<p>""If everyone in any class at Yale fails a test, they should fire the professor. "</p>
<p>Many friends who teach/TA undergrad courses at Ivies like Harvard have ranted endlessly about the entitled mentality embodied in the above sentence. It is also the mentality which prompts said entitled student and/or his/her parents to throw temper tantrums at the Prof/TA and in some extreme cases…actually threaten lawsuits with actual lawyers. Just because one excelled in high school with stratospheric GPAs and SAT scores is no guarantee one will…or more importantly…should excel in college without some good-faith effort expended on the student’s part. </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>
<p>One factor in this is the abysmal lack of math and science preparation in US K-12…even at many private high schools…which IME causes even straight A high math SAT scoring students to end up struggling in intro math and science courses…or even flunking them. Saw this at my SLAC and at Harvard in that summer stats course where many Harvard undergrads were panicked about failing that class. </p>
<p>Another factor is by Professorial design in order to “weed out” less capable and/or less motivated/dedicated students in the first year. A reason why so many science/engineering majors I knew said the intro science/engineering courses were felt harder than the more advanced courses. Experienced this firsthand in two intro CS courses for majors where 40-50% of my classmates ended up flunking each of the courses. A friend who was a bio major at Tufts said 60% flunked the intro bio courses he took by the end of their first year. </p>
<p>Moreover, there have been universities/colleges which had “weed out” policies across the board in order to abide by lax in-state admission policies and/or reap the benefits of extra tuition dollars from students who end up being flunked out. Several older Profs mentioned that state universities in their home states had that policy where up to half the entering freshman class ends up being “weeded out” by the end of their sophomore year. I also know of at least one private university which employed the same policies before they substantially raised their admissions standards so their USNWR standing would be in the top 100 rather than below it.</p>