Grading on a curve means that you compute the mean and standard deviation of your grades, and assign the letter grade cutoffs so that a certain proportion of the results falls in each category. For instance, the top 10% might be an A, the next 20% a B, the middle 40% a C, the next 20% a D and the bottom 10% an F.
There are teachers who simply add the difference between 100 and the highest grade to each score and apply a scale based on that. They don’t know what a curve is.
I think this must be a regional thing. I’ve never heard of any school or even college that puts anything but letters on a report card or transcript. This is annoying, since some of my teachers set their scales high, like 94-100% = A.
In my high school, every time I’ve had a test graded on a curve, it’s been the simple “set the highest score to 100%” kind. The math teacher always talked about how he was going to grade it with a true bell curve, but he never actually followed through.
I’ve had teachers like this in the past and I think that is a BULLSHIT way to grade. I really did have a teacher who made the cutoff for a B 90% because so many people did so well on the exam.
In my opinion how other people perform on their exams should have no bearing on your grade. Period.
The weirdest ‘curve’ I ever had was a linear progression where the highest grade got no increase but the lower grades were raised progressively so that the mean ended up where the professor wanted it.
I agree that a curve should mean distributing grades along a normal distribution, but in practice it means inflating the grades in some arbitrary way to protect the teacher at the expense of the student.
I think the intention is to remove the grr caused by poor question writing or bad teaching. If your top students didn’t get #2, #7 and #21 right consistently across the board, then it was probably a matter of the teacher not teaching or not testing the material covered in #2,7 and 21 adequately. “Throwing those out” by giving everyone the points for them is a way to keep your students quiet and not penalize their grades for your inadequacy. And the laziest of the teachers, rather that noting if it’s the same 3 (or 10) questions that every student is getting wrong and fixing their teaching, will just assume that and give the points without checking. Of course this means that if you got those particular questions right, you get double points for them and if you got them wrong, you don’t, so you’re still penalized in the larger picture. It’s stupid.
Sorry, I’m kinda bitter about this practice. In my first biology class at college, the teacher was so terrible and the test scores so dismal as a result that he just kept “curving” the tests more and more. I mean, he had two choices: teach better, or make the tests easier. Otherwise he’d have a classroom full of students who didn’t pass - which doesn’t look good for his annual eval, does it? Rather than teach better, he tested easier, until eventually a Unit Exam would consist of 25 multiple choice questions, of which we had to do 15, and he’d still add 5 points to everyone’s score at the end. I got an A in the course, of course, but didn’t learn a damn thing, which is now hurting me in my higher level courses, lemme tell you. It was humiliating to get my first test back in A&P II and find the whole first page covered in red - review stuff which I was supposed to learn in BIO101 and didn’t, despite my A.
I agree, Cubsfan, it’s bullshit. It makes “90%” meaningless. 90% of what, exactly? 90% should mean that I’ve mastered and can demonstrate that mastery of 90% of the material covered in the class.
Or you think you’ve covered a subject adequately, find you haven’t, and use that information to shape your lessons going forward. Assessment is a dynamic process, a communication between student and teacher–people don’t even know if they understand something until they try to do it, and they won’t try to do it until it counts for something. So you have to have assessments, and sometimes you find out that while everyone said they understood and seemed to be getting a concept, they really didn’t.
I am going to disagree with you here. I think it’s a weird idea that we define strong success in a course as mastering 90% or higher of the material offered, and that mastering 70% is barely adequate. 90% is inherently meaningless–it’s just a number. Context defines it, and the context of each course is different. In my AP Econ class, I teach way above what I expect my kids to actually learn (and what they need to pass the test), because I expect them to forget or not really understand the upper level of what I am saying. I also teach above my expectations because it gives me something to say in between the endless repetitions of the “basic” stuff that I really need to say/demonstrate 8000 times for the very bottom of my class.
If I limit my teaching (and testing) to where anyone who masters 70% of it is “barely passing”, I can’t differentiate between the different needs of my student. In the context of my course (and this is mirrored on the AP exams), 50% mastery is on par with someone who has completed a college course in the subject. So it should be a C. And someone who has mastered 85% of the material should get an A. And someone who has mastered 95% (and I have about one a year), needs to know that they are the bomb and they didn’t waste their time sitting in my class.
Sure.
I don’t understand the rest of your post, to be honest. It seems like you’re arguing that the 90/80/70 grading scale isn’t a good one, which I don’t disagree with necessarily. I think it depends on the course, the level and the students.
To be honest, I never had a 90/80/70 scale until I got to college. My high school courses were either 94/86/78 or, for some particularly brutal ones, 97/92/86.
Teaching more than they need to know is great, and I love teachers who do that. In such a case, 90% should reflect mastery of 90% of the material they should know on exit, IMHO. Otherwise, what does it mean? 9/10’s of what? 90 out of 100 whats?
If they can be expected to do okay in their next class only mastering 70% of the material they should know on exiting yours, then fine. If they can’t be expected to do well in their next class with only 70%, then it should be an F - a failing grade, and they shouldn’t be allowed to do the next course in the series.
If not a single student masters enough material to do well in the next course (or the career you’re training them for), then that indicates a serious problem with the teacher or the test. Giving them all passing grades by these dubious “curving” methods doesn’t solve the problem.
