This discussion reminds me of when I was teaching college-level chemistry at a military prep school about ten years after I graduated from university. The world-wide web came into existence midway through my teaching career, so I decided to check out the introductory chemistry course at the university I graduated from. I saw that they had posted recent exams and solution keys online.
I was curious to look at this for two reasons: (1) after teaching chemistry for several years at that point, I wondered how I would view the difficulty of the course with more experienced eyes, and (2) I was always looking for ideas for new quiz and exam questions for my own students.
And I quickly realized that all of the university exam questions were completely useless for my purposes for any of the classes I was teaching. They were all ridiculously difficult and overly complicated for any timed exam. I used to aim for an median grade of 75-80% (uncurved) on the exams I gave, and if I had used any of these questions the median grade would have been a failing grade.
Even for myself, with a degree in chemical engineering from that same university, and even after having taught chemistry for over three years at that point, the exam questions were ridiculous, IMHO. They were more like extremely complex puzzles to solve than any reasonable test of acquired knowledge.
And so I concluded that my university (at least as of the late ‘90s) was still looking to be difficult for its own sake that in actually testing the course material. Or they couldn’t figure out any other way to distinguish between a bunch of academically gifted students and so made the exams extremely (and artificially) difficult.
I’m digging back almost 50 years, but at Purdue.there was a class that kicked most butts - I believe it was the Matrix Methods in Engineering or something like that. One of the stupidest things about it was that you had to memorize and spew back definitions, word-for-word. That’s what did in most people. And, naturally, there was only one instructor.
Amazingly, I passed, but I was good at memorizing back then. I had no idea what the class was about, but I gave the prof his definitions, down to the punctuation. But the vast majority of students had to re-take it.
Or, they wanted to test if you could use the course material to do novel things. That’s actually a very good test of understanding, although there’s some “puzzle solving skill” bring tested, too.
If the goal of the course is to prepare PhD students, that’s a fairly reasonable thing to test. And yes, the median scores will be lower than of you were just testing acquired knowledge. So the passing score and the score for a “A” will be lower, too.
Northwestern’s College of Art and Sciences, at least, had a two year college level language requirement. I did embarrassingly bad at Spanish (mostly because I was deep in a depressive swing in my then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder) but I managed to test out last minute senior year by taking a proficiency exam in Polish (the language I grew up with.) Thankfully I passed, or I would have been screwed.
That’s true, but generally these were high-achieving university undergraduate students (typically freshmen students for the intro chem course), not Ph.D. students.
And while it may have been their goal to test for a deep level of understanding, in practice it seemed to result in uncurved class averages that were almost always in the failing range. So I (and many of my classmates) felt like a failure most of my way through college at the “elite” university I attended.
Ironically I felt like I had a fairly good understanding of my class material—for example, I passed the NCEES Fundamentals of Engineering exam required for professional engineering licensure on my first attempt with only a few days of studying—but I felt like I never had the opportunity to demonstrate my knowledge as an undergrad on most exams in college.
I think I learned a lot more in the Navy’s Nuclear Power School, teaching chemistry and physics myself (which requires a fairly deep level of understanding), and graduate school (at a public state university).
I reject the idea that some raw number is “in the failing range” unless that number is expected to be a fail for that test.
I mentioned above that i took an exam with four questions where “one right is an A”. I don’t think it was the best test in the world. But we all know that 25% wasn’t “in the failing range”.
I’m sorry, but having taught and given dozens of exams to hundreds of students, I don’t think you are accomplishing anything worthwhile if your exam is so difficult that getting 25% correct is an A.
I had undergraduate classes where the curve was so spread out it was unrecognizable. I got double the raw score of one of my classmates on an statics final exam. (I got a 60% raw score, and he got a 30% raw score.) We both got a C.
More frustratingly, none of the problems on the exam were anything like any of the problems in the class or the book. No, they assumed you knew how to do all of those like the back of your hand. The exam questions were instead an order of magnitude more difficult. They were so difficult I and most of my classmates had no idea where to start, and so were fighting for some partial credit for at least setting up the problem correctly.
And if a introductory chemistry exam is so difficult that a graduate of that same university—who had been teaching chemistry for three years at that point—finds your exams to be extremely difficult, what are you trying to accomplish exactly?
I found it all very frustrating. And it destroyed my confidence for quite a while. On the other hand, when I later got to Nuclear Power School (which was a graduate-level course in nuclear engineering), I thought it was a cakewalk.
I got out of Chemistry before I had to take O-Chem.
During our orientation they talked about how we were all in the top 10% of our schools, and now half of us would be in the bottom 50%. They also noted that our professors were definitely experts in their field, but their job was to present the material and our job is to learn, they weren’t teachers.
As a young man, I thought this made sense. I’m in college now, this is how it works.
