/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.9805569]

>prof never gives 100 because "nothing is a hundred :^)"

[Anonymous No.9805573]

While the "100% implies perfect mastery"-thing is obviously bullshit, in general shit is curved so that nobody gets 100% in order to get a decent distribution of grades. If many people get full marks it's a sign that your test is unable to differentiate between the abilities of the top students and should be harder.

[Anonymous No.9805649]

>>9805569
is da widdle froggy upset about his C- in the class?

[Anonymous No.9805668]

>>9805649
kys faggot, you aren't smart

[Anonymous No.9805693]

>>9805573
Or it's indicative that all of the material was taught properly. I don't know why people think a third of the students need to fail in order for a quiz in math 1010 to be valid

[Anonymous No.9805741]

>>9805569
HS AP calc teacher only gives one A in the class. All the brainlets chasing valadictorian drop the class. I only get second highest grade in the class. I don't get Smegma Cum Wade but they do.

[Anonymous No.9805768]

>>9805573

This is always the most stupid of arguments I hear.

Class grades should not be weighted based on what your classmates accomplished. It should be weighted on materials alone. Either you learned concepts A through Z satisfactorily or you didnt in which case I'll give you a grade based on the % of the subject you learned.

Everyone getting 100% means all the concepts were learned by all the students. If management has a problem with that I'll add more concepts.

[Anonymous No.9805782]

>>9805768
At least somebody understands what uni should be about.

[Anonymous No.9805793]

>>9805569
>prof gives impossible tests and then curves them up 30+%

[Anonymous No.9805871]

>>9805693
A third of the students don't need to fail. Similarly to the other end of the curve, many students getting very shitty marks means your test is too hard. Making a test which almost nobody gets 100% in but almost nobody fails is no small task, of course.

>>9805768
That works if your grading is pass/fail on whether you students learned concepts A through Z. However, if you want to really see to what extent they mastered this content you need to try a bit harder.

At least in my university the tests are not really about whether you can regurgitate the material that was covered in lectures, but whether you can apply it in problems you've usually never encountered before. As a result, the highest grade boundary is 70%.

[Anonymous No.9805966]

>>9805871

A test is not the time for new material or new challenges. Nothing should be unexpected to the student who has studied at least 2 hours for every 1 hour spent in class. The problems themselves might be difficult but the average student should have some idea of what the problems are about.

Otherwise what is the point? To find the 1 genius child who studies 8 hours per night? To find the cleverest of the clever?

I have found no subject yet which I cant learn given enough time. What I have found plenty of is professors gung-ho about rushing through 20 concepts in class and then not testing on any of them but instead coming up with questions with some vague relationship a chapter in the class book. I've asked them about it and they claim it's because I knew the 20 concepts and they wanted to see what it was I didnt know.

Maybe I just have a chip on my shoulder or maybe I have different fundamental beliefs about education or maybe it's a difference of cultures or me ending up in an applied engineering field. Maybe I'm just not intelligent enough to "get it".

After all, if education was good enough we might accidentally all become STEM majors and have nobody to look down upon anymore.

[Anonymous No.9805980]

>architect doesnt finish building because "only god is complete"

[Anonymous No.9805986]

>>9805569
>get all the questions right
>99.9...%

[Anonymous No.9805989]

>>9805966
Sounds like you're bitter about more than just exams there.

Of course the problems should be built on the material taught in the course. That some professor of yours decided to ask about things he didn't teach is beside the point. However, simply asking students to regurgitate information doesn't really tell you how well they can apply their knowledge, which is ultimately the test of how well they learned it (and how well you taught it).

I mean, I can read about 20 different concepts in, say, quantum physics. A test that asks about these 20 concepts will then say I know my quantum physics. However, if I can't apply that knowledge to actually solve problems (that aren't just copied from my homework/examples/whatever), then I'd argue that I haven't really learned quantum physics all that well.

