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Apparently Harvard has taken steps to lessen this practice and has set goals to hire more of its tenured track faculty. They used to hire only 40% of their tenure track faculty (pre-1986) now they hire about 60%.</p>
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<p>Nope, but when there is some sort of curve that ensures that everybody passes, that makes the course non-rigorous - by definition.</p>
<p>I completely disagree. A brilliant teacher can make everyone understand the material and do reasonably well. There is no need to arbitrarily lay in a normal distribution. Arbitrarily curving grades so that the kid with the 85 fails is the province of nasty people with small minds.</p>
<p>annasdad - I am not sure how you define a curve (It sounds like you are differentiating between two professors teaching one class) but when one goes to a rigorous engineering school, there are classes where the highest grades may average to be 40 out of 100, especially with open book exams and infinite time. Should they all have flunked the class?</p>
<p>PG - Who said talking about football is dumb? It’s not what, it’s how they say that makes anything dumb or intelligent.</p>
<p>Hunt, It is the mystery to me. As you mentioned, kids already took calculus, most likely AP Calc, in HS. Where does this hating math and science come from? They hate it so much that they should be coddled into taking funny math science courses to satisfy graduation requirement? I don’t really get it. It seems to contradict to their admissions statement.</p>
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<p>First of all, I have not argued anywhere that the requirement or lack of requirement for math and science has anything at all to do with the rigor of a university. I actually have argued (not on this thread but elsewhere) that a well-taught history or literature course is just as rigorous as a math or science course.</p>
<p>So my congratulations for so expertly setting up your straw man then demolishing it.</p>
<p>Second, if you knew as much about my D’s high school as you think you do, you’d know that saying there is “comparatively short shrift given to humanities” is nonsense. The social studies/English/foreign language requirements for graduation are basically the same as at any other high school in Illinois, and at least in the social studies curriculum, the courses are taught with much more rigor than at many high schools. How many one-semester history courses does the average high school student take that require 400+ pages of reading and two 20+ page papers? Furthermore, many of the students take more than the required humanities courses - this year, for example, my D is taking two languages, third year German and first year Russian, even though the minimum grad requirements are for just two years of a single language.</p>
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<p>Impossible to answer in the abstract. Will the bridge designed by the student with the 40 fall down? If yes, then that student should fail. If no, perhaps not.</p>
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<p>I guess I would rephrase this to: “some sort of curve that allows everybody to pass”</p>
<p>The professors I know don’t want students to “fail” because they don’t see it as serving any purpose. If they can’t do the work, they are encouraged to drop out before a failing grade or W is on their transcript. What purpose does failing serve in acquiring an education? I am, of course, assuming an education is the ultimate goal of college and not just getting some grades to put on an application for the next phase of life.</p>
<p>Frankly, when you have a freshman class full of over-achieving, type A valedictorians, grades really need to be de-emphasized imho - My guess is when you see this situation IRL, your views might change.</p>
<p>Now I am going to try very hard to be quiet while waiting for the professors reading the thread to respond to your comments.</p>
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<p>So people go to Caltech for a well rounded education? I thought a core curriculum was to force students to have a wider perspective.</p>
<p>^^of course you are right. I didn’t think what I wrote was that unclear in its purpose. Especially followed up with a shout-out for LAC’s :)</p>
<p>Also I am not smart enough to “debate” anyone and will just concede right now.</p>
<p>edit: I know nothing first-hand about caltech. For all I know they have a core that rivals Chicago or Columbia.</p>
<p>I am not even sure they are designing bridges at this point as much as trying to see if Einstein was wrong. These tests are usually designed to come up with answers for problems that have no answers like the one described early on in the thread, just to push people into trying to solve problems together.</p>
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See this is what I don’t get. There seems to be a completely different philosophy about how to construct a test. Basically in engineering a large portion of the test is either material that the students haven’t had yet, so only students who study ahead (or have access to old exams) can do well, or only students who are so brilliant that they can figure it out on the spot can do well. I don’t believe in curves. I think a test should test the material you want the students to know. Maybe you put in a few questions to identify the brilliant students, but I don’t see why those questions should be the bulk of the test. IMO you should have a notion of say what a student needs to know to design a safe bridge, or make a circuit that does “x”. Those students should get a good grade. If you’ve got a class full of brilliant mathematicians and they all get grades from 98 to 100 on a test, they can all get A’s. No need to give the 98s C’s.</p>
