The reality of college is that many of the courses are bullshit designed to contribute to some form of educational rounding. Graduate school represents a focus on a specific educational discipline.
If there’s something Dopers hate more than mediocrity, it’s ill-formed analogies.
…right, guys?
I thought it was improper grammar.
Professors that are only comfortable giving As to the top 20 per cent are either lazy or full of themselves or are just bad teachers.
Dear God, too many professors horrible teachers!
Is it really such a novel idea that college is about learning? Shouldn’t my professor teach?
Just as a data point, a passing (3) score on the AP European History test is =/- 37%. If you get an aggregate score of 68/180, you get credit and a 3. It all depends on the test and the competition.
Right, but the AP Euro History test is massive and isn’t really designed for ‘everyone who took the class to pass’. It’s several standards above one’s normal high school history class.
But if you are in, say, Microecon 101 and you get a 70 per cent on a test, I’m not so sure you know what the f you’re doing.
Or they teach hard courses. First year law school courses are graded on a C curve, which means most of the class will get Cs, and a certain percentage of students are generally required to fail.
So you’re not paying for an education; you’re paying to compete against others in an academic world that (ironically) rarely uses a rubric and grading is subjective.
Check.
edit: I’ve had hard courses taught by this man and his policy was, “You have time to sleep when you die. No excuses.” His policy was not, “Only 20 per cent of you are getting As, damn it.”
I have always believed that, in a perfect world, if every instructor did an adequate job of presenting the material, and all of the students were diligent in studying the material, *every student *would get an “A”. In reality, however, many instructors grade on a “curve”, whereby many students, while having a better-than-average knowledge of the material, still get a “C” because some of the other students in the class did better. It is not a question of only doing 3/4 of the work, or not applying oneself to studying.
To my perspective, it is the instructors’ job to convey all the required information to ace the course with a score of 100% to each and every student. If there are some in the class who do not measure up to that standard, it is a failing on the part of the instructor, not the student.
Plus, if all those students getting a “C” or lower (who some here maintain are in over their heads and ought to re-think whether they should be in college at all) left, by definition half of those students remaining would be “C” grade students, or lower (since they are still graded on a curve.) Lather, rinse and repeat. At what point would the class be composed of only “A” students, when, no matter how well the student has demonstrated knowledge of the material, the midpoint score will always be assigned a “C” grade?
“A” students are the ones who end up doing all the work. “B” students become managers or supervisors; “C” students become executives.
Grading on a fixed curve is not subjective, and every law school instructor I’ve had so far uses a very rigid rubric (allowing for the fact that law is obviously not a hard science).
Fixed curve grading is the only method guaranteed to eliminate grade inflation.
Because the C students understand effective allocation of resources. If you are pursuing a degree to enable you to pursue your chosen career (rather than pursuing an education, or perhaps even knowledge) every point above a passing grade is a waste of resource.
Fortunately, A students enjoy doing work. That’s why they get As.
bahh,
Some of the most useless science/engineering types I’ve known were the A students. They were only actually good at taking test, or regurgitating facts, or doing problems they had seen before, or so smart they never listened to anybody else ever, or just thought because they made good grades way back when they were somehow entitled to be well paid and admired for just hanging around and actual work was for the peons that surrounded them.
Thats not to say I haven’t seen similiar behavior from other “grade levels” but I know I seen it enough from the A guys/gals to not assume A = great in real life either.
I took a biochemistry course taught by a guy who played a major role in inventing synthetic insulin (B- in that class muthafukka). Several of my professors owned or were starting independent companies based on their research. Most of my professors in math/science did grad work or post grad work at the best universities in the US (Berkeley, MIT, Caltech, Harvard, etc), some of them after doing their undergrad a the best universities in their home countries. But I’ve had professors who only gave As to 20-30% of the class, and one told us if too many of us got too good of a grade, he would make the material or grading harder next semester.