>After all, if education was good enough we might accidentally all become STEM majors and have nobody to look down upon anymore.
If asking students to apply their knowledge means they all fail, your education really isn't that good.

[Anonymous No.9805995]

>>9805573
>your test is unable to differentiate between the abilities of the top students
Why would this be a goal? The point of a test is to measure mastery of the course material. It's not a competition to compare *relative* skill levels, it's a test how close someone is to a certain *absolute* line that you call mastery, ranging from insufficiently close (fail), to close enough to the line (pass), to at-or-beyond the line in which case you deserve a perfect grade. Why would relative measures of mastery play a substantial role in university education?

[Anonymous No.9806006]

>>9805995
>Why would relative measures of mastery play a substantial role in university education?
They play a substantial role in all education. Almost no educational certificate is graded pass/fail.

You're changing the topic here. Relative measures DO play a substantial role in university education, because just about every institution in the world grades their students. I'd understand your argument if anyone gave out pass/fail degrees, but nobody does; you always have a GPA or whatever attached, and it matters because it tells you who's the best at what they measured.

This is relevant when you want to apply for jobs/research positions/whatever. Finite places, many applicants, need a way to sort out the best.

[Anonymous No.9806022]

>>9806006
>Almost no educational certificate is graded pass/fail.
You are confusing two things. I am not talking about pass/fail grades. I am talking about grades measured to an absolute standard (how well you did on the test relative to what can be achieved on the test) versus a relative standard (how well you did on the test relative to how well other students in your class did on the same test). Absolute standards can still have high granularity.

When I was in university, getting 80% of the questions flawlessly correct while not answering the remaining 20%, would get you a 80% grade. What the other students in the class did would not affect that at all.

>I'd understand your argument if anyone gave out pass/fail degrees, but nobody does; you always have a GPA or whatever attached
There is no grade average of any sort on my bachelors or masters degree. You either have it or you don't. There is a cum laude predicate, but that is an absolute measure (if I recall correctly, it's an average grade over 80% and a few other requirements, or something along those lines), not a relative one.

>You're changing the topic here.
No, I am directly applying to the quoted statement.

[Anonymous No.9806039]

>>9806022
Then how do you deal with variations in test difficulty? Some year a professor makes a very hard examination and the average is 40%?

>There is no grade average of any sort on my bachelors or masters degree.
Where is your degree from? As far as I know that's not the norm in the anglosphere.

Also, from your previous post
>It's not a competition to compare *relative* skill levels
It literally is, over here. I guess that's the fundamental difference between our perspectives. And I don't really see why this is a bad thing. It's not like you can't set the bar for passing at similar levels of mastery each year.

[Anonymous No.9806045]

95/100

[Anonymous No.9806058]

>>9806039
>Then how do you deal with variations in test difficulty? Some year a professor makes a very hard examination and the average is 40%?
It is mostly avoided in the first place, which is not that hard if you do your diligence in crafting exams. I don't think this has ever happened to me. When it does happen (statistically it must happen *sometimes*), I think they apply pretty ad-hoc corrections, or invalidate and replace the entire test if it's really bad.

>Where is your degree from? As far as I know that's not the norm in the anglosphere.
Mainland Europe. As you say, not in the anglosphere.

>I guess that's the fundamental difference between our perspectives.
It would seem so. It does seem like the anglosphere has a very different educational culture than the one I'm used to (it is much more competitive across the board, not just in this particular detail).

>It's not like you can't set the bar for passing at similar levels of mastery each year.
Well no, but having the test scores be fundamentally a relative measure, makes it less suitable for a student as a judgment of absolute ability. It makes it harder to gauge whether you actually understand a topic.

(Also, as a test taker, I always found it really reassuring to be able to judge pretty accurately how well I was doing, and what standard of performance on the test in front of me would be enough for particular results. But I'm sure the curved grading system has different advantages to trade off against that.)

[Anonymous No.9806079]

>>9806039
>As far as I know that's not the norm in the anglosphere.
People don't put their GPA on their resumes unless they think it'll help. People who think it'll help are in school, recently graduated, don't have enough to put on their resume, or are dealing with a direct GPA requirement.

