I think it was in 1991 that we had a new hire who had just finished a Peirce instructorship at Harvard. He had been advised by the chairman not to give a mark below B+ because the work involved in justifying it to an enraged parent was just not worth the effort.
We had a class in college with a high flunk/drop rate. However the Prof announced right before the final drop day (get a W) that he had decided that anyone who stuck it out this far could withdraw, or just skip the final and get a D. I skipped the final. The number of students nodding off in that class was high- boring Prof who still knew his stuff.
I was in a BSEE program about that time and somehow my advisor had me take dynamics before I took statics. (FYI The basic difference is dynamics is forces in motion versus statics is forces at rest.) It was the hardest course I had ever had, and I felt lucky to get a C. The next semester I then took statics, which everyone really struggled with. Except for me: it was so basic and simple! I got an A, so between the two courses I did ok.
It just sounds patently absurd to me. How much do classes at college cost these days? And for me to throw it away on a “can’t pass” class, are you freaking kidding me.
Now weed-out classes are another thing. I went to a good school and we definitely had those in the hard sciences. It took me two weeks of orgo (what we called organic chemistry) to realize, ya know, maybe I don’t want to be a doctor, after all. I dropped it right quick, even before any sort of exam. I loved regular chemistry and was in the advanced class in university, but orgo was just way outside my wheelhouse.
About your last sentence: I had a pharmacy school professor who was like that. A year or two after I had him, he gave 66 D’s out of about 100 students. I’ll never forget that: 66 D’s. He gave us tests that were basically pointless and did not cover things taught in class, or lab - a lab that for some reason wasn’t graded, either.
He also didn’t believe in women in pharmacy, so we were identified on tests by our lab dates, and Social Security number. (Early 1990s.) The latest dean is a woman, and he barely missed living to see that. While I was in school, we got a dean who was black, and TBH he probably wasn’t very happy about that either. He died a few years ago, in his late 90s.
If you could get through THAT class, well, it wasn’t smooth sailing, but few people flunked out after that. When I first moved there, I worked briefly (she had just gotten her degree in something else, and got a job in that field and moved away) with a woman who had failed his class and decided it wasn’t worth it, and told me, “Get out now, while you still have brain cells left to think with.”
I walked into my O-Chem II final with a high D, and when I saw the C posted, I nearly burst into tears. A workman standing nearby said, “I’ve seen other people cry, but not because they were happy!” At one point during that semester from hell, I saw a reference to the movie “Psycho” and read it as P-S-Y and an aldehyde group. At least I didn’t see the aldehyde group preceded by phosphorus, sulfur, and yttrium.
One of the smartest people I have ever known wanted to be a dentist, and finally realized after failing O-Chem I for the third time that it wasn’t gonna happen. She became a dental hygienist.
Organic chemistry is something that you either get it well enough to pass, or you don’t get it at all. A class where 40% is a C - what’s that tell you?
The purpose of a class is to teach people. If nobody learns, then the class is a failure. Seems simple to me.
That’s also why I don’t get grading on a curve. The teacher’s goal is for everyone to learn everything, which means that in a perfect world, everyone would get an A. Why handicap people?
Because no instructor can perfectly target the format and content of any assessed work to reflect exactly what their students should know by that point in the course, calibrated to exactly the amount of time they have to demonstrate their knowledge.
If I underestimate the amount of time that should be reasonably allocated to solve a particular problem on a timed test, for example, and consequently all the test grades skew low becaise they ran out of time, the students’ actual competence will be more accurately reflected by a curved grading scale than by a standard fixed one.
But yeah, I don’t curve grades in the other direction, for the reason you mention. If, miraculously, everybody learned everything I assigned them to learn and successfully demonstrated their knowledge at an A level, then everybody gets an A. I don’t retroactively decide that okay, on this test 92% counts as a C grade just in order to make the grade outcomes a nice neat bell curve, because that would be shitty.
Me, too. That just sounds like a bad course. The point of a class is to teach stuff to students. If it’s too much to teach in one semester, split it in half and make it two classes. If it’s “too boring”, either the teacher sucks or they are advertising the class badly and attracting the wrong students.
Weeding some people out is not crazy. Maybe there’s a field that many people think they’d like to go into, but not all have what it takes to do it. Having a hard (but relevant) class up front so students can figure that out quickly can make sense. But someone should be passing that class on the first attempt.
I don’t think learning should be competitive, where one student gets a lower grade because others do well. But i also don’t think that all tests are calibrated to the same level. In general, you can’t write a test that covers everything one should have learned from a class and is doable in some reasonable amount of time. So tests are sort of statistical in nature: take a sample of learning and try to evaluate what it means. And they aren’t always perfect. So i don’t think some absolute “X% should be an A” is a good standard.
