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<p>More testable standards does not necessarily dictate harsh grading. Harsh grading has to do with grade curves, which are set arbitrarily. For example, what if you score a 50% on an engineering exam - what letter grade would you receive? If the course is an engineering weeder at a school that is infamous for difficult grading, it might be an F. If the course is an easier engineering course at a school with high grade curves, it might well be an A. </p>
<p>It also depends on where that 50% score stands relative to the score of the other students who took that same exam. This is not a contrived example. I once knew a guy who scored a 30% on an engineering exam…and celebrated. Why? Because the mean was a 25% with a tight distribution, which meant that his 30%, once curved, was effectively equal to an A. He freely admitted that he knew practically nothing about what was happening on the exam and performed terribly. But that didn’t matter - all that mattered is the other students performed even worse. On the other hand, I know another guy who scored somewhere in the 70’s or 80’s on an engineering exam (I can’t remember exactly), and panicked - because the mean was a 95%, which meant that his score translated to at best a D, and probably an F. It didn’t matter that he did fairly well on the exam. All that mattered is that the other students did better. </p>
<p>Hence, even if the actual components of the material are easily testable, your grade may be entirely arbitrary anyway. After all, why should it matter how well the other students are doing on an exam? All that should matter is how well you are doing on an exam, and what the other students do shouldn’t matter. But for the purposes of grade curving, it (sadly) does matter. You actually want the other students to do poorly, because that then improves your grade. </p>
<p>What that means is that grading in technical courses (eng, natural sciences, math, etc.) is often times just as arbitrary as the grading in the ‘softer’ subjects. But that still begs the question of why the grading in the technical courses also has to be harder in the sense of assigning lower grade distributions than do the softer subjects.</p>