I’ve got a question for anybody that’s taught college/university courses. Let me start out by saying I once flunked a 4th semester language course years ago. So I’ve always been curious about something. Generally speaking how would a school think that reflected on the person running the course? (I’m guess the answer is it depends.) I mean I know with some courses a certain amount of students failing would be expected. However I am curious if it’s expected in that sort of course and if a school would actually blame the instructor. Any ideas out there?
I’d guess not at all. Most F’s at the college level occur because the student didn’t do the work or even stopped attending classes.
Most college classes that I took were graded on a curve, so the percentage of failing would end up fairly consistent from one instructor to the next.
Not at all if it’s not a large proportion. If there were any question, simple scrutiny of the grade roster and requirements would indicate whether the course was too difficult.
I once failed two students in a sub-level grammar class. The dean came to see me to suggest that maybe my grading had been excessively harsh. All I had to do was show him the other ~60 students’ consistent grades above C, plus the options for make-up work, plus attendance record. It was really clear over the 16 weeks and 75 graded assignments that these two guys (who were friends) had not come to class, had done very poor work, and had not taken any of the make-up opportunities. The dean glanced at the grades, said, “Oh, if you’ve got objective criteria–” and left.
There is no such thing as an un-failable course (or there shouldn’t be). Every course is going to have requirements and expectations, and the bulk of the burden is on the students, not the instructor, that they meet those expectations.
If an individual student flunks a course—any course—no one’s going to think twice about it unless the student himself appeals the grade. In that case, if the instructor can document that there were clearly defined standards for passing that the student did not meet, then that’s that.
A school might notice, and raise questions, if a lot of students failed a course, particularly if other instructors teaching the same course didn’t fail nearly as many. (The school also might question if no one, including notorious slackers, failed the class and all grades were suspiciously high.) In that case the instructor might be called upon to explain his grading system.
To give an example, in a course of 120 students, I don’t want to see any fail, but some will. One of my standard make-up assignments is for the student to document everywhere that I provided deadlines they missed, criteria they didn’t meet, or instructions they didn’t follow (plus the missing work, and sometimes plus another piece of work). This usually takes a full page. It’s hard to argue that you didn’t know when an assignment was due when the due date was on the syllabus.
Related to the above comments - in a course with a large number of students The Powers That Be are going to be suspicious if nobody fails the course; that would imply that the course is way too easy.
Time for a conversation on the dreaded curve.
It’s been a few years since I was in college but IIRC doesn’t the curve pretty much mandate there will be as many Fs as there are As?
True (what Canadjun said). Also, I can’t speak for others but in a smaller course I can see who’s prepared more easily because there’s more discussion, and I can hound students more easily. In most classes, for most students, lack of preparation or completion of assignments is more the issue than lack of understanding of concepts in and of itself.
ETA: I’ve never taught at a college or university that mandated grading on a curve. I grade based on meeting criteria, and I work with students to help them meet those criteria, so there is no good reason not to pass.
No, and I’ve never known a teacher which did that. I’ve heard stories, but it was always “so and so told his roommate who told hisngirlfriend who told me” stories.
Depends on what you mean by “grading on a curve.”
See Define: Grading On The Curve?, and perhaps also ‘Curved’ grades.
(And, while searching for that, I ran across this at-least-tangentially relevant thread: College Professors: Why not fail them all?.)
Actually, it depends on what the person means by “curved.” If this means, “the scale adjusted so that the percentage of each grade meets the expected percentage of each grade in a normal distribution, where A’s and F’s are outside the 2 sigma range,” then yes, that’s exactly what would happen. If, on the other hand, the concept of “curving” the grade means attempting to fit what scores there are to a standard distribution curve, and then seeing what that curve would mandate as scores for A, B, etc., then no, it would not be required.
Since both methods are used by professors who “curve,” it’s quite possible that the former happens a fair amount. :eek:
I can say with certainty that there were a number of teachers in my courses that used a bell curve.
So, for the purposes of this conversation, we will assume the bell curve is in use.
That said, doesn’t the bell curve pretty much mandate there will be an equal number of Fs as As?
Don’t confuse the concept of a normal distribution with whatever distribution there happens to be in an obtained sample.
I never use a curve, and in last semester the lowest grade I gave was a “B.” (I teach grad students, so that’s not terribly unusual.)
I’m curious why the OP would think that anyone would be surprised, irked, etc. if a student failed a class. It’s college and the responsibility lies with the student primarily. You could have failed for any number of reasons - not showing up to class, not turning in assignments, bombing the final, etc.
