Do you think assignments graded relative to other students is fair?

[Leros]

For one of my classes, 70% of our lab grade is based on correctness. The other 30% is based on using minimal resources. The worst student gets 0% and the best student gets 30%. The rest are linearly interpolated.

Some students were complaining because your grade can be affected by other students. One really good or one really bad student can drastically change your grade.

Do you think grades like that are fair?

 

[TuxDave]

Sounds like a crappy method to me.

 

[Howard]

No. Competency isn't relative.

 

[Leros]

It seems ok to me as long as at least one student does a really crappy job. If everybody does a good job, then you have great labs getting low grades.

 

[Swozzle]

God no. That's just as bad as picking favorites.

 

[Leros]

God no. That's just as bad as picking favorites.

Well, minimal resources is not subjective in this case. You can compute a number using the same method for every student.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

There's usually always one dumbass in every class so it's not necessarily unfair.

 

[Leros]

There's usually always one dumbass in every class so it's not necessarily unfair.

That's my hope.

 

[Matthiasa]

Umm well yes and no... Doing it like that is just stupid though.

 

[jagec]

Welcome to life. Don't worry, most of your fellow employees will be borderline retarded.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Sounds crappy to me. The only way grades should be affected by other students is in a case where they are totally offset, then they will do a bell curve. Basically if everyone fails, they make the best person have close to 100% and rearrange the rest of the grades accordingly, so more people pass. I have never, ever seen or heard of this happening though, it's more or less a myth.

 

[AreaCode707]

Grading on a curve sucks but it's how performance reviews are done for the rest of your working life, so get used to it.

 

[Mo0o]

A lot of fields that have to test for merit as well as competency have to use percentiles to make their judgments. It's just teh way it is when theres limited spots

 

[ShawnD1]

Some students were complaining because your grade can be affected by other students. One really good or one really bad student can drastically change your grade.

Do you think grades like that are fair?

Generally I hate things that are put on a curve. It means moderately good engineers are booted out even though they're proficient enough to do a good job. It can also mean that dangerously bad engineers graduate just because the rest of the class happens to be dangerous as well.

I wonder what would happen if the police or the army were on a curve. A bunch of fat retards show up for police tryouts and half of them are hired because it's on a curve.


edit

Sounds crappy to me. The only way grades should be affected by other students is in a case where they are totally offset, then they will do a bell curve. Basically if everyone fails, they make the best person have close to 100% and rearrange the rest of the grades accordingly, so more people pass. I have never, ever seen or heard of this happening though, it's more or less a myth.

It happens a lot in engineering. Tests are unbelievably hard, are virtually impossible to finish on time, and nobody gets higher than 50%. The reason for making the test impossible is that it doesn't set an artificial limit of 100%; the smartest person in the world will always score slightly higher than the second smartest person. The curve can then be applied in such a way that a certain quota move on to the next level of training. If the university only has enough capacity for 100 second year students, they can get away with accepting 200 first year students and applying a curve that will fail half of them.

It sucks, but that's life. Applying for jobs is on a curve. You can be a very qualified candidate, but you still won't get the job if someone else is better.

 

[Leros]

I agree with what you are all saying. Suggest a better method for grading.

This is an integrated circuit design class. The 30% about resources is concerning how much area we use in our design.

Suggestions?

 

[yhelothar]

I agree with the curve in general for academia. The thing is, grading standards differ vastly between professors. So the value of a letter grade may vary vastly depending on how hard the teacher was. Curves compensate for that. And I doubt that curves make people lazier in general, at least not very much. People studying for a class with a curve will more likely try to study harder to get above the curve rather than to think, oh it's curved anyways so I don't need to study as hard.

In this case, I think the worst student getting 0% is a bit ridiculous.
I also think that curves should never hurt you.
Also the professor should use her own discretion to what the curve should be. If a class performs much worse than what students historically perform at, then the average shouldn't be worth as much as it usually does.

 

[0roo0roo]

curve compensates for material/teacher. setting worst student to zero ignores any objective standard of competence in the class material

 

[Leros]

I agree with the curve in general for academia. The thing is, grading standards differ vastly between professors. So the value of a letter grade may vary vastly depending on how hard the teacher was. Curves compensate for that. And I doubt that curves make people lazier in general, at least not very much. People studying for a class with a curve will more likely try to study harder to get above the curve rather than to think, oh it's ruved anyways so I don't need to study as hard.

Another things that bugs me is our university is just starting to implement +/- grading for undergrads, but it is optional. The professor can choose to use it or not to use it. That means a 90 average is a 4.0 for some professors and a 3.8 for some professors.

Another thing that bugs me is we have all of these group projects, as makes sense for engineering curriculum. If I do A quality work and my partner is a a lazy ass who does C quality work, we both get Bs. At least in other majors, you got to rate your partners at the end of the semesters and grades were bumped up or down accordingly (yes, lazy people were honest and rated themselves low). In engineering, you get what you get. The department's logic is that you don't get to choose your co-workers and if your co-workers screw up a project, you'll get fired too. That's fine and dandy, but I've gotten low grades in several lab classes merely because I got randomly paired up with a lazy partner instead of a hardworking partner.

 

[TuxDave]

I agree with what you are all saying. Suggest a better method for grading.

This is an integrated circuit design class. The 30% about resources is concerning how much area we use in our design.

Suggestions?

The 30% can work if they knew ahead of time what it took to get 0/30 vs 30/30. Maybe use a last year data as the metric.

 

[Leros]

The 30% can work if they knew ahead of time what it took to get 0/30 vs 30/30. Maybe use a last year data as the metric.

Isn't that the same as using this year's data as the metric?

 

[BarkingGhostar]

For one of my classes, 70% of our lab grade is based on correctness. The other 30% is based on using minimal resources. The worst student gets 0% and the best student gets 30%. The rest are linearly interpolated.

Some students were complaining because your grade can be affected by other students. One really good or one really bad student can drastically change your grade.

Do you think grades like that are fair?

Exactly how?

 

[mmntech]

Here in Ontario anyway, college/university teachers aren't supposed to bell curve. I think some of them secretly do though because bad marks across the board make them look bad.

I agree that bell curving is absolutely not fair. You don't get bell curved in the real world. If you get a 90%, you should get that 90. If you get a 0, you probably deserved it. Other people's performance shouldn't reflect on you, unless of course your the leader on a group assignment or something.

 

[actuarial]

Grading on a curve sucks but it's how performance reviews are done for the rest of your working life, so get used to it.

This isn't grading on a curve. Could you imagine if all University courses were graded linearly from 0-100%? Exactly half of people fail every test?

I'm assuming this idea is from a HS (do I ever hope it is at least), and I would hope the teacher has the good judgement to at least grade this over multiple classes, as even bell curves (which have shown again and again to work out to be a good distribution of grades) don't work over a class of 30 kids.

 

[tokie]

If the end result is a bell curve through the natural distribution of marks, then that is fine.

But skipping the "natural" part and forcing them into a curve through an assigned distribution is wrong. I dropped a class like this because of the ridiculous grading scheme. Never saw how it was ethical really... it takes extra work on the part of the instructor as well.

 

[Uppsala9496]

It may not be fair, but sadly the corporate world works on this method.