<p>Your professor has the right to do whatever he wants as long as he complies with university policy and lets you know in advance via the syllabus. I’m not sure what you’re asking/looking for here. If it’s sympathy, I’m afraid I can’t provide any since I find curving grades a ridiculous concept.</p>
<p>As your professor told you, you’re not entitled to a good grade just because you suck slightly less than average.</p>
<p>For the record, I’ve had professors who curve, yes. In classes where I was below average and in classes where I was at or near the top of the curve. Getting a great grade in the former felt like a total cop-out because I knew I didn’t deserve an A based on how hard I was working/how well I understood the material.</p>
<p>You make a valid point. Curving may feel like a cop-out in cases like this. But I view it a little differently. </p>
<p>If it was grading based on the understanding of the material, then I understand the no curving piece. After all, in mastery of the material, there are strict guidelines along the lines of " student X is the know Y, by time Z". In this case, the grading is simply “how well the student knows what I’m teaching”. </p>
<p>However, I always gotten the feeling, and even more so in college, that classes are not a “students vs. material” kind of thing, but more of a “student vs. student” performance. It all feels like a competition to me. That’s why accelerated programs, honors programs, and all that jazz exist. They are opportunities given to those who perform above their peers. In this case, grading is not based on how well the material is known, but simply “how well student X performs against student Y on subject Z”. </p>
<p>This could just be years of influence or exposure or whatever, but that is why the grading curve system makes sense to me. If it is student v. student, the average standard has to be set by the students as well, as opposed to an arbitrary point that is decided beforehand. </p>
<p>OK, so your class doesn’t curve. Cool. However, I think there needs to be a bar that is set as to what constitutes a good grade. In some uncurved classes at my college the average grade is 30-40%. So does that mean that the students who have high C’s have a good grade relative to the class? Or have they still not mastered the material enough? And what type of a grade would constitute “understanding the material well enough”? In my opinion, it’s not going to be an A all the time.
I also feel like the college you attend plays a role too. Like, for example, I attend UC Davis right now, and I guess our C is probably worth more than a C at the University of Alabama and less than a C at Harvard, assuming similar classes are compared.
I think we all know that you don’t have to ace all your classes in college to land a decent job afterwards. In my opinion, getting an A is ideal, but getting a C+ in some classes is already a huge achievement. And I know people who struggled to pass certain major-required courses in college and are doing really well right now. Unfortunately, there is no way a college professor can quantify future success and can only look at how you performed in his/her class, which is based off of a few assignments and tests.</p>
<p>“One problem with curving is that it is unfair to the students who do not need the curve. How is it fair that both the student with the 70% (pretend that this is the second highest score in the class) on the exam and the student with the 100% on the exam receives the same grade, an ‘A’? Also, a top score curve would not work in this situation because the top score is a 100%. Therefore, I have decided not to curve the exam.”</p>
<p>This was pretty much the argument one of my high school teachers made. I made up the percentages though because I do not remember them. Also, the exam was a practice IB exam, and a low score could still result in a “7” (IB exams are out of 7 while AP exams are out of 5).</p>
<p>Anyways, I do not really have an opinion on curved tests.</p>
<p>AP exams are curved heavily - I was told that around a 60% was a 5 for many courses. The College Board designs the examinations so that it is almost impossible to get a perfect or close to perfect raw score (but a couple of people every year do manage it.) The SAT is curved as well, but not nearly as much as AP exams - and the curve on the SAT varies by section. One section would have a relatively generous curve (I believe it was Critical Reading) so that a student may still receive a perfect score if they got 1-3 questions wrong - where as the Math section docked points as soon as you got one wrong. I might be confusing the two and its vice versa but you get the idea. </p>
<p>In my one class that does curve - Environmental Science - there are about 400 people, and only one person usually receives a 90+% and it’s always a low 90 on the test. So, if there was no curve, it’d mean that one guy would get an A, and then 399 students wouldn’t get an A. So, the professor takes the class average and turns it into a B - thus making the number of students receiving an A jump from 1 to like, 50. Unsure of the merit or logic in it, but that’s how he does it. I’m not complaining personally because that course is a non-major general ed and I’m never the person who gets the 90; so I’ll take an A if the professor wants to call my raw 82 an “A.” God bless that kid who always manages the 90 (I’m pretty sure it’s the same person), though. </p>
<p>@preamble1776 yeah it’s truly crazy how AP tests are curved. I got a 5 on all of them. However, I believe a 5 basically means “you would pass a similar college class” and not “you will ace this college class”. After all, the cutoff is usually something ridiculous like 70%. At my college some can even pass out of a class if they got a 3 on the respective AP exam, but I can imagine they tend not to do too well in the next level up though. After all, I’m struggling in Calculus B after passing out of Calculus A with a 5 on the AP Calculus AB exam. And I don’t know how anyone is going to get an A in my computer science class, even though most everyone passed the AP Computer Science exam with a 5.</p>
<p>In theory, yes. However, if a test or project requires anything more than memorizing Y, such as applying Y to some sort of problem, an instructor needs be very exact with the difficulty of the problems presented in order to use non-curve grading. This is not the easiest problem to solve, even with lower level multiple choice tests like the SAT, where the “experimental” sections are used to calibrate the difficulty of proposed test questions before they are used “for real”.</p>
<p>Yes, the instructor can recycle tests in order for them to be the exact same difficulty from semester to semester, but this is bad practice in many other respects.</p>
