You’re trying to redefine the entire grading system. In every undergrad institution I know of, a C is a passing grade. It means that you’ve demonstrated a satisfactory knowledge of the material. I don’t know about med school, but undergrad engineers who get Cs graduate, get jobs, and design the bridges you drive over every day. Accountants who get Cs keep track of your money. Business majors who get Cs manage the stores you patronize every day. A C student gets a diploma and becomes a productive member of society.
You claim that you’re against grade inflation, and you also claim that you won’t accept anything other than A work. How does that work?
I’ve taken math tests - in grad school, even - where 75% was a stellar score. At least it would have been, had anyone hit it. I’ve given a few, too.
That doesn’t mean they’re badly designed tests Particularly for a grad class, I tend to assume that the students know the basic material. What I want from this kind of exam is to find out who can take those basics and extend them to the kind of problems that they haven’t seen. I test on stuff that wasn’t explicitly covered all the time, and it gives me a much better handle on who really understands and who’s just getting by.
What do you learn from a test where everybody scores an 85 or better? To me, that’s a lousy test.
I accept As and Bs. Satisfactory is not meeting my expectations. I don’t take 82 or below. I give it back to the student and they can correct it. If they don’t, they get a zero.
You fail my class if you want to, but you can’t pass without working for it.
My exams are not easy, I taught ESL in a metro area school and I’m constantly thanked for my work. I put it a lot of effort when I teach. My students (generally) appreciate it.
There’s a difference between testing to see where students are and testing for grades. I test where students are all the time. I expect my first test to get a lot of F’s…but that score isn’t graded.
If most kids fail the test, I use it for the ‘actual’ graded test. Exact same test. No shockers. No multiple choice, either. (Obviously math means changing around numbers and such, but I teach social studies.)
Wait, do you teach high school? That’s a totally different learning environment.
When you define C work as unacceptable, you’re inflating grades. By giving less capable students and slackers multiple tries to get things right, you’re devaluing the A’s earned by the really smart, hardworking kids who get it right on the first go around. If you’re not giving out C’s to average students, your A’s and B’s mean less than they should.
It’s not surprising, I guess, but it makes my job harder when I get them in college. College students are adults, and they get to set their own priorities. I’d like for my class to be one of them, but I won’t take it personally if it isn’t. If Timmy wants to go out drinking Thursday night and scrawl down some chickenscratch to turn in Friday morning, I’ll grade the chickenscratch and move one. But I won’t give him another try - he made the decision and he gets to live with it. He’ll have more homework assignments to bring his grade up, but it’s ultimately his grade to earn. All I do is record it.
I never said they get full points back. They get some.
If a student fucks up the first round, then they aren’t getting an A when they return their paper to me. I just don’t take your shit if you are a) failing because you don’t get it or b) failing because you’re lazy.
Why would I teach if you don’t get the material? Classes should be progressive - as in, we build on previous knowledge.
In my grad program, if I get an 81 per cent I have to retake the class. In my classroom, if a kid gets a 79 per cent on an exam, he/she has to fix it for me to enter a grade. All students have to correct errors.
Oh yeah, I’m also a fan of well-written essay exams.
When I was in grad school you were expected to keep a 3.0 GPA. If you made to many Cs you were out. I guess the point was that every student there was expected to be above average. At the end of the day though, the professors decide what grades everyone gets and my school had decided to only use the top end of the measuring stick so it looked like everybody was smart. I guess a really good school would only give out A, A- and A+ grades?
> So yeah, John Kerry’s C average at Yale isn’t impressive.
I’m not sure why you’re picking particularly on John Kerry. Yeah, he didn’t get very good grades as an undergraduate. Like George W. Bush, he was a C+ student. He was recognized in college as a brilliant orator, winning prizes for his debating skills. He then joined the Navy and served in Vietnam. After leaving the Navy, he became known for his anti-war activism. He got into Boston College Law School and became a lawyer. I’m not sure what this proves except that it’s possible to be a C+ student (at Yale, admittedly) in college and yet have the skills to do very well after college.
I guess it would be irresponsible for students in the lecture to paint 3 walls of the professors house and leave a CD player by the front door playing “Everybody Wants To Rule the World” on continuous loop.
Obviously, it depends on the context, as others have said.
I still remember the shock of going from undergrad in university to law school. In my undergrad, it was relatively easy to get good grades - if you chose your classes carefully to suit your interests. In law school, it was damn near impossible, no matter how hard you worked (thought it was also difficult to do really badly) - pretty well everyone got C’s and B’s, and those who got straight A’s (or failed) were, to put it mildly, unusual.
In Law School, because of the rigidity of grading, you had to distinguish yourself not by getting better marks than the average (nearly impossible), but by doing extra-curricular stuff - working on the law review, working as a legal researcher for the profs, doing moot court, getting published, stuff like that.
What if you paint all four walls and the ceiling, but when you paint the trim work you get just a bit of paint on the glass, then when using a razor blade to scrape the stray paint off you accidentally remove a glazier’s point?
Wendell, thank you for the biographical campaign talking points of John Kerry. I didn’t know any of that before I voted for him [in the general] after I voted against him [in the primary].
I got one A- in college, from a professor that never returned a paper to me, forgot about meetings, and critiqued my papers for having too specific theses instead of making sweeping generalizations about the entire world’s history during, say, the 19th century :rolleyes:. Otherwise I was a straight-A student.
Bear that in mind when I say that your post shows a serious lack of understanding of what an average grade means. It’s impossible for everyone to score above average.
My classes have higher grades because I don’t give them a choice. Other classes have higher grades because the teachers are lazy or the school demands them to inflate grades.
If the average grade is a 3.7, what does that say?
Well here is the funny part. My first year of college I was in a smaller school doing general study pre-req courses and had all As with two A-s. I did about 30 credit hours my first year (I forgot exactly how many), but all As with a couple A-s.
Then I transferred to a bigger school and changed my major to something harder and started getting a lot more Bs and Cs. At the first school I was competing with the best HS student in the county/city region doing general courses. At the second school I was competing with the best students in the state (I went to a flagship university) and did a fairly difficult major. Several of my classmates at the second school were valedictorians and salutatorians.
So I have been an A student and top of my class. Had I stayed at the smaller school I would’ve graduated with a 3.9 or something. Like I said, it doesn’t matter. What matters it the people I was competing with for grades went up in quality when I transferred.
Fundamentally it comes down to competition and who you are competing with, and what kinds of grades your professor feels comfortable giving. Some don’t like giving more than 20% of the class As, some give 60% of them As. Classmates at MIT will be better than those at community college.
Unless you’re talking about cumulative GPAs, that’s pretty much a C- statement right there- it’s about 2/3 or so correct.
People have subjects they’re good in, and subjects that they’re not so good in. The mere fact of making a C in a particular course means nothing- the main reasons would be lack of preparation (long-term, prerequisites), lack of preparation (short-term, not studying), bad performance on the testing/homework events, and finally just not having a knack for that particular subject.
I’d say that if you’re busting your hump and still making a C average, you should probably rethink your chosen field, but making a C in a given course doesn’t mean anything.
I mean, I have a BS in Computer Science (top 50 program), a MBA (top 50 program) and a MS in IT & Mgmt. I made many Cs in the undergrad, and one in graduate school, even though I graduated with a B average in undergrad, and an A average in both master’s degrees.
In reality, in the U.S. college courses I taught and graded, a C meant “not* totally* clueless and/or illiterate.” “You can write a coherent sentence and appear to have listened and done the set reading at least some of the time,” got you a B.
