The only thing that I hate above all else in grading policies is the "Nobody gets an 'A', because an 'A' means you're perfect...and nobody's perfect." (Actual quote from one of my old teachers).
Excuse me, but go $%^& yourself. You're given a scale to grade on, and no, an "A" does not mean that the human being that did this assignment is bereft of all sin. It means that they did well and got almost everything, or everything, correct on an assignment...on something which is graded on a scale. The grade is not supposed to reflect the person, but their work....which may not be perfect, but goddamn it, it fulfilled all the requirements.
Ugh! Luckily, once I hit college, that sentiment seemed to stop. It wasn't often that I had a teacher who felt like this, anyway. Hopefully I'll continue to avoid them. :P
My department at Uni (Chemistry) had a policy that a course should pass about 75% of the attendees. Anyone who deviated to strongly from that (>90% or <60%) got looked into (I sat on the student review board of classes for a while, where it was discussed if classes were to hard or to easy). I know that Quantum Mechanics and Physics 1 both got reviewed because of this, because both had rates more like 40%.
Of course, in the Netherlands we grade on a 1-10 scale where above 5.5 is a pass, And 10's are pretty exceptional (I only gotten 2 in my studies). Good students tend to score 8's and sometimes 9's.
For practical work (which is a lot of your time at Chemistry), 10's are nonexistant, apart from the 2 kids who got themselves into Nature on a 2nd year course by giving their teacher a new idea for a model about stacking which proved very good. Even a 9 is pretty much unheard of.
The downside is that it makes a lot of people just aim for 6's instead of high marks.
Unfortunately, the employers of these professors will usually consider low grades across the class to mean the professor is a poor teacher, rather than accepting that the course is a difficult one. Hence, the professor finds his/herself being lenient and will give easy marks in order to keep their job.
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment). However, people who study chemistry are still somewhat averse to physics and math, and come out of high school with varying knowledge. The toughness of QM and TD courses especially has been cited by people who drop out in my starting year, they felt unequipped to deal with them and some took exams 4+ times before giving up. These courses were mandatory 1st year classes, and without them you could not get an internal BsC thesis research spot needed to complete your degree. Especially prevalent around people whose interests were in Biochem, which nowadays is by far the biggest branch of research, and rather far detached from the fundamentals, it caused a lot of delay in graduations.
The teachers, who were physical chemists, physicists, and mathematicians, were ill-equipped to this change in education standards (High school reform in the late '90's changed the skillset arriving at uni), as well as change in chemistry focus (Towards bio). They believed that because the course was essentially the same as in '80s, early '90s, they could grade the same and expect the same. It took a bit of politicking before it was resolved, and the outcome of it is not so satisfactory (QM is now optional beyond a very basic course, TD has been gutted very hard).
A hard course still needs to be fair. If I put in effort and time, do classes and work, and study for the exam, I should be very likely to pass (Assuming i'm not a moron). This is not always the case.
I've had fair hard courses too. Those are the best there are, because you can rise to them, and truely feel you are learning, understanding, instead of inputting loads of hours because of a teachers whim (unfair hard class) or doing nothing and getting free marks (easy classes).
My weirdest class that way was a project about chemistry and environment, which was ran by a damn bureaucrat. The course was slotted for 50% time during a 16 week period, and the prof. more or less demanded that we show that we used all that time. We ended up with a horribly bloated monster of a report because we knew he was more interested in seeing time spent then quality received, and with 6 people working 300 hours each on a project you can research and write a lot.
What's both frustrating and unfair is those teachers who willfully buck the trend to make some sort of point. Yeah, yeah, we get that you think C should be the average grade. It's nice that you think nobody should ever get an A unless he's fucking Stephen Hawking. Huzzah. Problem is, nobody is going to take the time to research your particular grading habits when they look at my transcripts, fucko. All they'll see is that my department views B as an average grade, and I got a C in yours, which may as well be a D as far as they're concerned. So yay, you made your point, and now people are going to disregard me as an applicant because of your principles. Congratulations.
Im currently studying computer science at my school (Computer programming for those who don't know).
Bell curves are quite common in my program, the professors usually can't teach very well in the 3rd and 4th year so it becomes something like this:
1) Learn the material on your own
2) Do the assignments
3) Get a ridiculously hard midterm that gets curved
4) Prof makes the final exam mark replace the midterm mark (If hes not an asshole).
5) The final becomes a somewhat mediocre test that averages at about a C, C- level.
Now there are variations to this formula, if you have a bad prof like I did this past semester. The prof will make a ridiculously hard final based on 2 powerpoint slides that he didn't go over, and then curve it really hard.
Or if your in the first or second year, you will usually have a good prof and none of the above happens. This makes me hate my school because you are eventually stuck in the system of bad prof for 2 years due to stupid things like teacher's unions and the amount of published work they have.
Its almost like a trap, our school is very good for the first year, the second year is ok and afterwards you get shitty profs. They intentionally do this because you know that after 2 years of university, your going to stay and get your degree.
