Wow, I wish my professor had that policy. I got a 32% on an exam last week, and the class averaged at 54%. Haven’t heard a peep from him about it. I’ve never done so poorly in a class out of incompetence. I feel so fucking stupid thinking about retaking the course.
I had an engineering professor in freshman year give exams expecting the class average to be 50% of the available points, and just graded on a curve based on how many standard deviations we were from the mean. So a 50 was generally good enough for a B. It was not a statistics class, but I think I learned more about statistics from that class than any other.
I’m just tired of constantly struggling. I wish there was some way to tell if I’m capable of doing engineering, you know? Let me know if I’m wasting my time or not.
Dude, I did really well in grade school despite all the issues caused by my shitty parents. I went out on my own and went to college and watched my grades go to shit. I quit smoking weed and saw my grades improve immensely. I finished college with mostly A’s and B’s.
Some people can go to class and smoke weed 24/7, but I’m willing to bet that most can’t. I definitely can’t, it makes me way too lazy. Think about your habits. As long as you read the material you’re given you should be able to pass with a decent grade without trying to hard.
Maybe talk to your professor then?
Oh, I meant, like, on the whole. This class might just be a speed bump on the path, but I don’t know if there won’t be something insurmountable next time around.
Sure, and the professor should know that. They can figure out what you’re struggling with and help you decide if you just need TA time or something else.
I did the opposite of this once by being the only one to score 100%
I had a professor in my government and private organizations interactions class who was clear that he’d never given a “true” 100% on a paper before and was confident they never would. They’d just adjust it so that the best paper would get bumped to 100, and everyone else would get the same bump. So if the best was what he’d consider an 85, everyone would get a 15 point bump.
He was essentially making the point that the subject was too complex. I took it to mean that he was a harsh grader and expected way too much out of students.
Later that semester, I had a paper and presentation in which I decided, stupidly, to try and map out the history of the intersection between corporate personhood and campaign finance. I basically wanted to bitch about Citizens United (this was in like 2013).
So I started with Citizens United and worked my way back through Supreme Court cases tracking precedent. I got a little obsessed because I actually found it fascinating, and I ended up having like 25 SCOTUS cases summarized across over 200 years and before I knew it, I had a 60-page paper.
At that point, I knew it was way too long (there had been a 10-page minimum), but I was out of time, so instead of editing it down I just had to turn it in at 11:59pm. My presentation was like 20 minutes in which I was rushed, and I felt pretty bad about it.
The next week the professor came in and opened with 2 announcements. 1 was that there was now a 15-page limit on any papers, and that for the first time in 35 years he’d given a “true” 100. Because of the presentation I’d done, everyone knew it was me that blew the curve, so I didn’t know whether to be proud, embarrassed, or scared about it.
The laptop I wrote the paper on was stolen a few months later and I didn’t have a backup of the paper, which is a shame because I’d love to read it today and see if it really was good, or if I just wore him out with citations.
Screw you.
yea everyone hated me for this. i never do well on tests, but this one i studied for and i ate shit for it
How dare you be responsible. 😁
the teacher called me out on it because he hated me for aesthetic reasons. wanted everyone to know that i ruined the curve. i didn’t understand what happened until i was much older
Properly made open book exams are not easier. The opposite.
One of the toughest classes I ever took had a final exam that was 24 hours long but it was done at home. It wasn’t just open book, it was open internet. The only requirement was that we completed it individually.
It was the first and only exam I slept in the middle of.
It was something like 6 essay style questions in a CS topic, you had to pick 3 to answer.
It was my favourite exam. Not that I generally do badly on more traditional style exams (closed book, cheatsheet, open book, whatever), and not that it was easier because of the format. But it challenged us in real ways rather than test how much we memorized from the course material.
The assignments were similar, assignment 0 was to implement a console to run on an embedded system without an OS or standard libraries or anything other then a UART we could send one byte at a time over. We didn’t even have print statements until we implemented them and got them to work (that was fun to debug). It was deliberately set up like that to encourage people to drop the course early so people on the waitlist could get their spot.
Open book where the question merely implies needing to know X without spelling it out is where it really gets hard
That, and also when the questions require actual understanding instead of memorized knowledge.
Also, our professors tended to make open book exams so tight on time that you couldn’t realistically look most things up.
Kinda the opposite, but I took a physics exam once where everyone else did so badly that when the professor curved the exam grades mine went up to 114%. Still not quite sure how I managed that.