<p>OTOH, why can’t the curve go from 30-40 on a 100 point scale for an A? </p>
<p>You may have 5 really difficult problems on a test and one may get to only 2 questions on the test in whole in the given time. I am used to the 100 point scale being completely available to me but for some reason some of the harder schools seem to work totally differently. I have heard these stories from IIT students from India and also Caltech and MIT where a test is so hard that only part of the test can be completed.</p>
<p>When I was teaching an online college course, I based my grading categories on degree of demonstrated mastery of the material. I taught the class several times, and gave out a quite different mix of grades each time, because in some classes there were a number of excellent students, and in others there were very few. In my mind, it would have been nonsensical to give out the same number of As each time. I would have been delighted to have a class of students who all earned As. But there was a tremendous variation in the levels of ability and preparation among the students in those classes–something that is going to be much less likely at Yale or Caltech.</p>
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I’ve never really understood the point of this. Is it really just grandstanding by the professor? It would be like giving students in an English class 30 minutes to write a 50 page paper, and then giving As to whoever wrote the longest good one, even if it was only 20 pages long. Why?</p>
<p>Hunt - I have no idea why these hard tests are given! I just know the scale and curve are completely off in such classes.</p>
<p>Anyone here from IIT/MIT/Caltech who experienced such classes who want to shed some light?</p>
<p>I guess there are two reasons for profs to give long and hard tests:</p>
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<li><p>Give students a chance to work on problems that they know. Out of 6 problems on the test, each student may know to solve at most 2 or 3, regardless of the allocated time. Testing is a mean for profs to evaluate students. If profs give only 3 problems then most students can only solve 1 or 2 and profs have less chance to assess students’ understanding of the topics covered in the course.</p></li>
<li><p>Maybe once in a while there are some geniuses that have ability to solve most or all problems. Profs want to identify those.</p></li>
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<p>And think that’s why they have Math 55 at Harvard.</p>
<p>Regarding A in humanities vs STEM: In the country where I came from and in some other countries, it’s not easy to get A in social sciences, literatures, and humanities while STEM students can. In my HS, the highest score students can get out of a literature or philosophy essay is 7, and rarely 8 out of 10 and students get 9, 10 on math and science tests all the time.</p>
<p>I have to admit that I am astonished by mathmom’s statement that Harvard tenured 40% of its junior faculty pre-1986. I was on the faculty job market in the “pre-1986” era, and it was common knowledge that if one went to Harvard as an Assistant Professor, one needed to plan on moving–although starting at Harvard generally permitted one to get a tenured position at a good university. That was the experience of 100% of those in my field, taken moderately broadly. In fact, at the time, 2 people in my area had been tenured in the past 15 years after starting as Assistant Professors at Harvard, and both had been college students there. mathmom has been at Harvard, though, and I haven’t. So maybe it’s just my general field?</p>
<p>sewhappy - I think you hit the nail on the head. that is exactly what I was asking about. straightforward question and answers that you are prepared for when you show up at a test vs a test where you have to sit around and think about the question itself. It did not have to be Math or science, could be english literature and the question goes - How would Bernard Shaw write a play about George Bush’s Gulf War I.</p>
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<p>I know, right? Wouldn’t that be weird for a smart humanities kid to not want to take a lot of math and science? That would almost be as weird as a smart math-and-science kid not wanting to take a lot of humanities courses and seeking out an environment where humanities are de-emphasized. Oh whoops, that’s Caltech. Well, I guess that’s different.</p>
<p>Why the double standard? Why the admiration for the focus-on-math-and-science-kid and the lack of caring that he doesn’t have a classics / humanities core, but the scorn for the humanities-kid and the concern that he doesn’t have a math and science core? Make up your mind. Look, either well-rounded is good, or angular is good (or either are fine) but don’t engage in the hypocrisy of dictating that angular is wonderful when it’s a STEM kid but awful when it’s a humanities kid. If it’s just fine and dandy that the Caltech kid doesn’t take Classic Greek Mythology, then it’s just fine and dandy that the Hunts of the world don’t take Advanced Differential Equations.</p>
<p>Thanks, texas, but I deleted my post. It just felt exploitive to talk about my poor boy’s travails with science classes at his easy elite school.</p>