/sci/ - Science & Math

I agree but I want a high average so idgaf.

>mfw I had a 50 test average in linear algebra but still got A-

>>3075535
That would be fine if everyone were taking the same tests.

My hoo-man professors are not following the strict hierarchy my autism demands! I need my hugbox!

>>3075535
B>>3075535
Because most professors arn't educators, and have no idea how to create a perfectly linear assessment of a set of materials.

/thread

All marks are subjective anyway, it's not an accurate system.

http://thewaronbullshit.com/2007/07/24/bad-grades/

Scaling is only done in third world countries

>>3075570
*hug*

>>3075581
there are no accurate system in biased education.

>>3075581
>I was a fucking retard in school and want to blame the system for my bad grades because obviously I'm a genius like Einstein

Everyone sucks at making tests. I don't think anyone even takes test-making seriously. I'm not sure most test-makers even have a clear idea of what they're trying to test or why they should be testing it.

Which is ridiculous, when society treats universities more as certifiers of skill and knowledge than as developers of the same.

Anyway, the point was, scaling is a lazy way to correct for having made a really bad test after the fact.

You understand something, or you do not.

Anything else is multiculturalism.

>>3075635
whats hilarious is you could replace making tests with taking tests and it's indestringuishable.

>>3075650
I would probably disagree with that if I had any idea what "indestringuishable" meant.

IMO, all grading should be based on a system of standardized tests. No muss, no fuss. Just a straightforward test for understanding. Scores could be used to quantify teacher performance as well.

>>3075642
this.

would you prefer
>doctor that knew 95% of organic chemistry
>doctor that knew 40% of organic chemistry but it was scaled up to an A

at the end of the day, you know it or you don't.

>>3075603
Naw, I got relatively good marks. Got into university with them. I just don't need to pretend they mean much in order to keep my ego in tact.

>german student goes to american university, thinks he learned not enough for the test, get an A for 50%

>american student goes to german university, thinks he learned enough for the test, get a D for 50%

>>3075535

Agreed. I remember being bitched at because my professor would tell the class I killed the curve with my test.

>>3075669
Would you prefer 1 doctors to 10 patients, or 1 doctor to 1000 patients

?

OP, these people paid for their degrees..

>>3075665
Wouldn't standardized tests make the teachers focus in the test area and ignore anything else? Aside from that I like the idea.

>>3075570
This guy's the only one giving a reasonable answer.

Getting 40% on an OChem test does NOT mean you only learned 40% of the material in that level. Just means the professor gets his kicks from smashing kids' faces in. That happened in EVERY engineering class I've ever taken.

If they made tests just like homework problems then yeah you'd probably get a nice bell curve. But if they throw you curve balls and see how you deal with them, then the prof gets a chance to grade your abilities, not how well you can regurgitate on a test paper.

>>3075669
who cares about organic chemistry it is pretty irrelevant to medicine.

>>3075744
No, the degree paid for itself.

Professor needs to teach a bunch of material and wants only a certain number of students, say 50 out of a class of 100, to pass.

But more than 50 of the 100 students are capable of understanding and passing a course on the material.

Solution: Add more material and some harder material to the course.

Less than 50 students pass the course, and you then scale the grades such that exactly 50 students pass.

It's beyond ridiculous that professors are writing and grading the tests for the classes they teach.

When you measure how well the students have learned, that's a measurement of the teacher's performance as much as it is of the students'.

For the teacher and the tester to be the same person is an entirely corrupt arrangement that invalidates the finding.

>>3075841
No, the anonymous student reviews are measurements of the teacher's performances. Dipshit.

Departments keep eyes on their people, and most professors have these things called ethics. They don't let dangerous degrees get into the hands of complete retards.

>>3075854
>They don't let dangerous degrees get into the hands of complete retards.
As someone who has met degree-holders, I would have to disagree.

>>3075841
I did have a situation where a prof i had seemed to have tests that had arbitrary scores, and her class included what appaeared to be an arbitrary extra credit.

It was a core class, and I was given a D+ in it. When I brought up the arbitraryness of her grading and testing procedures, and added the extra credit (which I did not attempt to take) to the head of the department, they asked her if, given my D+, if there was any score in the extra credit that would bring me up to a C-.

She said no, even when her syllabus said the EC was 10% of the grade.

The head of the department signed off on my transcript that my D+ constituted a passing grade for my core major.

What supported my case was other, passing kids, also expected better grades, but they were all looking to go from B->A or some shit.

I'm fairly certain that she was a needy proffessor who did not like the fact that I refused to interact with her. She went so far as handing out 7 pages of 1 sentences questions about her tests, which inevitabbly made everyone but me want to talk to her.

Shit was insane.

>>3075862
Do I smell a butthurt dropout? But yeah there's always people filling in the tail end of the curve. But thankfully my professors pulled this "bullshit" where they fail half the class. My class size dropped from >100 to 34 by the time I graduated. The real world will filter out the rest and leave them unemployed, or with shitty meaningless jobs.

>>3075862

>>3075872
>tests that had arbitrary scores
>arbitrary extra credit
>needy proffessor who did not like the fact that I refused to interact with her

What the hell is your major? Philosophy?

My linear algebra teacher tried to explain this. His first midterm he thought he made too easy. This was because the average was about 84%. The standard deviation ended up giving over 100% because so many people got high scores and some people did poorly. As a result, he could see clearly who needs improvement and who lies at the struggling end up the bell curve. However, he could not see the difference between who was doing well, and who was doing exceedingly well.

