Weird Grading at Cornell

Colleges and Universities A-Z Cornell University
1

<p>My son, just finishing his freshman year, has run into a weird grading situation at Cornell. He says he got As on all the exams and assignments, yet earned a final grade of B+ for the course. He was a little surprised to not receive an A. It is for a humanities course, one that he took to fulfill a requirement.</p>

<p>I suggested emailing the professor, but he doesn't think it is worth it.</p>

<p>Of course, we have heard stories of weird grading and curving grades at Cornell ... I know it might be putting the cart before the horse, but it does concern me if he wishes to apply to a competitive graduate school later on. Do they/will they really take that into account?</p>

<p>I am a former college professor myself, and I don't really understand how such things work at Cornell. Grades I gave were always based on exams and assignments, and I never had a situation where someone who earned As all the way along ended up with less than an A for a final grade. I did curve grades at times, but I never "forced" a curve to the extent that someone with an A was "marked down."</p>

<p>It just seems strange to me, and a little unfair. Although, I have to say, we were warned about this very thing by former Cornellians--one who told us tales of students with grades of 90+ (median for the class) earning a C! (This was years ago.) I'm no advocate of grade inflation, but I'm not sure I'm a fan of the other extreme, either. (Yes, I know Princeton has a very strict grading policy, which I have heard about at length from a friend with a daughter there.) But it seems like if you earn a 90+ you should get an above average grade, and, if you earn As all the way along, you should end up with a commensurate final grade.</p>

<p>This bothers me more than it bothers my son! In fact, it bothers me a lot and is just the kind of thing I used to rail about as a student, grad student, and instructor.</p>

2

<p>I think what you are talking about at cornell is very true, it is a very, very grade deflated school, which is almost for sure connected to their very poor admission rates to graduate schools. At Cornell a C is common. At other top schools they are very rare from what I read here on college confidential. Cornell is known for giving out lots of Cs, especially in intro courses. Very hard to compete with Penn or Columbia where they have intro courses in subjects like chem and economics that every single student gets an A. Penn and Columbia have very high admit rates to top grad schools, easy to figure out why. With Princeton, yes they do have a curve, but grad schools don’t care because it is Princeton, a league unto itself. I wanted to go for medicine, so I did not pick cornell because of their grading. Derrick S.</p>

3

<p>Grade inflation is not that rampant, have him email the professor. Though make sure he knows what exactly the grading policy is to begin with. I highly doubt a humanities class is curved down.</p>

4

<p>What your son is experiencing seems common to me. My daughter kept track of her grades all semester in several classes and so far, in 2 of them ended up with lower grades than what she expected based on what she earned according to how the grade was determined according to the syllabus. She has not had time to thoroughly check them b/c she has one more final to go tomorrow, so perhaps these were accurate grades.</p>

<p>Yet, last semester, she felt that she deserved an A but earned a B+ in a class and when she did the math according to the syllabus, she definitely ended up on the short end of the stick in the grading - she was a solid A. She had me check it and she had another student check it and we concurred - she was graded down. Several students in this class experienced the same problem so separate e-mails were sent to the professor. He sent a group e-mail to the whole class that the grades were final. It is worth a try to e-mail the professor, but trust me, he/she has heard it all before. </p>

<p>Another gripe I have is TA’s grading assignments/tests/papers. I understand that these are large intro classes but really…</p>

5

<p>DerrickSpa is an obvious ■■■■■. Median grades at Cornell are similar to that at other top schools.</p>

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<p>Now we know DerrickSpa is a ■■■■■. C’s are not common. Not when the average GPA is a 3.4 with a std dev of around 0.3. </p>

<p>I’ve never heard of a class curving down. In many cases, I was pleasantly surprised by my final grade (higher than I expected based on my individual test scores). I suggest that your son email the professor as they do make mistakes when calculating the grade (or it could be simply that participation or some other component of the grading was unaccounted for). I was premed so grades were important to me. But, if I expected an A but received a B+, I’m definitely emailing the professor. My guess is that your son might have um “overestimated” some of his exam/essay grades and knows it.</p>

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<p>^
Cornell does not cap the amount of 'A’s, right? </p>

<p>I heard that we are not actually grade deflated, and that it is just a myth…</p>

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<p>Totally agree with Norcal. Current student in Cornell here. I never got a grade back lower than I expected. Definitely talk to the professor to see what’s going on.</p>

<p>In contrast to what DS says, Cs are pretty rare here. Not Bs, but yes for Cs.</p>

9

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<p>Depends on your major. Quite a few engineering classes, especially the intro ones, are curved to a median grade of B/B-, meaning that a significant number (>25%) of people get Cs. </p>

<p>However, grade deflation is just a myth here. I’ve only experienced it in one class during my 4 years where the professor had to curve down since there were too many 90s.</p>

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<p>My daughter, while never having gotten a C, did run into the problem the OP is experiencing in an intro class, and did e-mail the professor as I stated earlier. She earned an A and got a B+. Apparently more than one person must have e-mailed him with the same problem and he did e-mail the whole class and said say all grades were final. She was still very upset because the grade was most definitely and A but she let it go at that point. Out of the blue she received an e-mail about a week later and the professor reviewed her grade and realized a mistake was made. She did get the A. Kudos to the professor for fixing it. </p>

