<p>Is curving the whole grade good for " smart students" ?
Thank you</p>
<p>Define “whole grade”, “good”, and “smart student”. </p>
<p>In other words, what do you mean by the question and what is the context?</p>
<p>Do you mean curving the grade on a test? Or for an overall course?</p>
<p>Generally, curving a grade gives people extra points they might not deserve. This can be good for the numeric grade, but it might not be good for the student who genuinely wants to be graded on the quality of their own work. IME, when a professor curves something, it’s usually because a lot of students did poorly and the professor wants to have a certain average. If a person is smart, they’ll do well on the test already, but they’ll get extra points. So if they want to be challenged and graded accordingly, this might irritate them.</p>
<p>I think it’s good for everyone, because it eliminates the chance that students will get lower grades than they deserve due to a the material not being taught well. Sometimes it’s the teachers fault, not always the student, for the grade. Curving eliminates this problem for everyone.</p>
<p>Honestly, I’d say it depends on your peers. A curve means that how you do depends on how well everyone else is doing… if you’re smarter than the average student, the curve works in your favor. If everyone at your school is amazing and competing for top grades, well, curves are a nightmare.</p>
<p>If you’re a “smart student” relative to the rest of your classmates, yes, curves are a good thing.</p>
<p>Curving is not always helpful. Has anyone heard of bell curve?? Percentage adjusted curving? So many different waves to curve…some more helpful than others…</p>
<p>Exactly Niquii77,</p>
<p>there is no one “curve” that is used everywhere so any statements about the impact of “curves” without specifying what type of curve is being used is meaningless.</p>
<p>As an engineering major, I live and die by the curve. All curves. I’m not a huge fan of the bell curve because there aren’t any guaranteed grades so if everyone does really well, you can be screwed. But so far all of my curved classes have favored me for the most part.</p>
<p>Most of my professors explicitly state at the beginning of the course that if they do curve the class, they will always curve in favor of the students and not against them. In other words, if everyone gets an A, they won’t curve at all, while if everyone gets an F, they will curve (and usually they curve by making the average grade a B- or a C and then each standard deviation away is another letter grade). So in the vast majority of cases (in my experience), the curve is a good thing for pretty much everyone, and most of the time in my classes without the curve everyone would fail.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I’ve had one professor that made a bell curve, regardless of how well or poorly the students did. So because many students did very well, the cutoff for an A- was 93%. That was the only time I had ever even heard of a professor doing that at my school, but it happens. So it depends on what professors think the curve is for. In most cases, I’ve found that professors use a curve to adjust for extremely difficult tests (I’ve had professors who say outright that they write the test expecting an average grade of 50% or lower) or to account for things that might not have been taught well. Other professors use the curve to normalize the distribution of grades, regardless of the performance of students, but I’ve found this to be a rarer situation.</p>
<p>Thanks Everyone</p>