“But in those classes there should be students who earn As & Bs without a ridiculous curve. In the example given, nobody got higher than a 60 on the test - nobody was able to “pass” (considering 65 a passing grade) I still argue that something is wrong in that example.”
There’s nothing wrong with that once you get off the “anything above 90 is an A, 80 is a B model”, as hegebege posted. Doctors who undergo the most rigorous training get about 7 to 8 decisions right out of 10. If 80 is the max for them, an average of 50 or 55 is pretty reasonable. The average on a test being 75 and giving a B to students who scored 1 standard deviation above the mean, an A to those who scored 2 SDs above, only really happens in tests in college or high school.
@compmom Kudos to you! I agree with everything you wrote above. Our kids were exposed to a wide variety of ways of contending and challenging themselves. In class, extra-curricular activities, and home-based projects. They never looked at schoolwork or tests as a competition for scarce goods (high grades). It didn’t matter to them whether tests were graded on a curve. But they looked at tests and grades as one way to gauge how much or how well they had learned a subject or skill.
There were some exceptions to this. One was when they entered an actual competition, such as a debate, an art show, or a math competition. There are winners in such activities.
Then there is this big competition for college admissions. For sure, our kids recognized that admission to the better colleges was a competition, and that grades and test scores mattered. But we reinforced the idea that there are dozens of colleges where they could develop their thinking, skills, and preparation for later life.
Our oldest one largely left the choice of where to apply for college to his parents. He had very good grades and outstanding test scores. But he never looked at college admissions guidebooks or discussion boards. In high school our son’s competitive spirit was focused on his extracurricular activities (mainly debate, but also fantasy sports), not on college applications. He attended UChicago.
Our younger one also left much of the background research on college admissions to her parents. She had an interest in attending only a stand-alone art school, preferably in “a real city” in the East. We felt that extra-curricular training in summer art programs could help her to prepare a good portfolio. She did this at the Art Institute of Chicago. She later earned her BFA from RISD, and subsequently (after several years working in the real economy) an MBA at a large university.
Hmm, never did that either. Again, tests don’t get individual letter grades in my courses, so only the weighted grade you manage to muster by the end of the semester matters to your final grade.
The university grading system will be different from what you’re used to. When you start at university, any mark over 50% is a great grade.
Getting a mark over 50% means that you are beginning to understand the difficult work of your degree. Getting over 60% is excellent because it means you have demonstrated a deep knowledge of your subject to the marker.
You may be used to getting marks of 90–100%, but this is very unlikely to happen at university. Remember that marks in the 50–70% range are perfectly normal. Your grades will improve as you get used to working at university level, and in the style required by your degree subject.
UK degree classifications are as follows:
First-Class Honours (First or 1st) (70% and above)
Upper Second-Class Honours (2:1, 2.i) (60-70%)
Lower Second-Class Honours (2:2, 2.ii) (50-60%)
Third-Class Honours (Third or 3rd) (40-50%)
In your first year at university, achieving a grade of 50% or more is a good thing. You can build on your work and improve as you work towards your final grade. Scores above 70% are classed as “First”, so you should be very excited to get a grade in that range.
It is rare for students to achieve grades higher than 90%, though this can happen. Remember as well that you will be surrounded by other highly motivated and capable students, so you may not automatically be top of the class anymore! Don’t worry – lots of your fellow students will be feeling the same, and there is always someone you can talk to about this. Having realistic expectations about your grades will help to reduce the possibility of feeling disappointed with yourself.
O for those halcyon days of my undergraduate college. We were never told our grades. We were given oral or written feedback (generally written in whole sentences) from our professors. The professors did keep letter-grades, and those turned up on our transcript. But when I reached senior year and was deciding where to apply for graduate and professional schools, I still did not know my cumulative GPA!
This approach kept students from grubbing for and competing for points “grades.” We focused on mastery of the subject matter. Reed College still records a conventional letter grade for every student, but the grades are not distributed to students. The exception to this system is for students who have unsatisfactory grades, a C- or below. Quote from the Reed website: https://www.reed.edu/academic/gbook/acad_pol/eval_student.html.
So how did we know whether our performance was up to snuff? We had written evaluations of our papers, as well as more specific scores on tests for which the results could readily be quantified. And we had a “conference” (meeting) with the teacher, and with our academic adviser (major professor) at the end of the year to discuss our performance. The only time this caused me any concern was when I was applying to graduate schools. I took GRE’s and LSAT’s, and those helped me to evaluate where to apply. But my GPA was just a guess, until I requested a copy of my transcript after I had already graduated.
I know this seems archaic, and so quaint – and idealistic. But I think the lack of grade grubbing and competition from that was important to the program. Students focused on what they had to say, what they knew or didn’t know, and on what their fellow students had to say – not on what letter or numerical grade they had received from the professor.
This way of thinking helped me in raising our own kids. We wanted them to do well in school but neither we nor they got hung up on grades at the expense of learning.
I don’t really “distribute” the difficulty of the problems. I look at all the topics which are relevant for the exam. Then I try to pick out reasonable problems and questions to represent the topics. Many of the problems will have multiple parts, some parts requiring more steps than others. Some are purely conceptual questions with multiple choice or short answers. Where there is a possibility of a variety of difficulty and the problems can be short, I might include one of each (unit conversions, for example). Overall, I try to include a variety of conceptual and application questions which students who understand the material should be able to handle. I also try to avoid problems with odd tricks or steps in them.
In my engineering courses, the exams are more problem-based and not generally “conceptual”. I typically make them such they are straightforward applications without any odd tricks or steps that students would be unlikely to hit on during the course of an exam period.
