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I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve. I'm admittedly not a teacher so there's much I don't know, but I don't really understa

I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve. I'm admittedly not a teacher so there's much I don't know, but I don't really understand why difficulty would be a useful metric, which is what I was getting at. The only useful metric is if they can apply the knowledge somehow. To the original point, if someone cheats, they weren't interested in the first place, so why were they there? Likely they were coerced. I just think this effort of "gotcha"ing people that don't give a shit about the subject in the first place might be better spent either showing them why they should care, or working with the people that are actually interested. What could this professor alternatively have done with his time compared to this, which is a headache of dealing with these people that are going to have to, bitterly, retake this class, or worse, leave school altogether? What was accomplished here?

foldr 3y ago
>I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve. No, it just means "last year's exam seems to have been a bit too difficult, so I'll make this year's a bit easier" (or vice versa). Curving means that you assign grades based on a student's performance relative to the others in the class rather than on their absolute score on the test. >but I don't really understand why difficulty would be a useful metric, If you really don't understand how it's possible for an exam to be too easy or too difficult, then I'm not sure what to say. The exam is intended to differentiate between students who've mastered the material, students who understand the basics, and students who learned nothing. To do that it has to be difficult enough that people who skipped half the classes† can't get full marks, but also easy enough that not everyone fails it. Even these basic boundary conditions on a good exam can be quite tricky to satisfy in some cases. †Not that I care about people skipping classes per se. I just mean that typically they'll have significant gaps in their knowledge of the material.

foldr 3y ago

>I was assuming that calibration of difficulty implied some sort of curve. No, it just means "last year's exam seems to have been a bit too difficult, so I'll make this year's a bit easier" (or vice versa). Curving means that you assign grades based on a student's performance relative to the others in the class rather than on their absolute score on the test. >but I don't really understand why difficulty would be a useful metric, If you really don't understand how it's possible for an exam to be too easy or too difficult, then I'm not sure what to say. The exam is intended to differentiate between students who've mastered the material, students who understand the basics, and students who learned nothing. To do that it has to be difficult enough that people who skipped half the classes† can't get full marks, but also easy enough that not everyone fails it. Even these basic boundary conditions on a good exam can be quite tricky to satisfy in some cases. †Not that I care about people skipping classes per se. I just mean that typically they'll have significant gaps in their knowledge of the material.