the dean, they can shop around for another university.
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With the amount of tests I had where I was the highest grade at ~60% and still got the equivalent of a D, I would have loved some of this curve you guys keep talking about.
Dang, that sucks. At the end of the day, it's up to the professor how to assign grades.
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Because if the next cohort is simply performing better you force some students to be graded below their performance, which is unfair punishment, and if they're worse then some will be graded higher. It's especially unfair when the composition of students changes rapidly or when used over very mixed groups of students.
Grading should be decided based on achieved learning targets, not group rank. It's not a fucking sport.
I've never heard of a curve being used to adjust scores downward, only to adjust them upward.
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My first introduction to this bullshit was calculus. Teacher bragged about only passing halve his students. Like my man... that ain't the brag you think it's is 1, 2 this is a fucking prereq for the vast vast majority of us!
State Universities lovee failing a student in an entry- level course, because the state will subsidize tuition twice for a given class per student.
They don't like doing it a second time because the student has to pay full tuition, and when classes triple in price they're more likely to drop.
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Yeah, when a prof or teacher says "my course is so hard, only a few people pass" then I immediately translate that to "I am a shit teacher".
So long as you do the work and aren't a lazy ass student, you should have a decent pass.
Only exception I have seen was when the professor was kind of a troll. He was a good teacher. This was in a pretty entry level physics class at a tech school, so we basically got a high school level physics as a pre-req for our degree in whatever 2 year program we were in.
He spent the week leading up to the first big test talking about how hard it was, how people needed to take it seriously, etc.
He handed out the grades after and everyone was visibly upset, nobody had a passing grade. Then he explained, after letting us freak out for a minute, that the score at the top was out of 50, not 100 and I think everyone passed
After that the class pretty fun.
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i think multiple-choice-exams* are even better because they're corrected by a machine by scanning the checkboxes and saying either "yes" or "no". it's 100% fair and also really effective.
* where applicable
I had so many horrible multiple choice tests where the number of correct answers was stated and I was 100% sure that that wasn't correct, but there was no room for additional remarks to explain my thoughts.
