This probably didn’t actually happen, but I did have a physics class in college where we had an exam where the highest score was 35%, so it was graded on an absurd curve
Anon studies Organic Chemistry
Submitted 11 hours ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/4140abea-17e7-4351-899f-0d9ddeb774e0.jpeg
Comments
protist@mander.xyz 10 hours ago
snooggums@piefed.world 10 hours ago
My calc I class in college had a 23% average on the first exam. Later ones made it into the high 30%s. The professor was terrible, but since I had already taken calc in high school and he graded on a curve it was a breeze.
The main problem was that he would test for the stuff we had not covered yet because he "wanted people to work ahead."
kautau@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
“wanted people to work ahead”
Ah yes “not fucking doing my job that people are taking loans out for and pay off for years to come”
Fuck that “professor.” A college degree is an overpriced commodity and they are falsely charging students by not teaching them the course
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 9 hours ago
Now that’s an asshole move.
abbadon420@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
It’s fine to give points for “extra work”, but the regular work should give you a passing grade at least. The extra work should maybe give you the difference between a 6 or an 8.
Dalvoron@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
Grading on a curve is always absurd to me: it’s a cop out for teachers who don’t know how to set curriculum/exams properly and demeans the education process.
Should just be
- here’s a list of things you learn in this class
- you demonstrate understanding and skill over about 60% of that list
- you get a grade of 60%
Eq0@literature.cafe 8 hours ago
While I mostly agree with you, the grading on a curve idea comes from two factors On one hand, the idea that knowing some topics very well can absolve you from knowing other topics at a sufficient level. On the other, people making the exercises for the exams are experts and can easily overlook the hidden difficulties of an exercise. So it happens way too often that a professor would think “this exercise is super easy” and miss that it uses concepts from other courses the students are not super familiar yet.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
That seems so low that it makes the benefit of the class dubious. Can you really say you’re making good use of the students’ time when it’s clear none of them are understanding the material? Maybe the material needs to be broken up into more digestible chunks.
wolfpack86@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
It’s also possible to just write a bad question/exam and recognize you need to do better as a professor.
I had a physics professor who graded himself on whether or not he wrote/taught well by the grade distribution. He was always transparent about it and had benchmarks of how it went previous years. He was also one of the most sought after professors.
I also had s philosophy class where the best grade over the entire semester was a 30 and the professor was like yeah this is just expected. You get an A. This guy obviously derived enjoyment from not being a good teacher and for humiliating his students that they really knew nothing about philosophy. That guy sucked.
Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Had a similar thing happen in an intro geology course. Highest grade on the final was 41%, my grade. I got an A in class. I do not understand why anyone would make an intro to geology course that difficult. Very few are going into the field. Most just needed an extra science course, like myself.
hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I knew someone who had to pass a class where the failure rate was 85%. The worst part is this was only one of a few of these classes. She was studying physics, and even though I really don’t want anything to do with her now for unrelated reasons, I still feel bad for her.
It would never happen as described in this post, but things like this are way more common than people think.
I still remember teaching >3 people a subject, because they asked me to, and then we all did the exam and I was the one who failed it. Now I’m, not error-proof but that’s kind of ridiculous. I have experienced a truckload of these things but that one illustrates very well how random and/or unfit for purpose most exams are. It’s like a coin flip +/- 5% depending on the depths of your studies beforehand.
Opisek@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
I love the correction system we have at my university. All the exams are pseudonymized with a sticker you receive during the exam and scanned after completion. About 10 to 30 people are involved in correcting the exams for one course. We don’t know who the exams belong to as we only see the scanned version on our tablet or computer. Each task is corrected by a different set of people. We can select to see only a single task or subtask to streamline the process of correction, too. Furthermore, all the tasks are checked twice independently. Once done, the system can assign the exams back to the students. I love how it’s fair and “anonymous” by design.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Wait… are there universities that don’t have an anonymous exam system?
crazycraw@crazypeople.online 10 hours ago
suuuuurree
ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 10 hours ago
This post doesn’t pass peer review
julietOscarEcho@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
If the story was about peer review it would probably be more believable. No way a professor does that to a fee paying student less still admits it to them. But do it to a competing prof where they are anonymous… Much more tempting.
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 7 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…
Natanael@infosec.pub 4 minutes ago
Grading on a curve is indeed that, and it should be criminalized because of how much it harms students
someguy3@lemmy.world 20 minutes ago
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.
RaccoonBall@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
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
mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
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.
Redex68@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
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.fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 6 hours ago
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
Amir@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
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.
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 11 hours ago
I hope you were smart enough to record that interaction, anon.
TootSweet@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
My major in college for my BS included all but 2 credit hours of a physics minor, so my final semester, I took Thermal Physics to complete that minor. I’ve never met a physics course I didn’t ace, so I figured “easy A”.
I’m quite certain I was the highest scorer in the course and was a solid B+ before the final. I took the final and felt really good about how well I did. I thought sure they’d curve and I’d be the one that threw off the curve.
I got my grades back. I got a C. My only C ever, in fact. An A (what I expected) would have gotten me summa cum laude.
The same semester, I took a statistics class. Paid exactly zero attention in class. The class took place in a computer lab for no good reason other than I’m guessing the other classrooms were booked. I played a fast-paced Quake-like FPS every class all class. Got an A in that course.
But that fuckin’ thermal physics class.
Years later, a coworker of mine who was an alum of my alma mater told me that they’d taken the professor who taught that thermal physics class off of teaching permanently due to his completely unreasonable grading practices.
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 9 hours ago
I remember that my statistics professor was so smug about grading on a curve because it was using statistics. It was also a class that he gloated about as a class where you “needed an a” if you wanted to get into grad school. In other words, the asshole was making sure only a certain number of people even had a chance to get into the graduate programs. It was rumored that he even ran tests on students in the different labs, telling the grad students teaching the labs to teach in certain ways and seeing if there were any differences. Wouldn’t put it past him.
kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
This is a certified this totally happened moment
Jackcooper@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
But he didn’t write anything
unmagical@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
I have had teachers try to grade on a strict bell curve distribution, but if you’re goal as a school is to accept promising talent then train them better you should expect your students to fall within a part of a bell curve and not spread across the whole damn thing.
Sorry, can’t pass you cause my morals oblige me to give 2 As, and 2Fs, and I’m all out of everything but FS (no matter how many points you were away from someone with a better final grade).
bassomitron@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Anon is just making a fake post. Literally no college would authorize this type of shit and I’d argue there could be grounds for a civil lawsuit if they did. Paying them tens of thousands of dollars and one of their professors admits to just auto failing students because there’s too many in the class? Nah, I’ve attended 3 different schools before I graduated (I moved a lot), and every single one would drop you before class even began or within the first week if the class was too full.
If this did actually happen to OP, I can guarantee there’s more to the story they’re not telling us. But I’m going to assume it’s made up or extremely exaggerated/altered.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 9 hours ago
Yeah, it’s way to easy to prove that the exam was graded wrong. Given the economic incentives, some of the failed students are definitely going to sue if you’re going to be that blatant about it.
fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 6 hours ago
IfIf the class is graded on the curve and you’re on the bottom half of the curve you should get a refund
atro_city@fedia.io 6 hours ago
gay: anon was fucked by the professor
fake: anon left the house
drolex@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
This is so fake that we managed to reach the {fake + gay} threshold without having to tap into the gay potential