5 ms·

Not sure about this case in particular, but I have a firm belief that a class should be in a certain aspect fair. Although that is subjective, I mean the class

• lbotos 4y ago
  What if the lesson was "sometimes things in life are really hard, and no matter how much you prepare, things may still challenge you beyond your current capability?"
  • shafoshaf 4y ago
    How does one get an A on that test, since grades are important as people move to jobs and graduate degrees? How can I compare an A from the University of Everything is Reasonable versus one that includes the grade every student gets on the Kobayashi Maru?
    • unethical_ban 4y ago
      If that isn't something taken into consideration by grad programs and top hiring firms, then the system is broken. How do you compare two "A"s, one from a mediocre place and one from a well established institution? By knowing the difference, of course.
      • blix 4y ago
        When I was an undergrad looking for internships, many of the most desriable had hard GPA cutoffs. I'm pretty sure these were not flexibly adjusted for every single applicant depending on their university and specific course load.
      • mschuster91 4y ago
        Isn't the point of all this "standardization" crap that has been forced over universities and even basic education that all children and students should have equal opportunities in life, no matter if they went through public or private schools or ivy league universities vs "normal people" institutions?
    • lbotos 4y ago
      > How can I compare an A from the University of Everything is Reasonable versus one that includes the grade every student gets on the Kobayashi Maru? Where I grew up, and A was a 93. Where my partner grew up an A was a 90. We already have this problem. For better or worse your GPA + your universities prestige/perception/etc are a factor in hiring/grad school anyway. Is a 4.0 from University of Phoenix (Online School) the same as a 4.0 from an Ivy?
    • 7thaccount 4y ago
      Yes. You get a few Kobayashi Maru profs and your GPA makes you look like a moron.
  • kangda123 4y ago
    I doubt that's what people actually learned
  • roflyear 4y ago
    That's fine, but that lesson shouldn't also impact your finances (having to maybe retake the class), your future career, and your life in general... that's pretty extreme. And yeah, depending on the class, failing one test can really have consequences like that. I had a few classes where I only had 2 tests and 2 finals. The tests were like 40% of your grade. And it didn't seem like it was an isolated incident, from the tone of the post. If the outcome was the teacher talked about that lesson, then said "we'll adjust the grade so you don't all have negative consequences b/c you did nothing wrong: this is a school, after all!" yeah I'd agree with you...
  • bell-cot 4y ago
    In an academic context, where the institution is supposedly setting admission requirements, prerequisites for courses, etc. - and final grades are effectively published, as the institution's professional opinion on the student's qualifications - no, sorry. There are plenty of better ways to teach that lesson, which do not screw up the public grading metrics.
  • dividefuel 4y ago
    This is not the lesson that students are paying a lot of money in tuition/fees to learn.
  • AlwaysRock 4y ago
    If that is a part of the syllabus than okay. But if that isn't clearly stated as a goal of the class at any point than it doesn't make sense. If the knowledge is necessary, it sounds like there should be an additional class before said class to give knowledge that can be built on in the more difficult advanced class.
  • mcguire 4y ago
    Well, you see, that's kinda the thing about "education". Every step should be beyond your current capability, but not so far beyond it that you cannot expand your capability to take the step. With the assistance of an educator and the assorted educational materials, of course. In fact, that is the difference between a good educator and a bad one: a bad one will just say, "it is what it is", and describe their failure to teach as laziness or stupidity on the part of the student.
• ballenf 4y ago
  If the test was whether students are lazy then you'd be right. > The teacher has failed to either teach or formulate a test that meets reasonable expectations. I think there are potentially other explanations.
• gjsman-1000 4y ago
  I had an instructor that was quite unforgiving on his tests - he was well known for the difficulty of his exams. However, he made up for the brutal exams with ample extra credit opportunities. As a result, while very few people got As and Bs in his exams, a normal-ish percentage of people passed, but were forced to work harder than expected to pass. This was Calculus I and II, so it was tricky but an interesting teaching style. At least those who passed knew the material. Plenty still failed - but this is why everyone I knew called him a difficult, but not unfair, instructor.
  • faeriechangling 4y ago
    What are teachers reasons to not giving out extra credit? From the outside looking in, it seems like being against extra credit ensures students will learn less and pass less.
  • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    The best teacher I ever had was known for being difficult. It was American History (college) and I've never liked history. When people found out I was taking his class, they tell me they were sorry for me. To this day, that man was the best orator I have ever seen in my life (and I'm over 40). He would get up, start talking, and I would be enthralled. It quickly became my favorite class. But he was ironclad in his expectations. He had no attendance requirements, but every class he gave a 3 question quiz over the lecture the day before. These quizzes added up to be worth more than the tests in terms of final grade, and he would only allow you to make up 3 of those quizzes (for missing). And he was absolutely, 100%, willing to fail you if you didn't have the points for it. What I learned from that class is that students didn't like him because he wasn't lenient. You got the grade you deserved and there was never any leeway. He made this quite clear. --- Contrast this with the semester I ended up having to drop Diff Eq. The professor had a policy of 3 missed days is an automatic failure. My alarm clock stopped working and I went over that limit (kept trying to get people to wake me up, but none did). I had to drop a class I had an A in.
