Academia: The true meanings of the letter grades

Factual Questions
41

This.

The instructor usually must disclose his planned method for computing the final grade in advance, normally in the “syllabus” that is given out on the first day of class. It might say that the final exam is worth 40% of your grade, with a 30% term paper, 20% midterm exam, 5% homework, and 5% attendance and participation. Not all instructors grade homework or participation - it was typical to show up in class and be assigned, “Page 104, Problems 1-10, Page 106, Problems 5-9”. You were expected to do them. All classes had indirect consequences for not doing them - i.e. you would not learn the material as much and consequently do worse on exams. In some classes, the instructor would collect and grade the homework and thus the homework had a direct impact on your grade.

While it’s true that the final exam is typically a large (if not the largest) percentage of your grade, it’s not true that the final exam is the only important thing. If you do well on the final but slack off elsewhere you can and will suffer - the other graded items are not usually of trivial value.

If you oppose the syllabus, you can withdraw and find another class.

42

Anecdote:

I was in a STEM class that had a lecture and a lab component. There was a higher policy (not sure if it was departmental or schoolwide) that the lion’s share of the final grade must be based on performance in the lecture (exams, homework, essays). Only a fractional, specified percentage could be based on lab performance. The instructor didn’t like this because it ended up meaning that any individual lab assignment was worth a trivial number of points toward your final grade and students would just skip a few to concentrate on More Important Things ™ and still expect to do well in the course, which he deemed to be unacceptable. He found a loophole though - the school let him put a policy into his syllabus that failing to turn in a lab report resulted in an automatic F for the course. You didn’t have to get an A in every lab report, but you had do at least do all of them.

43

Not to hijack, but almost all the topics discussed above continue after academia and into the working world with “performance assements”. The names get changed a little; 'C" becomes “meets expectations” and so forth.

And you run into situations like a company that says “We hire only the best people” and then insists that the bulk of emplyees get a “meets expectations” grade instead of “exceeds” or “excels”.

44

Eh, I’ve had plenty of math(-related) classes where if you go in and talk to a professor, they may give you extra points if you explain why your batshit insane test answer was actually a minor error in logic when setting up the equation.

At least at my university, the syllabus can be altered with unanimous consent of the professor and the enrolled students. This seems like it would never happen, but I’ve had it happen 2-3 times (not including votes to cancel class the day before a holiday, which happens almost without fail every semester at least once).

The magic number in the physics department at my uni is 3 missed labs, but that’s standard practice here.

45

Google “grade inflation” for some fun. It’s a well-known issue, and started when students began rating professors (and those ratings mattering to administration).

When I went to U of Mich, most profs made it clear that they graded on a curve, and gave the figures. I suspect it was a standard policy, because as far as I could tell it was always the same. That applied to engineering classes, and IIRC, math & physics as well.

IIRC, 10% got A, 20% got B, 40% got C, 20% D, 10% E, or something like that. A lot of people were rather frosted that they had to work their asses off in organic chem to get a C while friends got easy A’s in basket weaving, but such is life. Or, was. I don’t know whether UM is still on a curve. I was there in the late 70’s.

46

I think the person you’re responding to meant going over the professor to the chair or dean.

Weird–I’ve never seen a syllabus that didn’t specify the instructor can change it unilaterally at will.

47

I taught 1st year high school physics for two years, and my semester final grade averages were always in the mid to low 70’s (so I really had a C average overall for my classes). And that was with generous curves on my tests and assignment-forgiveness (wipe out the lowest grade each student had at the end of each quarter).

Needless to say I was not a popular teacher and got driven out of the job by administrators who simply refused to stand behind my decisions as an educator.

That being said, I think the mode of the grades my students earned were B’s, but they were low B’s, and there were enough WTF students who stuck it out and earned like a 10 or a 20 in my class that it brought the average down into the mid-to-low C range.

48

I think they can unilaterally change things like number of assignments, or minor schedule/topic changes, but things like changing the grading policy require unanimous consent by university rules.

49

Yes, that’s what I meant. You can’t go to the dean, department head, etc. and say, “Professor Jones gave me a C. That’s not fair - he should have graded the homework and counted labs as a smaller percentage of the grade.” Well, I guess you can, but the dean won’t change your grade unless you can show that the professor graded arbitrarily (e.g. used a ouija board), assigned grades based on race and religion, took bribes to increase one’s grade, or something else that’s obviously unfair.

50

I had a professor who determined letter grades by making a chart of all of the final percentages and claiming that grades would “clump together” and she could just draw a circle around the As, Bs, etc. I got an A, so I guess I had no reason to complain, but I feel bad for the person who got a bad grade based on the vibes a professor got from a magic chart. (Of course, maybe she gave everybody an A. I had another instructor who did that.)

