I hope you were smart enough to record that interaction, anon.
My major in college for my BS included all but 2 credit hours of a physics minor, so my final semester, I took Thermal Physics to complete that minor. I’ve never met a physics course I didn’t ace, so I figured “easy A”.
I’m quite certain I was the highest scorer in the course and was a solid B+ before the final. I took the final and felt really good about how well I did. I thought sure that professor would curve (or otherwise adjust the grades) and I’d be the one that threw off the curve.
I got my grades back. I got a C. My only C ever, in fact. An A (what I expected) would have gotten me summa cum laude.
The same semester, I took a statistics class. Paid exactly zero attention in class. The class took place in a computer lab for no good reason other than I’m guessing the other classrooms were booked. I played a fast-paced Quake-like FPS every class all class. Got an A in that course.
But that fuckin’ thermal physics class.
Years later, a coworker of mine who was an alum of my alma mater told me that they’d taken the professor who taught that thermal physics class off of teaching permanently due to his completely unreasonable grading practices.
I feel kinda bad for anyone ADHD sat behind you, because there’s one data structures class where I don’t remember a damn thing except the dude in front of me 1CC-ing Einhander.
This is a certified this totally happened moment
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).
Anon is just making a fake post. Literally no college would authorize this type of shit and I’d argue there could be grounds for a civil lawsuit if they did. Paying them tens of thousands of dollars and one of their professors admits to just auto failing students because there’s too many in the class? Nah, I’ve attended 3 different schools before I graduated (I moved a lot), and every single one would drop you before class even began or within the first week if the class was too full.
If this did actually happen to OP, I can guarantee there’s more to the story they’re not telling us. But I’m going to assume it’s made up or extremely exaggerated/altered.
Yeah, it’s way too easy to prove that the exam was graded wrong. Given the economic incentives, some of the failed students are definitely going to sue if you’re going to be that blatant about it.
I remember that my statistics professor was so smug about grading on a curve because it was using statistics. It was also a class that he gloated about as a class where you “needed an a” if you wanted to get into grad school. In other words, the asshole was making sure only a certain number of people even had a chance to get into the graduate programs. It was rumored that he even ran tests on students in the different labs, telling the grad students teaching the labs to teach in certain ways and seeing if there were any differences. Wouldn’t put it past him.
But he didn’t write anything
i’ve had professors that moved the passing grade based on how many where in the course. 100 people? if you make a single mistake you’re out. he also bragged about this from the start.
i passed by waiting until most of the others left or passed.
organic chem(for life science majors, the one for scientists is more harder) was brutal in my CC, surprisingly, and i found out they made stem courses extremely ivy league level on purpose, because a UC said so or they wont accept transfer students with an “easy grade” i think its bs to keep students perpetually in the school to continue paying for admission.
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.
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.
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.
That’s not fair, they’re also debt slavery scams where they sell false hope to people. They even have entire military boot camp lite night release prisons where they brainwash you into going
I assure you that’s not how it works in Europe. Nowhere near as bad as the US, in any case.
I guess that’s what happens when education is deeply ingrained in the culture.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
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 :/
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.
In Germany, most trades are organized as apprenticeships with a split of work days and school days, which means you’ll basically get paid for school!
That’s a pretty jaded way of thinking about it.
Universities don’t exist to train you for a job, they exist to teach you how to learn. That’s why you take a bunch of seemingly irrelevant classes, such as history, science, and English before you get into your specialization. Basically, half your education is unrelated to your specialty, and much of the rest is theoretical since you’re expected to learn what you actually need in the field.
At the end of the day, most jobs don’t require formal education and they’re happy with practical experience. But most companies won’t hire you wlfornyour first job without some indication you know what you’re doing, and companies trust university degrees as that form of evidence. After your first couple jobs, they really don’t care as much about your formal education.
There are other ways to get that experience, they’re just a lot harder than going through formal education. I’ve hired self taught people that have been fantastic, it’s just a lot harder to prove yourself.
That said, I wish there was a better way to tell kids what other options are. Everyone seems so focused on traditional university education that they don’t consider alternatives.
The curve means the class’s scores is fit onto a bell curve. X% pass, Y% fail, etc all according to the predetermined standard bell curve. Doesn’t matter if the class is full of Einsteins or dunces. If 30% is the highest mark in the class then that’s an A+, and so on.
Usually if everyone gets high scores, a curve isn’t used. The curve is only used if most people score poorly to make up for a bad exam or something.
You still “need” people to fail, so
No, you don’t. That’s not how a curve works, the curve merely improves scores. If a curve would lower scores, it’s not used.
Not what they did for us.
Grading on a curve is indeed that, and it should be criminalized because of how much it harms students
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.
I’ve never heard of a curve being used to adjust scores downward, only to adjust them upward.
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 :)Grades in the US are on a 4 point scale, with decimal values between:
- 3.5-4.0 - A
- 3.0-3.5 - B
- 2.5-3.0 - C
- 2.0-2.5 - D
- 1.0-2.0 - F
A “good” grade in a class is 3.5 or better, and 2.0 is usually barely passing. Letter grades are used through high school, and high school and college use the 4 point scale on transcripts, and people translate to the letter grades for talking with friends.
In assignments, you get a percent rating, with 60% being barely passing. There’s a lot of granularity there.
Grading on a curve means the professor expects a certain distribution of scores, so of everyone scores poorly, the test is bad, so the scores are readjusted according to that expected curve. If people outperform, then there’s no curve and you get the score you get.
It’s only ever worked to the benefit of the student in my experience
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.
This was my experience at a US university as well.
basically that, yes.
though in my experience, they’d make the tests so hard that everyone would get failing or nearly failing grades, then curve up so that more people pass and some get As
only issue for them is if the average is 36% but 3 students got high 90s… makes the curving math a lot more awkward
-
You forgot to fuck the professor.
-
Dean time!
-
This is so fake that we managed to reach the {fake + gay} threshold without having to tap into the gay potential
Um, the text is green, so it is clearly the unvarnished truth
Clearly unvarnished. Left exposed to the elements to corrode
“gay potential” sounds like the cutest physics term.
Gay potential is measured in homos
Please tell me it uses SI prefixes.
“They measure 1.63 x 10² megahomos!”
We did it, Lemmy!
>anon waits until all the other students leave
>asks the professor what he can “do” to pass
this is a classic porn script, gay/10
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.
suuuuurree
It’s like they didn’t even try to make the story plausible.
Yeah, I studied and taught in STEM. There are true stories about professors who are monsters, but this is pure bullshit.