I once faced the anger of my entire class because my Inability to pay attention to lessons meant i was the only one that knew how to brute force reverse engineer formulas using the fancy calculator and oblivious to the fact the teacher had forgotten to teach that specific material.
My Imposter syndrome peaked when we got the test and teacher pointed at me directly as proof we had covered the material.
I never really understand what the point of grading on an average is. An individual’s ability isn’t measured against everyone else’s ability is measured against the test. So then to take that and change the grade to something else based on what is essentially arbitrary doesn’t seem to have any point except to make it look like more people passed than didn’t.
Most professors don’t have the time or desire to actually make a good test so the curve is a way to compensate for the poor test. There is more pressure in the current day to also pass more than may deserve it as well.
A class of 200 students performing much worse than the last class is very unlikely. 200 Students is enough to make even small differences statistically significant.
A single test being much harder than the last test is much more likely, since it isn’t an averahe of 200, it’s a single datapoint.
That’s why if this semester’s class performed much worse than last semester’s, you can assume it’s because of the test, not the students.
Or more likely, instruction was lacking and didn’t cover the material on the test properly.
Not unlikely enough, even something as simple as more students studying harder between years would mean the next set of average students drop in score despite the same performance.
Grading on a curve is always unfair when the grade carries forward and isn’t just for a one-off application. More unfair when classes are smaller and student cohorts differ.
I guess this makes sense in a university context and with aggregated data.
As an example of how you do not want to do grading based on an average, I once had a high school professor rescale my 85%-ish percent on a test to 65%-ish, because most people did well in that test so the professor decided he had made the test too easy and scaled grades down.
That was only one of the reasons I hated that guy’s guts.
Yeah, that’s unfair.
I’m okay with scaling grades up because that implies either the test or instruction was bad, and the curve accounts for that. Going the other way unfairly punishes things like misreading questions.
Or when there are 1000 students over multiple classes getting 5 different versions of the test (to make looking over someone’s shoulder more difficult.)
If one of those has a significantly lower average it’s more likely it just had a few badly worded questions than that those 200 randomly picked students are all bad at the given subject.
It wasn’t a regular thing in my class; the professor just realized he had screwed up and made the exam way too difficult. I agree that doing it for every exam is a bad idea.
Your prof curved to the third quartile. Interesting.
Yeah it was originally 20 points, but the highest score aside from mine was 17.5, so he changed it to 17.5. Putting my score at 20/17.5. :D
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Were you in Hogwarts?
Statistically an outlier like that shouldn’t count.
Yep. Should have used q2/median
Got 4% on my first (and only) calc midterm. I statistically should have gotten a better grade by randomly picking multiple choice questions and leaving everything else blank… Sadly it didn’t provide anything to the rest of my class and I had actually studied for it.
Your calc exam was multiple choice?
Depending on the question, many answers in calculus are:
- 1
- 2
- 0
- invalid
This is especially true if they don’t let you have a calculator.
They say leave the rest blank, so there was some multiple choice questions, which is fairly normal. Well, at least I think it is, all the maths tests ive done have had at least a few multiple choice qs (UK)
Well not the whole thing. Maybe a third of the questions or something like that.
Listened to a podcast yesterday where the lesson was don’t procrastinate except when it helps you because someone else implements the solution for you. Same vibes.
For anyone who wants to repeat OP’s experience:
Also I once scored a 3 out of 200 on a final exam and failed the fuck out of a class.
I will never understand churros. Chocolate or cream stuffed churros? Sure, that’s a mini hot ice cream pocket. But churros by themselves? Maybe the first 20 seconds after they’re cooked they taste alright, but anything after is like eating granulated sugar on styrofoam
You’ve hit the nail on the head.
There’s precisely a 3 minute window of time, between the churro being the temperature of the sun and it being unpleasantly cold, where they’re good.
Also it must always be served with the chocolate sauce, even in the window they’re a bit lacking without
I just feel like anything that needs granulated sugar (not even powdered sugar, how lazy is that!) added to its surface probably doesn’t taste that good in of itself.
Prime example are jam donuts. If the dough is good and the jam inside is good, then it’s a good donut. If you have to sprinkle literal sugar on it’s skin, then you can bet your ass that the dough is bland and they skimmed on the jam
Well, to be fair, OP did smoke weed and ate churros, so that might have influenced how OP could eat so many churros.
Maybe the first 20 seconds after they’re cooked
Yup.
Mean vs median.
Math prof ought to know better than to include outliers.
Maths prof, not statistics prof.
They are the ones who introduce this topic, don’t need to be an expert to active few brain cells.
True self-sacrifice.
