4 ms·

Yes. At my school we had a real curve. If we all got perfect scores, that's a C for everyone. (More often we all got 15s and they became C's). Teachers who gave

by hashkb 8y ago

Yes. At my school we had a real curve. If we all got perfect scores, that's a C for everyone. (More often we all got 15s and they became C's). Teachers who gave too many A's would be benched. We laughed at Ivy League 4.0s which just require a phone call from a parent.

drewg123 8y ago
MIT? My wife went there, and while most STEM grad schools understood that grades at MIT were not inflated, medical schools did not seem to care. One of her friends had to first get inflated grades doing a STEM masters degree before she could get into med school due to her uninflated MIT undergrad grades.
- hashkb 8y ago
  GT. I heard you all got to play with kittens freshman year. In response, GT professors replaced 20% more lectures with exams.
  - lordCarbonFiber 8y ago
    Almost no one at GT does true curves anymore. Just like stack ranking, trying to implement true curves with a non random distribution is a fool's errand and poor knowledge of statistics.
  - mrexroad 8y ago
    To hell with Georgia!
joshvm 8y ago
This is standard practice at a lot of universities. At my university results were scaled based on the class performance in that exam and the performance of everyone in other exams. So if you're all 4.0 students, but the exam is horrendous and everyone only gets 20%, you'll probably end up with a good grade still. I studied physics. It was possible to game the system to a certain extent. If you took the (subjectively) hardest modules like gauge theory, you could get a high grade even if you only answered half the paper. So if you were smart, but not top of your class, you'd be better off taking the hard subjects because every mark you got was effectively worth more. If you took the easy and popular modules, every mark would count and it might even be normalised down.
- workinfunk 8y ago
  Of course this only works until everyone becomes wise to it. Then you're worse off where you started.
  - joshvm 8y ago
    That's true, but unlikely. These are not particularly large or popular courses (15/70 people was common). It's not a tactic that would work for everyone, but it would potentially useful if you're a good student, but at a borderline grade. The reason I liked it was because I hated having to cram for easy subjects because the class average would be so high. I would rather put the same amount of effort in to learn concepts (and have to remember less in the exam) than rote facts.

by hashkb 8y ago

drewg123 8y ago

MIT? My wife went there, and while most STEM grad schools understood that grades at MIT were not inflated, medical schools did not seem to care. One of her friends had to first get inflated grades doing a STEM masters degree before she could get into med school due to her uninflated MIT undergrad grades.

hashkb 8y ago
GT. I heard you all got to play with kittens freshman year. In response, GT professors replaced 20% more lectures with exams.
- lordCarbonFiber 8y ago
  Almost no one at GT does true curves anymore. Just like stack ranking, trying to implement true curves with a non random distribution is a fool's errand and poor knowledge of statistics.
- mrexroad 8y ago
  To hell with Georgia!

joshvm 8y ago

This is standard practice at a lot of universities. At my university results were scaled based on the class performance in that exam and the performance of everyone in other exams. So if you're all 4.0 students, but the exam is horrendous and everyone only gets 20%, you'll probably end up with a good grade still. I studied physics. It was possible to game the system to a certain extent. If you took the (subjectively) hardest modules like gauge theory, you could get a high grade even if you only answered half the paper. So if you were smart, but not top of your class, you'd be better off taking the hard subjects because every mark you got was effectively worth more. If you took the easy and popular modules, every mark would count and it might even be normalised down.

workinfunk 8y ago
Of course this only works until everyone becomes wise to it. Then you're worse off where you started.
- joshvm 8y ago
  That's true, but unlikely. These are not particularly large or popular courses (15/70 people was common). It's not a tactic that would work for everyone, but it would potentially useful if you're a good student, but at a borderline grade. The reason I liked it was because I hated having to cram for easy subjects because the class average would be so high. I would rather put the same amount of effort in to learn concepts (and have to remember less in the exam) than rote facts.