The entire idea of post-secondary education is good but the issue becomes balancing business with the actual art of teaching students. While my shitty prof may not be a good teacher, he is an excellent researcher who earns the university a lot publicity and grant money, thus he has diplomatic immunity.
When I was grading for a professor of mine, he literally gave the lowest scoring person in the class a C. She had something around 30% when the average grade was up in the 80-90's. Then he just sort of arbitrarily picked some ranges for C+, B-, etc... And based it entirely on their test scores instead of including their homework like the syllabus states. Which, coincidentally, mentions that grading would be on a standard 70-79 -> C, 80-89 -> B, 90-100 -> A scale.
A few years ago I got B's in two classes I showed up for only once, I left the class but I never dropped it.
I also got a B in an English class where I did less than half of the classwork, skipped a paper, and had a lot of absences. To be honest though I think she was just lenient because I was one of three people that weren't completely retarded.
Also I hate art history, its required for my major (graphic design) and it is purposefully one of the most painful grading and testing setups for a mostly unremarkable class. However I have had a few other art courses where the teacher was very easy based upon whether you put in the effort and work and not the usual subjective arbitrary grading setup.
Exactly, Art History courses seem entirely based on regurgitating bits of info, factoids, but very little concerned with anything that you'd actually, iono, learn. You're graded not on the quality of your independent thought, but how much of the factoids you can associate with an image shown out of context on a test.
Either way you get fucked though. Points are taken away arbitrarily at the end of the day, and it's pretty easy to justify in a class that isn't centered much around knowledge at all compared to raw information.
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
edited May 2008
I did this research paper that I spent days working on, taking it as seriously as possible. When I got it back all it had is '96%, nice paper'.
Grade inflation is a relatively large problem when you have to decide what a person's scores actually mean. I came out of my undergraduate career at a private university with a whopping 2.9 gpa. (Un)Fortunately, my GRE scores went through the god damned roof. What that says to prospective graduate schools is that I'm an immensely capable lazy sonofabitch. Unfortunately, what the truth is, is that I had a bunch of courses graded on a curve, and I was just mediocre when compared to my peers.
On the other side of the coin, now I'm a TA for some of the mixed grad/undergrad courses, so I'm grading things from people who already have, or are about to get their degree. I see things that should have been corrected, presumably by harsher grading standards, in their freshmen or sophomore years. Pages and pages for single functions, poorly named variables, columns wider than 80 characters, etc, etc. Makes me so freaking angry.
tl;dr some people benefit from it, some of us get screwed. Isn't this the sort of thing ABET was created for?
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
ElJeffe on
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Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics define how molecular bonds are formed, why and how light interacts with atoms.... if you do not know the basics of QM you can never know why 2 Hydrogen atoms form a molecule, and why 2 He ones do not, or where the angles in molecules come from. QM is the theoretical basis for chemistry.
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics define how molecular bonds are formed, why and how light interacts with atoms.... if you do not know the basics of QM you can never know why 2 Hydrogen atoms form a molecule, and why 2 He ones do not, or where the angles in molecules come from. QM is the theoretical basis for chemistry.
I always did wonder why there were nice angular structures to molecules.
I figured it was just scientists making pretend but I guess that is probably why I got that B- in chem.
When I was in high school, I had a love of both writing and math/science that made it difficult for me to pick what I wanted to pursue in college.
I ended up picking journalism, and many arbitrarily deducted points later, I transferred to engineering. I can't stand arbitrary grading, and it was riling me up that I'd miss points because the tone of my writing didn't happen to agree with the professor's, even though it was correct with respect to spelling, grammar and content.
I knew I belonged back in the sciences when I longed just to see, "Fuck, there's what I did wrong. Can't argue that 1 * 0 = 1."
I still maintain that there are occasions where passive voice is necessary even in journalistic writing, so fuck you, journalism professors.
ah, passive voice. It's the difference between an A and a C in any English class you take at my uni, depending on whether the prof you get cares. I've only had one who did. God damn, she was nice and willing to work with you on it, but fuck, it's not fun to write a 15 pager 4 times, and sometimes there's just no other way to say stuff without sounding like you have a stick up your ass at the keyboard.
I'm a college English professor, and I just wanted to say that good professors understand the necessity of the passive voice.
In terms of discourse grammar, the passive voice provides an integral flow in maintaining the transition between old information and new information. Often times, a sentence can be improved by switching from a passive to an active construction, but the passive voice is not always incorrect. Teachers who make you write awkward sentences simply to get rid of a passive construction are not good teachers. Also, they're probably not very good writers.
Which brings me to my next point: there are a lot of English people, particularly in High Schools, who have never taken a linguistics course. They don't understand that a lot of the prescriptive grammar shit they were taught is founded more on social control and less on actual correctness. It is okay to split infinitives. It is okay to end a sentence in a preposition. "Ain't" is a perfectly acceptable word, and Shakespeare used it several hundred years ago.
