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If the school would force teachers to grade on a curve, the problem would go away. Teachers would have only a limited budget of high grades to give away. Gradi

• azhenley 8y ago
  That is a horrible idea. Then students will try to take courses with weak students. Oh, that smart group is taking CS340 next semester? Guess I'll wait until the following semester. Do not turn it into even more of a competition than it already is. Why should someone else's ability influence my grade???
  • thaumasiotes 8y ago
    Because the meaning of your grade is that it gets compared to their grade.
    • azhenley 8y ago
      Says who? Why can't it be used to evaluate my individual learning/effort? Grades only make sense to compare within the same class at the same university during the same semester.
      • the_jeremy 8y ago
        Grades are relative to other people. That's the point of places asking for GPA. If you were just evaluating your effort / learning, your grades could just say "learned a lot" or "made a good effort". But GPA is a way to discriminate between potential candidates for schools/businesses, and thus needs to be quantifiable and comparable.
        • azhenley 8y ago
          Some schools have found how useless GPAs are and have adopted narrative evaluations [1]. The grading in my course is not relative. I set a rubric that I assess each individual on. Sure, within the class you can compare grades, but I wouldn't say it is particularly meaningful. Comparing between classes or universities is completely meaningless. People just want a simple number that can accurately represent someone's knowledge/learning/skill/effort, but it doesn't exist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_evaluation
        • nijave 8y ago
          The increase in technical interviews and decrease in reliance on GPA/grade suggest that's generally a poor metric It's fairly easy to boost your GPA by mixing in easy courses
        • closeparen 8y ago
          No, not at all. GPA tells the difference between "mastered the material" and "did well enough not to get expelled" which can be a useful signal for an employer, but universities and professors don't view it as their responsibility to sort students for industry's needs. For starters, the quality of students is not uniform across universities. Middle of the pack at Harvard is a very different thing from middle of the pack at a party school. To get a useful ordering, you'd need to give every CS graduate the same standardized test, like the bar exam.
          • wahern 8y ago
            Grades are relative to other people in your school and program; it's why you mention the institution on the resume. And IME you don't often communicate your grade but your class rank, most notably if you're at the very top (valedictorian, etc); even with grade inflation schools still must be able to differentiate the very top students from everybody else so they can actually provide these honors. You can't graduate an entire class of "top" students, no matter how earnestly they studied. With few exceptions there is no mastering the material, or at least there shouldn't be. Not in college. There's always more complex material you can use to differentiate students. When you grade on a curve the test should be difficult enough that even the best students will typically get at least one question wrong, with most students falling along a nice bell distribution. (I say most because it's probably better to err on the side of a handful of students clustering at the top rather than at the bottom, especially if the bottom means flunking out.) This can be more difficult for smaller, seminar style classes. One solution is giving the professor leeway to shift up and tighten the curve so he's not forced to give Fs or Ds. These classes are usually in the latter years of a program, particularly in undergraduate, where it's less important to winnow students out and ensure challenging curriculums. That latter point is important. If you don't enforce some sort of statistical distribution how can you gauge the quality of your curriculum? If everybody is getting As is that because all your students are smart and disciplined, or because the material is too simple? If you require a bell distribution, then the curriculum will by necessity be a good fit for your cohort of students. In this way a university can maintain a quality curriculum without having to resort to external metrics or comparisons with other schools.
• have_faith 8y ago
  How does that work if all the students are very similar in ability? maybe I misunderstand the concept
  • baroffoos 8y ago
    Some of them get marked terribly because they made a spelling mistake on a page or some other trivial difference.
• devonkim 8y ago
  You’re saying something like Cravath would improve the situation and be fairer assessments than grading on absolute scores. I was in a class where a curve was non-existent - 30% of the class got above 90%, 45% got below 60%. What would be “fair” then? Perhaps methods to decouple evaluation scores from student grades should be better explored without antagonizing anyone? Perhaps scores after the first week should be compared to scores mid-way and then last? Maybe all of that temporal basis is flawed too and we need to try crazier things. A weirder option could be to randomize the evaluations given back to teachers and to have the teachers select which ones seem to be theirs and some consideration is given to professors that are accurate for themselves. Basically it’d be a test of whether a teacher could identify their own teaching methods’ strengths and faults in contrast with other teachers’ and encourage diversity in styles among faculty. If a teacher wants to grade hard, I think they should be free to do so if it’s shown to be in students’ best interests. This is vaguely similar to how classifiers in machine learning training works but with a really different goal in mind.
  • stale2002 8y ago
    The answer to your question is that the class in question is a bad class, and needs to be fixed. If 45% of students are failing, then either the class needs to be changed, or more effort needs to be made to prevent students from taking a class that they are likely to fail.
    • sethammons 8y ago
      Sure, perhaps. And that has nothing to do with the failure case for curve grading.
• currymj 8y ago
  I don't think it would make it any easier to compare schools. I'm fairly certain a 30th percentile student at Caltech could go to Directional State University and be at the top of the equivalent class. People trying to judge students based on grades would then have to have a rough sense of how the institution works and how a grade should be interpreted. But this is what they have to do anyway, curve or not. For example, employers already know that a B- at an Ivy League institution is a somewhat poor grade. (At Harvard, 75% of all grades given are B+ or above.) Admittedly I think the Ivy League system (which effectively is grading on a curve, just a very narrow one with the mean set to an A-) is pretty good. There's certainly little incentive for students to want easy classes, because in terms of grading there is basically no difference between an easy class and a hard class. It's as close as you can come to just not giving grades at all, but doesn't mark you out as a weird hippy school.
• Fomite 8y ago
  Grading on a curve statistically should mean that a fixed number of my students must fail my course. ...I don't really accept that.
  • wahern 8y ago
    Yes, accept that fixed number could be 0. Often a curve might be A-D, not A-F. And there are many shapes of curves. You choose the shape based on what you're trying to achieve. In this day and age a curve that requires as many Ds as As might not be tenable, but that doesn't mean you can't enforce some statistical distribution to help manage curriculum quality. The problem with grade inflation isn't just that it becomes more difficult to judge student competency; similarly, it becomes more difficult to judge curriculum quality. If everybody is getting As when the curriculum is challenging, they'll continue getting As if it degenerates. Enforcing a distribution helps you to maintain a stable relationship between the abilities of your student body and the quality of the curriculum.
    • Fomite 8y ago
      Enforcing a distribution assumes that student abilities are indeed stable. In my experience, they aren't, for a number of reasons.