He liked to aim his averages around 50-60% so that the bell curve can give him both ends. He can see the group of people that have the capacity to do well and pass the course and he can also see the group of people who understand the material beyond the normal range.

So, most professors make tests difficult. They incorporate the material at an extent that the students likely haven't seen. That way, the students are still understanding the material but are still being challenged and those that may struggle and may not struggle can be differentiated.

>>3075902
cl;ose, geology.

I mean arbitrary in her scoring method. I looked at other people's answers to tests and couldn't determine any set of facts that resulted in a difference in scores.

Often geology tests rely on a long form question and answer.

What always got me was the long tests and short times.

I have always done math CAREFULLY, because I was using it to solve real programming problems before I went to university. If I need to solve a lot of math problems quickly, I use a computer. There is no practical use for solving a lot of easy problems by hand quickly but unreliably.

But in the exams, spending more than five minutes on a problem was as often bad as (and frequently worse than) getting it wrong.

Developing bullshit skills and counterproductive habits purely to get passing grades was something I just couldn't handle, and eventually I dropped out.

>>3075979
Know it well or don't know it at all. It's not like you were doing addition problems. And if it's as bad as you make it out to be you probably didn't go past your first year and you're trying to justify quitting.

>>3075942
In my (>>3075872) case, the prof wanted a hard test, but couldn't demonstrate to anyone that the method with which she actually tallied both the tests and the final grade, followed any consistent method.

It was absurd, as it was almost as if the numbers of her tests were twice removed from relevenances as:
1. the points per question did not appear consistent
2. her choice of letter grade was not consistent with the overall grade and had no correlational curve.

>>3075999
>Know it well or don't know it at all.
Oh fuck off. In my first year calculus course, I could have sat down and solved every problem in the final exam on day 1 of orientation, if they gave me all day to do it.

That whole term, other students in my class would come to me and I'd teach them how to solve the problems. I fundamentally UNDERSTOOD the material, and could generate all of the major identities from first principles with a sheet of scrap paper and handle problems of arbitrary complexity, whereas most of them only memorized identities (and had to look them up and cram them for tests), could only work a few steps away from them, and got bizarre wrong answers without noticing if they misremembered some detail.

I got something like 30% in that class, which most of the class passed. I still know some of these people: years after they graduated, if they took the course again, they'd have to work just as hard at it as they did the first time. They didn't learn shit.

See, the testing didn't measure comprehension at all, or the ability to handle complex problems, and had little regard for the primary importance of accuracy. It tested speed in handling trivial problems. It tested speed so hard that you didn't have time to think, only to recognize, to regurgitate.

Call it sour grapes or whatever, but I failed a course I could have TAUGHT, and that is bullshit. It didn't get any better from there; whenever a prof made exams hard by putting some challenging individual problems on it, I was way out ahead of the class, whenever a prof made exams hard by packing a huge amount of easy problems into a very limited time, I flunked, and eventually it got me kicked out. And these were never problems you'd have a real-life need to solve quickly.

>>3076110
i can respect your perspective and agree to an extent, but the problem is much much more on your end if you're failing any class you think you understand the concepts of. i hate how often i made silly mistakes on a 55min long test worth 25%-30% of your grade, and you're right in that it shouldn't make much of a difference in the "real life," but if being slow is the real reason you got 30% in a uni math class, then there aren't too many "real life" places that will want to hire you either way. especially if easy problems fuck you over, there are VERY few jobs out there where you will be doing carefully constructed "challenging" problems.

personally i agree that doing all that math shit on computers is more modern and efficient, which is why after calc i just decided on doing applied math instead of the regular courses, but you are exaggerating the fuck out of how much blame to put on the system/profs.

>>3075738
False dilemma. There is a third option.
1 doctor, 99 quacks who don't know medicine but were scaled up to an A, and 1000 patients.
Of those three, I prefer 1 doctor 0 quacks 10 patients the most, then would reluctantly accept 1 doctor 0 quacks 1000 patients, and I am against 1 doctor 99 quacks 1000 patients.

>>3076241
>if being slow is the real reason you got 30% in a uni math class, then there aren't too many "real life" places that will want to hire you either way. especially if easy problems fuck you over, there are VERY few jobs out there where you will be doing carefully constructed "challenging" problems.
These are just amazingly stupid statements.

And for the record, as previously mentioned, I taught myself calculus and was regularly applying it to programming problems before I started university. I haven't exactly had a hard time making my way in the world without a degree.

It generally turns out that if you don't need a teacher to get knowledge, you don't really need an employer to get money.

>>3076318
If you say so. It's not like Ochem makes and breaks medicine.

>>3076110
>I could have sat down and solved every problem in the final exam on day 1 of orientation
>I got something like 30% in that class

Time pressure is always a concern in any class you take, you should have known and adapted, instead you didn't bother studying or practicing enough.
If you give me unlimited time, I'll eventually solve anything but that's not how work it.

>>3076395
This assumes that I saw university as a place where you go and submissively do whatever ridiculous things are required in order to get grades so they will hand you a paper certifying your obedience.

I see it that way now, of course, but if I had seen it that way then, I wouldn't have gone. I was a naive kid, and I thought people went to university to learn, and they tested that you learned properly and gave you a paper that certifies that you know stuff.

I was already pissed that there wasn't actually anything for me in my whole first term that I hadn't already learned on my own, and I wasn't allowed to challenge anything or take other courses (requirements of the engineering accreditation -- all applicants to the guild must make the customary sacrifice of four full years).