[QUOTE=Rysto]
I went to a high school with a large gifted program
[/QUOTE]
Which high school was this?
[QUOTE=Vision of Love]
Which high school was this?
[/QUOTE]
It was in Ottawa.
[QUOTE=Rysto]
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.
[/QUOTE]
I take the intellectual stigma off myself by telling everyone that I don’t study. Apparently I learn everything intuitively. I try my best to make everything I do look effortless too. Strangely enough people respect high grades, but don’t seem to like people who study or care a lot. I get by by pretending to do neither.
Though when I’m around people who care about their grades, I can actually discuss the work I do to get the grades I get.
And my favorite grade is not a 100%. It is a 100% when everyone else did miserably bad. 
[QUOTE=Lakai]
I take the intellectual stigma off myself by telling everyone that I don’t study. Apparently I learn everything intuitively. I try my best to make everything I do look effortless too. Strangely enough people respect high grades, but don’t seem to like people who study or care a lot. I get by by pretending to do neither.
[/QUOTE]
This is the exact opposite of my experience. Telling people that you glide through your courses and get high marks, while they struggle really hard just to pass, really rubs people the wrong way.
[QUOTE=Celyn]
Am I being really stupid to wonder how 106% is even possible?
[/QUOTE]
Obviously **Rysto **is teacher’s pet (or petting the teacher - whatever works) 
Rysto, been there done that. You are already sweating it more than any of them will. Some will mutter under their breath or give you a glare and that will be the end of it for them. Be proud of that grade!
Besides, with the Prof. publishing it that way it saves you the time of standing up in class and singing “I’m smarter than you guys are. neener neener neener”.
[QUOTE=cerberus]
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.
[/QUOTE]
As a Prof., I concur with all of this. “Extra credit” is bad policy. 100% is the best you can do in my classes.
And I once heard that if you have more than one student score 100, you should make harder exams/assignments, so that the most superior student can distinguish him/herself.
This happened to my sister. She took a psych class in which the professor was notoriously difficult. The test were horrid, and sometimes the highest grade in the class would be a 65 or something. The prof would then make that paper the 100, and bump everyone else up by the same number of points. I find this method incredibly stupid (a prof of mine used it, too), but he used it every semester, and it was well known.
Then my sister toddles in. She consistently got a 90 or above on her tests, and everybody else was still scoring in the 60s and 70s. On the high end. So these folks were getting 67s, where the semester before, they would have been in the A range. There wasn’t quite active resentment toward her in the class, but people did start begging her to tank on purpose.
I think the professor took mercy on them and made the second-highest grade a 95 and bumped people according to that, so there wasn’t actually a mutiny. And if that didn’t enlighten him as to the idiocy of his testing and grading methods, I don’t know what would.
[QUOTE=Kid_A]
Heh, just another reason not to go to Waterloo.
It’s Waterloo, right? I can’t see a Laurier student ever getting 106% on anything unless it was a blood-alcohol test.
[/QUOTE]
Now we gotta have another Toronto get together, 'cause I have to buy you the beverage of your choice.
One of my High School English teachers gave black marks and red marks. To get your final grade for any evaluation period, he’d take your grade from the exam, add 1% for every black mark and susbtract 1% for every red mark. You got red marks for misbehaving and black marks for answering questions thrown to the class, for using valid words he hadn’t taught us or for catching some movie reference (extra points for knowing the movie’s English title).
One day he’d given us “study time” (we had exams coming up) and was counting everybody’s marks. At one point he said “Nava?”
“Yes, Father?”
“You can skip the exam… I’m counting 150 black marks.” My classmates laughed, it wasn’t any kind of surprise.
He allowed three others (out of 42) to skip that one, also with 100%. People who had 70-90 marks were given the choice of taking the exam (which was bound to raise the grade) or skip it.
After that he’d throw the questions “to the class in general” first and to us four “on second try”.
Another teacher gave me 110% for coming up with a working solution he hadn’t thought of, in a chemistry exam. Back then the grade registry didn’t involve a computer, so that grade report says “Cheimstry… 110%” and has a note below that “the 110% in Chemistry is not a mistake.”
Your teacher sounds like he’s been the contents of an ass his whole life, Rysto: approaching retirement is merely making the stench more evident.
[QUOTE=Sunrazor]
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!
[/QUOTE]
I actually took my students’ lab books to the stairs and threw them down. You should have seen the panic in their eyes when they thought that I was serious!
Much worse was my fourth grade teacher, who used to make students who got an F stand up in front of the whole class and humiliate them. I’m ashamed to say that I just didn’t understand what it was like for these kids and would cheerfully report these incidents to my mother when I got home. Years later Mom told me she was secretly quite pleased when Mrs. M outraged me by singling me out for arbitrary embarrassing punishment (though this was for behavior, not academic performance).
