<p>If everyone in any class at Yale fails a test, they should fire the professor.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Again, it depends on what you mean by ‘fail’. If by ‘fail’, you mean that every student scored less than a 60% on a particular exam, then many engineering and science professors at HYPS and certainly MC should be fired. Engineering and science exams, even at the top private schools, are notorious for their difficulty. </p>
<p>But that’s the point of the curve: to ensure that not everybody fails, but only that some do. Scoring a consistent 50% on exams is generally considered to be reasonable performance in most engineering programs as the exams are usually calibrated around that point. </p>
<p>But if your beef is with curves in general, again, I would point out that you’re taking on a monstrous battle involving most technical majors, apparently even including ones at Yale. It’s become a cultural norm within the technical majors to implement difficult exams and then assign grades with curves. Practically nobody in those majors expects to “do well” in the sense of actually scoring high absolute percentages on exams, as such a feat is practically impossible. </p>
<p>As a case in point, I know a guy who earned his engineering BS, MS, and PhD all at MIT, hence making him “MIT-cubed”. He once said that couldn’t recall scoring higher than an 80% on any engineering exam even once in his entire time at MIT, whether undergrad or grad, and most of his scores tended to cluster around 50-65%. Yet he was admitted to MIT for grad school and now he’s an engineering professor at a top program that shall remain unnamed and with numerous publications in top journals. His “poor” exam performances, in terms of absolute scores, clearly didn’t hurt him, as the curve saved him every time. Practically everybody in engineering performs “poorly” in terms of absolute scores.</p>
<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>
<p>
</p>
<p>Which then naturally begs the question of why only science/engineering majors tend to weed out less capable and less motivated students while other majors don’t, hence the pejorative but truthful term ‘soft majors’. Why should those other majors permit less capable and dedicated students to remain? Shouldn’t all majors strive to eliminate those students? </p>
<p>I can think of a number of former engineering students who found the major to be too demanding, often times to the point of nearly flunking out, and so was forced to switch to an easier social science or humanities major. How many humanities/soc.sci students find the major to be too hard to the point of flunking out and so were forced to switch to engineering? I’m going to go with ‘zero’, and I don’t think I will be far off. </p>
<p>See below.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The underlying premise here along with the remainder of your post is that while US K-12 students may not be well-prepared in science/math, they are proficient in humanities and arts and social sciences. I must challenge this premise. Is there really any clear evidence to support that notion? Seems to me that US high school seniors, even many of the very best ones, don’t seem to be particularly knowledgeable about literature, arts, history, philosophy, sociology, or economics, relative to their peers from other (developed) countries. </p>
<p>While obviously much of this knowledge is socially-specific and therefore difficult to compare across countries, the evidence seems to be quite clear when it comes to language and modern culture because of the infamously monolingual and solipsistic state of American society. For example, it is far more common to find a high school senior in continental Europe who speaks passable English and has some familiarity with US history & US culture, especially pop culture, than to find an American high school senior who speaks a passable continental European language and is familiar with the history and culture of that country. {Let’s face it: the typical 4 years of high school language schooling, even if you earn straight A’s, does not really provide you with a passable command of the language that really allows you to interact with native speakers.} People throughout the world are familiar with American movies, TV shows, and pop music; Brad Pitt and Madonna are worldwide icons. How many Americans are familiar with foreign language movies, TV and pop music? {The navel-gazing extends even to the granting of official honors: doesn’t anybody else find it suspicious that not even once has a foreign-language film ever won the Academy Award for Best Picture?} Practically every educated foreigner in the world has heard of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. How many current and recently retired foreign political leaders do most Americans know? {Pop quiz: without looking it up, who are the former Prime Ministers of Canada who left office in 2003 and 2006? Heck, who’s the current Prime Minister of Canada? }</p>
<p>Hence, while I can agree that US high school students may not be well prepared in the hard sciences or math, I’m not sure that they’re well-prepared in the arts, humanities, or social sciences either. Yet the fact remains that the corresponding college majors are significantly less demanding and allocate higher grades than do the technical majors. Let’s face it: as a college student, you can weasel your way through many softer majors while doing very little work and learning very little while still earning passing grades. You try that in engineering and you will fail.</p>
<p>I’m sorry, but if *everyone *in a class at Yale, or any other elite university fails a test, somebody at the college has failed to do his job. I suppose it could be the admissions office, but I think it is more likely to be the professor. The majority of the students in any such class will be smart, driven, and hard-working, and many of them will be as well-prepared as American students get. If they all “fail,” who, exactly, are they being compared to? If it’s some abstract standard that nobody can achieve, then it’s absurd. Perhaps its (likely legendary) students from the past.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>lol wow </p>
<p>10char</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Perhaps because science/engineering knowledge is more easily testable than other kinds of knowledge. I don’t want to overstate this proposition, because science/engineeering knowledge definitely can’t be reduced to problem sets and short answers. However, you can at least step through a process involving problem sets and short answers on the way to systematically building knowledge. I think that’s much harder to do in philosophy or comparative literature.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, nobody is saying that literally everybody would fail, but rather that a large proportion would. </p>
<p>But, again, the real question is, even within the same school, why do certain majors - notably the technical ones - tend to fail out a much larger proportion of students than do others? For example, at probably any school, a larger proportion of engineering/sci students fail out than will humanities students at that same school? It seems highly unlikely that the reason is that engineering/science students just happen to be dumber and lazier than the humanities students - if anything, the opposite is true (which is especially clear at universities that run different admissions regimes for engineering students vs. liberal arts students, as the former group tends to have higher average qualifications.) </p>
<p>Granted, the reason could be that engineering/sci professors do a poorer job of teaching than do humanities professors, but then that naturally begs the question of why engineering/sci professors are such poor teachers, and why universities continue to employ such poor teachers as eng/sci professors. If that truly is the case, then one possible solution would be to have the eng/sci professors learn better teaching skills from the humanities professors. </p>
<p>But that hardly seems to be the only answer. The most important reason why engineering/sci students are likelier to fail than are humanities students is cultural: the engineering/sci educational community believes in harsher and more painful grading and workloads, whereas the humanities don’t. The question then becomes why can’t/won’t the humanities do the same.</p>
<p>Consider the incisive comments of Stuart Rojstazser:</p>
<p>*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=“Grade Inflation: Your Questions Answered - The New York Times”>Grade Inflation: Your Questions Answered - The New York Times)</p>
<p>
</p>
<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>
<p>I think the difficulty of coursework depends on each individual professor.
The math coursework for Calc at a private or prestigious school could be just as difficult and time consuming as the math coursework for Calc at a public school.</p>
<p>I’ve taken tests where the average was a 12% and I aced it because I had a 28%. That’s just how engineering classes are. They make the tests ridiculously hard to really separate the men/women from the boys/girls and then curve. Engineering tests are made to challenge you.</p>
<p>@sakky </p>
<p>The reason why foreigners know a lot about American culture and history is simply because America is a dominant country in the world, especially in culture. Think about it, American tv, radio, music, movies and sports are in every country in the world right in their television sets. Its almost forced on them. If say Brazil were were like the US in dominance, Brazilian culture will be all over our tv, radio, and theaters. The reasons some Americans speak only English is because Americans only like their culture, and set way of life, many people call this American arrogance and close-mindedness.</p>