<p>
</p>
<p>I am not using that statement as a persuasive statement, and in fact, I myself have decried the wanton use of grade curves.</p>
<p>What I am saying is that this is a far bigger battle than you may have imagined: the fact is, plenty of university programs enforce grade curves in which some students must fail. If you want to join me in having them stop that, I welcome the support. And the first battlefield in which we ought to fight is with the engineering programs, practically all of which are notorious for rough grading that serves to discourage students from studying engineering and hence will likely contribute to the weakening of the US technological base. One major reason why the US has to import so much foreign engineering talent is because Americans don’t really want to study engineering because they don’t want to risk their GPA’s, especially when compared to students in easier majors who earn higher grades for less work. </p>
<p>Consider the lamentations of Duke professor Stuart Rojstaczer:</p>
<p>*Duke is actually a good example of the loss of talent in science and technology that happens in college.</p>
<p>Unlike most colleges and universities, Duke’s undergraduate engineering school has a separate admissions office. Every year it has to oversubscribe its admissions because many students will leave the engineering school and transfer into arts and sciences after a year, typically majoring in the social sciences. When you ask students why they make this move, they often say it’s because of the workload and grading.</p>
<p>There is also significant attrition across college campuses when it comes to potential biology majors, typically those who initially wanted to go into medical fields. Again, the driver for this attrition is workload and grading.</p>
<p>There are those who argue that this attrition is a good thing, and I would agree to some extent. We don’t want mediocrity in the design of our bridges and machines, or in a hospital operating room. But some of this attrition is undoubtedly unnecessary.</p>
<p>I don’t want to dwell on Duke, but many of those who move out of engineering have the talent to excel. In conversations with them, I have heard a common story about seeing people in dorms partying away and wondering, “Why not me?”</p>
<p>That’s what I mean by unnecessary (and harmful) attrition. I don’t believe that the sciences and engineering should demand less of their students. Rather, the social sciences and humanities need to demand more.*</p>
<p>[Grade</a> Inflation: Your Questions Answered - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/grade-inflation-your-questions-answered/]Grade”>Grade Inflation: Your Questions Answered - The New York Times)</p>
<p>But I will provide a (partial) defense of engineering curves: they sometimes prevent the entire class from failing. As a case in point, I know one guy who got a 30% on an engineering exam…and celebrated. Why? Because the mean score was a 25%. He freely admitted that he had no clue what was happening on the exam - but that didn’t matter, because he knew more than the average student who knew even less, and so his 30%, as pathetic as it may have been, at least meant that he wasn’t failing. Even the highest scoring student of the class only earned something in the 50-60’s Without a curve, everybody would have failed.</p>
<p>Nor is this story - while certainly unusual - as extreme as one might think. Many engineering and science exams at most schools - likely even ones at Yale - have mean scores of around 50%. In fact, such test scoring is generally calibrated, through the allocation of partial credit, to have such a mean in order to effect an evenly distributed bell-curve with well-defined tails on both ends. Without a grade curve to accompany the 50%-centered distribution, the majority of the class who scored less than 60% would fail.</p>