[Anonymous No.9806081]

>>9806079
Also, I'm American.

[Anonymous No.9806089]

>>9806058
I'm not entirely sure why the argument is about completely relative vs. completely absolute grading.

Our grading is not entirely relative either. The tests are designed to be such that the average is around 70% and very few get 100% of 20%. If the average deviates greatly from this, they will sometimes apply an offset to everyone's grade to make it line up. A similar performance in different years should produce similar percentage grades.

However, because the distributions are as they are and very few people get full marks, you also get to find out where you lie in the distribution.

[Anonymous No.9806093]

>>9806079
Maybe, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a GPA associated with your degree, which is (sometimes) used to gauge your performance relative to other people.

[Anonymous No.9806099]

>>9806058
>>9806089
Maybe the reason we don't have Pass/Fail is because it's abnormal for students to learn all the material in a course, and they tend to fill in the gaps when later courses build on the old material or review it?

[Anonymous No.9806110]

>>9806093
>sometimes
Almost exclusively within the University system and fairly easy to bypass for graduate school if you already know what lab you want to be part of, study papers coming out of that lab, and have good letters of recommendation from undergraduate research.

[Anonymous No.9806118]

>>9806110
At least over here plenty of jobs for fresh grads have a grade requirement. And grad school applications have grade boundaries (which are usually lower than the usual grades of successful applicants so there is some leeway). It would be very misleading to say that your grades don't matter.

[Anonymous No.9806120]

>>9806118
Where do you live?

[Anonymous No.9806124]

>>9806120
bongistan

[Anonymous No.9806126]

>>9806124
I'm so sorry.

[Anonymous No.9806135]

>>9806126
I'm only here because the only other universities of similar reputation are in the states and that was too far.

But yeah, between that and the whole "exam questions are ones you've likely never seen before"-shit it's been a stressful few years.

[Anonymous No.9806150]

>>9806135
Good luck with your undergrad, 後輩.

[Anonymous No.9806156]

>>9806150
thanks m8, but I graduated this year

next is postgrad and hopefully no more exams ever

[Anonymous No.9806168]

>>9805980
Doesnt he imply that if he had finished, then it would be comparable to God by saying that? I know I'm fedoraing but come on

[Anonymous No.9806301]

>>9805569
>>9806006
>>9806039
>>9806079

As a consumer of goods and services you want different types of grading based on the job.

[Anonymous No.9806555]

>>9805741
Sounds like the guy's crazy. Why in the world would you only give a single A?
A lot of teachers have some real big issues of their own. maybe that's it

[Anonymous No.9806792]

Luckily, the only time I was ever subjected to curved grading that I was made aware of was during HS chemistry. The rest of the time, including through undergrad, grading was instead carried out fairly with respect to myself, so far as I am aware.

[Anonymous No.9806857]

>>9805989
>I'd argue that I haven't really learned quantum physics all that well
I'd argue that you weren't taught very well in that case

[Anonymous No.9806865]

100 is 100

[Anonymous No.9807379]

>>9805793
>score 110% without help
>140% total rounds to 100%
>get lumped in with brainlets

[Anonymous No.9807563]

>>9805569
This better not be in fucking math.

[Anonymous No.9807604]

>>9805569
>grade it on a curve
>*drags all your scores down because people are fucking retards in your class*
>can't get scholarship because of that very thing

Fuck, the 1990s. This is why you segregate via IQ and don't grade on a curve.

[Anonymous No.9808307]

>no grade-curves here in EU
>sometimes 70-100% people failing
>Americans still going about "muh 100% ;_;" and "muh 4.0 GPA"

I'll never understand your education standards and system.

[Anonymous No.9808974]

>>9805793
FUCKING TYHIS

[Anonymous No.9809859]

>>9808307
>See americans complain because their final makes up 40% of their grade
>Literally 100% here