Anon studies Organic Chemistry
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It's also possible to just write a bad question/exam and recognize you need to do better as a professor.
I had a physics professor who graded himself on whether or not he wrote/taught well by the grade distribution. He was always transparent about it and had benchmarks of how it went previous years. He was also one of the most sought after professors.
I also had s philosophy class where the best grade over the entire semester was a 30 and the professor was like yeah this is just expected. You get an A. This guy obviously derived enjoyment from not being a good teacher and for humiliating his students that they really knew nothing about philosophy. That guy sucked.
I had this one teacher in university (not yet a PhD but was working on it) that I ended up taking like 4 different classes from in university. Although he was brilliant and experienced having worked in the industry for 30 years or so, and was naturally a very good teacher and very passionate about what he taught, it's a simple fact was he was new, but he was very humble and transparent about that. The first course I took from him was only his second time teaching that course (or any course), and the other three were each his first. All these courses he built the curriculum himself. Again, he's an excellent teacher, one of the best I ever had, but he was still working out the kinks in his tests. He was being very transparent with us students about his process of choosing to award partial or full credit for questions and problems he decided weren't fair, or were worded ambiguously, always taking feedback during class after getting our graded tests back.
I had a few other courses like that too, and I feel like that system (decreasing the weight of problems that aren't fair to students) is generally a better system than simply grading on a curve. The former is more granular, differentiating poor grades due to lack of study from poor grades to a faulty test. It also provides a clear direction for improving the curriculum next semester. Grading on a curve often feels like a copout to avoid the labor involved in improving the curriculum. BUT on the other hand, if the class really went so poorly that nobody understood the material or if the test was almost totally unfair, then imo grading on a curve could be the fairest solution for the students. There's no perfect solution there, the students time is already wasted, better to give them the benefit of the doubt in that case.
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Wait... are there universities that don't have an anonymous exam system?
I was a university student around ten years ago and we usually wrote our names and student identification numbers right on the exam. For the most part our professors didn't really know us very well anyway (due to the number of students), so I never questioned why it should not be so.
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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...It's only ever worked to the benefit of the student in my experience
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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.
Yeah there are plenty of degrees that shouldn't really be an area of study at university. But there are plenty that justify it as well
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Wait... are there universities that don't have an anonymous exam system?
In early 2010s I had a TA give me an A without grading. When I confronted him he said "Why do you care, you know you're getting an A anyways?" Lol. He got reprimanded though.
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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
We did it, Lemmy!
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You forgot to fuck the professor.
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Dean time!
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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...At my uni they'd take the highest grade of the class and reset that as the max points and grade from there.
So if max points on an exam was 120 and no-one scored higher then an 85, then an 85 would be an A, 75 a B, etc.
I'm a mediocre student but an amazing test taker and used to compete on math teams. So some of the math heavy engineering courses I would get perfect exam scores and sometimes the prof would ignore me as the highest grade. I was frustrated at first because my A didn't mean the same as someone's but I realized later it was to stop me from getting beat up by a bunch of 30 yo guys.
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At my uni they'd take the highest grade of the class and reset that as the max points and grade from there.
So if max points on an exam was 120 and no-one scored higher then an 85, then an 85 would be an A, 75 a B, etc.
I'm a mediocre student but an amazing test taker and used to compete on math teams. So some of the math heavy engineering courses I would get perfect exam scores and sometimes the prof would ignore me as the highest grade. I was frustrated at first because my A didn't mean the same as someone's but I realized later it was to stop me from getting beat up by a bunch of 30 yo guys.
I still think the ABCDF system sounds so... childish? But presented like that I can see how it makes sense.
I always thought about more absolute systems as more, eh, honest? More of an absolute value of our worth, but in truth it depends completely on our teachers, so it's not really any "truer" than the letter system. Just a different bias.
I'm glad there are so many interesting answers in this thread
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Professors don't work like that.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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
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Professors don't work like that.
They do in conservatives' anti-intellectual fantasies
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In early 2010s I had a TA give me an A without grading. When I confronted him he said "Why do you care, you know you're getting an A anyways?" Lol. He got reprimanded though.
Everyone I know who's ever done uni marking was getting paid a pittance and expected to work at an extremely fast rate.. I kinda understand this
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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
Multiple choice often fails to allow full demonstration of understanding, and especially at college level, that matters much more.
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Um, the text is green, so it is clearly the unvarnished truth
Clearly unvarnished. Left exposed to the elements to corrode
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Professors don't work like that.
Yup, they have their TAs grade exams and grade on a curve so only a fixed percent passes.
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I was a physics major, and the whole department was famous for this. I think it's just lazy. They don't make the test for what they actually taught, they just throw shit against the wall and see what sticks.
That's pretty common for math heavy classes, the tests are ridiculous and they grade on a curve.
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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.
Eh, I had a physics class like this and the test questions had so many moving pieces that missing one would give you the wrong answer, even if you remembered all the formulas and otherwise did the problem correctly. So getting 1/4 right was actually pretty good in the stressful environment of the testing center. And there were only like 4 problems anyway, and you'd get partial credit, so a 30-40% meant you probably got one right and had the right approach on the others. You also don't get full credit unless you show all your work, so even a savant probably wouldn't get 100%.
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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.Add to this that exams need to be different each year to prevent cheating and you can easily get a few bad questions.
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In my uni, professors are expected to teach almost 220h/years of in person teaching (correcting doesn’t count, nor preparing), on top of “being a team playing” and doing quite some extra bureaucratic work. Obviously on top of doing their own research. Good teachers (professors that care about teaching quality) look like ghosts by the end of the academic year…
Each college does it differently. Some allow professors to choose research vs teaching, some require a fixed balance.