Like most people, I forgot most of what I learned soon after the test. It really doesn’t matter. That is the part I don’t get. If I were actually using what I learned in college in the real world (either for my career or my personal interests), then I could understand why it matters. But I don’t use it.
No one (I’m not!) is saying you have to be the smartest or the best at anything. What I’m saying (and I think the general tone is), is if you can’t do better than mostly Cs, you don’t belong in college. I think colleges should be run as they are in Europe. Someone was telling me in Europe college is like a tube. Very few people go in, but they all come out. America is like a funnel. Everyone and their mom can attend, but very few actually finish.
To be fair, I think colleges main problem (and I thought this WELL before this thread) is there more about offering a service than a product. In doing this, their product (a degree of any sort) goes down as does their reputation. Colleges shouldn’t care as much about money. They should turn many people down.
I also wanted to say that there’s a big difference between doing something/finishing something because it’s good enough and doing a full job. That’s my problem with good enough. Good enough suggests there is more to be done and a lack of effort.
I really don’t understand your point. Are your claiming your classmates were better than you? Or are you just claiming that they were able to play the system better? Either it doesn’t make you look good. I think part of it was good enough was enoigh for you. You could have been one of the 20%, but it didn’t happen. It seems you have no regret. I don’t want to say without offending you (most likely). All I have to say is in my major, I got all As. I got As and Bs in my nonmajor classes. Getting As sometimes met doing more work than some feel required and sometimes it meant being competetive, but not being a small fish in a big pond was also import to me.
In a general way, I can see some people being swayed by a big school. I’m not impressed by a C student from any state school as I’m EQUALLY not impressed by the C student from MIT/YALE/BROWN/HARVARD/ECT. The C tells me they probably didn’t belong there.
If you’re asking my opinion, I don’t think you were qualified to go to college. It sounds like you were just passing gen requirements and prerequists. Thoses classes are just basically 15 weeks of “Did you ever have X course in high school?”.
To answer what you seem to be asking first, no. One C is ok in my books with lots of effort. Many C are not ok at all.
What you’re clearly not understanding it that it really matters how the C grade is calculated before you judge if a student is fit to attend their school.
At my university and in my program (four-year nursing degree), all of the courses have a section in the course syllabus which has a predetermined grading system. In each course I take, you are graded on assignments/exams (as a percent grade), and each assignment is weighted into a final course mark. That final percentage converts to a set letter grade, which converts to a grade point value.
For example, in several of my courses, getting a final percent grade of 60-62% was a C-, which is 1.7 grade points. Similarly, a grade of 95-100% is a A+ (4.0). Each course in my program requires a C- to pass the course and use it as a prerequisite for the next semester’s courses.
Now, I have a pretty good GPA (3.7), which means the percentage grade I got in most of my courses was 85-90%.
Each course has it’s own grading system, so some courses are easier than others. A C- in one course requires a grade of 62%, while a C- in a harder course might require 57% and a C- in an easier course requires 67%.
In my program, at my university, I would agree with you that I would think that anyone who is intelligent enough to get into the program (which is very competitive), should be able to maintain a B GPA (approx. 75-79%).
HOWEVER, there are two universities in my city that offer a four-year RN degree program. My university uses the fixed percentage to GPA system. The other university’s nursing program grades all of their classes on a curve. (Although other faculties at that university use the curve, percentages, or a combination - it varies between faculties/departments).
So at the other university, a fixed percentage of students will definitely fail, and a fixed percentage will get a C, a B, or an A.
You say “a C tell me they don’t belong there.” Maybe at my university I could kind of agree with you, but if I were going to the other university I would not. If a fixed percentage of the students will get a C or lower, you can’t just say that those students shouldn’t be there. If grades are on a curve and you lop off the bottom of the curve by kicking out all of the students who got a C, then the next semester the students who previously got B- and B marks will become the lowest part of the curve and will then get the Cs that are required to be given out by the curve.
