Exams are a shitty model of the real world of any job, though. In no situation will you have to rely solely on the contents of your own brain, with no ability to research a problem through the internet, book, coworkers, or superiors. So, why didn’t your dad do away with exams altogether, if he’s so hip on teaching from an industry perspective?
Probably got someone shanked within a day or two.
I don’t know your dad, but it’s possible. (I keed!)
If you have a 10 question test, and the passing score is getting 2.5 questions right, perhaps the problem isn’t the students?
Weed out classes sucked.
Forcing a civil engineer to take EE and Thermo as weed out classes sucked doubly so.
Having my gpa sink or swim on nothing more than the statistically random performance of the class as a whole? That’s not cool, either.
You still haven’t explained what the “problem” is in this scenario. The exam questions are hard, so the grades are scaled accordingly.
Maybe, but having a weed-out class is more the decision of the department or university as a whole, rather than the particular professor. On the other hand, they can serve a purpose, namely, they can let a student know early on that being a Physics major just isn’t going to work out for them.
This is a fair point. What I hated in college was that, as a math major, I was forced to take 4 non-math courses in the physical sciences. This was in addition to the college-wide general education requirements that included physics/chemistry.
On one hand, this is how every class ever is graded. On the other hand, the really standard science courses (in math, this would be calculus) don’t change that much from semester to semester, either in terms of content or average student performance.
Because he was a god-damn idiot. By trying so hard to be an asshole, he created an exam that could not distinguish between a ‘B’ student and one who just picks one letter all the way through.
Well he certainly wasn’t being an ambassador for thermo. :rolleyes:
That is true. You are just dealing with student sampling there which should be really consistent from semester to semester unless there are some radical shifts in the student population. Class enrollments don’t just bounce around randomly among different groups from year to year.
It wouldn’t be cool if the MIT kids suddenly enrolled in Backwards State U. causing all the former student’s grades to fall but that doesn’t happen.
Universities can be all about the love of learning and all of that but they are also competitive in many classes. They have to be. There are an awful lot of doe-eyed freshman that show up thinking they will become a physician or an engineer when it isn’t going to happen for most of them if only because of the available slots ahead of them. It is best to identify the most promising ones early and send the others down another path sooner rather than later.
The best tests you can design follow a bell curve with a median score of 50% because it gives you the best possible resolution among all scorers. It doesn’t tell you much about how well the really good ones will do if many students are piled into the 80 - 90%+. You can still give reasonable grades based on really hard tests while leaving plenty of room for the truly outstanding to show what they can do. Those tests are hard to design properly however so you don’t see them everywhere but it is the general formula for standardized tests like the SAT.