Some things are, of course, just wrong. If you conjugate a verb incorrectly or use the wrong verb tense, you have made mistake. However, it is much more important that you know how to get your ideas across clearly and succinctly. You are likely to correct spelling and grammar errors if you revise your papers (please, for the love of god, revise your papers), but if you don't understand how to form and further an argument then you are fucked.
What my Shakespeare professor told me was that I had solid ideas in my papers that basically deserved a good grade, but because of formatting and passive voice I was fucked. She gave me a bunch of chances to resubmit, but every time she would just mark off new errors that she hadn't before.
That's ridiculous. I can understand the formatting thing to a certain extent (i.e. you didn't cite sources, didn't use MLA format, you have 3" margins, etc...) but giving someone a C largely for using the passive voice is absurd. I hate hearing about shit like this. It makes me, and my discipline by extension, look foolish and outmoded, which it is a lot of the time.
I cited sources but apparently I wrote "Works Cited" on the citations page the wrong way, my margins were fine. Apart from the passive voice her main beef was the way things were spaced. And she disagreed with where paragraphs should start and end. And apparently my citations were formatted wrong even though I followed the exact same thing from the same writer's handbook- I guess there was something very minutely wrong with the spacing there, I don't really remember. No spelling errors (that I could find, I'm a good speller and typist) no grammar errors except for that passive voice thing.
This particular prof was doing a Phd. on Shakespeare (concentration on gender themes) and I guess her mentor looked at all our papers too. That might be an explanation for all the bullshit.
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INeedNoSaltwith blood on my teethRegistered Userregular
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics define how molecular bonds are formed, why and how light interacts with atoms.... if you do not know the basics of QM you can never know why 2 Hydrogen atoms form a molecule, and why 2 He ones do not, or where the angles in molecules come from. QM is the theoretical basis for chemistry.
just how deep into chemistry are you talking here
because I got a B+ in chemistry 1 during my freshman year and I have no background in quantum mechanics
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics define how molecular bonds are formed, why and how light interacts with atoms.... if you do not know the basics of QM you can never know why 2 Hydrogen atoms form a molecule, and why 2 He ones do not, or where the angles in molecules come from. QM is the theoretical basis for chemistry.
just how deep into chemistry are you talking here
because I got a B+ in chemistry 1 during my freshman year and I have no background in quantum mechanics
I guess you can say that, technically you need QM to completely understand chemistry since, yeah, it's the fundamental conceptual basis. But that's just like saying you need calculus to do mechanics, or you need relativity to understand electricity/magnetism. It's only true if you're dealing with the theoretical basis, but not if you just want to sketch out the concepts in qualitative strokes, or if you just wanted to memorize some formulas.
Some things are, of course, just wrong. If you conjugate a verb incorrectly or use the wrong verb tense, you have made mistake.
Was this intentional?
Not at all. But, as I've asserted in my previous posts, omitting something small like a determiner isn't really a big deal. That's the kind of thing I would have caught during the revision process.
Also, I hold myself to a much higher degree of accountability in my academic writing. I'm slummin' right now.
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Oh dear god. My Principles of Chem class, UGH, was chock the hell full of quantum mechanics. It's become accepted now that QM basics are included. Plus, Bohr was so wrong (lol).
Plus VSPR theory. Let's reserve this thread for additional bitching at chemistry. I just love memorizing electron configurations for octohedral bondings. ):
The history of quantum mechanics and relativity are extremely interesting topics, the ideas between 1880 and 1920 were so elaborate, confusing and hilarious yet produced the whole of QM and GR so completely and perfectly fast.
I guess it's because in both cases, reality turned out to be a lot weirder then anyone expected was ever possible.
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics define how molecular bonds are formed, why and how light interacts with atoms.... if you do not know the basics of QM you can never know why 2 Hydrogen atoms form a molecule, and why 2 He ones do not, or where the angles in molecules come from. QM is the theoretical basis for chemistry.
Possibly what you consider QM and what a physics major considers QM are two different things. Understanding orbitals as brute facts is important to chemistry and achievable for someone with very limited math. Deriving them from Schroedinger's equation, Pauli's exclusion principle and other theoretical fundamentals is absolutely not, and requiring this in undergraduate chemistry is not out of date, it's insane.
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics define how molecular bonds are formed, why and how light interacts with atoms.... if you do not know the basics of QM you can never know why 2 Hydrogen atoms form a molecule, and why 2 He ones do not, or where the angles in molecules come from. QM is the theoretical basis for chemistry.
Possibly what you consider QM and what a physics major considers QM are two different things. Understanding orbitals as brute facts is important to chemistry and achievable for someone with very limited math. Deriving them from Schroedinger's equation is absolutely not, and requiring this in undergraduate chemistry is not out of date, it's insane.
We had to learn l, m, m1 and so on, including +1/2 and -1/2. We didn't do the math to prove it. That would be crazy and irrelevant. o_O
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics define how molecular bonds are formed, why and how light interacts with atoms.... if you do not know the basics of QM you can never know why 2 Hydrogen atoms form a molecule, and why 2 He ones do not, or where the angles in molecules come from. QM is the theoretical basis for chemistry.
