My son had a college professor who announced on the first day of class that his policy is that only 3 students receive A’s per class. I am not sure if he had number limits for the other grades, but I know he did for A’s. Obviously, this can result in a variety of unfair scenarios, similar to the example given above where a 94.6 gets one grade, and a 94.3 a lower one.
I think the professor needs to look at the exam and ask him or herself if it evaluated what it was supposed to evaluate. If so, and everyone failed, then they fail. If not, curve it up and work on the next exam more accurately measuring what they need to be able to know/do.
I am in no way suggesting that a prof should give everyone a passing grade if they do not master the material, concepts and application of those. But let them “compete” against the work expectation, not each other.
Some years ago I taught an on-line college course that I had never taught before, and I wasn’t given much guidance about grading at all. I took the approach that I was concerned with mastery, not with grade distribution, and I created a rubric that told the students what I intended to require in order to obtain various grades. I think it worked pretty well. I will say, though, that the first couple of times I taught it, I had to look closely at how the students were doing on the tests to determine if the tests were “too hard” or not. I’ll also note that the students pretty much sorted themselves.
I looked online to see if I could find examples of actual curves from large college classes, but didn’t find any.
However, in regards to the suggestion that grades might be lower this year because the students didn’t study as much, I think that’s an extremely unlikely explanation for any large STEM class. Do you really believe that this year’s 200 organic chem students are a bunch of slackers compared to the 200 premeds who took it last year? Or is it just possible that the exam was harder this year? What happens when professors change–do they write exams of the same difficulty? Also, it’s been my observation that new teachers and professors always expect more of students until experience tempers the expectations. So with each change of staff, the students should just suck it up when grades are low?
“Humanities teachers assign grades that are based on the students’ work, not based on how well they did compared to their peers.” My humanities assignments generally had a letter grade slapped on them with no indication of why it was graded that way, maybe a few words of comments but nothing detailed so that I would know exactly what criteria I met and exactly where I was lacking. And you’re saying that an intro freshman humanities course is graded the same as a senior level seminar with no regard for the level of the students? So, freshmen get a lot of Cs and Ds in humanities courses, and as they improve their experience and skills, the grades get better? That was not at all my observation. Because the expectations are not based upon the students’ abilities but upon some absolute scale of perfection that is revealed to the professor but nonetheless a secret to the students?
My STEM assignments, I could see what exactly earned what points.
My hs rising junior has submitted a lot of writing to various venues and contests and it’s clear the subjectivity of evaluating it is huge.
@ucbalumnus always seems to be able to find this kind of thing…
I highly doubt that’s what’s being said.
More is expected of students in senior seminars than is expected of freshmen in first year writing seminars, just as I’d think seniors studying history in a 300 or 400-level course are expected to be able to produce work that is different than freshmen in their first college 100-level history course.
Suggesting anything else is like saying freshman students who do well in first semester Gen Chem should get Fs but seniors in advanced chem courses should get As, no?
Most humanities profs provide some sort of rubric or guidance as to what is expected for major assignments or exams. My own profs, and my Ds, both accepted early work and gave feedback as to how to improve too, either before the grade was assigned or after. Maybe that’s only possible at LACs with small classes, I don’t know.
Two real-life scenarios I encountered:
One teacher graded on a genuine bell curve. For every A there was an F. For every B, a D.
Another created obscenely difficult tests in an effort to identify prodigies. Most of the time, the highest grades were Cs. Once in our class, it was a D. He then added points so that the highest grade was the lowest possible A.
Were the grades distributed in a bell curve? Most of the large classes with curves that I saw were in fact distributed this way. No one was pushed into a grade they didn’t clearly deserve. The curves I have seen for small classes were often not bell shaped and the lines between the grades were drawn as much as possible between natural groupings so that the same grade reflected as much as possible the same performance. You seem to want to give different grades to students whose scores were substantially the same.
When I read this over the weekend I immediately thought of this thread.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/opinion/sunday/why-we-should-stop-grading-students-on-a-curve.html
Couldn’t agree more. The author gets off on a tangent about student leaders being the ones who help others, but the comments on the disadvantages of the forced bell curve are relevant for discussion, I think.