What does it mean to have mastered 90% of the material? Does it mean that you’ve memorized and can regurgitate 90% of it? Or does it mean that you know the material well enough to be able to draw connections beyond what’s been discussed in class and the readings? Under the first notion, an absolute 90% cutoff for an A is definitely the right thing to do. Under the second, it’s a little less clear.
The problem that many learned folk seem to forget is that a classroom is most often not of a sufficient size to give a population size from which one can expect a normal distribution. Perhaps in a large enough class, or across enough sections you can do this. But I’ve seen educators and business people try to do this with populations of under 20 and as small as five.
It’s a curve if your grade is dependent upon the other students’ test scores.
So, if before the test is given, the teacher says “80% is an A, 60% is a B, 40% is a C” it is not a curve. It may be creative grading standards, but it isn’t a curve.* If the test is given and the papers are scored, and then the teacher does some math and ends up with 80% being an A, it is a curve.
Learning is not a competition. When the class starts the expectation and requirements to achieve high-grades should be clear and should not include competing with classmates. Save that shit for the workplace. That was the point of my post.
Using your logic there should be no grades at all, just pass or fail.
As a professor, grading is the hardest part of the job.
When, say, test results come back, you want to be somewhat flexible (because you might have written a bad test, or had a bad day teaching, etc), but you also can’t be too flexible (because you need to genuinely reward the superior students).
It’s not easy.
But the bell-curve doesn’t make any sense, nor does an inflexible 90-80-70 thing.
I think we largely agree here. What I am saying is that if mastering 75% of the material will make you super-prepared for the next class (and on most AP exams, 75% of possible points is a 5, the highest score), then it’s ok if 75% mastery = the highest possible grade. A system like that doesn’t mean that the teacher is a bad teacher, as long as they have reasonable expectations. As many grade systems demand a numerical entry where an A = >90%, teachers have to curve the percentage grades to fit that set scale.
I can use half a test to find out whose managed to master the basic information of the class. The other half is a tool for learning–both an incentive for the top kids to really pay attention and keep trying, because they will get a chance later to show their chops, and as a learning tool–many people won’t really try to work their way through something, push through regurgitation and begin synthesis, until they really have to–until they are tested. So by putting a few problems on my test that really push them to apply what they have learned in new ways, they don’t just show me what they’ve learned in the past, they actually learn new things.
Furthermore, having a wider range of what counts as success–a 50% spread instead of a 30% spread–it’s easier to write a test that discriminates between “barely got it” “Kinda got it” “comfortable” “thoroughly understands” and “could teach the class”. Something like a square root curve allows you to do this.
I don’t doubt that there are teachers that use curves to cover up laziness. But curves can be useful teaching tools.
Holy christ…Jindal is the worst. Wow…he sounds like he’s reading a script to a class of 3 year olds. Or maybe an infomercial.
Just terrible. How the hell did the pubs choose him to deliver this speech? Ugh…
What does that mean? I never suggested competing with classmates, and I never advocated a bell-curve. There are many kinds of curves. I said that it’s okay to teach a class in such a way where if you get 50% of the material you’ve covered the bare basics and deserve a C, and where if you’ve mastered 75% of the material you deserve an A. I very much think their should be grades, I just don’t think they should always be 90% mastery = A, 69% mastery = no credit.
Well, that leads us down the path of discussing authentic assessment, which is probably beyond the scope of this thread. (But I’d love you join you in a new thread about it, as I’m really excited by one of the best assessors I’ve ever had a class with right now!) For this thread, I’ll just accept that “mastery” is whatever the teacher says it is.
Where are you from? In high school and college, we were give number grades on our report cards. However, on our high school report cards there was a scale at the bottom that told you what the range was for As-Ds, so you could glance down and see that your 98 in History was an A+ and your 67 in Math was a D-. Every teacher and professor was held to the same scale (all As are from _ to _ points) for grades, though.
That I know of, I never had a teacher or professor who graded on a curve.
I’m in Minnesota, and my high school, the University of Minnesota, Southwest State University, and Minnesota State University just use straight letters. The teachers in high school all give us grade printouts so we can see the percentages, but on the report card, it’s just the letters. This means, that, for GPA purposes, the 105% in Biology is worth just as much as the 91% in English (that teacher uses a 90-100% = A system), but the 91% in English is worth more than the 93% in Civics, whose teacher uses a 94-100% = A system.
And that’s not even getting into the shitstorm that flies up twice a year, every year, when the college level course that isn’t structured by quarters has to turn in a quarter grade and all the students in it go on probation because they’re failing a class.
If anyone’s keeping track, I’ve been in and had a kid in schools in the Chicagoland area for 30 years, and some sort of summary grade - usually A, B, C etc., but in his elementary school 4,3,2 and 1* - have always been used on the grade reports. Percentage grades were available upon request, but they aren’t the official grades.
As a parent, I’d actually prefer percentages along with an interpretive score, to know if my kid was getting a skin-of-your-teeth C, a solid C or a little-less-television-time-could-make-this-a-B C.
*From an old report card:
4 - Exceeds Grade Level Standards
3 - Meets Grade Level Standards
2- Making Satisfactory Progress Towards Meeting Grade Level Standards
1 - Not Making Satisfactory Progress Towards Meeting Grade Level Standards
As with many of life’s most difficult questions, Wikipedia has a page… 