<p>they give out? like having a preset grade distribution..</p>
<p>I just don't think this is fair at all. What's the reason behind it?</p>
<p>It’s an incredibly stupid idea. Today’s students shouldn’t be punished because they’re smarter and more diligent than those of the past. Plus, limiting the number of A’s hurts a school by making its students less competitive for jobs and grad school.</p>
<p>Almost every class I had limited the number of As… I don’t like classes that give out too many As because you cannot distinguish between students. The 90th percentile student should get an A, the 60th shouldn’t. </p>
<p>I can buy the argument that it harms it’s students because it makes them less competitive for grad school and employment. Ultimately I think it’s a necessary evil though.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s necessarily unfair, but it’s probably not the best system either. Ideally the grade distribution should be close to the distribution of how much was learned in the class. Fixing the grade distribution beforehand probably isn’t the best way to accomplish that.</p>
<p>^ agree. A’s inflation would be bad. But curves are worse IMO. I love the easy system like community colleges: A-90, B-80, C-70, and so on.</p>
<p>Most of my classes seem to be on a system where it’s much easier to get a C but equally hard as normal to get an A. So you would only need a 55% for a C, a 75%-ish for a B, but still a 92% for an A, and the tests would be made difficult enough so that the average would be somewhere in the 40s or 50s, with the professor reserving the right to adjust the scale in a way that helps everyone if he sees fit (like if the average was in the 30’s, maybe), but guaranteeing that it would not be adjusted to make it harder to get any grade. But in those cases this was an absolute scale that was announced on the syllabus on the first day of class, so while it made it difficult to get an A, it wasn’t strictly saying “only the top 5% of students in this class will get A’s”…just setting the standards so that it’s likely that if you got an A you’re in the top 5 or whatever %.</p>
<p>I think it’s unfair because I think the point of grades should be to reflect how well one knows the material, not how much better one knows it compared to his/her classmates.</p>
<p>We just covered this in Stats class. The idea is that a random sample of students would include students that naturally follow a bell curve. Professors are not omniscient, and cannot design exams and assignments that produce the proper number of each grade, so they instead just give exams and then superimpose a curve. So in theory its MORE fair. I still don’t like the idea of giving up on any percentage of the class though…</p>
<p>The percentage based on the class seems the most fair. This way if a professor sucked at teaching and everyone got a 30…not fair to punish the class for his information.</p>
<p>The scary part is a student who receives a scholarship and has to maintain a GPA of 3.7. If her grades depends on each professor that grades the way they feel like. (and unfairly it seems to me at times) how does she maintain that GPA so the scholarship isn’t lost.</p>
<p>Scary thought. Finding info on professors before you take their class sounds impt !</p>
<p>A class that has matriculated into UChicago is not random and would never fit a bell curve unless imposed. Does it make sense to excluded a percentage of this class from grad or proffessional school? The student at a non-competitive state college has the GPA and the time to prepare for the GMAT,GRE, or MCAT and has the stats to qualify. Many colleges will point to the fact that their competitiveness and curiculum is taken into consideration. The question is by how much?</p>
<p>Yea, I attend the school that is notorious for grade deflation which includes limiting the amount of A’s and curving to a B… I just don’t see the point of doing this at all!</p>
<p>It really does suck, especially when percentage-wise you know you earned a better grade than you got. There have been a few times when the curve helped me, however, although I think I’d much rather not have a curve at all. I always like the professor a little more when they say they don’t believe in curves.</p>
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<p>This.</p>
<p>I think your grade should reflect how well you know the material.</p>
<p>It’s a tough call, really. Of course everyone wants it to be fair, but the top of the class wants to be recognized as such when they are applying for jobs/graduate study as well. A 4.0 in all-curved classes means a LOT more than it could on non-curved classes.</p>
<p>For example, my high school took the “grades reflect learned material” stance. Though it was hard to get an A on an exam, you could do an assignment/test over and over again until you “learned the material” and got an A. Suddenly, an A didn’t mean anything any more.</p>
<p>The fact that you graduated shows that you learned the material. Your GPA should show a little bit more than that.</p>
<p>I despise curves and I despise certain allocation for grades. </p>
<p>One of my teachers did the most logical thing. Midterm and final is worth 200 pts each, each test is worth 100 pts, each homework assignment is worth 25 pts, each quiz is worth 50 pts, etc. etc.</p>
<p>If you don’t have the certain amount of pts for an A (900/1000), then you don’t get an A. If you miss 5 questions on a 50 question test, then you earn EXACTLY 90pts… no more, no less.</p>
<p>You were given all of the information needed for everything he gave you. Study hard and reap the rewards.</p>
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<p>Okay. I have an 80%. How well do I know the material? What grade should I get?</p>
<p>I don’t like the idea of limiting how many grades you’ll give out before class starts. It’s stupid and you’re essentially setting some students up for “failure.” However, I’m all for curving especially when the average is low. For my Bio class, the average exam score was somewhere around 60-65% but there was no curve, which is stupid. When the average is consistently low for the exams in multiple classes, then the common denominator has to be the professor(s) because the odds of class after class after class failing the same exam or getting the same questions wrong speaks to the way the material was delivered when the exams are lecture-based. </p>
<p>I agree with the above poster. We just tack letter grades on to percentages and give those letters a point value. That’s not a very good measure of how well the student knows the material especially if the letter grade’s percentage varies from class to class because the system then lacks consistency. But it’s never going to be perfect, so curving can make things fair, especially in the science/math/engineering courses.</p>
<p>In my experience, a test with an average below the 80%s tends to not be distributed normally. You’ll have a few outliers at the top (As), a clustering where most people land (Bs), and a long tail with maybe a little bit of clumping (Cs and Ds). When I’ve done curving in the past, it’s always been done by looking at a distribution and drawing lines where it seems like they naturally fall. This becomes a real problem when nobody gets below an 80% on an exam, since the data just gets too clustered.</p>
<p>I’m not a fan of classes like that. A previous poster brought up a good question- what about scholarship students? The grade should reflect the work the student did, not the grade the professor feels like giving.</p>
<p>I’ve had classes where the average was in the 40s and the highest score out of anyone in the class was a 67. At that point it seems like the professor either doesn’t teach well at all or is intentionally trying to make the exams so that everyone gets less than a 70. A good portion of the material he was testing was not only not in his lectures (which only seldom related to the book) but could not be found anywhere in the textbook, either, which probably explains the low distribution.</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of a professor curving downward, because usually the just make the tests difficult enough that they don’t have to do so.</p>
<p>I’ve also never heard of a scholarship requiring someone to maintain a 3.7 GPA. Even the National Merit scholarship from my school only requires me to keep a 3.0 cumulative, and that covers basically everything.</p>