<p>After most students did poorly on the first test in APUSH, our teacher decided not to count the results of the test as part of our grade. Furthermore, she won't be handing back our tests, which makes this seem like an effort to avoid grading.
I was confident I did extremely well on the test. And while I personally don't care (I mean, I'm sure my grade will stay a high A), isn't this unfair for the students that actually tried? Just because the majority of the class did badly on a test, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be counted. If anything, curve the test!...
Thoughts?</p>
<p>It does seem like curving would be a better option, but it could have been a badly designed test, and the people who did well on this test will presumably be able to do well on future tests. There will almost certainly be times in your life when things like this go in your favor (i.e., someday you’ll be one of the people who did badly). </p>
<p>Honestly, even if /all/ of the students did badly on the test, which I doubt, that wouldn’t be a valid excuse for a teacher to drop the test grade. My APUSH teacher counted our first test, and most of the grades were in the 40s. (I got like an 80.) While it totally sucked for all the students, it was a nice wake up call to all that studying and participating would really reflect in tests. However, every Thursday she allows students to come after school in order to do test corrections to raise test scores. She doesn’t curve, though I agree with halcyonheather that it’s definitely a better alternative to dropping scores.</p>
<p>@awakeningvenus
You’ll probably need to get used to teachers dropping test scores because it is more common in college than curving the results. </p>
<p>This was probably done for the reasoning that it was the first test of the year and most kids probably had never taken an AP class before. The teacher probably is trying to acclimate the students by giving them a taste of the rigor of an AP course without counting it. Now everybody in the class knows what to expect for the next test and the average will probably be significantly higher and there won’t be a punishment for the people who weren’t aware of the required amount of studying they would need to put into an AP class.</p>
<p>@DigitalKing
It’s unfair for you to say that anybody who bombed the test didn’t try. For the reasons above they may just not have been aware of what was required of them and there’s a stark difference between the typical high school junior who takes APUSH as their first AP and the college confidentialer who took five APs their freshman year. Some of them probably didn’t study, but others may have studied and thought they knew the material well but didn’t realize how well they really needed to know the information.</p>
<p>All in all, I think it was fair to do this. I don’t like the idea of the teacher arbitrarily dropping tests after the first one though. I do like the idea of dropping the lowest test grade over curving tests. Curving tests is basically giving people points they didn’t earn. It’s like the old saying “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you”. Dropping the lowest test score basically says “Everybody has bad days or circumstances tht prevent them from being perfect at all times and we’re not going to crucify you for that”. Also, dropping test scores is a lot more common in my college than curving tests.</p>