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I’m not sure about curving the grades. It creates a level of adversarial competition between students that I don’t think is healthy in an academic environment.
by noodlesUK 5y ago
I’m not sure about curving the grades. It creates a level of adversarial competition between students that I don’t think is healthy in an academic environment. Sometimes it can be necessary, but it’s not fair to punish people for having better peers than last year.
- sokoloff 5y agoIn most cases, at least for medium and large courses (over 30) the curve is calibrating the exam contents more than the peer group.
- noodlesUK 5y agoI agree with you on that point, especially with extremely large sample sizes (think national exams like SATs or A-Levels). My point is more that universities (in my opinion) should hope to foster a cooperative rather than ruthlessly competitive learning environment, and students know that curves mean that there’s effectively a quota of good grades available, and they’re competing with their friends for them. I feel this massively impacts peer learning dynamics.