Possibly what you consider QM and what a physics major considers QM are two different things. Understanding orbitals as brute facts is important to chemistry and achievable for someone with very limited math. Deriving them from Schroedinger's equation is absolutely not, and requiring this in undergraduate chemistry is not out of date, it's insane.
Basically this. It's nice to have some familiarity with the math and concepts behind it, but you're not going to convince me that I need to learn all of the spherical harmonics and the legendrian integral to do chemistry. You probably need it if you're going to do spectroscopy or ... I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. But analytical, or organic, fuck no.
edit: I just took pchem too. So I did learn all this stuff. Sort of.
edit2: And back on topic. It was a hard course, but if you did all the work and showed some understanding, you were not going to fail. Which strikes me as fair, considering how difficult the subject matter is.
On topic myself: the grade never mattered as much to me as my professor's assessment of me. I didn't have many professors who handed out easy grades, but the ones I got were pretty unsatisfying.
Well this is of course a dilemma. Consider the chemistry POV. In order to understand chemistry, you need a basis in QM, Thermodynamics, mechanics and electrodynamica. Otherwise, you cannot compehend atom, molecule and fluid interaction, nor understand the chemists tools (All our analytical equipment).
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics define how molecular bonds are formed, why and how light interacts with atoms.... if you do not know the basics of QM you can never know why 2 Hydrogen atoms form a molecule, and why 2 He ones do not, or where the angles in molecules come from. QM is the theoretical basis for chemistry.
Possibly what you consider QM and what a physics major considers QM are two different things. Understanding orbitals as brute facts is important to chemistry and achievable for someone with very limited math. Deriving them from Schroedinger's equation is absolutely not, and requiring this in undergraduate chemistry is not out of date, it's insane.
Basically this. It's nice to have some familiarity with the math and concepts behind it, but you're not going to convince me that I need to learn all of the spherical harmonics and the legendrian integral to do chemistry. You probably need it if you're going to do spectroscopy or ... I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. But analytical, or organic, fuck no.
edit: I just took pchem too. So I did learn all this stuff. Sort of.
edit2: And back on topic. It was a hard course, but if you did all the work and showed some understanding, you were not going to fail. Which strikes me as fair, considering how difficult the subject matter is.
So, I have a seething hatred of curves in classes. I used to simply dislike them because they almost always just "curved up", artificially elevating the entire class. Sure, it was good for me, but it still sucked that dumb fucks were getting decent grades.
However, my dislike turned into seething hatred when I took statistics. Now, you're probably expecting me to say that my statistics professor graded on a strict curve and I hated him because it dragged me down or some shit. No. In fact, just the opposite. It was after the first test and we got our graded tests back and one of the students who didn't do so hot asked if he was planning on curving the grades.
My professor, this small Russian guy who spoke in a thick Russian accent, responded, "No. I will never curve anything. Normal curves don't make sense in a class this small. To curve in any shape or form would be an abuse of statistics." As it turned out, we were studying normal curves next, so he spent most of the time talking about why normal curves are fucking stupid for class grades, especially in a small 20 person class. His grading policy was to simply assign grades based on how well he thinks we learned the material and simply use our assignment and test scores as guidelines.
It was that professor that taught me my hatred of all abuses of statistics.
So, I have a seething hatred of curves in classes. I used to simply dislike them because they almost always just "curved up", artificially elevating the entire class. Sure, it was good for me, but it still sucked that dumb fucks were getting decent grades.
However, my dislike turned into seething hatred when I took statistics. Now, you're probably expecting me to say that my statistics professor graded on a strict curve and I hated him because it dragged me down or some shit. No. In fact, just the opposite. It was after the first test and we got our graded tests back and one of the students who didn't do so hot asked if he was planning on curving the grades.
My professor, this small Russian guy who spoke in a thick Russian accent, responded, "No. I will never curve anything. Normal curves don't make sense in a class this small. To curve in any shape or form would be an abuse of statistics." As it turned out, we were studying normal curves next, so he spent most of the time talking about why normal curves are fucking stupid for class grades, especially in a small 20 person class. His grading policy was to simply assign grades based on how well he thinks we learned the material and simply use our assignment and test scores as guidelines.
It was that professor that taught me my hatred of all abuses of statistics.
When my professor curves, it usually helps the people on the cusp of an A/B, B/C line and no one else. It's beneficial to everyone that's borderline.
My professor, this small Russian guy who spoke in a thick Russian accent, responded, "No. I will never curve anything. Normal curves don't make sense in a class this small. To curve in any shape or form would be an abuse of statistics." As it turned out, we were studying normal curves next, so he spent most of the time talking about why normal curves are fucking stupid for class grades, especially in a small 20 person class. His grading policy was to simply assign grades based on how well he thinks we learned the material and simply use our assignment and test scores as guidelines.
It was that professor that taught me my hatred of all abuses of statistics.
In most of my undergrad classes, the raw scores were actually pretty close to normally distributed.
