<p>My friend was a Bio major at UCSD.</p>
<p>Today he told me that there are bio professors that actually gave a class two (2) A's out of 300+ students in the entire class.</p>
<p>He continued that the only people who get high GPA's, 3.7-4.0's, are those who selectively choose all their professors as there are professors that give out little to no A's (previous sentence).</p>
<p>Is this true and do certain professors at UCSD do that?</p>
<p>Somehow I don’t feel that that’s true.</p>
<p>no way. you can check the grade distributions (by class/professor) on the registrar’s website for yourself.</p>
<p>Your friend is probably just projecting his frustration of not being able to get an A by placing the blame on the professors. I’m not even a Bio major and I’ve gotten A’s in lower and upper-div Bio classes.</p>
<p>Yeah your friend is bitter. And no, the people with 3.7-4.0 are the people that put in the effort. Upper Div professors give around 15% A’s.</p>
<p>**no way. you can check the grade distributions (by class/professor) on the registrar’s website for yourself. **</p>
<p>That’s good information, do you know where I can find this?</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies so far y’all.</p>
<p>[CAPE</a> Statistics](<a href=“http://www.cape.ucsd.edu/stats.html]CAPE”>http://www.cape.ucsd.edu/stats.html)</p>
<p>^
The CAPE statistics aren’t the real grade distributions though. They are simply what the students <em>think</em> they would get in the class.</p>
<p>the old link was here, but they reorganized the website. you might have to search around: [University</a> of California San Diego](<a href=“http://registrar.ucsd.edu/reports/default.aspx]University”>http://registrar.ucsd.edu/reports/default.aspx)</p>
<p>Why do some professors grade that way (15% A’s, etc.)? When they do that, what if 20% of the class earned an A? How is the top 15% picked?</p>
<p>^That rarely happens if at all. Classes are curved so large amounts of students don’t fail. A 36% was a C- in my Chem 6B class! If for some magical reason it does happen, the top 15% of the best scores in the class get an A, and the rest of the “As” get Bs. But really, I don’t think it will be a common occurrence.</p>
<p>What about classes with no curves, are there such classes too?</p>
<p>^Most (if not all) social sciences/humanities classes have no curves. Basically anything that’s NOT math or science won’t have a curve.</p>
<p>^ Because their grading is subjective to begin with. </p>
<p>A professor will end up with a grade distribution close to a curved class, but that’s because of how people tend to grade anyway. If you really took a “C” as being an average grade, then a third of the class wouldn’t even pass.</p>
<p>@ wootie </p>
<p>that actually happened in my c/c++ class…the professor came in the last week and decided that he would only give 15% A’s, etc. because he had to answer to the dept why he was giving out so many A’s. So my 92 ended up being a solid B. Which kinda miffed me but meh.</p>
<p>Most professors will write in their syllabus that they will never curve up, but thats generally because the average is around a 50% anyways and theres no way in jahoosafats 15% of the class will get above a 90%</p>
<p>$KingsElite$ what percentage was an A?</p>
<p>^An A- was 79%. Pretty crazy huh?</p>
<p>My MATH109 midterm (the professor started writing easier tests afterwards) had 10% as the C cutoff and 25% as the A (only 3 people in a class of 20 got 25%+). You see some REALLY weird distributions in smaller classes.</p>
<p>WoW. I’d rather there be classes way too difficult than to see people getting by without learning anything…they could be the professionals affecting your life. How much do you think people are just getting by? I hope that math109 midterm was really ridiculous hard</p>
<p>Looking back, I don’t think it was too hard, but I took that class back before I really started buckling down and trying in my classes (2.7 GPA first 4 quarters; 3.94 afterwards through graduation). I think I had a 13% or something and came out with a C+? Basically, the class was given sample proofs throughout the course that we were meant to use as guides on how to analyze various theorems/axioms/lemmas/etc., and the midterm consisted of 6 proofs we had NEVER seen before and were expected to use the tools we acquired from the earlier, simpler problems and apply them to these more abstract, difficult problems. Needless to say, everyone only wrote the beginning out of each question and turned the exams in looking scared and frustrated. The next midterm and final were just taken straight out of the homework and we got much higher grades, though the final grades still required a large curve (40% passing, 60?% A-).</p>