As an adult, I feel like they’re making students pay very high prices to be in the room while a guy presents material. They also almost revel in the fact that many students pay high prices for a year or two to just wash out. I’m now leaning a heck of a lot more towards:
During convocation, someone said, “Look to your left. Look to your right. One of the three of you will not graduate from this school.”
And yes, the cost of attending university these days is more insane than it’s ever been. Many top schools are approaching $100,000 for the annual “total cost of attendance” (meaning including tuition, room, board, books, fees and so forth). And meaning that four years of an undergraduate education might cost $400,000. And even then, the schools tell us that the actual cost is much more than that and they rely on endowment income, federal research dollars and other income to cover the total cost. I believe that university education in every country other than the United States is far less expensive. (It’s a wonder that the present administration seems to be doing its best to discourage foreign governments from sending their best and brightest to the United States to study, given that, generally, they pay the full price.)
I’m a professional organic chemist, so I’m obviously a bit biased on how hard it is. It has a reputation of being a memorization fest, which I’ve found has become less and less useful (and less common) as good, fast, and reasonable cheap searching of the CAS database along with several others has become available in the last 25 years. Plus of course the explosion in reactions and the sheer increase in scope of them with so many tweaks and variations especially with metal catalysts. And the massive expansion of the literature, more and more of which is of minimal value.
What it is very good at is being a completely different, mostly pictorial language where to understand the basics of what is going on is almost entirely driven by electrons. And yes, the theoretical underpinning of “why does that do that?” can be very complicated and math heavy. But first year o-chem generally doesn’t get deep into physical organic.
But I don’t like it as a weed-out course. Chemical engineering doesn’t require an understanding of the bones of what’s going on in a reaction, it requires an understanding of heat transfer and generation and pressure and flows and so on. It’s my job (or at least it was when I was still a process development chemist) to understand what is going on to the point where I can tell the engineer what the thermodynamics are and what is safe and what isn’t. Either from a physical safety aspect or from a product suitability and stability aspect. Pharmacy and medicine should have an understanding of the basics but there’s too much out there to bother getting too deep. That’s what guides are for.
The exams in my EE weed out course were open anything except other people. Open book, open notes, open computer (this was pre-internet) (and actually some questions may involve running a SPICE circuit emulation) etc. They were scaled accordingly – that is, they were tough, though honestly I don’t remember the tests being SUPER hard – certainly challenging and from what I remember relevant.
What killed in that class was the labs – trying to get your breadboarded circuit to behave (and only after many hours remembering that you forgot to convert \omega to 2\pi f)
One fun test thing a Physics prof did was give out a sheet of formulas (so you didn’t need to memorize them), and all the formulas needed would be on there, but there were also be OTHER formulas, like V= {4 \over 3} \pi r^3 (volume of a sphere) when there were no questions where the volume of a sphere was relevant.
I feel like this is something that comes with experience. As you gain more proficiency and experience in your vocation–especially if you’re working in a field where you’re in new territory–you can’t be getting down in the weeds on every tiny little detail.
In the Navy we called it pushing the “I believe” button and it’s something I’m often advising junior engineers about. A competent junior engineer’s curiosity is admirable but there’s no bandwidth to get wrapped around the axle on topics that are (for back of a letter term) “solved.” I’ll generally give them a brief description of why xxxx can be assumed in our current application and point them to resources if they need to beef up those fundamentals… but you’ll literally never get anything done if you’re tearing everything back down to the foundation with every new problem.
When I taught Data Structures for the first and only time I pitched the tests much too hard for my class. They were used to absolute grading and came in after getting the results expecting to fail. All the places I had gone graded on a curve, and I sure wasn’t going to make them suffer for my inexperience, so grading on a curve pulled grades up, not down. I dumbed down later tests.
I TAed for a filter CS class - PDP 11 assembler. It was to distinguish those who really had aptitude from the ones who could handle Fortran in CS101. We front loaded the hard stuff so that anyone having issues had time to drop and not fail. We gave out very few Fs and those people worked at getting one.
I think this is common, as we got a similar speech during Orientation for Engineering at my college. The hope was that those who washed out would still graduate, but with some non-engineering degree.
MIT didn’t do it, and the University of Chicago didn’t do it. If 1/3 of entering students are going to fail, then someone in admissions didn’t do a very good job. Or they were so desperate to fill the ranks they took people who weren’t likely to make it.
Or the administration just likes to see students sweat.
I don’t think any of the highly selective schools do that, because they can accept only students who have a good chance of succeeding. But some of the lower-tier schools are more open, and accept students who might not make it through.
Which suggests that the graduates of those schools are a lot more “selective” than the entering body of students.
People feared organic chemistry at my school, too. But mostly because it was a lot of hard work, the lab smelled bad, and grades were lower than for most of the other required premed courses. Few students failed, but some got C’s, and feared that would hurt their chance of being accepted to the medical school of their choice.
I enjoyed it more then i expected to, possibly because it was more math-heavy than i expected, and i was much better at math than at memorizing stuff.