In real life, you can always spend more time and money on a project to make it incrementally better. This can be done for an infinite amount of time and money. A good Project Manager knows when the report, the product, the building design, has either reached the point of diminishing returns or has met the contract specs. When the project is good enough, it’s time to call it complete and ship and get paid.
A Project Manager who always runs over schedule and over budget because they have to make things perfect, when it is never possible to be perfect, is harming their company’s bottom line. This will get noticed, and not in a good way.
No. A person who got A’s is not necessarily going to be able to take those A’s and do a good job. Jobs are not classes. I’d hire whoever has the best track record of doing the job. That probably means not hiring someone straight out of school, unless they’ve had internships and/or summer jobs.
What you get paid depends on the contract. For painters (the original analogy) that’s usually 50% or less up front and the balance when the job has been completed and accepted. So if you do a 75% job, you get 50% pay and an unhappy customer bad-mouthing you to everyone they can lay a complaint on.
For a long, complicated project, a contractor will be paid roughly monthly for work completed, minus 10% retainage, and they’ll have to put up a completion bond for 100% of the estimated cost of the project. Sometimes they will also provide a 100% workmanship bond as well.
The job is complete when it meets specs. Not when it’s perfect - when it meets specs. When it’s good enough.
Oddly, I recently read an article contending that you didn’t want a doctor from the bottom 10% or the top 10% of the class. Apparently the top 10% aren’t known for their patient communication abilities. It’s a single article with no citiations. Feel free to ignore. But I’d have trouble trusting a doctor that I didn’t think was listening to me.
Also, being listed as in the top 25% of the class doesn’t mean a doctor doesn’t know 75% of what they need to know. As an example, when his father needed brain surgery, my brother-in-law (an anesthesiologist) looked for a surgeon who (A) did that kind of surgery regularly and (B) had a very good results rate. The doctor who had begun treatment didn’t qualify by either criterion. The family switched hospitals to get a better doctor* for that surgery*. Results were good. At no time did anyone check college grades.
No. Good enough says that the specs have been met. There is always more that could be done. If you paint a house assuming that it will be graded, and that you want 100%, you can always find something more to do. You can put on another coat of paint for fuller coverage. You can find a drip hidden up in the eaves that could be sanded down and repainted. Do not get caught in that infinite loop. You’re a painter. Finish the job, get paid, and start the next job.
You’ll starve if you do one job in the time that other painters do two. And word will get around that you take twice as long as everyone else. Customers who can’t see the difference between two coats and three, and who would never think to get up on a ladder looking for runs in the paint under the eaves will definitely notice the extra cost of the third coat and the extra week that they had to dodge scaffolding.
Many of my classmates at the second school were better than me at academics. I went from being an A student to being a B/B- student with some Cs.
If those classmates had gone to MIT or CalTech, they would’ve been getting Cs instead of As.
I didn’t want to be one of the 20%. The majority of my classmates were pre something. Most were pre-med but many were also pre-vet, pre-dental, pre-law, pre-pharmacy, pre-PhD. Evenso, I couldn’t have been one of the 20%. Even if I had worked my ass off, hard work only goes so far. There is innate talent that matters too because there is a g factor of general intelligence, and there were people who had more of it than me. One of the guys who did get mostly As who was a classmate of mine was a total stoner who would party and fuck around all week, then study for a few hours before the test and get an A. I didn’t have the innate talent to do that. I could do that at my first school, but not the second. If that guy who got As had gone to MIT, he would’ve gotten Cs with that kind of work ethic. But I never had any real desire to do grad work because I lack the self-discipline and do not think it would advance my career or personal life, so it didn’t matter. Some people are cut out to get amazing grades and go on and do great things. Some people get amazing grades and fail miserably in life. The same happens to some people with terrible grades.
The C student from MIT would be an A student at a state school despite having the same grasp of the material. Either way, I never asked for anyone to find me impressive. But if a person uses undergraduate GPA as a metric to determine how successful a person is in life, or how competent they are at their job they are pretty out of touch and idealistic. GPA really doesn’t matter.