To Curve or Not To Curve

[LostAngeles]

That is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to give students the grade they got or by adjusting the scores on curve boost the entire classes grade? To pass, to fail...

Week 6 has passed and in its wake lay the students, broken and battered by an onslaught of exams. It is the Midterm season and for five weeks, exams will be hurtled at them from every corner of the campus. Case in point, I had several exams crammed into a three-day period, one of which was a Sunday. As a master of the procrastination arts, I had postponed studying until the week prior.

So it came to pass that in one class, on a scale of 150 points, the low was a 15 and the high was a 139, with a median around 73. In another, no one scored in the high range, but most scores were around a B.

And on the lone Saturday class with a teacher who had a reputation for being difficult and failing many students, the scores ranged from a 36/50 to a 6/50. There would be no scale, the teacher proclaimed. After all he was dropping one test score, was he not? And lo, many students protested, yet they fell on deaf ears.

On that information alone, should there be a grading curve?

So I'm not even in the 30's in that group (but no where near the lows. I was above the mean) and I do not believe he should curve at all for the follwing reasons:

His other class in the same subject had people getting As. Their exam consisted of seven questions. Ours consisted of six, two of which were omitted due to errors on his part.

As he went over the test, my friend, who's score was half of mine, looked at what he put up on the board and commented that it should have been easy. He's correct. We're given a list of problems that the test will be based on and ALL of them came directly from that list. And by "directly" I mean number for number. Three of which had answers in the back of the book.

This is not my first time with this professor. I know how he works, I know not to fear him. I also missed a class due to five hours in a doctor's office. And I didn't get around to studying the material I had missed. I knew better. I damn better have known better. Also, I lost points for stupid mistakes.

In fact several people in the class admitted that, "Gee. I should have studied better."

Frankly, I think we mostly earned our grades here.

That and we can always get one dropped.

 

[Zep]

Sorry, I thought you were talking about buying a padded brassiere...

 

[TragicMonkey]

I've always hated curves. Give me the grade I earned, not the grade based off some statistical trick.

I'm bitter because I got a B in a college course because the professor insisted on grading on a strict curve. I had a 98 percent average. One guy had a 99. Since there were only five students, I got the B. Pretty fair, huh? Because the point of the course wasn't to learn the material, but to compete with each other.

 

[Jeff Corey]

All grading is subjective.
But,I love it when I give a test that asks questions that I think get to the heart of my topic and over half the students get 85% or better. And I don't use multiple choice tests. Ever.
Grading on a curve means that you don't have a clear idea of what your students should know and that you let some formula take the place of your better judgement.

 

[Jorghnassen]

Ah, the intricacies of curving... I say the prof should use the order statistics and force them into a gaussian curve of his choice.

/but I'm teh evil

 

[LostAngeles]

Monkey, there are no words. Regardless of my expression of rule 8 violations in Paltalk.

My Econ class was curved. I set the curve. My grades were B and C. I got an A. I learned nothing.

I've got another teacher who's grading scale is five points lower than the usual (85-100% is an A). Not only is that up front and not curved, he likes to give a few tough questions for us to try.

 

[Zbu]

The curve is silly because it assumes that there will always be someone who fails, hence it insures that by making sure the ones who didn't understand it (or did poorly) get screwed. This is all nice if you're trying to make your class hard so students will be afraid of it, but you're not doing anybody any favors except the teacher and his/her ego.

 

[cbish]

I don't use a curve per se. I call it a percentage curve but it's really a scale. I take the top couple of scores (depending on the number of students) and I average those top scores. That becomes my 100% that I break down after that. It allows me to ask a few more difficult/challenging questions. I break my courses into 50% exam, 50% assignments. It's worked well for me. I like it.

 

[Arkan_Wolfshade]

I am against curves for the following reasons

1) If everyone does well, somebody is going to get screwed. You shouldn't be screwing someone who did well just because the prof made the test too easy.

2) If everyone does poorly, somebody will get a boost, but someone else will get screwed. You shouldn't be boosting or screwing someone because the prof made the test too hard.

In short, I see curves as a way for profs to cover up their teaching mistakes, not as a way to help students.

 

[roger]

I never quite understood curving - it implies that the professor doesn't know how to evaluate the student's skill set.

I went to a technical university, so basically all the first year students took largely the same courses - everyone was required to take physics, chemistry, calculus, etc., in freshman year. It was also standard for the Physics 101 exam to be the first one taken in all the classes. I think the average in my class for that exam, before curves, was 36. It seemed to be planned as some type of wake-up call. I remember everyone walking out of that test shell-shocked. You were abruptly shifted from being the brainiac of your high school to being one of the hopelessly unprepared, and your next weeks were spent desparately studying for your other tests during every waking moment.