<p>@collegeamateur - Eh, I don’t know. I think that depends on the college. Maybe at MIT, AP Calc AB can’t cut it - but at my school, getting a 5 in AP Calc BC places you in Calc III or Linear Algebra and the students I know who got placed into those classes are thriving. Similarly, I got a 5 in AP Language and Literature and was placed in a higher level English course and it’s easier than the AP versions I took in high school. </p>
<p>I think that the material you retain in those classes are important - but just as important is the skills you absorb in learning them which carry over into college. I took AP World, got a 5, (got credit for two different history classes), and while I can’t tell you what dynasty came after the Zhou, (Song? No. That can’t be right.) I can tell you that some of the skills (critical reading, evidence synthesis, succinct summarization) I learned in that class I happen to use in all of my courses in college. </p>
<p>However, note that MIT’s frosh calculus courses are accelerated, so that the first semester course 18.01 is equivalent to most of the first two semesters of calculus at most other schools. After completing the second semester course 18.02, the MIT student will have covered the material found in three semesters at most other schools.</p>
<p>The idea of not curving grades is dumb, for any class. The point of curving is so a distribution can be created that means that the grades have meaning to them. If you have 80% of students getting a B or a C or whatever grade you’re not using the distribution of available grades well to distinguish between students. </p>
<p>That reasoning doesn’t make any sense to me. How does a standard, non-curved grading system not distinguish between students? The students with the A’s are the students that have worked hardest to learn, understand, and use the material. Similarly, the students who have gotten F’s have demonstrated that they have not worked to learn, understand, and use the material. B’s, C’s, and D’s, show various levels of comprehension within the spectrum. What difference does it make if the grades are doctored to make a smooth curve on a graph? If the majority of students are getting B’s or C’s, why would a smooth curve to distribute them across a wider section of the spectrum create a more fair or accurate representation? </p>
<p>Honestly, the idea of curving makes no sense to me. If two people out of 100 got A’s on an exam, and the rest got low C’s, D’s, and F’s…why should it be curved to move the lower students up? A high F should not be turned into a low C, which is what happens with many curves. </p>
<p>Curving only makes sense when:
the instructor recognizes that the test included concepts that were not thoroughly introduced in class/reading
the questions were of a ‘qualitative’ nature (not math or science!)
it’s a new test or material and we aren’t sure about expected outcomes</p>
<p>I often teach gatekeeper courses where the distribution is a double-hump. Half the class gets better than an 80% and almost half the class gets less than 60%. I don’t really need to add points to the student with an 88%, and the student with a 50% isn’t going to pass no matter how many points I add.</p>
<p>The only time curves actually were in effect, as far as I’m concerned, is when the average was failing, and then all grades were curved up so that the average student would pass. Did your experience with curves resemble this?</p>
<p>What @baktrax said. I went to college back in the dark ages, when personal computers were just becoming popular, and someone at my Ivy university decided that ALL students, regardless of major, should take a BASIC computing course. Problem was, some students from big high schools had already seen computer programming while others from small schools (like me) had never even touched a computer before. And the course was curved. So I remember one exam where I so pleased to get a 90 but that turned out to be a C because of the curve .</p>
<p>I teach social sciences to mostly humanities majors at an open-admissions college (where, FWIW, grade inflation isn’t really a thing). I also write very detailed, comprehensive, difficult exams and problem sets. I don’t expect students to do perfectly on any of them, but to show competence—but still, the average grade on some of them may fall below 75% at times, particularly if it turns out I pitched it too hard.</p>
<p>I don’t curve grades on individual assignments, though, but rather only on final grades. (I also only ever curve upward—I had the experience of having an 84% turn out as a D as an undergrad, and that just seemed utterly wrong to me. If I write an overly easy exam, that’s on me and the students shouldn’t be penalized for it.)</p>
<p>I feel like most of the people on this thread are:
Professors
Grad students that TA or teach classes
The top students in their class, or otherwise graduated at the top of their class
Not calling anyone out, just curious to see if that’s really the case because the majority of my classmates and college friends elsewhere hate classes that don’t have curves.</p>
<p>Because that’s what the curve does. It creates a more fair, accurate, and useful representation of the abilities of the students. What is unclear?</p>
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<p>You don’t get an “A” or an “F” on a test. You get a numerical score on a test. The distinction of “D” and “F” are slightly different, but between “A,” “B,” and “C” why shouldn’t the whole spectrum be used. I’ll say I’ve had a few classes where 80% of the grades assigned were between a B- and a B+. That’s just useless. </p>
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<p>The distribution need not necessarily be a plurality of “B” grades given. If it makes more sense to have dual pluralities of “C” grades and “A” grades given that can make sense given how the class went. It’s only a problem if most of the spectrum of grades is not used. </p>
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<p>I think I had one class in college where grades were curved “backwards” from the standard 10-pt high school scale. Wasn’t drastically, but the average grade numerically was probably in the low 90s and they didn’t want to just assign As to 3/4 of the class. </p>
<p>What is unclear is why a standard grading scale is somehow less accurate. Why does it -need- to be a smooth curve? If 10% of students fell in the 90%-100% range on an exam, 36% fell in the 80%-90% range, 32% fell in the 70%-80% range, 10% fell in the 60%-70% range, and 12% fell in the <60% range…how is this not a clear representation of the standing? Data does not always make nice smooth curves. Sometimes it has dramatic peaks and valleys. This in and of itself makes for a more accurate representation of data. Perhaps I simply see this in a fundamentally different way, but inflating a students grade doesn’t paint a more accurate picture of their abilities. It gives them a false sense of accomplishment and the knowledge that they don’t have to work so hard because they’ll be saved by the curve. </p>
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