Kakos, please explain to me why the following is bad, because I don't get it:
In most of my engineering classes (class sizes of 15-30), the prof would calculate the mean and standard dev for a given test. The mean would be whatever the mean was supposed to be for the class (for example, a . One standard dev above the mean in that case would be an A, one standard dev below would be a C, two below would be a D, and if you were more than two below you failed at life.
Was your professor basically saying that the only appropriate way to grade a class (assuming that a professor is not so wonderful as to always perfectly write every test such that 75% is exactly a C, and so on) is to analyze every bit of work for every student individually and just make up a grade? Because that sounds even stupider than whatever horrific "abuse" of statistics might come from a curve. Because, see, in a class with objective, fact-based answers, I would like an objective, fact-based grade.
ElJeffe on
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My freshman year of college: I was told by some of my friends who went a year before me to take this specific communications teacher because she was a cakewalk. It was that kind of find that had been passed from previous generations one to the next about this teacher. The rumor was all her tests were True/False, open book open note, all the answers were True. 90% of your grade was based on these tests. The other 10% your final project.
I didn't believe them at all, but went ahead with taking her Comm 131 class. Sure enough first test, 30 questions True/False. I figured what the hell, True all the way down. Handed it in in like less than a minute. The whole class was just looking at me as I walked out (its all we had that class) the whole time the teacher was just laughing and said, "you have good friends"
The sad/funny thing is, even halfway through the class there were people who still hadn't caught on, and were getting like 50% on their tests because they just couldn't believe every answer was true.
Odd thing is, I never skipped class and did all the reading and studies it took.
Kakos, please explain to me why the following is bad, because I don't get it:
In most of my engineering classes (class sizes of 15-30), the prof would calculate the mean and standard dev for a given test. The mean would be whatever the mean was supposed to be for the class (for example, a . One standard dev above the mean in that case would be an A, one standard dev below would be a C, two below would be a D, and if you were more than two below you failed at life.
Was your professor basically saying that the only appropriate way to grade a class (assuming that a professor is not so wonderful as to always perfectly write every test such that 75% is exactly a C, and so on) is to analyze every bit of work for every student individually and just make up a grade? Because that sounds even stupider than whatever horrific "abuse" of statistics might come from a curve. Because, see, in a class with objective, fact-based answers, I would like an objective, fact-based grade.
Meh, well, I don't disagree with the prof's grading policy, though it does make it tougher on him, since it opens the grades up for dispute more. I fully support the idea that the numbers game isn't the thing that shows how good of a student you are. Like in my ODE class, I was having a bad day on the midterm and made some very bad brain farts, but I did well on all the homeworks, and rocked the final. But because I did so poorly on the midterm, I fell just below the cutoff for A's. Probably, if my prof had the same policy as Kako's prof, I would have gotten an A. I think allowing some degree of subjectivity isn't necessarily a bad thing. As for his rant about how dumb it is to curve, I'm not sure I agree. That probably depends on the circumstances. As I mentioned, the scores did tend to be normally distributed in my classes, so fitting a normal distribution grade system to it makes sense, but I could imagine there are scenarios where it doesn't.
Kakos, please explain to me why the following is bad, because I don't get it:
In most of my engineering classes (class sizes of 15-30), the prof would calculate the mean and standard dev for a given test. The mean would be whatever the mean was supposed to be for the class (for example, a . One standard dev above the mean in that case would be an A, one standard dev below would be a C, two below would be a D, and if you were more than two below you failed at life.
Was your professor basically saying that the only appropriate way to grade a class (assuming that a professor is not so wonderful as to always perfectly write every test such that 75% is exactly a C, and so on) is to analyze every bit of work for every student individually and just make up a grade? Because that sounds even stupider than whatever horrific "abuse" of statistics might come from a curve. Because, see, in a class with objective, fact-based answers, I would like an objective, fact-based grade.
The problem is not that the grade is objective and fact-based.
The problem is that the grade is relative.
Suppose that in a classroom the maximum grade you can get is 100, which equates to "a superb and perfect understanding of subject material."
Now suppose the highest grade in this class is a 50, and the mean grade, which say equates to a 3.0, is 28.
When you apply a curve to this class, it turns out that the person who got 50 gets an A. You know, the person who is only HALF good at the material, gets an A.
I think this signifies a fundamental flaw with our education system, i.e. people being graded relative to each other, rather than how well they actually learn the actual material.
Kakos, please explain to me why the following is bad, because I don't get it:
In most of my engineering classes (class sizes of 15-30), the prof would calculate the mean and standard dev for a given test. The mean would be whatever the mean was supposed to be for the class (for example, a . One standard dev above the mean in that case would be an A, one standard dev below would be a C, two below would be a D, and if you were more than two below you failed at life.
Was your professor basically saying that the only appropriate way to grade a class (assuming that a professor is not so wonderful as to always perfectly write every test such that 75% is exactly a C, and so on) is to analyze every bit of work for every student individually and just make up a grade? Because that sounds even stupider than whatever horrific "abuse" of statistics might come from a curve. Because, see, in a class with objective, fact-based answers, I would like an objective, fact-based grade.
