Comment on Anon studies Organic Chemistry
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
I keep reading about people grading on a curve and I still can’t grasp what that means. Do those teachers have like a set number of A B C, or whatever, they can give out? And if they’ve run out of A then you get a B? And if the B run out you get a C and so on? That seems a completely intellectually bankrupt practice! If you don’t want more than X people passing, then just grade people with percentages and let only the first X highest through and that’s it, but don’t lie with fake grades! How insane…
basically that, yes.
though in my experience, they’d make the tests so hard that everyone would get failing or nearly failing grades, then curve up so that more people pass and some get As
only issue for them is if the average is 36% but 3 students got high 90s… makes the curving math a lot more awkward
Wait until you hear that universities are just literal paywalls to seperate social classes so poor people can’t get good jobs that once were apprenticeships.
I mean, not the whole world is the US. Plus, at this point you’ll get a better paying job if you go into trades.
There’s a trade school near me that is fucking free. They have a huge endowment and that pays for everything, even room and board for the on-campus students. They still have to advertise and meanwhile kids go $300K into debt to get a degree in English Lit. I’m all for a classic Liberal Arts education but god damn.
In Germany, most trades are organized as apprenticeships with a split of work days and school days, which means you’ll basically get paid for school!
Haha, yeah, if you actually look at how much you earn vs how much you actually work (quality of life), some trades like electrician or plumbers are so much better off than my doctor wife, it’s not even funny :/
That’s not fair, they’re also debt slavery scams where they sell false hope to people. They even have entire military boot camp lite night release prisons where they brainwash you into going
I assure you that’s not how it works in Europe. Nowhere near as bad as the US, in any case.
I guess that’s what happens when education is deeply ingrained in the culture.
Yeah there are plenty of degrees that shouldn’t really be an area of study at university. But there are plenty that justify it as well
It’s only ever worked to the benefit of the student in my experience
Grading on a curve is indeed that, and it should be criminalized because of how much it harms students
In Delft, corrections of the curve are only ever used upwards, in case the passing rate is very low. If everyone completes the test without mistakes everyone gets a 10.
This was my experience at a US university as well.
The class is forcibly fit onto a bell curve. X% pass, Y% fail, etc all according to the predetermined standard bell curve. Doesn’t matter if the class is full of Einsteins or dunces.
Unlearned9545@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
At my uni they’d take the highest grade of the class and reset that as the max points and grade from there.
So if max points on an exam was 120 and no-one scored higher then an 85, then an 85 would be an A, 75 a B, etc.
I’m a mediocre student but an amazing test taker and used to compete on math teams. So some of the math heavy engineering courses I would get perfect exam scores and sometimes the prof would ignore me as the highest grade. I was frustrated at first because my A didn’t mean the same as someone’s but I realized later it was to stop me from getting beat up by a bunch of 30 yo guys.
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
I still think the ABCDF system sounds so… childish? But presented like that I can see how it makes sense. I always thought about more absolute systems as more, eh, honest? More of an absolute value of our worth, but in truth it depends completely on our teachers, so it’s not really any “truer” than the letter system. Just a different bias.
I’m glad there are so many interesting answers in this thread :)