OTOH, just about every freshman stumbled out of the classroom and headed downtown to get drunk after that test, so I wouldn't be surprised that it was all a payola scheme between the bar owners and professors.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I have no idea what is meant here. At least I hope I don't.
A result is a result.
A massage is a back rub.
A hybrid of the two is pointless.

 

[wunky]

With the push towards everything being standards based maybe that means that "curving" will go away.
In some of my grad school classes were K-6 educators who taught in DC (Washington, DC) public schools. They always were talking about how "curving" was such a good thing.

 

[Jimbo07]

A result is a result.

It almost never is.

I have seen 3 directions:

i) The school competitively ranks students (U of A engineering program) - this is an explicit curve.
ii) Poor results drives professor to say, "Too bad, so sad." (barely scraped that class, despite performing much better on final than midterm)
iii) Did poorly on a midterm. I was allowed to bet it all on the final. Crushed the final and aced the class.

Based on a professor's experience, the abilities of the class, etc. all grading is subjective. Even if straight percentages are awarded, the professor still chooses the questions, assigns the student marker and so on.

In fact, it bugs me when people say, "a result is a result." If the test is too easy, do I really deserve 100?

 

[pgwenthold]

It almost never is.

I have seen 3 directions:

i) The school competitively ranks students (U of A engineering program) - this is an explicit curve.
ii) Poor results drives professor to say, "Too bad, so sad." (barely scraped that class, despite performing much better on final than midterm)
iii) Did poorly on a midterm. I was allowed to bet it all on the final. Crushed the final and aced the class.

Based on a professor's experience, the abilities of the class, etc. all grading is subjective. Even if straight percentages are awarded, the professor still chooses the questions, assigns the student marker and so on.

In fact, it bugs me when people say, "a result is a result." If the test is too easy, do I really deserve 100?

I always tell people, I could write an exam where the average is 75/100, or where the average is 25/100. You tell me what you want the average to be, I can write the exam to accomodate it, for the most part. If I use the combination of writing the exam and grading the exam, I can come even closer.

It never made any sense for me to write an exam where the average is 35 and then just curve the grading scale. Why not just write an exam where the average is 75 and then use the old 90/80/70/60 or other such hard cutoffs?

 

[drkitten]

It never made any sense for me to write an exam where the average is 35 and then just curve the grading scale. Why not just write an exam where the average is 75 and then use the old 90/80/70/60 or other such hard cutoffs?

Because you don't get the same amount of diagnostic information. For example, if you write an exam where the average is high (and I consider a 75 to be a 'high' average), you can't tell the difference between the very good students and the excellent students, because of the ceiling effect (you can't score more than 100% of the points). Similarly, a test with a low average will lose information that lets you distinguish the truly wretched from the merely underperforming, because there aren't degrees of difference on a blank paper.

 

[Overman]

If he said he is alrealdy dropping the lowest test than thats fine. It just means you have to drink about 11 beers less the night before the next test.

Big Whoop.

 

[LostAngeles]

If he said he is alrealdy dropping the lowest test than thats fine. It just means you have to drink about 11 beers less the night before the next test.

Big Whoop.

Ha!

The class I had with him last semester met every day (meaning four days at my school because an old president was on crack). He tested every half-chapter which amounted to about 9, and dropped the lowest two.

My Physics professor during that semester seemed disappointed that he was behind this particular teacher in handing out tests.

 

[strathmeyer]

Well, obviously there's only one way to get an answer to this questions: randomly assign people into two groups: those who get curved, and those who don't, and then wait 20 years and see which group is the happiest.

 

[Jorghnassen]

Because you don't get the same amount of diagnostic information. For example, if you write an exam where the average is high (and I consider a 75 to be a 'high' average), you can't tell the difference between the very good students and the excellent students, because of the ceiling effect (you can't score more than 100% of the points). Similarly, a test with a low average will lose information that lets you distinguish the truly wretched from the merely underperforming, because there aren't degrees of difference on a blank paper.

You are infering about the scale parameter with only a location one. It's feasible to design a test with a 75% mean and be able to weight questions properly to distinguish between the very good, the excellent, the underperforming and the plain bad.

 

[Soapy Sam]

But what does "curved" mean?

It's obviously a well known term to the educationalist types here. I never heard of it.
It seems to me the point of an exam is to tell if the student has acquired an adequate understanding of the course work. If he has, he will achieve a certain score. If he fails to achieve the score, it is assumed he has not done the work or understood it.

What more do you need to know?