51

Huh? That sounds like a standard method of grading to me. I’ve had a lot of teachers that look for “clumps” in the grading, meaning natural gaps in the distribution. Usually you’ll get something natural like a clump of roughly closely spaced grades from 89% up, then a “gap” from, say, 78-85%, then another “gap”, etc. Sometimes it doesn’t work out that way, and you’re forced to just make a solid decision like “90%+ is an A because there’s no obvious gap to draw the line, sorry”, but it usually does.

52

Even without student evaluations, insane grade inflation can occur if the school administration is being evaluated on their student outcomes (give them all A’s so it looks like we are teaching them something) and/or if students (or parents) are paying for the tuition and want a piece of paper in return for their investment.

53

.A few thoughts:

-Instructors are not gods charged with objectively delineating what is good and what is bad in the world. Grades are not (and cannot) be some kind of objective judgement. They are a tool for learning, nothing more and nothing less. Different teachers use them in different ways because different people teach and learn in different ways.

-Often there are two kinds of students: those who engage actively with the materials, and those that don’t even pretend to try. When students actively engage, the results tend to be AWESOME and teachers get really excited about it, and that translates into high scores. And of course the students who don’t care are easy to write off. Sometimes there really aren’t a lot of students in the middle. For example, if you are teaching an art class among a generally pretty talented pool, I’d expect pretty much everything the students who try hard do will be great. There aren’t going to be a lot of students who turn in a mediocre landscape or whatever. Often it’s either good or its just not there.

-It’s pretty standard to grade “subjective” things like essays with a matrix. For example, when I taught ESL, I might give five points for pronunciation in a presentation and they may be distributed as 1 = noise comes out of the mouth, but it’s impossible to understand what is being said, 2 = There are large, pervasive errors that make it difficult to follow the line of thought, 3 = There are large OR pervasive errors, but the general line of thought can be understood with some effort, 4 = There are occasional errors, some may be large, but the general meaning is clear, 5 = errors are minor and the meaning is clear.

-Never underestimate the incompetence of the people around you. I know you shouldn’t get an award just for waking up, getting your teeth brushed, and showing up where you are supposed to go, but that actually is a pretty exceptional thing. For any number of reasons, a good chunk of people have a hard time consistently attending class, making basic deadlines, writing coherently and otherwise demonstrating basic competence.

54

The trouble with bell curves is that they fail when most of your students are bell-ends.

55

Most grades in my classes were based on actual percentages of the assignments and tests completed correctly, with different weights assigned to different assignments and tests.

The thing is, this only gives the illusion of objectivity to appease the students. The tests and assignments are as hard as the teacher wants them to be. The same can be said about standardized exams as well.

There is no such thing as an objective measurement of what a person knows, no matter how much professors and hiring managers would like there to be.

56

In my experience, especially on science courses, marks were awarded on a pretty straight-forward basis determined by correct answers and often, clear and somwhat correct intermediate work on a problem. In arts-oriented classes, essay grading can be somewhat arbitrary but there was often a matrix like even sven mentions - points for language, for logic of the essay, etc.

In the original classes I took in the 1970’s, these marks would add up; the “marking scheme” was stated at the beginning, so much for assignments, so much for term test(s) and so much for the final exam. At one point, a certain percent had to be allocated (by some departments’ policy) to finals, so that the student had to demonstrate some of their own proficiency with the course material.

By the 80’s, as I mentioned the profs semed less dedicated to tailoring teaching, tests etc. to student proficiency. Grades had also become a concern all the way up the ladder, so that profs were under pressure to not have grades too far off the average. As a result, they used bell curves to adjust marks. In the 70’s, you could calculate your mark; in the 80’s many course, your final mark was based on some magical adjustment of the coursework. In many cases, you did not get your final exam back, so part of your mark was based on some unknown number that you guessed, comparing answers after the exam.

I’m sure many profs found it was less trouble to bell up than down, so it was simpler to make a test regimen where the marks were 50% than 80%. Nobody complained “I calculated my coursework and I should have gotten a 56% not a 75%”. Going the other way invited too many complaints.

I helped a high school teacher with her marks once, writing the early equivalent of a spreadsheet with BASIC. She took the course material, then fiddled with the weighting to get a better distribution and average. She also adjusted participation and even final marks, but generally upward to reward effort over ability. This way, if someone failed or had a bad mark the number was justifiable (“here’s the calculation”) but those who she felt deserved it, passed or went up a grade benefiting from magic boosts.

Thi was another problem with grades - students in college who don’t want to be there usually aren’t. Most high school students have no chaice, so the level of interest, participation and dedication can vary much more widely.