Have you ever been graded on a real curve in a class?

[The_Lurker_Above]

@Patch

I had a structures design teacher who believed that if someone got all the questions on a test right he’d not made it hard enough. I saw test averages in the 30’s in that class.

I had a physics prof who must have had the same philosophy. I scored 30% on the mid-term (class average 40%).

After the final exam I tried to estimate my maximum possible grade based on mid-term, assignments and getting full marks for all the questions I answered on the final exam. I figured I’d be lucky to score 59% but ended up with an A-.:dubious:

[BigT]

@ENugent

Exams should be hard enough that you can reliably separate the A students from the B students (or even the A students from the A+ students, if you’re the kind of professor who believes in giving A+'s). From the point of view of exam design, the “best” exam is one where the class average is 50, the best student gets a 99%, and the worst student gets a 1% - this means that you have “spread out” the class along the curve in a way that lets you actually assess their abilities accurately.

This presumes that every class, no matter how large, is going to be distributed on a normal curve. This just isn’t true. A good teacher does not have over half of his class fail to learn the material.*

Moving the apex to something other than 50% isn’t a concession, but a requirement under any grading system that does not define average at 50%.

*Imagine if, growing up, over half of all students got held back a grade. Shudder.

[penultima_thule]

'Tis a very long time ago, but as I recall, when I sat the HSC (age 18, end of year 12 high school) every course in the state was “normalised”. The top student got 100, the bottom 0. You put together your best subjects for your aggregate mark. It was theoretically possible some poor sod (or sods) would have got a combined HSC mark of zero out of 500.

I took on a higher maths course than I was best suited. Pitted me against the best in state and though I got 65% in the exam I was graded in the bottom 25%.

The moderation system was changed the next year when it became evident that “above average” student electing to sit higher level courses were being outscored by “average” students who elected to do lower level courses.

On the other side of the coin, when at uni most of the larger 1st year courses were graded. I picked up my first high distinctions when I got mid 60% in brute of exam in biology and statistics where the average mark was only in the low 30s.

[ShibbOleth]

My college Statistics class was graded on a real curve. Teacher was an absolute jackass who loved it. The sucky part was that after the first test, which no one did well on (and that worked out for me, pushing me up to an A with something like a 75-80), a cabal formed amongst the pre-med/pre-law students whom I suspect were cheating and suddenly all got 100% on every test, when they’d gotten Cs and Ds on the first test. Only college class I ever got a C in.