3 ms·

> If your studies were negatively impacted by <whatever factor outside your control>, why would "lenient grading" be the right response? I'm not necessarily sa

> If your studies were negatively impacted by <whatever factor outside your control>, why would "lenient grading" be the right response? I'm not necessarily saying it is, just that the issue covered in the article is only tangentially related to the "math is now racist" strawman. personally, I think no-penalty incomplete would be more fair, although I'm sure someone could find issues with that too. my guess is "lenient grading" starts to seem more reasonable when you take into account what a lot of schools were already doing in response to covid and remote learning at this time. giving incompletes is a reasonable measure to take when you have a couple students with extenuating circumstances. but what do you do when almost all the students have been impacted by a sudden shift to remote learning? you can't just give the whole class an incomplete and delay everyone by some fraction of a semester.

sokoloff 6y ago
> you can't just give the whole class an incomplete and delay everyone by some fraction of a semester. Why not? If it was medical school and you didn't learn topic XYZ, you'd rightly be held back until you did (or at least I hope you would). Are we giving grades based on effort/attempt or based on knowledge acquired?
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > Are we giving grades based on effort/attempt or based on knowledge acquired? it's not really that simple. grades are just a way to measure how well students have met the course expectations. the expectations may or may not be reasonable in the first place. if there was no curving and year after year, 90% of students fail a course, the material would get adjusted. either fewer topics would be covered, or less difficult problems would be selected from each topic. the syllabus itself is an implicit curve, in a way. when someone designs a data structures course, they design it in a way that a target portion of the students will actually pass the class. they don't just say "well, arrays, linked lists, binary trees, rb-trees, BSPs, splay trees, octtrees, hashmaps, bloom filters, skiplists, and all the different types of heaps are essential topics and everyone who can't master every single one in 16 weeks fails". there's no objective standard for exactly what set of topics needs to be covered and learned in a particular course (or major), you just try to teach as much as is reasonable.

sokoloff 6y ago

> you can't just give the whole class an incomplete and delay everyone by some fraction of a semester. Why not? If it was medical school and you didn't learn topic XYZ, you'd rightly be held back until you did (or at least I hope you would). Are we giving grades based on effort/attempt or based on knowledge acquired?

leetcrew 6y ago
> Are we giving grades based on effort/attempt or based on knowledge acquired? it's not really that simple. grades are just a way to measure how well students have met the course expectations. the expectations may or may not be reasonable in the first place. if there was no curving and year after year, 90% of students fail a course, the material would get adjusted. either fewer topics would be covered, or less difficult problems would be selected from each topic. the syllabus itself is an implicit curve, in a way. when someone designs a data structures course, they design it in a way that a target portion of the students will actually pass the class. they don't just say "well, arrays, linked lists, binary trees, rb-trees, BSPs, splay trees, octtrees, hashmaps, bloom filters, skiplists, and all the different types of heaps are essential topics and everyone who can't master every single one in 16 weeks fails". there's no objective standard for exactly what set of topics needs to be covered and learned in a particular course (or major), you just try to teach as much as is reasonable.