The closest teacher to retirement I ever had, put on a tough act. He graded hard and he ridiculed the students at every turn. But all nine (out of an original 30-something) students who stayed in the class the whole semester, myself included, got A’s as a token of his appreciation. That was the hardest Physics class I’ve ever taken, and I earned a C at best but got the A.
Bonus points? The last midterm I took (on Tuesday–scored a 98% 
) was 55 questions but your score was out of 50. IOW, if you got all 55 right you would end up with a score of 110%.
[QUOTE=Celyn]
Am I being really stupid to wonder how 106% is even possible?
[/QUOTE]
These go to eleven.
[QUOTE=Shoshana]
If I could teach pass/no pass with the option to revise your work until you hit criteria for passing, I would.
[/QUOTE]
This is kind of what I do in my HS chem classes. I love it now. It gives the perfect defence to anyone upset about bad grades: “I had an appointment sheet taped to my desk for tutoring and retakes, but you didn’t schedule anything.”
It also lets the kids who really need that grade for college or their parents have hope that they can fix the problem, instead of despairing.
Where else but the SDMB can we find a thread where everybody commiserates over the hardship and ostracism that come from being smarter than everyone else, and even exchange helpful tips on how to be smarter than everyone else without attracting undue attention from the masses?
[QUOTE=Key Lime Guy]
And I once heard that if you have more than one student score 100, you should make harder exams/assignments, so that the most superior student can distinguish him/herself.
[/QUOTE]
But there’s often some super smartypants who is smoking the whole class. If you make the tests harder because of him/her, this makes it harder for everyone else to get a decent grade. What do you do then? Is that fair? to some extent, every college has adjusted to the student body. You can bet that Physics Intro has a different depth and pace at MIT vs Santa Monica Community College., but both give out As. Those As mean different things, though, coming from different places.
[QUOTE=StuffLikeThatThere]
This happened to my sister. She took a psych class in which the professor was notoriously difficult. The test were horrid, and sometimes the highest grade in the class would be a 65 or something. The prof would then make that paper the 100, and bump everyone else up by the same number of points. I find this method incredibly stupid (a prof of mine used it, too), but he used it every semester, and it was well known.
Then my sister toddles in. She consistently got a 90 or above on her tests, and everybody else was still scoring in the 60s and 70s. On the high end. So these folks were getting 67s, where the semester before, they would have been in the A range. There wasn’t quite active resentment toward her in the class, but people did start begging her to tank on purpose.
I think the professor took mercy on them and made the second-highest grade a 95 and bumped people according to that, so there wasn’t actually a mutiny. And if that didn’t enlighten him as to the idiocy of his testing and grading methods, I don’t know what would.
[/QUOTE]
I actually don’t think that’s a bad system - IF you adjust for outliers. Obviously, after teaching the course for several years, he should have recognized your sister from the start as an outlier and just discounted her grade completely when adjusting.
I’m getting a business degree after being in Corporate America for twenty years. There are times that I’m teaching the instructor something - and very often what the other students are being exposed to the first time I have real world experience with. Most of my instructors figure this out, use me as a “teaching tool” and sort of ignore me for comparison purposes. Once in a while one thickheaded soul doesn’t figure it out and says “I didn’t think that test was that hard - you did fine on it.” Yeah, well I’m not your typical student, am I. Sometimes there are things on the exams that the instructor didn’t bother to teach and aren’t in the book, but I’ve picked it up somewhere else.
[QUOTE=Absolute]
Fuck them. They’re the lazy idiots, not you.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know about that. While I agree that Rysto’s classmates have no right to be annoyed at him, there’s plenty of room in this scenario for people to have grievances before we hit “lazy idiot” territory.
A grade of 106% means extra credit was offered and completed. Personally, whenever I knew I had a 100% in a class, I didn’t complete any extra credit work, because, well, why? (I had no problem with the folks who did; I just didn’t see any point to it.)
If, at semester’s end, I were to be informed that despite my achieving a perfect score on every curricular assignment and test, I would be receiving a suboptimal grade, due solely to another student’s choice to complete assignments outside course requirements – and then, on top of that, somebody were to have the nerve to call me a “lazy idiot” for only having the ambition to achieve a mere 100% – you’d best believe I’d have a few issues.
While there may or may not have been anybody in the OP’s class whose grade even approached the 100% mark, if you agree that I would have a legitimate complaint in the above situation, then his classmates’ complaints are valid as well, whatever their original grades. Now, if they can’t figure out that those complaints lie with the professor instead of their classmate, then I’d be willing to cede the “idiot” part.
Rysto, your professor is indeed a bonehead for doing this, and doubly so for publicly announcing his reasoning. Still, don’t let your classmates’ misplaced frustrations discourage you from doing your best. The only ones whose opinions matter will respect you for it anyway. 
[QUOTE=OneCentStamp]
Where else but the SDMB can we find a thread where everybody commiserates over the hardship and ostracism that come from being smarter than everyone else, and even exchange helpful tips on how to be smarter than everyone else without attracting undue attention from the masses?
[/QUOTE]
It’s a burden.