About 2/3 are required to take it for their major (technology, physics, or pre-med). The rest need a science class for their gen eds and wandered in, or it was the only one fitting the schedule.
Why would it make you angry that a student wants feedback on how well they’re mastering the material? The grade at the end of the semester is derived from work done throughout the semester, isn’t it?
They get tons of feedback - minimum, average, and maximum on each exam.
However, in a class where the final is 30% or more of the grade, I cannot honestly tell someone “oh yeah, that’s an A” without having all the grades.
An A is 93 or above where I teach. If you can look up things on the internet, you can look up the university grading scale, and you don’t need to ask me.
Anything beyond that, a curve, me feeling nice, etc., that is all up to me. I am allowed to give all A’s, I am allowed to give all F’s. If the class average is in the F range, I am not going to tell someone midyear that their 50% is “really a C” when they can end up failing if the rest of the class starts doing their work, as they are supposed to.
The feedback is their percentage grade. The feedback is a warning notice or not at mid-term.
But again, it’s not fair if exactly the same course (is it?) and three different instructors, and one curves significantly and two do not. Worth talking to the chair about.
I am asking this sincerely and with good intent, not trying to start a fight - I am genuinely curious… but if that happened, would you not at least re-evaluate the effectiveness of your methods first?
^What do you think are good, effective, methods and what are bad ones, exactly? Can you give some specifics?
What does the work of other students have to do with the grade of the one who wants to know how she’s doing? You’ve set up a system where a 50% means nothing. It could be an “F” at the end of the semester, but it could just as easily mean a “C” if that’s what you feel like making it that day. No wonder the students want additional feedback from you. Why don’t you just give them a grade based on the number of questions they answered correctly on the exam instead of arbitrary grades that you can adjust to mean whatever you want them to mean at the end of the semester? Then they would know how much of the material they’ve mastered compared to the amount of material there actually is. Why wouldn’t you want your the students to know how well they’re doing in your class?
And how is giving them a 50% not doing just that? You got 50%, that means you mastered 50% of it. Can’t say if that’s an A or a D right now. Might want to work on it some more though. If you get a 93% it will probably be pretty clear to me then.
The problem is high-stakes tests, often 30-40% of the course grade per test, and meaningless homework towards the final grade. Make homeworks and projects count more - cheating is an issue obviously but if majors like Computer Science have figured it out… - and see grades and understanding improve.
I am the OP and this is high school we’re talking about. I would never dream of getting involved in this personally if it were college.
Once you found out it was a different exam I don’t think you have any recourse.
Personally I think the Physics team should work together and have consistent policies. I know at my daughter’s school and I’m sure at a lot of schools departments work together and have consistent policies in all classes throughout the department so students have a firm grasp of what to expect.
Is an online homework system going to mitigate the cheating? How do Computer Science departments “have it figured out”?
I’m not sure if CS has figured it out but they do have a lot of tools to help catch/prevent cheating. Programs that quickly compare submitted assignments for duplication, homework tools that force the user to go step by step and complete tasks as opposed to just submitting completed end products, etc
How does mastering only 50% of the material translate to an A? My husband is an electrician. Would you want him wiring your house if he only mastered 50% of the code? How about the engineers who design our bridges? We have a large one going up in Tarrytown. Would you be willing to cross the Hudson on it if you learned the engineers only understood 50% of the material from their courses?
I don’t believe rhandco is saying she doesn’t know the student’s average offhand and can’t tell what a 50 on one exam will do to the total grade; I think she’s saying she’s one of those professors who can know the student’s running average is 30, or 50, or whatever, but not know the letter grade that might equal because they haven’t decided that yet. For some foolish reason, the grade that particular student makes is dependent upon the work done by other students. Why should a student’s grade be affected by how well anyone else does? They either know the material or they don’t. If 300 students can master it well enough to get an A, then 300 students should get an A. Arbitrarily assigning some a B and failing others simply because you’ve decided only x number of students should get a particular grade is a waste of human resources.
@austinmshauri, a test isn’t wiring or building a bridge. There are some countries/schools/profs with the philosophy that giving an extremely hard test (say, problems that grad students tackle in an intro class) is how you tell whether someone knows the material. I can see a case where 50% may be considered stellar for a class.
But a prof should be responsible enough to say what that 50% means, either by letter grade or some other way.
The safest thing is to assume there is no curve unless notified otherwise. At the end of the semester, if the professor curves the grades up, you may be pleasantly surprised. Most do not curve the grades down.
I totally agree. I see no reason to curve based on the grades of the rest of the class unless you have to weed students out. In that case you’re grading for “the best x number of students in this class” to move on up to the next level, not “those who understand and can creatively apply the material and concepts taught”.
I strongly feel that kind of grading in the absence of a need to ID the top x students is lazy and dumb.
But I’ve said all this on curve threads before.
This is why I’m not a fan of the “GPA is everything” thinking on CC. It’s so uneven, between school districts, schools, and even between two teachers at the same school. It’s easy to get an A from some teachers and even in general from some HSs, and then almost impossible to get an A from others.
Hear, hear, MamaBear16. My third child is finishing up her junior year and I can say that she has been really unlucky with her high school teachers compared to her two siblings, who took many of the same classes. The quality of instruction and quantity of work was very inconsistent. For example, the AP Lang class taken by two older ones was very intense and extremely difficult. For the youngest, the exact same course was easier than the honors level courses English taken in freshman and sophomore years. (After that class, I finally understood why some CC parents didn’t think AP classes were that demanding.) In contrast, D2 took the same math sequence as D1, but D1’s calculus class was a breeze whereas D2’s was pretty tough.
I’ve seen people curve grades for all kinds of reasons. Kind of a broad brush to say they are all lazy and dumb. Suppose you have a course where one of the exams is more difficult than you anticipated and brings down all or most of the grades below where you would otherwise see them being (based on everything else in the course). How is it lazy and dumb to curve the whole class upward by some factor that brings them more in line with what you, as the instructor, feels is fair? What would be less “lazy and dumb”?
The issue has been resolved. Apparently, a student petition was circulated about the unfairness of one teacher curving while the other two did not. This morning the teacher told the class that in order to be fair, he was going to curve their grades. Thank you all for your input.