@OHMomof2 Curving by adding 25 point is absolutely forcing grades. Where do you think the 25 points came from? The teacher is adding a number of points to force the grades into a range the teacher desires. I’ve had teachers do this kind of curving. My kid ended up with about a 105+ and received the same A as students who ended up with 90. Tell me that isn’t forced. And the kid who ended up with an 89 and a B lost out because the teacher arbitrarily decided to add 25 points and not 26 points.
@mathyone I’m not clear if you’re asking for a specific course at a specific school or have just never heard of the type of curve I’m talking about. If the former, someone else will have to help because my college profs didn’t curve (though others on CC have reported their experiences with such curves).
If the latter, it’s usually done to limit high grades (fear of grade inflation if too many students do well) or to weed out lower ones (because there isn’t room in the department for everyone who might be able to succeed so only the top x number of students can go on to the next level). At many schools this seems common with intro science courses for engineering or other competitive majors.
This is a pdf which I can’t seem to link directly to, but here is the google cached version:
This paper is discussing two different things - “left of center” grading where most score well below 50, but it’s also talking about the curve I am talking about where the goal is to obtain only 10 As, 20 Bs, whatever.
IMO if the class average on an exam is 20, that’s not a very useful test and certainly does feel discouraging to even those who are curved to a high grade with their 22. But that’s a separate issue IMO.
IMO the teacher is recognizing that the exam was too hard in that case. Or intentionally made it very hard to see if any students could get way up beyond the mean.
I’m sorry for your kid having to share his high A with kids who got 90s. Mine got an A- in a class this semester because her grade was a 89.87 instead of 90. That’s life, there are arbitrary cutoffs. But at least she didn’t get an A- because other kids in her class section got high As, she got it because she didn’t put quite the time into it that she could have to get the A.
" But at least she didn’t get an A- because other kids in her class section got high As, she got it because she didn’t put quite the time into it that she could have to get the A. " But that’s exactly what is happening when the teacher adds 25 points. The kid who got the A- (or B in our school, we don’t have minuses) got it because enough other kids had high A’s so the teacher added 25 points, not 26.
“IMO the teacher is recognizing that the exam was too hard in that case. Or intentionally made it very hard to see if any students could get way up beyond the mean.” But this is often how STEM tests are created. They are trying to test problem-solving and the ability to apply the principles that were taught to new problems and you can’t do that if you just give cookbook type problems. The grades are telling students whether they are average, or below average, or above average at solving the problems and applying the principles. The objections to this are kind of like saying, well a college English class should only require students to provide an accurate summary of the readings. That is mastery. Asking them to draw conclusions, compare and contrast, etc. doesn’t measure mastery and assigning grades based upon who does a better or worse job with this is “forcing” grades and ignoring who was able to provide an adequate book report, where we could look at what percentage of the important plot elements they included in their summary and give grades according to a strict rubric of A= all plot elements, B=90% of plot elements, etc.
Yes that’s exactly what they’re doing. But who cares if they average or above average compared to the 50 kids who happen to be in that class section? Maybe the section is full of kids who can ace a test with “problem-solving and the ability to apply the principles that were taught to new problems”. Maybe it’s full of kids who can’t, but the top x kids are getting an A anyway because they’re in the section with a bunch of kids who can’t either, but are even worse.
NO ONE is suggesting cookbook type problems here. I don’t understand why you think in order to grade on ability to problem solve and apply principles or draw conclusions, compare and contrast you have to pit students against one another.
I have been involved, as a TA, in college courses where this was done to an extreme (referred to as “team teaching”) and in courses (as an adjunct) where the texts and final exam were the same but with less coordination during the semester. For the most part, however, this sort of coordination has not been the case.
It is my understanding there may be some issues of academic freedom involved. I’m not saying one method or another is better, just that I’ve had a lot of different experiences in this regard. It seems like forcing everyone into the same box kind of limits the individual professor from trying different tactics and approaches.
Because it’s just not that easy to come up with appropriately difficult problems. Should a professor penalize an entire class because the exam was harder than they thought it would be? That seems to be what you are asking for. No one is being “pitted”. Just like in the humanities, there are students with better mastery and students with clearly less mastery. It would be unreasonable to expect the same performance from college freshmen as from graduate students or from middle schoolers whether they are writing a paper or solving complex problems. Grading anything that isn’t cookbook is always going to take into account the quality of the students.
You are setting up a straw man–the fact is that the quality of the students is much more stable from year to year than the difficulty of the exams. So should a professor not give any As because this year’s exam was harder and no one scored over 90 percent? How is that fair to the students who took it this year instead of last year when the exam was easier? Even with fairly cookbook type standardized tests, there is a norming process used to correct for small differences in difficulty between exams.
No, that’s why I said, more than once in this thread, that I don’t see an issue with curving everyone up.
I feel like I’m arguing against one thing (a curve designed to weed out or ensure a certain number get a certain # of grades in a given class), and you are arguing against completely different things (cookbook tests, tests that are hard).