• sidlls 4y ago
  Sometimes things are just hard and it should be expected that nobody masters it in any arbitrary period (e.g., the course of a two week period covering a topic, or even over a semester).
  • Retric 4y ago
    If you can’t cover the courses materials in a semester then split the course into multiple different classes. Most collages have 2 or more Calculus courses, but you can also pull various aspects of multiple classes into a single introductory one.
  • Ar-Curunir 4y ago
    Then don’t teach a semester-long course about it. Break it up over two semesters
  • BostonEnginerd 4y ago
    If this is the case, then the course should be broken down into a bit that can be mastered in the timeframe allotted.
• wl 4y ago
  I've seen three scenarios where most of a class has low numerical scores 1. The instructor has difficulty calibrating the difficulty of the assignments because it's all so easy to them now. 2. The instructor is interested in having a high ceiling so the truly gifted can distinguish themselves, usually using a generous curve to not screw over the competent but average students. 3. The class is beyond the current capability of the students.
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    Frankly I am fine with number 2 and it is the most common I have experienced when this happens.
  • professoretc 4y ago
    Coming out of the pandemic, in math we're seeing a lot of #3. It's rather hard to blame the instructors when we have college calculus students who struggle to work with basic fractions.
    • busterarm 4y ago
      I'm not sure that it's just COVID. You're just in the last 2-3 years landing upon all of the kids who were entirely educated via Common Core. My niece just finished her degree and got private math tutoring from her parents to supplement what was done in school (which was woefully inadequate). All of her friends are pretty atrocious at basic math. That damage was done long before COVID.
      • CptFribble 4y ago
        Common Core is not the problem, that's just a political talking point. Common Core is not a curriculum, it is a set of standards. Before Common Core, there were 0 national standards for math (and language skills, but this is about math). The US "standards" were created accidentally, like how Texas sets the standard for many states due to being the largest customer of textbooks and printers not wanting to make separate versions for smaller states. Common Core simply set the minimum knowledge and skills by grade level, basically saying "students should be able to do fractions by the end of 5th grade." The major criticisms of Common Core are that it was too expensive to implement for states that were already so far behind in funding their educational systems, and that it's too test-driven, for example tying teacher evaluations to test scores. In any case, over the last 12 years since it started in 2010, many states have quit trying to implement it and gone in other directions. Most experts agree the overall impact of Common Core is nothing to slightly negative due to the implementation problems. This says more about our abject failure to properly fund and organize our educational systems nationally, by the way, since the people in charge of implementing the standards in various states and cities did things like LA spending 9 figures on iPads to deliver Pearson tests that only were licensed for 3 years. AKA typical American turn-government-initiative-into-private-industry-giveaway stuff. And anyway, the oldest child that would have been "entirely educated via Common Core" would be 17 (5 y.o. kindergartener in 2010)
• spacemadness 4y ago
  I’d say 50% of my electrical engineering courses were this way in a bad semester and it was often emotionally debilitating and resulted in lots of test anxiety fueled fever dreams. And this is after the first years were weeded out and lots of hard working and bright students remained. I think it’s absolutely pointless to do this and is a cop out for those that can’t teach.
  • 7thaccount 4y ago
    Exactly. This was my junior year where we were all battle-hardened vets that had survived two full years of weed-out classes. At some point it's bad teaching. I still have test related nightmares in my 30s.
    • spacemadness 4y ago
      I think the worst part is it reinforces this adversarial system by those survivors that go into academia. You see it in comments in these threads where folks think it was worth it as it says something about them. I don’t buy it even though I made it through despite many professorial efforts to thwart real learning through artificial difficulty and bad teaching.
• P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  Or maybe the class was full of slow students. I once had a math professor explain he stopped grading on a curve because he once had a class where the highest grade was a low C and he didn't feel that deserved an A. And I agree with him. You're there to learn, the grade isn't supposed to be a reflection of your effort. I once had a class where the professor would put things on the test that weren't in the lecture. Caught me off guard the first time, didn't catch me off guard the rest of the semester. The gap between my grade and everyone else in the class was huge (I think I'm the only one that passed in that class). --- At the end of the day, if a student cannot show some sort of mastery of the subject, they should be failed.
  • pitaj 4y ago
    I've seen it happen. Fellow students in my year in EE were way more capable than students the following year - same professors, same courses.
  • mcguire 4y ago
    Exercise for the reader: the probability that an entire class would be significantly "slower" than another class.