I would rather not say. Obviously the college placed more value on churning out graduates than actually producing productive employees. Several of my employers (past and present) have told me that I was the only graduate from the college that they have been satisfied with and they would no longer be hiring from there.
In my next life, I am just going to go to university and shoot the lights out there. From what I’ve read here, at least I would get credit for it.
I agree with your last, but that is the way people do it these days, at least in my daughter’s high school. When I was an instructor in grad school I gave hard tests. The class was used to being graded on absolute scores, and when there was a class average of about 60 they all had fits. I was used to curves, so never thought about designing my tests so people would get good scores.
I disagree a bit on fitting the grades to a curve. First, the class has to be big enough so that you can expect a clean distribution. Second, you have to assume an even distribution of abilities. In an entry level class, maybe, but if there is filtering before people come into a class, you might want to preassign a distribution of grades, and fit the results to that (within reason.)
I TAed for a large assembly language class, that my professor made hard to help filter out students. Since the school had a liberal drop policy, we had to curve with the understanding that the low end got chopped off as time went on. Curving so the bottom 10% always got Fs even when 20% dropped wouldn’t be fair.
Speaking from the experience of a 30 year career in teaching…
The usual class does not contain enough students to really apply a “bell shaped curve” to it.
Classes can vary from section to section - with one section having many top students while another section might have a disproportionate number of weak students. This variance is also evident from year to year.
I think that the best solution is to grade on a set percentage for each grade. For example, 90% would be an A-, and 94% would be an A.
A fair teacher will let the students know what it is that they are expected to learn, and then write a test that measures just that. The teacher is responsible for writing a resonable test! And in fact, after the first test of the year, it is helpful to go over the test and discuss where the answer could have been found and studied (notes, text, etc)…thereby demonstrating to students that they all have the opportunity to get whatever grade they work for. (Yes, I do realise that some students will have to work much harder than others for the same grade.)
I have no problems with having classes where there are many A’s and B’s, with no D’s or F’s. I also have no problems with a class that has no A’s in it. Students should have grades that reflect what they know, rather than some artificial comparison to other students.
And I secretly believe that some teachers “curve” tests to avoid having to write good tests, and to be a “good teacher”…
Would that be a Bactrian curve? 
For me curving proves one thing…the prof doesn’t know how to effectively teach/evaluate.
Although often colleges require a certain grade level for a class. For example in my college students are expected to achieve a 75 average int their classes. If they don’t…curving results for good or bad.
An evaluation should test specifically what the prof wants you to know. If he has taught effectively, the student should have no excuse for not knowing it (barring exceptional circumstances like a death in the family causing stress)
My chemistry teacher in HS did something that I enjoyed. He had a sliding scale for the curves, with fewer points added at the top and more at the bottom. That 50% I just made on that test? It’s a 62% now!
This is not an accurate model for many kinds of tests. For instance, any of my qualifying exams gave a mark of “Honors” (basically, an A) for something like three questions perfect out of ten.
You don’t have to dodge 75% of the bullets to prove you can survive someone pulling a machine gun on you, and sometimes survival is all that matters.
Well, this is why you use some multiple of the standard deviation (as I’ve said how many times now?) rather than a straight percentage of the class as a measure of how wide the grades should be. Even so, you’re right that the lines shouldn’t be drawn blindly.
Also, assigning grades on a curve is really only necessary in a large class. In a small enough class that no Gaussian outline can be seen at all, the instructor should have some contact with each student to tell whether or not each one “gets it”.
To rigorously apply a curve-fitting, no. To see the rough outline, I’ve yet to see a class with more than 30 students fail to show the pattern.
As long as you intend the scare quotes around “curve” to mean the addition of points which many teachers call curving these days, I’m in agreement. On the other hand, if you mean what I’ve been talking about (finding a rough Gaussian outline to the distribution of raw scores and using that to assign letter grades), I again point out that well-written tests give good separation and tend to show off the curve.
As for fixed percentages, you seem to forget that the curve method not only smooths out class-by-class and year-by-year variations in the students, but it smooths out year-by-year variations in the exams themselves. For instance, I haven’t taught any calculus class quite the same way twice – the topics and emphases are slightly different each time – and this affects the material on the test. Further, it’s almost impossible to write two independent tests which are exactly as difficult at each other. Should the students in a year which gets a slightly more difficult exam be punished for that? The ones who would have gotten a 94% the previous year now get a 93% and drop from an A to an A-.
I’ve been teaching at the college level since 1991 and don’t believe in curves. They artificially inflate grades and while everyone supports a curve when it raises the grades, the same students would argue against a curve if it pushed grades down (too many A’s and B’s). Curves are too self-serving.
I’d rather students actually earn what they earn, be it all A’s or all E’s. In terms where I’ve taught more than one section of the same class, I’ve seen sometimes wildly different performances from each class. As the only meaningful variable between them is the students themselves, I see no reason to adjust the content of the course. Students who are doing poorly need to rise to the occasion, as their peers in the other section did.
In the end, the curve allows the instructor to A) look on paper as though he or she is teaching to some beancounter’s statistical fantasy and B) to avoid having too many students pounding on the chair’s door to complain about the professor being “too hard.” Neither seems to have anything legitimate to do with education.
I think one of the reasons proper curves are looked down upon is that many departments require a C or better to recieve credit for the class. In a proper norm-referenced grading scale, the lowest-scoring 10% of students fail and the 25% above that get a D. In a class where the scores are all grouped in an A percentile range (say, an exceptionally bright group), is it really fair that the 35%lowest of that group do not receive credits despite what would be an A in a criterion-referenced system?
I’ve had all kinds of “curves,” from true blee curve redistribution of grades to a simpler “everyone gets a ten point bump.”
My favorite curve was in my high school physics class. The teacher gave very hard quizzes and tests. At the end of each quarter, he’d take your overall percentage, then take the square root of that number and multiply it by ten – so a 49 became a 70, and hence was a passing grade. I got a lot of seventy-somethings in that class. . .
That’s a pretty terrible typo. Obviously I meant “bell curves.”
I’m glad your students have such an amazing teacher that has discovered the absolutely optimal pedagogical technique for even one course which will work for any group of students and under any pressures from the administration of the department and from without the department. Please, if one of your courses is a calculus-series course, let every other calculus instructor in the country know the secret to your amazing breakthrough.
In college, in my major, nearly every class was bell curved…it sucked. Mean was centered on a B-/C+. If you were more than 1 Standard Deviation above the mean, you got an A (starting at A-, then up depending on how high)…if you got below a standard devation, you got a D+ to an F. So, 2/3 of the class was between C- and B+…it was very tough to get good grades. Because the competition was so tight, mediocre GPAs were actually pretty good. Dean’s List was a 3.2, and the mean GPA for my major was around a 2.9.