Interesting topic…
Usually when I hear about a curve it is to the student’s delight because it means everyone will move up in their grade. It’s usually a way to compensate for a very difficult test.
Are there many teachers (HS or college) that use a curve to force grades down (or fit a bell curve)?
Not in my personal experience, but this was until recently the directive at Princeton.
I have always assumed that curving meant to fit the grades to a particular distribution (and I assume that there should be few Fs due to attrition as those students presumably would drop out), but students seem to think curving always means to give higher grades.
People on this thread keep talking about “forcing” grades into a curve. I have seen 3 different types of curving.
- In large college courses where the exams are designed to be difficult, the actual raw scores usually do fall in a bell shaped curve. In such classes when I took them, a line was drawn at the median. We all knew the curve was set to a B- or whatever, that was announced in advance. So, above the line, B-, below the line, C+. More lines were drawn further out. I am not sure exactly how their placement was determined, but I never looked at this data and thought, wow that doesn't seem right. It looked very reasonable to me. So yes, these students were being compared to each other, but the variation in difficulty of the exams was far greater than the year to year variation in quality of the students, so it would be less fair in some absolute sense to grade students simply on their percent grade on those exams.
- Most professors are smart enough to realize that in a small class you may not see such the abovementioned distribution of scores. Lines are drawn between obvious breaks with the goal of assigning the same grade to students whose performance was closest. Attention is given to how the students performed in some absolute sense, such that grades might be higher in a good class and lower in one whose performance disappointed the prof. I'm not sure this process is any different than what happens when an English professor reads papers and puts grades on them. "This paper was pretty good and I gave an A- to the last paper that was about the same. A-".
- The typical high school teacher "curves" by simply adding extra points to everyone's score to get the scores into the desired range to then apply typical high school grading standards to. I've most often seen this done by method 3a, adding enough points to get the top student to 100, which could mean rather large fluctuations in curving from year to year or teacher to teacher and be rather unfair to the other students depending how much of an outlier the top student might be. And talk about competition--this approach could result in some nasty social repercussions for said student, whose identity is often known. I've also seen teachers use method 3b, where the top student is allowed to go well over 100, because even more points are added to everyone's grades, to achieve the desired number of As or to save kids from getting low grades, not sure which. And then there's the method which I can only call 3 unacceptable, which involves forcing the top students to feed answers to lower scoring students in some kind of regrade process and then allowing the lower scoring students to replace their bad grades with the grades provided by the better students.
The AP teachers are in a bit of a bind when it comes to grading because on the one hand, students get a 5 for getting something like 60 percent of the questions correct, but on the high school scale, they need usually at least 90 percent. So, is it fair to students to administer questions designed for the much more lax AP grading scale, and then grade their performance on these questions according to a much more stringent high school scale? Some type of curving seems only fair to the students.
What some of our AP teachers do is give you an after the fact grade bump if you get a 5 on the test.
Basically they acknowledge that if you got a B in the class and a 5 on the test, they may have graded a bit harshly.
That doesn’t seem right to me. A lot goes on in AP classes that isn’t directly tested on the exams. That’s why colleges say they are more interested in the course grades than the exam scores. And there is a huge range of scores that result in a 5. Maybe a borderline 5 and a so so performance in the course “deserves” an A, but I am not convinced that a teacher who’s had a year to evaluate the kid knows less than the college board.
I can’t read through all of the comments–although I’m interested–because I can feel my blood pressure mounting and my stress level rising after just a few! And my son has been out of high school for 2 years now! But we ran into a situation in which there were 2 sections of an AP history class taught by 2 different teachers, but they used the same exam on the same day. My son got the highest grade of both classes, a 75, but was with the teacher who did not curve, and thus got a “C” on the test. In the other classroom the highest grade was a 74, but that teacher curved, so that student got an “A.” So you have the ridiculous outcome where someone with a lower test score got a higher grade than the person with the higher test score, and for the life of me I could not get anyone at the high school to even acknowledge that it made no sense! So frustrating, and I count my blessings every day to be done with that school!
I thought the whole New York Times article was well worth reading - the professor who wrote it ended up using a system where you could ask another student for help on a question - the whole effort ended up resulting in students studying together and learning more.
@b1ggreenca I’d be infuriated too.