I think it would have also to do with the historical trends in that course. Do most students in that class pass? If most did, and all of a sudden half the course fails, then you’ve got something. How does the prof’s evaluations look? I can count on a couple of students who hate the course or hate me, but the vast majority are positive.
Last, American strikes me as a moderately research intensive school. I’m not sure of its Carnegie classification but I suspect there is a modest to large focus on research and publication for the faculty. If this is the case, a poor teacher can go quite far with a stellar research record.
So essentially, unless you’re part of a larger trend of failures where there haven’t been, I don’t think your individual case would cause much consternation for the professor. If the syllabus wasn’t followed or something like that, I think you might have something. Otherwise, not so much.
If a professor had a disproportionate number of F’s (especially in a upper level, not intro level course) they might wonder about it. However, in general a grade of an F does not affect the assigning professor. In my experience, my Deans are looking more closely at the number of A’s we give (grade inflation concerns) than F’s!
Missed the edit window-ETA: I never curve my grades now, however, I did adjust grades when I was just starting out to allow for the fact that I was new and not completely adept at test creating. Now I only adjust if there seems to be something really off about a particular question or test.
heh I completely missed my Biology 101 final because somehow or other I failed to get the news flash that, in college, finals are often not administered during regularly-scheduled class time. :smack: That sucked, since I’d been running a low-B/high-C up to that point, had an excellent prof, and really enjoyed the class. To be fair, my only other “academic” classes that semester were Philosophy 101 and Music Theory, and those professors did administer the final during regular class time. My other classes were music groups, so had no finals.
When I went red-faced to the professor the day after the final and explained my mistake, he told me all I could do was wait and take the final at the end of the following semester. (Alas, I didn’t return for a second semester.)
Am I the only one who experienced a “flunk out” course?
The freshman level biology and chemistry courses were designed to be tough to weed out the pre-med, pre-dental and pre-nursing students who had absolutely no change of being able to do the upper level coursework.
There was no grading on a curve, no makeup work, no dropping of the lowest grade or any other adjustment. If you failed, you failed. If you didn’t want to be a doctor, dentist or nurse, there were other entry level courses that didn’t count as a prerequisite that were (supposedly) somewhat easier.
I’m always curious about were this idea of a minimum number of each particular grade comes from. While i’m perfectly willing to believe that some professors in some courses assign final grades based on certain types of grade distribution, the idea that this requires the same number of F grades as A grades is bizarre.
In my time in undergrad and grad school, the only time i ever came across a single example of limiting the number of A grades was in a freshman Spanish language course, where we were told that no more than 20% of the class could receive an A. The idea that some students MUST fail, no matter what their actual performance level, is ridiculous.
I spoke to a friend of mine today, who is a humanities professor at Very Large State University in the United States. She teaches survey courses with 300-400 students. While she was cautioned not to be too generous with handing out A’s, as it would not look good on her tenure review, she told me that there has never been any suggestion that she should fail a particular number of students, or assign grades in any particular distribution. The fact is that, in a class as large as that, in which you have a wide variety of students (geniuses, dummies, hard workers, slackers, etc.), there will always be some F’s, and chances are that most grades will fall in the high C or B region. But this is not a result of mandate.
By contrast, in upper division seminar courses, where there might only be 10 or 15 students, and where they are probably all majors in the subject in question, it’s not unusual to have more high grades, because the students tend to be self-selecting. In my second year of grad school, i was TA for an upper division Intellectual History class. It was clear from the beginning that most of the students in the class were high B or A quality students, and that’s how the grades turned out. We weren’t going to give some of them a D just because the class happened to be full of above-average students.
Obviously, things might be different in the sciences. I don’t claim to have any real knowledge of how grading works in subjects like biology or physics or mathematics or engineering. But ANY course that requires a particular percentage of Failing grades would, in my opinion, be intellectually bankrupt.
I have spent many semesters TAing large physics classes (a hundred or more). Typically, in any given semester, there are one or two students who drop the course without taking care of the paperwork (i.e., they just stop showing up, or sometimes never even showed up at all), and there are not infrequently one or two students who show up the whole time, but still fail. We usually try to take these students aside and recommend to them that they drop the class, but ultimately, it’s their decision.
I have never seen any sort of investigations or repercussions from these occasional failures. The closest I’ve ever seen is that, when entering a failing grade into the records, we’re required to also enter the last date on which the student attended class (estimated to the best of our ability, if we don’t know for sure).