Anon studies Organic Chemistry
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I keep reading about people grading on a curve and I still can't grasp what that means. Do those teachers have like a set number of A B C, or whatever, they can give out? And if they've run out of A then you get a B? And if the B run out you get a C and so on?
That seems a completely intellectually bankrupt practice! If you don't want more than X people passing, then just grade people with percentages and let only the first X highest through and that's it, but don't lie with fake grades! How insane...Wait until you hear that universities are just literal paywalls to seperate social classes so poor people can’t get good jobs that once were apprenticeships.
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My calc I class in college had a 23% average on the first exam. Later ones made it into the high 30%s. The professor was terrible, but since I had already taken calc in high school and he graded on a curve it was a breeze.
The main problem was that he would test for the stuff we had not covered yet because he "wanted people to work ahead."
It's fine to give points for "extra work", but the regular work should give you a passing grade at least. The extra work should maybe give you the difference between a 6 or an 8.
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Wait until you hear that universities are just literal paywalls to seperate social classes so poor people can’t get good jobs that once were apprenticeships.
That's not fair, they're also debt slavery scams where they sell false hope to people. They even have entire military boot camp lite night release prisons where they brainwash you into going
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I have had teachers try to grade on a strict bell curve distribution, but if you're goal as a school is to accept promising talent then train them better you should expect your students to fall within a part of a bell curve and not spread across the whole damn thing.
Sorry, can't pass you cause my morals oblige me to give 2 As, and 2Fs, and I'm all out of everything but FS (no matter how many points you were away from someone with a better final grade).
IfIf the class is graded on the curve and you're on the bottom half of the curve you should get a refund
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I love the correction system we have at my university. All the exams are pseudonymized with a sticker you receive during the exam and scanned after completion. About 10 to 30 people are involved in correcting the exams for one course. We don't know who the exams belong to as we only see the scanned version on our tablet or computer. Each task is corrected by a different set of people. We can select to see only a single task or subtask to streamline the process of correction, too. Furthermore, all the tasks are checked twice independently. Once done, the system can assign the exams back to the students. I love how it's fair and "anonymous" by design.
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This post doesn't pass peer review
If the story was about peer review it would probably be more believable. No way a professor does that to a fee paying student less still admits it to them. But do it to a competing prof where they are anonymous... Much more tempting.
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Wait until you hear that universities are just literal paywalls to seperate social classes so poor people can’t get good jobs that once were apprenticeships.
I mean, not the whole world is the US. Plus, at this point you'll get a better paying job if you go into trades.
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While I mostly agree with you, the grading on a curve idea comes from two factors
On one hand, the idea that knowing some topics very well can absolve you from knowing other topics at a sufficient level. On the other, people making the exercises for the exams are experts and can easily overlook the hidden difficulties of an exercise. So it happens way too often that a professor would think “this exercise is super easy” and miss that it uses concepts from other courses the students are not super familiar yet.On the first point I agree. In my country, 40-50% is a pass usually and that seems crazy for its own reasons. But a curve can make that worse just as easily as it can make it better. The education system I work in is now introducing the idea that not only do you need to hit 50% to pass, you also have to show a competency with every learning outcome on the curriculum. We'll see how it goes. My subject areas haven't been hit yet.
The second point is essentially what I said, it's a cop out for a teacher who is bad at setting exams. Easily fixed by some QA and/or collaboration. At least run it by a TA. Also they should read the curriculum before writing an assessment.
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This probably didn't actually happen, but I did have a physics class in college where we had an exam where the highest score was 35%, so it was graded on an absurd curve
That seems so low that it makes the benefit of the class dubious. Can you really say you're making good use of the students' time when it's clear none of them are understanding the material? Maybe the material needs to be broken up into more digestible chunks.
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That seems so low that it makes the benefit of the class dubious. Can you really say you're making good use of the students' time when it's clear none of them are understanding the material? Maybe the material needs to be broken up into more digestible chunks.
It's also possible to just write a bad question/exam and recognize you need to do better as a professor.
I had a physics professor who graded himself on whether or not he wrote/taught well by the grade distribution. He was always transparent about it and had benchmarks of how it went previous years. He was also one of the most sought after professors.
I also had s philosophy class where the best grade over the entire semester was a 30 and the professor was like yeah this is just expected. You get an A. This guy obviously derived enjoyment from not being a good teacher and for humiliating his students that they really knew nothing about philosophy. That guy sucked.
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I keep reading about people grading on a curve and I still can't grasp what that means. Do those teachers have like a set number of A B C, or whatever, they can give out? And if they've run out of A then you get a B? And if the B run out you get a C and so on?
That seems a completely intellectually bankrupt practice! If you don't want more than X people passing, then just grade people with percentages and let only the first X highest through and that's it, but don't lie with fake grades! How insane...In Delft, corrections of the curve are only ever used upwards, in case the passing rate is very low. If everyone completes the test without mistakes everyone gets a 10.
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Wait until you hear that universities are just literal paywalls to seperate social classes so poor people can’t get good jobs that once were apprenticeships.
I assure you that's not how it works in Europe. Nowhere near as bad as the US, in any case.
I guess that's what happens when education is deeply ingrained in the culture. -
I mean, not the whole world is the US. Plus, at this point you'll get a better paying job if you go into trades.
Haha, yeah, if you actually look at how much you earn vs how much you actually work (quality of life), some trades like electrician or plumbers are so much better off than my doctor wife, it's not even funny

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I mean, not the whole world is the US. Plus, at this point you'll get a better paying job if you go into trades.
There's a trade school near me that is fucking free. They have a huge endowment and that pays for everything, even room and board for the on-campus students. They still have to advertise and meanwhile kids go $300K into debt to get a degree in English Lit. I'm all for a classic Liberal Arts education but god damn.
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This is so fake that we managed to reach the {fake + gay} threshold without having to tap into the gay potential