<p>Does anyone else get ticked off by classes or departments where grades in a class must be scaled in order to ensure that certain people don't as well as they otherwise would? Or, that TAs are essentially forced to give out bad grades, by, for example, being coerced by the administration to ensure that the class average is consistently at around 70% (a B- at my school), regardless of whether that is what the students in the class actually deserve?</p>
<p>I find this grossly unfair as this has been happening with several of my classes. Apparently, this is what regularly happens to first-year classes so that they can hit people hard and say, "this is college, not high school." There was a person who got an 85% (A) brought down to a 73% (B) because of grading policies employed.</p>
<p>I don't know if this is typical of other colleges, but this in general seems to be a trend in Canadian colleges. I go to UBC, by the way, which is somewhat known for grade deflation. Does this happen at your school and what do you think of it?</p>
<p>ive never experienced a class where the straight grade you got was higher than the scaled grade. Scaling usually makes it easier to get higher grades. curves, well, thats a different story.</p>
<p>definitely doesn't happen where I go, especially since profs are pretty much allowed to grade however they choose.</p>
<p>as far as TAs go...when I was one, I always found it easier to grade people giving them the benefit of the doubt, because, ultimately, you're never going to have a student complain to a prof that you graded them unfairly high! haha....</p>
<p>I've noticed that the profs and TAs do really try to stay around the average, especially in the large first year courses (econ, for example). On the other hand, the average in my French class last semester was an A-. The department wanted to scale us down, but our prof fought for us. It was nice.</p>
<p>I dislike classes more when they have to scale so much it's ridiculous. I'm in a class now which had a 35 average for a test. Scaling a 35 to an 85 (B centered) is just weird. Happiest I've been with a 46 ever.</p>
<p>In all my classes so far, scaling can only help, never hurt. They've never lowered a grade, only increased, be it by a couple points or by 15.</p>
<p>Still, in many of my classes, especially the intro classes or lectures with several hundreds of people, grades are heavily deflated simply because tests are hard. The average usually ranges from mid-50s to mid 60s at best. Thus, scaling up is almost necessary. Honors classes usually have higher averages, for obvious reasons.</p>
<p>hey doverdemon, you must be talking about the psychology department in UBC. For first year, the average of the course must be 66-68%, in third and fourth year its 68-70%. I also feel that its quite unfair especially since in other departments they dont do that so its actually harder to get higher marks in psychology (compared to other departments) especially if the class is very competitive. However, one of the profs I know, if the average of the class is higher than 70%, they will use statistical technique to compare if the class is actually more competitive than other class that the prof taught. For example, they will compare the results of current midterm with last year's midterm and see if the students did much better (since midterms are usually different from year to year, they will only compare the same questions they put in both years). But capping the average at 70%, means that as long as you do better than everybody else, youll be fine.</p>
<p>I think the grading policy that is unfair in UBC is for math especially the first year course. If your class's average for the midterm is high, and the final is low compared to other sections, they will scale you down. Sometimes we cant do anything about it, because its the prof's fault.</p>
<p>there are like 10 different sections in math taught by 10 different professors. The final exams are not made by these 10 profs and each profs give different midterms. So people who are stuck with easier profs, tend to do very good on the midterm, but then did bad on the final and scaled down.</p>
<p>I'm not talking about the psychology department specifically, but it seems to be the case for many classes throughout the school. Many math/science classes have vicious grading curves, but even without a formal curve in arts, there's a huge tendency to force an average at the B- level. This is what I've heard personally from profs and TAs themselves who are made to do so by department administrators. If a class average is higher than it should be, then the profs get reviewed, and the TAs have to regrade every single paper. Essentially, they're threatened to give out low grades because that way, the profs won't get reviewed and the TAs don't have to regrade, since TAs, in particular, already have enough work on their hands as grad students with their own coursework and exams.</p>
<p>i know of curving, but I don't get how this scaling stuff works. How would they make an 85 into a 73? I mean they can't just lower grades just to lower grades because if I'm not mistaken professors on the syllabus give out the grading rubric for the course and tell you how much tests, paper, hw, attendance, etc. is worth. So it's not like the professor can screw you over because you should know how he got his grade.</p>
<p>If you get a final mark of 85.. and the class average is 80.. but the department requires 70 average.. the class average will be decreased to 70, and your final mark will be 75</p>
<p>Wow that sucks big time. There's gotta be rules against that though. Or at least one would think. That just doesn't seem fair at all, especially to those students who worked hard to pass the class with high grades.</p>
<p>I find it incredibly unfair, of course. But that's what large public schools like UBC gotta do, I guess, to kick out the slackers and those that aren't quite good enough. Apparently, a third of all freshman at UBC get kicked out every year. It's harsh.</p>
<p>I'm in a similar situation right now were in a B curve. Though it's dire for me. I'm at an 82.4% in my econ class, but the average in the class 86%(90% engineering majors). I'm within the standard deviation, but I think I'm going to get a C, which I think is unfair I get penalized, because I enrolled in a class that an unusally higher number of brighter students, thats ridiculous. Standard grading curve is 90-100 is an A, and so forth. To boot, the class also was more mathemtically focused, I can't take a "C".</p>
<p>After my freshman year, i have not experienced anything like that. The profs that i had (mainly for my large science classes) said right from the beginning that each student would get the letter grade that he or she has earned. My profs did very well in making exams that naturally gave the class a C average (70-80%), despite the occasional 68% or 83% exam avg., (they tended to cancel one another out) so there was no need for sudden changes to the grading scale.</p>
<p>I think that when professors are screwing students over by changing the grading scale, the tests being given in that class have not been written well. In the end, i don't know that it actually makes a difference because the students generally perform the same relative to each other despite test difficulty, but i certainly believe that its unethical to mislead students regarding their grades.</p>