<p>Wow, looks like I'm not the only person that is panicking over first semester grades. Anyhow, I have a question and was wondering if you guys could help me with. </p>
<p>I am currently attending a small liberal arts college in my state (it's not very well known), and there's a certain professor at our school that is infamous for being a tough grader, and I found out a bit too late so I couldn't drop the course and decided to stick it through. Well, I just got my grade back today and it seems that I'm 1% away from an A due to the extremely difficult final that he gave out.</p>
<p>After talking to him I found out that I got the highest grade on both the midterm (83% before curve, 93% after curve) and on the final (90%), but due to losing points here and there on various assignments, I still ended up with a B. This is a class with around 22 students, and I'm pretty certain that I had the highest grade in the class with a 89%.</p>
<p>I know it's not the end of the world, but on the other hand I am considering transferring into a more selective university with better programs. I was hoping for a 4.0 semester but this effectively breaks it and could hurt my chances.</p>
<p>My question for you guys is, have you had a professor that refused to give out As to anyone? Is this normal at college? What, if anything, can I do to fix it? Should I go talk to him more or contact one of my academic advisors?</p>
<p>Thanks for your time, and hope everyone is having a good winter break. :)</p>
<p>I don't think it's a case of the professor refusing to give A's. You just happened to earn a very high B. If the prof. is as hard a grader as he is reputed to be, you should be really proud to have earned such a great grade. And if he's such a tough grader, the chances of him bumping you up to an A is, um, likely nil. Be happy with what you've got and move on.</p>
<p>I probably should feel that way, but I guess the pre-med slave mentality of needing a 4.0 is engraved in my mind. XD Thanks for your input though. </p>
<p>Professors don't "give" As (or Bs, Cs, Ds, or Fs). You earn them. It's impressive that you earned the highest grade in the class, but remember that you earned a high B; the professor didn't "give" you a high B.</p>
<p>If you've done well and your prof likes you, you can consider asking that prof to write you a LOR. If anything, he might be the BEST LOR writer you can ask for in order for that "B" to be justified.</p>
<p>I had a prof who really makes her students work hard to earn A, not if not A+, in her class, including papers. When I came to pick up my research paper, she said that it was one of the best she's read and I had the highest grade. I felt awesome but was in dazed ecause I had never won that spot before. Because of what she said, I decided to ask her to write my LOR for grad school. She wanted me to see her LOR so I said fine and read it. She admitted in there that she had a reputation for being a difficult grader and was astonished that I had met her standards, and felt that I could really handle grad school.</p>
<p>Counter-question: is a professor allowed to not fail anyone?</p>
<p>If yes, then the answer to your question is also yes. To be normally (and, by definition, properly) distributed, every A must have a corresponding F. Unfortunately, grade inflation has prevented that from happening, but personally, I really think we need to set a m=75 w/ SD=10 as a grading standard. That would fix the issue of grade inflation...and students' petty complaining.</p>
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personally, I really think we need to set a m=75 w/ SD=10 as a grading standard
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<p>I'm assuming you mean you think all grades should be curved to m=75. Otherwise, your statement doesn't make much sense. As for SD, that's purely based on the grades of the students as I'm sure you are aware. Assuming that how exams are graded is based on the keys and therefore can be considered inflexible, the only way to have SD=10 is if the students' scores are distributed in such a way as to make it that way. You can't just arbitrarily set that. </p>
<p>Of course, you could also mean you want to set m=75 and make letter grade cutoffs every 10% up and down from that. In that case, it's likely that the students' grades will not be normally distributed at all, thus defeating the purpose of using that system anyway.</p>
<p>Sure you can. It's called curving....
Basically, I'm suggesting a standardized grading system with a C-average and a single grade letter for a standard deviation, making a C Z=-.5 to .5, B/D would be Z=±.5-1.5 and Z=±1.5+ would be an A/F. You can give tests that are beyond the level of any student in class and then curve upward from there. Such a test might test students on things they did not learn in class (stuff that's in the book only or maybe can only be found by doing some outside reading from the books the prof referenced in the syllabus).
I think it's ridiculous that so many people have above a 3.0. That's supposed to be "above-average," but instead we have an extremely skewed grading system that really makes no sense; however, professors cannot fix the problem b/c giving a low score on something gets people all mad. The solution? Z-score everyone's grades.
In my experience, grades actually do typically distribute normally; it's just that the mean is often 83-90% (B to A- range) with an SD of around 5, which doesn't provide for a very useful measure of students' abilities!</p>
<p>Such a system might work...if we can convince everyone that C is really average. Apumic, you said it yourself in one of the other threads, that a 2.54 wouldn't get you very far. Yet, a cumulative 2.54 GPA would indicate a person that's above average (2.0), or at the very least average in your system. In order for your grading scheme to work, then we need to accept that there will be many people who will have that kind of GPA and overcome people's conception that a 2.5 =fail.</p>
<p>Right, a 2.54 won't get you very far in today's system because it'd be equivalent to a D+ average! (see below)
Using the latest available data from the California State U-San Marcos (cum GPAs of all students, Fall 2007), the mean GPA there is about 2.95 with an SD of about 0.6. With that in mind, a 2.54 is Z=-.68. Using my model (m=2.0, SD=1.0 GPA), that GPA is equivalent to a 1.32. Basically, what that model would do is create more space toward the top of the GPA spectrum where it matters most since there would be far fewer 4.0s (only 2% of the population would receive above a 95% in any given class and it would be closer to 0.6% that would get a perfect score in any given course).
Using that model, the high 3.xx range would be opened up, allowing for meaningful differences between, say, a 3.6 and a 3.7 since the SD would be over 1.5x the size.
Additionally, since the courses themselves would be harder in order to make that system work, students would be likely to learn more and work harder to obtain those grades -- no longer would Bs be second best. They'd actually be an accomplishment!
A 3.5 is currently only the 82nd percentile. A 3.0 is hardly better than average (53rd percentile). A 2.0 (C-average) is not even the 6th percentile (should be the 50th according to the old idea that a C was "average")! YES! A C IS FAILING in college with the current system. If you have an actual failing GPA (<1.0) according to the current system, you are in the bottom 0.0577% of all students! (Hey, at least you can say you're just about 1 in a million!) I mean, that's great that we are so "successful" at making sure students don't fail, but seriously?! I've graded a heck of a lot of students' work that I wondered how they ever got to out of high school! And these were juniors and seniors in college! We should be holding back students who are significantly below the mean and helping them, not simply inflating grades to get them out of our public high schools and universities "unscathed."</p>
<p>So yeah... end of rant... what was the topic again? Sorry... I just don't think grade inflation is the answer and assuming that a prof "cannot not give As" is just another symptom of that issue. Academic success (esp. for at risk students) has been one of my primary research areas.</p>
<p>Well, as long as the perception persists in the greater society, there's really nothing that can be done. To change the grading system would be unfair to the students as it puts them at the disadvantage compared with other grade inflated students.</p>