The problem is not that the grade is objective and fact-based.
The problem is that the grade is relative.
Suppose that in a classroom the maximum grade you can get is 100, which equates to "a superb and perfect understanding of subject material."
Now suppose the highest grade in this class is a 50, and the mean grade, which say equates to a 3.0, is 28.
When you apply a curve to this class, it turns out that the person who got 50 gets an A. You know, the person who is only HALF good at the material, gets an A.
I think this signifies a fundamental flaw with our education system, i.e. people being graded relative to each other, rather than how well they actually learn the actual material.
I agree with ege on this one, most definitely. Grades that only make sense in the context of the class in which you take them are completely useless. I prefer systems with only three "grades" - pass, fails, and honours. It's pretty straightforward that way, and you don't have to deal with grade inflation like you do with the more conventional systems.
Kakos, please explain to me why the following is bad, because I don't get it:
In most of my engineering classes (class sizes of 15-30), the prof would calculate the mean and standard dev for a given test. The mean would be whatever the mean was supposed to be for the class (for example, a . One standard dev above the mean in that case would be an A, one standard dev below would be a C, two below would be a D, and if you were more than two below you failed at life.
Was your professor basically saying that the only appropriate way to grade a class (assuming that a professor is not so wonderful as to always perfectly write every test such that 75% is exactly a C, and so on) is to analyze every bit of work for every student individually and just make up a grade? Because that sounds even stupider than whatever horrific "abuse" of statistics might come from a curve. Because, see, in a class with objective, fact-based answers, I would like an objective, fact-based grade.
The problem is not that the grade is objective and fact-based.
The problem is that the grade is relative.
Suppose that in a classroom the maximum grade you can get is 100, which equates to "a superb and perfect understanding of subject material."
Now suppose the highest grade in this class is a 50, and the mean grade, which say equates to a 3.0, is 28.
When you apply a curve to this class, it turns out that the person who got 50 gets an A. You know, the person who is only HALF good at the material, gets an A.
I think this signifies a fundamental flaw with our education system, i.e. people being graded relative to each other, rather than how well they actually learn the actual material.
I agree with ege on this one, most definitely. Grades that only make sense in the context of the class in which you take them are completely useless. I prefer systems with only three "grades" - pass, fails, and honours. It's pretty straightforward that way, and you don't have to deal with grade inflation like you do with the more conventional systems.
Grades absolutely should be relative to the general population; excelling doesn't mean anything except by reference to being well above the average. That said, obviously a class of 20 is not a good sample of the general capabilities of college students learning the material. Ideally, a professor adjusts his tests over time so that, when many classes are averaged together, you get a decent bell curve with the average at about B-. For a new prof using new exams, I can understand curving though. It may be a blunt instrument, but I think it's likely to be better than the prof's subjective decisions about what constitutes thorough understanding.
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Excuse me, but go $%^& yourself. You're given a scale to grade on, and no, an "A" does not mean that the human being that did this assignment is bereft of all sin. It means that they did well and got almost everything, or everything, correct on an assignment...on something which is graded on a scale. The grade is not supposed to reflect the person, but their work....which may not be perfect, but goddamn it, it fulfilled all the requirements.
Ugh! Luckily, once I hit college, that sentiment seemed to stop. It wasn't often that I had a teacher who felt like this, anyway. Hopefully I'll continue to avoid them. :P
Of course, in the Netherlands we grade on a 1-10 scale where above 5.5 is a pass, And 10's are pretty exceptional (I only gotten 2 in my studies). Good students tend to score 8's and sometimes 9's.
For practical work (which is a lot of your time at Chemistry), 10's are nonexistant, apart from the 2 kids who got themselves into Nature on a 2nd year course by giving their teacher a new idea for a model about stacking which proved very good. Even a 9 is pretty much unheard of.
The downside is that it makes a lot of people just aim for 6's instead of high marks.
Same story the world over.
The teachers, who were physical chemists, physicists, and mathematicians, were ill-equipped to this change in education standards (High school reform in the late '90's changed the skillset arriving at uni), as well as change in chemistry focus (Towards bio). They believed that because the course was essentially the same as in '80s, early '90s, they could grade the same and expect the same. It took a bit of politicking before it was resolved, and the outcome of it is not so satisfactory (QM is now optional beyond a very basic course, TD has been gutted very hard).
A hard course still needs to be fair. If I put in effort and time, do classes and work, and study for the exam, I should be very likely to pass (Assuming i'm not a moron). This is not always the case.
I've had fair hard courses too. Those are the best there are, because you can rise to them, and truely feel you are learning, understanding, instead of inputting loads of hours because of a teachers whim (unfair hard class) or doing nothing and getting free marks (easy classes).