I really don’t know how to be clearer than I have been.
Can you explain what is the difference between curving everyone up, which is nearly always what happens, and “forcing” grades? Once you have curved everyone up, you have made some choice about what grades you want to give. Many high school teachers will simply add enough to everyone’s score to give the top student 100%. Assigning grades based on the performance of the outlier seems unfair, but I’m guessing you don’t consider this “forcing”. After all, this is ensuring that a certain number of students get an A. I know some teachers excluded my kid from this type of curving because if they had included her, not enough kids would have gotten an A. How would you determine how to curve the grades, if not by taking into account the performance of other students in some way?
I haven’t seen curves “designed to weed out”. What I’ve seen is curves with a few kids hanging well off the bottom of where all the rest of the kids are. Whether you curve or not, that is an F.
@sylvan8798 I think we’re off topic but I’ll just add - in the case I’m talking about in which you have multiple instructors for the same course it most certainly a "service’ course of some type so the teaching freedom is less of an issue. Feedback about the course content is obviously something that’s encouraged and the content is tweaked as needed. Redesigning of a course like that takes more than just sign off from the department head but input from the departments that are being serviced as well.
Well apparently they do exist despite the fact that you haven’t seen them.
@Mathyone, I think what @Ohmomof2 is talking about occurs on the college level, particularly in STEM fields. There are threads on CC that discuss it. Students aren’t given grades based on how well they know the material; they receive grades based on how well they did compared to other students. As described upthread, students are given grades and at the end of the semester the professor arbitrarily decides what letter grade to assign to it. A 30% may be an A if that’s what they decide. It also appears that the number of students who are allowed to have each grade is limited, so students who would have passed based on the college’s general grading scale are failed because too many students got high A’s. The lower A’s all become B’s, the B’s become C’s, and the C students are failed. It doesn’t seem to matter how well they mastered the material or what their grades actually are; if only 75 can pass and student 75 has an average of 94.6 and #76 has an average of 94.3, #76 still fails.
This type of grading is neither fair nor helpful. Students who demonstrate they know the material should pass. Their grades shouldn’t be determined relative to other students.
I think a lot of people are underestimating the power of the statistical distribution. In a large sample group, it would be so exceedingly unlikely as to be not worth worrying about that the entire class would have grades above 90%.
Show me a case where a 95% was an F. STEM courses are hard. There is nearly always going to be a wide distribution of scores. You don’t see such glaring differences in non-STEM classes, because, frankly, they are easier to do a passable job on. I have not seen any artificially imposed situation where a STEM student who scored well was pushed down to an unfair or unreasonable grade to meet some kind of quota. This is a straw man.
As far as arbitrarily assigning grades, can you really say with a straight face that STEM grading is more subjective than humanities grading?
“As described upthread, students are given grades and at the end of the semester the professor arbitrarily decides what letter grade to assign to it.” How does this differ from a humanities class where a student writes a term paper and the professor arbitrarily decides whether it’s good enough to get an A? If a STEM student gets all the problems correct, they know they got an A. How can the humanities student know they got an A? Only if the professor “liked” their paper.
So, just to be clear, if the professor writes an exam which is harder than anticipated, you are ok with adding points to correct for the difficulty of the exam and prop up student grade to a desired distribution? Or you believe all the students should fail? But if the exam was a little easier than intended (which rarely happens), it’s no longer ok to try to correct for the difficulty of the exam? Those students just lucked out and all should get As and next semester or next year, the grading will be back to normal?
I actually had this happen one semester when I had to give a take-home exam due to circumstances and the results were overly high. Fortunately, I never curve individual pieces, just the final grades and I was able to adjust by making the final more challenging.
Those numbers are similar to the ones that were used to explain this type of grading. The point was that an otherwise passing grade, and one well past the borderline, could still garner a failing grade.
Humanities teachers assign grades that are based on the students’ work, not based on how well they did compared to their peers. I haven’t seen their rubrics, but I’m confident they exist. The difference between those grades and some STEM grades is that an 87 average in humanities is an 87; it doesn’t change based on work turned in by fellow students like STEM grades apparently do.
That was the point – some STEM professors assign grades to individual assignments and all the grades in the class are low (40% or less). At the end of the semester the professor may decide that 35-40% is an A, 25-30% is a B, etc. The grades aren’t based on mastery of the material, they’re based on how well students did compared to their peers, and there’s no clear standard for what constitutes a particular grade. I don’t think either of those creates an environment conducive to learning.
If professors are incapable of creating exams that accurately reflect what they’ve taught, perhaps they need to go back to college so someone can teach them how to write better ones. Other colleges’ professors don’t seem to have that problem, so there must be classes that are useful for learning that skill. If professors learned how to write good exams consistently, there wouldn’t be much need for a curve.
Right. I never curve. But my grades end up looking more or less what you would expect them to look like – some As, a bunch of Bs, a smaller number of Cs and Ds. It is important to know how to ask questions and how to grade the answers. Sure, in some years the students study less and so the average is a bit lower.