Your final mark in my class is X%. However, one student managed to achieved 106% in this class. Because I can’t give a mark about 100%, all marks will be scaled by 106. Therefore your final mark will be reported as X/106%.
Professor Counting the Days Until Retirement
Dear Professor,
Thank you for publicizing my mark to the entire class. No, you didn’t actually say who it was that got 106%, but anybody who’s actually attended lectures will have figured it out. I’m sure everybody will be gracious and congratulatory about my success and I won’t have to put up with any jealousy or anger from any of them. Also, I really appreciate you announcing that because I did so well, everybody else’s marks will now be lower. I’m sure that they appreciate it as well.
Sorry, that really sucks, but I couldn’t help guffawing at that Prof. My family is all teachers, so stories abound with us about how profs near retirement get their jollies by tormenting students.
One of my friends is a graduate student on fellowship. He got the fellowship for his second year as well, and this has caused some spiteful forms of resentment in a couple of his fellow graduate students. One of the stupid things they’ve tried to convince him of is that he’s “never going to get into a PhD program without teaching experience,” even though the friend hasn’t been bragging about his fellowship status at all. (Uh, hello, getting one of the two fellowships in the whole department of over 100 people trumps any TA position from the same dept. Suck it.)
If there are kids that are resentful of your progress, they can go eat a dick or just work harder to match your performance. You work hard for the rewards you’re getting, and not all of those kids who are resentful are putting in nearly as much work.
When I was in 6th grade, our teacher got sick of us students not doing well on our semi-weekly reading comprehension tests. He told us that anyone who got 100% on them would be given money to get an ice cream bar from the cafeteria. Cool, I thought, I can do that!
So I did. And he gave me the money. And told me to go right down and get my ice cream.
This was after lunch. I had to go buy my ice cream, bring it back, and eat it. In front of the whole class.
After the first couple of times, I asked the teacher if I could just get my ice cream the next day at lunch. He said absolutely not - I earned that ice cream, I deserved it, and it was a reminder to the rest of the class that they could be doing the same thing if they just tried a little harder. I was supposed to just ignore the other students if they didn’t like it.
Well, I didn’t like it, but I dealt with it. If a 12-year-old can handle it, surely you can, right?
And congratulations - I’ve never gotten 106% on anything!
To be fair, no one has gotten on my case about this. But then, it’s not very likely that I’d run into any of my classmates from this particular lecture out of that class anyway(they’re mostly a term ahead of me, so I don’t know any of them). So I’m just worried about the potential reaction, not any actual reaction.
The reason I care about this stems from something that happened in my first year here. I went to a high school with a large gifted program, so there wasn’t really any stigma against getting high marks. The non-gifted students just accepted that some students, like me, would do really well, and there were no problems discussing marks. Then in first year, somebody from my dorm demanded to know what mark I’d gotten on some midterm. I told him that I’d gotten an 86 and that I wasn’t very happy about that without even thinking about it, because that was completely normal for me. He got pretty mad and told me that he’d do anything to have gotten an 86% on it. I bit my tongue, but I wanted to say, “Well, excuse me for having higher standards than you”. I decided then and there that if people weren’t going to be able to accept that I expected to do really well, then I wasn’t going to rock the boat by discussing my grades. So it’s kind of annoying to have the professor come out and announce my grade for me.
Sunrazor: Yes, I attend UW.
And thanks for the congratulations, everyone, but I really didn’t have to work that hard for this. The assignments and exams were pretty easy to begin with and I had a lot of prior knowledge of the material. The marking scheme was a joke(“if you wrote something down that was in some way relevant, I gave you 5 out of 10”) and they handed out bonus marks like it was candy(for such difficult tasks as handing in the first assignment on time :rolleyes: ).
At least he didn’t stand at the top of the stairs, toss the final exams to the bottom and grade on the steps – a time-honored method of grading for professors counting the days!
I usually mention the high grades on exams so that the people who are pissed about their 70s and 60s don’t think it was my fault for writing a hard exam. Of course my classes are also fairly large and anonymous.
Gotta love the innumerate instructors … Look, geniuses: the max score should be 100%: period. If you suffer from Severe Anally-occluded Cephalopathy(SAC), then at least do not penalise the others. Let the bonus points help the top scorers, but leave the rest alone. Also, a memo to the “everything is a bell curve” people: not everything is a bell curve. Here’s a clue: score on the basis of competency, not relative stupidity.
I have a very good short term memory for knowledge and I use and abuse it constantly. I had an econ class where the prof kept talking about how A students read the book and notes multiple times and went over their homework starting a couple nights before and blah, blah, blah (which, granted, I’ve done in hard classes, but this wasn’t one of them). So she’s handing back our first test and she’s making some comment about the grades and studying and then she makes eye contact with me. Somehow, in that moment I realize two things - I made one of the highest grades on the test and that she’s about to ask me what I did to study. Which she does in the midst of my “Oh shit!” moment.
I could’ve lied. I could’ve said that yeah, I read the book a few times and went over my notes as well, but my mule stubbornness kicked in and said “F that”. (I’ll admit, part of it was an immature desire to pay her back for separating me out from the herd.)
When I said that I’d just gone over the notes a couple times and glanced at the book once, her face just fell (priceless to watch). She never called on me again.
For a story 180 degrees removed, in my audio engineering class, the prof praised me for getting his first ever 100 and everyone said something along the lines of “Go you/Awesome” and wanted to study with me. Those were some cool kids.
I provide mean, median, mode, and range for the exam and final grade in my big classes, but I don’t grade on a curve. If I could teach pass/no pass with the option to revise your work until you hit criteria for passing, I would.
I had something similar happen on an exam once, where I got a 95 and the class average was 45. It was not as bad as I feared. I got a few glares, but mostly people didn’t really think about it.