My weirdest class that way was a project about chemistry and environment, which was ran by a damn bureaucrat. The course was slotted for 50% time during a 16 week period, and the prof. more or less demanded that we show that we used all that time. We ended up with a horribly bloated monster of a report because we knew he was more interested in seeing time spent then quality received, and with 6 people working 300 hours each on a project you can research and write a lot.
faux edit: or what ElJeffe said:
Bell curves are quite common in my program, the professors usually can't teach very well in the 3rd and 4th year so it becomes something like this:
1) Learn the material on your own
2) Do the assignments
3) Get a ridiculously hard midterm that gets curved
4) Prof makes the final exam mark replace the midterm mark (If hes not an asshole).
5) The final becomes a somewhat mediocre test that averages at about a C, C- level.
Now there are variations to this formula, if you have a bad prof like I did this past semester. The prof will make a ridiculously hard final based on 2 powerpoint slides that he didn't go over, and then curve it really hard.
Or if your in the first or second year, you will usually have a good prof and none of the above happens. This makes me hate my school because you are eventually stuck in the system of bad prof for 2 years due to stupid things like teacher's unions and the amount of published work they have.
Its almost like a trap, our school is very good for the first year, the second year is ok and afterwards you get shitty profs. They intentionally do this because you know that after 2 years of university, your going to stay and get your degree.
The entire idea of post-secondary education is good but the issue becomes balancing business with the actual art of teaching students. While my shitty prof may not be a good teacher, he is an excellent researcher who earns the university a lot publicity and grant money, thus he has diplomatic immunity.
Exactly, Art History courses seem entirely based on regurgitating bits of info, factoids, but very little concerned with anything that you'd actually, iono, learn. You're graded not on the quality of your independent thought, but how much of the factoids you can associate with an image shown out of context on a test.
Either way you get fucked though. Points are taken away arbitrarily at the end of the day, and it's pretty easy to justify in a class that isn't centered much around knowledge at all compared to raw information.
No criticism, no comments, nothing.
I was severely disappointed.
On the other side of the coin, now I'm a TA for some of the mixed grad/undergrad courses, so I'm grading things from people who already have, or are about to get their degree. I see things that should have been corrected, presumably by harsher grading standards, in their freshmen or sophomore years. Pages and pages for single functions, poorly named variables, columns wider than 80 characters, etc, etc. Makes me so freaking angry.
tl;dr some people benefit from it, some of us get screwed. Isn't this the sort of thing ABET was created for?
What sort of freaky-ass chemistry are you using that you cannot hope to understand without background in quantum mechanics?
Quantum mechanics define how molecular bonds are formed, why and how light interacts with atoms.... if you do not know the basics of QM you can never know why 2 Hydrogen atoms form a molecule, and why 2 He ones do not, or where the angles in molecules come from. QM is the theoretical basis for chemistry.
I always did wonder why there were nice angular structures to molecules.
I figured it was just scientists making pretend but I guess that is probably why I got that B- in chem.
I ended up picking journalism, and many arbitrarily deducted points later, I transferred to engineering. I can't stand arbitrary grading, and it was riling me up that I'd miss points because the tone of my writing didn't happen to agree with the professor's, even though it was correct with respect to spelling, grammar and content.
I knew I belonged back in the sciences when I longed just to see, "Fuck, there's what I did wrong. Can't argue that 1 * 0 = 1."
I still maintain that there are occasions where passive voice is necessary even in journalistic writing, so fuck you, journalism professors.
In terms of discourse grammar, the passive voice provides an integral flow in maintaining the transition between old information and new information. Often times, a sentence can be improved by switching from a passive to an active construction, but the passive voice is not always incorrect. Teachers who make you write awkward sentences simply to get rid of a passive construction are not good teachers. Also, they're probably not very good writers.
Which brings me to my next point: there are a lot of English people, particularly in High Schools, who have never taken a linguistics course. They don't understand that a lot of the prescriptive grammar shit they were taught is founded more on social control and less on actual correctness. It is okay to split infinitives. It is okay to end a sentence in a preposition. "Ain't" is a perfectly acceptable word, and Shakespeare used it several hundred years ago.
Some things are, of course, just wrong. If you conjugate a verb incorrectly or use the wrong verb tense, you have made mistake. However, it is much more important that you know how to get your ideas across clearly and succinctly. You are likely to correct spelling and grammar errors if you revise your papers (please, for the love of god, revise your papers), but if you don't understand how to form and further an argument then you are fucked.
C's get degrees huh?
This particular prof was doing a Phd. on Shakespeare (concentration on gender themes) and I guess her mentor looked at all our papers too. That might be an explanation for all the bullshit.
just how deep into chemistry are you talking here
because I got a B+ in chemistry 1 during my freshman year and I have no background in quantum mechanics
I guess you can say that, technically you need QM to completely understand chemistry since, yeah, it's the fundamental conceptual basis. But that's just like saying you need calculus to do mechanics, or you need relativity to understand electricity/magnetism. It's only true if you're dealing with the theoretical basis, but not if you just want to sketch out the concepts in qualitative strokes, or if you just wanted to memorize some formulas.
Not at all. But, as I've asserted in my previous posts, omitting something small like a determiner isn't really a big deal. That's the kind of thing I would have caught during the revision process.