<p>It seems that if grade deflation were ever to occur it is when grades are “borderline” and there are too many A’s in classes like an intro class, but I really can’t say that grade deflation does exist or if it is simply just too many students in the class so mistakes are made.</p>

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<p>One final thing about my daughter’s situation - a friend of hers that was in the class had the exact same point total for the final grade and was one of the ones that e-mailed the professor and her grade never changed.</p>

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<p>You don’t email the prof to change your grade if there’s no reason to/didn’t ask them why in the first place. You ask them what the reason is and if it doesn’t sound reasonable then contend.</p>

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<p>I will suggest again that he contact the prof for a detailed explanation. Our son is very diligent and a math person, so he usually has a good, and realistic, grasp of his grades. The fact that he mentioned it to me means he was surprised – he rarely discusses grades with me/us. But, as a former prof, I know mistakes do happen, and it is possible a grade got “misplaced” or was inadvertently not recorded or misrecorded or something. (It is a large, but not huge, class.) In any case, he was surprised but not upset. So far, it hasn’t cropped up in any other classes, and he has had some pleasant surprises in the other direction as well. The irony is that it was supposed to be a “fun, easy” class to complement all the heavy duty math and science he’s been taking, LOL. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask … even though I know he doesn’t want to be seen as pandering for grades … And he would be horrified if he knew I posted about it here. Fortunately, he’s not on CC. I don’t think!</p>

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<p>This is what could have happened…When D1 was taking some math intro class, it would start out with 30 or 40 kids. They would take their first prelim and D1 would be above the mean, and the professor would say “if you are from 82-90 then it should be an A, 75-81 is a B…” D1 would think with 85, she got an A on the test. But then when bottom 50% dropped out and the mean moved higher, 86 was an A, not 82-85. D1 used to think it wasn’t fair. But as she started to take higher level courses, it didn’t happen as often because less people dropped out.</p>

<p>There were a few times when D1 was a borderline B+/A-, after emailing her professor she often got the higher grade. She was one of those students who often showed up for office hour too.</p>

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<p>^This is a good point and happens quite often in science classes (test means rising after the bottom-feeders drop out).</p>

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<p>oldfort has one possible explanation. A few others that I can think of:</p>

<p>a) An error in grading occurred. If the exams and assignments were marked “A” and there is nothing else on the syllabus, this may have occurred, and it would be worthwhile contacting the professor.</p>

<p>b) Your son’s average was 90+ for the course, and the papers were not explicitly labeled “A.” The cut-off for an A might have been higher than that. In many college classes one could anticipate that 90+ is an A, but I have known of exceptions. For example, Dbate on the Yale forum had a post a year or so ago about a science lab where he had an average of 94 and got an A-.</p>

<p>c) The course grade had a participation or discussion component (check the syllabus) with a grade. If it’s not in the syllabus, it should not have contributed to the grade in the course, but if that’s what happened, it is probably more trouble than it’s worth to attempt to get the prof to change the grade to conform with the syllabus.</p>

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<p>My daughter would be okay discussing her situation if she thought it would help other students. She, like your son keeps track of her own grades - I never see any of them unless she shows them to me - including the final grades in classes. She, like your son, brought it up to me and someone else who was there at the time and had us check the grade by reading out the points earned against the total which did include papers, participation, etc. It was all posted on Blackboard so it was easy to calculate. When we came up with the same point total and distribution and that she should have earned a very solid A, she e-mailed the professor with the point total and asked if that total earned an A or a B+. That is all she said in the e-mail. She got a canned response that he sent to the whole class that the grade was final. There was no way she could have talked to him in person b/c it was winter break and she did not get the grade before she came home. She was pleasantly surprised when he e-mailed her and told her that she did, in fact, earn the A. If your son is sure that he earned the A, then by all means he should e-mail the professor. Why not? Mistakes happen. He earned it. My only other point was that a friend of my daughter had the same situation in the same class and her grade did not change That, I cannot explain. The only thing I can think of is that my daughter did take the time to speak to him outside of class.</p>

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<p>Definitely have your son contact the professor. More than likely, some graduate assistant made a mistake because I’ve never heard of a humanities course being graded down at Cornell.</p>

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<p>Good news. The professor contacted my son (even before he got around to emailing) and said there had been a grading error. He did, indeed, get an A for the class, which was in synch with the grades he had received on exams and papers. Of course, my son accused me of overreacting. But I’m a Mom and that’s what we do best!</p>

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<p>except I don’t think that sort of grading curve would apply in a humanities class…
I can’t be completely sure since I haven’t taken too many but in the ones I have the grading is pretty accurate/corresponded with the grades I received on papers/assignments throughout the semester. and the OP mentioned that it was a humanities class. there’s no harm in emailing the professor. the worst that can happen is they refuse to look at it. </p>

<p>my situation is very different than most, but I generally take design/studio classes, where I usually have absolutely no idea where I stand because we don’t have intermediate graded assignments. the intermediate assignments aren’t really graded, we’re just graded on our progress and the final project. so in that case I definitely have gotten grades both lower and higher than I expected, because while I might have an idea of the work I did the professor has his own opinion/understanding, and there’s no real way of predicting it after a certain point.</p>