| Often the B+ students are way sharper but have poor incentives to work for the As. This creates bad work habits for them. The As, then, are better at the game. Once you've become a TA and have to grade the exams, you realize how A grades are quite within reach: For the professors, being an easy grader has almost no downsides. The contrary is a minefield of trouble. "A" students will "ask for clarifications" for any minor mistake, knowing professors will often throw them a point or two. The exams are, typically, slight variations of problems from assignments. Often, they are the same. Exams have no curveballs; problems or situations that you have never seen unless you did extra readings. No problem which to solve you must have read more or fully understood the core material. The TA is primed to give 40% of a problem's points for free - just restate the problem in math and draw a picture and right out the door you get 2 out of 5 points. Note that, as far as I can tell, this is not generally true for "hot" topics like CS or bio. These programs have so many eager kids that the material is hard. But then these fields get hard working, bright, kids that don't actually care about the material - they go to McK. Within ten years they've forgotten everything and are just consulting parrots. |