Also, I hold myself to a much higher degree of accountability in my academic writing. I'm slummin' right now.
I guess it's because in both cases, reality turned out to be a lot weirder then anyone expected was ever possible.
Possibly what you consider QM and what a physics major considers QM are two different things. Understanding orbitals as brute facts is important to chemistry and achievable for someone with very limited math. Deriving them from Schroedinger's equation, Pauli's exclusion principle and other theoretical fundamentals is absolutely not, and requiring this in undergraduate chemistry is not out of date, it's insane.
Basically this. It's nice to have some familiarity with the math and concepts behind it, but you're not going to convince me that I need to learn all of the spherical harmonics and the legendrian integral to do chemistry. You probably need it if you're going to do spectroscopy or ... I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. But analytical, or organic, fuck no.
edit: I just took pchem too. So I did learn all this stuff. Sort of.
edit2: And back on topic. It was a hard course, but if you did all the work and showed some understanding, you were not going to fail. Which strikes me as fair, considering how difficult the subject matter is.
However, my dislike turned into seething hatred when I took statistics. Now, you're probably expecting me to say that my statistics professor graded on a strict curve and I hated him because it dragged me down or some shit. No. In fact, just the opposite. It was after the first test and we got our graded tests back and one of the students who didn't do so hot asked if he was planning on curving the grades.
My professor, this small Russian guy who spoke in a thick Russian accent, responded, "No. I will never curve anything. Normal curves don't make sense in a class this small. To curve in any shape or form would be an abuse of statistics." As it turned out, we were studying normal curves next, so he spent most of the time talking about why normal curves are fucking stupid for class grades, especially in a small 20 person class. His grading policy was to simply assign grades based on how well he thinks we learned the material and simply use our assignment and test scores as guidelines.
It was that professor that taught me my hatred of all abuses of statistics.
In most of my undergrad classes, the raw scores were actually pretty close to normally distributed.
In most of my engineering classes (class sizes of 15-30), the prof would calculate the mean and standard dev for a given test. The mean would be whatever the mean was supposed to be for the class (for example, a
Was your professor basically saying that the only appropriate way to grade a class (assuming that a professor is not so wonderful as to always perfectly write every test such that 75% is exactly a C, and so on) is to analyze every bit of work for every student individually and just make up a grade? Because that sounds even stupider than whatever horrific "abuse" of statistics might come from a curve. Because, see, in a class with objective, fact-based answers, I would like an objective, fact-based grade.
I didn't believe them at all, but went ahead with taking her Comm 131 class. Sure enough first test, 30 questions True/False. I figured what the hell, True all the way down. Handed it in in like less than a minute. The whole class was just looking at me as I walked out (its all we had that class) the whole time the teacher was just laughing and said, "you have good friends"
The sad/funny thing is, even halfway through the class there were people who still hadn't caught on, and were getting like 50% on their tests because they just couldn't believe every answer was true.
Odd thing is, I never skipped class and did all the reading and studies it took.
Meh, well, I don't disagree with the prof's grading policy, though it does make it tougher on him, since it opens the grades up for dispute more. I fully support the idea that the numbers game isn't the thing that shows how good of a student you are. Like in my ODE class, I was having a bad day on the midterm and made some very bad brain farts, but I did well on all the homeworks, and rocked the final. But because I did so poorly on the midterm, I fell just below the cutoff for A's. Probably, if my prof had the same policy as Kako's prof, I would have gotten an A. I think allowing some degree of subjectivity isn't necessarily a bad thing. As for his rant about how dumb it is to curve, I'm not sure I agree. That probably depends on the circumstances. As I mentioned, the scores did tend to be normally distributed in my classes, so fitting a normal distribution grade system to it makes sense, but I could imagine there are scenarios where it doesn't.
The problem is not that the grade is objective and fact-based.
The problem is that the grade is relative.
Suppose that in a classroom the maximum grade you can get is 100, which equates to "a superb and perfect understanding of subject material."
Now suppose the highest grade in this class is a 50, and the mean grade, which say equates to a 3.0, is 28.
When you apply a curve to this class, it turns out that the person who got 50 gets an A. You know, the person who is only HALF good at the material, gets an A.
I think this signifies a fundamental flaw with our education system, i.e. people being graded relative to each other, rather than how well they actually learn the actual material.
I agree with ege on this one, most definitely. Grades that only make sense in the context of the class in which you take them are completely useless. I prefer systems with only three "grades" - pass, fails, and honours. It's pretty straightforward that way, and you don't have to deal with grade inflation like you do with the more conventional systems.
Grades absolutely should be relative to the general population; excelling doesn't mean anything except by reference to being well above the average. That said, obviously a class of 20 is not a good sample of the general capabilities of college students learning the material. Ideally, a professor adjusts his tests over time so that, when many classes are averaged together, you get a decent bell curve with the average at about B-. For a new prof using new exams, I can understand curving though. It may be a blunt instrument, but I think it's likely to be better than the prof's subjective decisions about what constitutes thorough understanding.