Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by recursivecaveat 21 days ago
It's kind of curve grading I guess? There's no limit on A- and below, so you could have 20%(+4) A students and 80% A- if you really wanted. Or 100% Fs if you want to retire from teaching immediately. I wouldn't say I'm a curving advocate, but it seems to me 400 Calc 1 students or whatever is a large enough sample that statistically curving will not do any great injustice.
2 comments
mishellaneous 21 days ago
> Or 100% Fs if you want to retire from teaching immediately

it's crazy to see that mentioned so non-chalantly. my expectation is that the teacher, when they grade, is meant to be impartial, as if they were doing nothing more than taking a measurement of the student's work, you could say (this is why, i believe, we value standardized tests in some settings, even though they are worse in other aspects). it's the student who is responsible for the grade. a teacher not being allowed to give F's to everyone suggests a corruption of the system to me.

can you share more? what pressures teachers not to do this, for example?

link
recursivecaveat 21 days ago
Same argument about distributions cuts both ways to me imo. Like you taught 400 students and you couldn't get a single one over the line? I think the immediate suspicion would fall on the common factor of the teacher. For a crazy event like that it seems much more likely that the instruction or assessment was flawed.

Mostly though I was just chuckling in my head about an old curmudgeonly professor of mine who was literally retiring at the end of that semester. We were all actually quite scared he would go out with a bang given his disdain for us. We weren't like 100% Fs or anything, but I think it was obvious we thought the material was pretty phooey and the lectures interminable.

link
Kim_Bruning 21 days ago
Ok, so this is where I really show that this is all foreign to me. For sure: There probably should be questions asked if a class scores all F's anywhere. Obviously. Something went wrong there.

But why would this automatically cause the teacher to be the one to retire?

Are there documents or books on this? This system seems so alien to me. And yet it does seem to produce some amount of competent graduates who can -eg- launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit.

link