And sometimes a teacher is surprised by how the class does, and that’s more likely to be evidence that the test was different from last year’s than that the students are collectively different from last year’s. But that shouldn’t be a major effect. And if the test is too easy and even the students who didn’t learn much do well, it’s unfair to penalize students who did learn the material but forgot to cross a “t” somewhere. Because you typically need more than one class to do anything, and one bad grade can hurt your funding, etc., i think it’s more unfair to hurt the good student when the bad students do well on a poorly calibrated test than it is to give the bad students an inappropriately high grade.
I once took a test in my honors real analysis class with four questions. Each was a prompt to prove something. As the professor passed out the test, he announced, “one right is an A”. And indeed, i mostly proved the first one, and made a little progress on another one, and got an A- on that exam. Was that “graded on a curve”? No, i think it was just a hard test. And that’s probably not the ideal test, either. But it’s not the worst exam I’ve seen, either. It basically did what it was supposed to do.
It was well-known that the two-semester electromagnetics sequence was a weeder in my electrical engineering program (West Virginia University, early 1980s). Many struggled, but by no means did everyone fail.
When I decided to get a master’s degree in applied math at Johns Hopkins, they required a pre-req in applied statistics for non-math majors. As the final exam wrapped up, the professor made a remark, something like, “If you can’t do the work, we’re not really doing you a favor to pass you into the program”, which sounded to me like there were people who flunked. But it didn’t seem like they were trying to flunk people, just verify they could do the work.
I heard second-hand of two college math classes in which pretty much everyone flunked. One was a Calc 1 class taught by a new professor who apparently needed to learn to teach. Another was a Trig class taught by a tenured ninny who wasted class time. Instead of covering the material, he would write phrases on the board in several languages, showing off his language skills. In both cases, administrators told the students to re-take the class from a different instructor.
Both calc 1 and trig are eminently teachable to anyone with the right background and general math ability. If everyone is failing, the teacher should get some remedial training.
The Trig teacher simply chose not to teach, and he had tenure. This was ~60 years ago, when tenured teachers could do pretty much what they wanted. I’m hoping they at least relieved him of his teaching duties.
Which was probably his clever plan all along. “Oh, please Dean Fox, just don’t throw me into that briar patch of no teaching!”
That’s always my first thought. My second is, if you dislike teaching/dislike undergrad teaching so much, then support the instructional faculty rather than sneering that they’re not researchers.
In junior college, I had a professor was strangely proud of how many students failed his Introduction to Philosophy class. Years later I realized that in fact, he just wasn’t a very good teacher.
For my undergrad I was enrolled in a specific school within the university that heavily emphasized foreign language acquisition. It didn’t matter what you actually majored in, but in order to graduate you had to pass a five -hour language proficiency exam that included writing and speaking. About 33% of first-timers failed. Any time you used an English word, it was an automatic fail.
The fun part is, while you’re in your intensive language course, which is also required, they don’t tell you whether you’re on track to pass or fail. There are no grades, though I recall being given numbers, but nobody could figure out how high the numbers actually went. I think the purpose of that was so you’d see if you were improving or not. The only thing you got at all from class (besides total immersion) was feedback for how to improve. They were brutal.
God, it was like boot camp for language. That’s not counting all the other required immersion activities. The administrators did a little lecture for the parents: “In the Spring, you will get panicked phone calls from your children. Don’t worry. If they fail, they can take the test again.”
I think part of the reason the fail rate was so high is that you had people coming in who had never learned a word of Spanish in their lives and others who had lived abroad in high school. I was middle of the pack, having taken four years in high school, and I tested out of the first semester of intensive Spanish. I still found it incredibly challenging.
I passed! One of the instructors said she thought I would fail the verbal, but I surprised her, so yay (In reality I was just too shy to speak up in class.)
That was my experience with intensive language.
I did take a weeder course for psychology, Stats 350, and I got an A-, which I am still pretty proud of, and it was genuinely enjoyable. I took it because a lot of graduate programs required a stats course and I hadn’t fully decided what to do after I graduated.
Revelle College at UCSD has that language requirement. My wife enrolled in Revelle specifically to study German, even though she double majored in two science fields.
They have one at Michigan, which is also the general repository for freaks, geeks, creatives and communists, and you live, attend school, eat and socialize in one building on campus, so when you’re finally released your junior year to attend other classes, there’s a lot of confused blinking.
(You can attend other classes on campus during freshman and sophomore year, I just didn’t much. I’ll tell you though, after I passed that exam I got through the general language classes pretty easily.)
I did end up majoring in Spanish, though I had wanted to double major, and never could decide on the second thing.
Programs like that are really good if you’re easily overwhelmed by large numbers of students and want to feel like you’re seen. The class sizes were 8-10 students.
When I was in journalism school we were required to demonstrate “proficiency” in a foreign language, proficiency being defined as passing an upper level undergraduate class. I hadn’t done anything in Spanish since I was a freshman and only a miraculously decent final exam got me through the course.
We also had to pass a typing test (it was a long time ago.) You’d be surprised how many college seniors had trouble typing 20 words per minute.