Posted on 04/16/2010 7:33:18 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Grading on the curve is great when you have a large group and a competitive enviroment. You can still have a minimum standard for passing.
A lot of these math and science courses for non-tech students are a joke however. They teach them moreas history of courses than any solid.
One would think that a 90% failure rate would reflect poorly on the teacher. I’m not sure that it has anything to do with her grading too hard ... but, apparently, she wasn’t teaching anyone anything.
If 90% of your students can’t pass your test, you’re probably part of the problem. Your job is to prepare your students for your test.
SnakeDoc
I had a similar experience as a freshman in an English class. The prof had a very off-putting way of teaching and threatened to fail everyone except for me and another person who would get C’s, which is what showed up on my grade card at the end of the term. Months later when I got my transcript for transfer to another school, I found that the grade had been changed to an A. I always figured the administration must have told her she had to grade on the curve. I heard she wasn’t back the following year.
My email message to Dr. Homberger:
To: ‘zodhomb@lsu.edu‘
Subject: Grading in Higher Education
Professor Dr. Homberger:
Many thanks for your efforts to maintain academic standards, Good luck with the LSU administration.
Regards,
Bingo!
Grade inflation appears to have become policy at Louisiana State University, where Professor Dominique G. Homberger was removed from teaching an introductory biology course for giving tough grades.
Poor little students. Their lives are ruined by this hard grading professor. Oh, what will become of them, oh, woe.
For goodness sakes, when I was in school I had an English teacher that proudly proclaimed that most of us would never see a B in her class. We worked our butts off to prove her wrong. While some did, unfortunately, I didn’t. But, I sure learned a lot in that class.
“...LSU boasts of being the state flagship...”
Dumbing down education for globalization; these students should get use to bowing as part of daily employment.
Absolutely. If the grades are “easy” then the diploma is worthless.............
You'd get maybe 6 choices, then you'd get choices like, 7: All of the above; 8: None of the above; 9: A and B, definitely not C, D and E, possibly F. 10: Definitely not A or B, possible C, D, and E and certainly F.
Well, you get the idea.
We hated those multiple choice tests, but it seems that is the way the subject was taught back then, becuase I've spoken to others that took the subject at a different school and their recollections are the same as mine.
+1
Nothing new here. At my major northeast state university, promotion and tenure considerations include student evaluations. As long as student evaluations are good (better than 4 on a scale of 1-5), other factors are considered. If student evaluations fall below 4, it really doesn’t matter what else you do.
So... Give higher grades, get better evaluations, get promoted. Until colleges stop using student evaluations as a primary factor in promotion and tenure, the dumbing down will continue.
In the 31 years that I have been teaching, the standards have dropped to a point where students do not feel a need to study outside of class. Ever.
I’d say that she is doing one thing wrong. She needs to coordinate her efforts with the other professors in her department. It would be MUCH better to raise the standards across the board somewhat than to create a situation where one entry-level class is dramatically harder than all of the others.
So...my daughter is taking a Calc-based Physics class and the teacher grades on a curve - the classic curve where the highest student gets enough points to get a 100 and everyone else gets that many points added.
As of mid-term 26 out of 53 students had dropped because they had a D or lower and many filed complaints about the professor.
Guess whose daughter was busting the curve with 97’s and 99’s?
My advice to the others? Show up for class, listen, take notes, do the homework, study, and try to get to bed before 3 am, then you’d be sitting pretty with high 90’s too.
I recall taking a “find out how much you don’t know” test in English in High School. It was a hell of a test.
I went to a very good high school in a well-to-do Houston suburb. I was in an “advanced placement” college-level English class surrounded by the elite students in the school ... co-valedictorians (twin sisters, by the way), the entirety of the high school National Honors Society ... pretty much the intellectual leaders of the school (many of which were well smarter and more driven than I). From that class of thirty, I know of four doctors, two surgeons (not included in the doctors), three attorneys, a professional musician, and many graduates of elite colleges around this country. It was a class of high achievers.
The test was multiple choice ... 100 questions ... six-to-ten answer choices per question ... “mark all that apply” (i.e. if the answer was ABF, and you mark only AF ... you’re wrong).
The ENTIRE class failed (and these were kids that didn’t fail at ANYTHING). Though I would put MANY graduates of that class well beyond me in intellect ... I got the second highest score in the class — a 32%. The average score was 19%. It was a nightmare of a test.
SnakeDoc
I had a Physics class and over half the class failed the first exam. The professor callout out about 20 names and advised them to drop the class because they didn’t have the skills to pass. He didn’t fudge a grade at all. If your grade was a 79.9, you got a C.
This is EXACTLY true. I've been "pleasantly advised" to make sure that there are few failures in the courses I teach.
The 90% might try something different.
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