This is what I was trying to say is the way it should be. There should be no predetermination of how many students in the course should get a certain grade based on a distribution curve. Each student should be assessed relative to the curriculum. Their mark should be reflective of their individual level of mastery of the material. It shouldn’t be assessed relative to how the other students in the course have scored. Grading should also be appropriate for the course level. An introductory course should not have a grading scale appropriate to a 4th year course and then curved upwards when the entire class fails to achieve a passing grade. How is that an effective way of determining if the students have grasped the material?
Going back to the first page, @roycroft, you entirely missed the point of the teacher giving all A’s. HIs goal was to get kids to forget about grades and focus on learning. The results were remarkable. My own kid said she finally understood math, because not only did she get help from peers in a context that wasn’t about grades but she also taught peers, and we all know that teaching is sometimes the best way to learn. The atmosphere in the class was wonderful. The only parents who complained are the ones who want their kids to be the best, and that arrangement didn’t allow for that. Why does anyone need to be the best? Everyone needs math skills to function in life, and that was the important thing.
As I wrote before, same daughter now teaches in a university and gave some ungraded writing assignments. The results were free, creative, and some even said fun. It was a great experiment.
Some colleges do still give narrative comments rather than grades though for grad school grades are needed. Bennington is one. There is so much more information, insight and advice embedded in narrative evaluations as opposed to just a grade.
Everyone doesn’t need math skills to function in real life. Lots of people function fine in real life who couldn’t define a tangent or solve a quadratic equation.
Some folks can’t do math or probabilities even when they can do quadratic equations- or not being accepted into HYPS would not seem “unfair”’or tragic somehow.
“There should be no predetermination of how many students in the course should get a certain grade based on a distribution curve.”
But why should you then need to get 90% to get an A? All that achieves is to ensure that the exam will have to be easy (or you give bonus points for class contribution, attendance, etc). Hence “I try to include a variety of conceptual and application questions which students who understand the material should be able to handle. I also try to avoid problems with odd tricks or steps in them” and “I typically make them such they are straightforward applications without any odd tricks or steps that students would be unlikely to hit on during the course of an exam period.”
Sounds a lot like a driver’s ed test to me. When do students actually get challenged by their courses? Isn’t it a good life lesson to wrestle with a problem which actually has some “odd tricks or steps” while under time pressure?
@Twoin18 While I am all for tests which require students to use the knowledge they gained, rather than regurgitate, I am not a fan of time constraints. Unlike driving, there are almost no occasions in life in which you have to solve a complex issue in a couple of hours, unless you are a physician. No accountant needs to figure out tax breaks in 45 minutes, and no architect needs to produce plans for a new office block in 2 hours.
In almost every single real life situation, a person usually has days or weeks to figure out what to do. Trying to get them to do the same thing in a fraction of the time just teaches them to look for quick-and-dirty solutions, or to expect solutions which can be found in a couple of hours. It does not help them develop the habit of doing thing methodically and thoroughly.
I understood the point, @compmom, but I think it is not realistic to think all, or even most children are motivated by a love of learning, at any time. There are many fun interesting distractions-phones, games, socializing- and learning takes consistent work and can be hard. It requires self control and delayed gratification, along with a perspective on why this subject must be mastered, even if one has no particular interest in English literature or algebra or whatever. I think few teachers would say that their students have such intrinsic motivation to learn that they will do so without external prompts.
If the grades were totally irrelevant in your case, why not give them all C grades-they still learned the material and that was its own reward, right?
Employers have an expectation of productivity. Suppose a talented employee takes a couple of hours to complete a task. If someone else at the same seniority level instead takes days or weeks to figure it out, questions will arise as to why. And if the situation keeps repeating itself, that employment will be short-lived.
Not having a predetermined distribution simply says you don’t start out saying “5% will get A, 10% B, etc.” Students are pitted against the material rather than against each other.
Good Lord, no. I’m not teaching life lessons. Tests are supposed to evaluate whether you are understanding and applying the course concepts, not whether you know obscure tricks. If the exam average is 60%, the students are not finding it easy by any means. A problem can be plenty challenging and still be straightforward (i.e. without odd tricks or steps). Such problems can be done as examples in class or assigned for homework, although in general the students have their hands full just getting through the basics.
“In almost every single real life situation, a person usually has days or weeks to figure out what to do.”
@MWolf In the real world (as opposed to when I was doing my PhD), if I took days or weeks to figure out what to do, my business would all have been taken by competitors who come up with a “quick-and-dirty solution…in a couple of hours”. Finance related topics are just as time sensitive as medical issues.
To your specific examples, I fired my accountant when he couldn’t answer my questions satisfactorily during a one hour meeting and if an architect can’t give me a convincing conceptual proposal to design my house in a few hours (based on an intuitive understanding of what’s technically feasible within my budget) he won’t win the project. Being able to get 80% of the way there in less than 20% of the time (by coming up with short cuts which don’t bypass the critical sensitivities) is one of the most important skills in business.
^But we’re talking about an academic process - perhaps your accountant was not in Accounting I at the time of your meeting nor your Architect in Houses 101?
roycroft, the experiment did not require a love of learning. It was a relief for the kids to stop thinking about grades and just do the work- together. C grades would have been fine with the kids, but not the parents.
Most any endeavor based on external motivation is successful in the short term, but not the long term. Kids in school were given prizes for reading. When they were older and expected to read, they asked “where’s the prize?” and didn’t read.
My daughter was probably the strongest reader in the class but she did not keep a journal on her reading to be graded for the teacher. We felt she should be free to read or not read and that it should be for pleasure. The school day should end before bed! She did not get to go to the pizza reward party. The teacher ended the reward program the next year because she did actually get the point.
ps I had a kid who was not a strong reader and I also felt she had a right to draw or do whatever she wanted at bedtime, but that is off topic
