Class average 56%, 34% of the people got 40% or lower, what does this mean?

[verty]

All I can say is I wouldn't even try that schedule.

 

[oksanav]

A lot of students do have it harder these days than it used to be. I saw something on CNN that said in 1980 a summer job could pay for 2/3 of your fall tuition, and now that's a joke, thank you stagnant minimum wage. College is relatively harder too, because now public schools just teach you how to take a test, not how to problem solve or write. And there is a lot of cheating in the smaller town schools, at least here in Texas. So when most students get to college they're in shock. Just in the 4 years I've been teaching labs, there's been a depressing decline in math and writing skills. When I poll the students as to how many have had trig/precal, it used to be half the class would raise their hand. Now I'm lucky if it's more than one.
At the same time, there's prolific laziness. My students who work 30 hours a week tend to get better grades then the others, because of the incredible self discipline. One of the astronomy lab requirements is of course to go to the observatory a couple times. In someone else's lab a freshman football player was whining about not having time to go out there, and before the labee could respond, an older working mom told him that if she could find time, he could find time.

 

[JSBeckton]

My school raised tuition 14% last year, my raise at work was 4%...go figure. What will it cost in 20 years? Its too scary to think about.

 

[leright]

My optoelectronics test had a class average of 40%, with a class high of 73%. Honestly, I can't blame the professor because, in my opinion, the test was reasonable. There were no curve balls or anything thrown at us. 3 out of the 4 were straight out of the assigned hw...or quite similar problems, maybe with a minor twist. One problem was conceptual, and the prof went over the concept in class.

He said that improvements in grades will play a part in the final grading, so that helps.

 

[JSBeckton]

If that is all true than I think that he should not curve your grades. If your class scores an avg of 40% on a test that 3/4 of the problems were straight out of the HW, the students are just not trying.

I think that most people are talking about tests that have very little in common with the HW and the scores are low. It dosent bother me that much as long as the grades are curved, let's see what the super smart kids can do.

But your example falls out of that range, I would not curve that if I was your prof. and I would question what kind of a University accepts students that would do that bad on an easy test.

 

[leright]

If that is all true than I think that he should not curve your grades. If your class scores an avg of 40% on a test that 3/4 of the problems were straight out of the HW, the students are just not trying.

I think that most people are talking about tests that have very little in common with the HW and the scores are low. It dosent bother me that much as long as the grades are curved, let's see what the super smart kids can do.

But your example falls out of that range, I would not curve that if I was your prof. and I would question what kind of a University accepts students that would do that bad on an easy test.

They weren't exactly the same as the hw, and honestly, I expected the class average to be much higher than it was...I don't know what happened on this one...

 

[leright]

If that is all true than I think that he should not curve your grades. If your class scores an avg of 40% on a test that 3/4 of the problems were straight out of the HW, the students are just not trying.

I think that most people are talking about tests that have very little in common with the HW and the scores are low. It dosent bother me that much as long as the grades are curved, let's see what the super smart kids can do.

But your example falls out of that range, I would not curve that if I was your prof. and I would question what kind of a University accepts students that would do that bad on an easy test.

They weren't exactly the same, and honestly, I expected the class average to be much higher than it was...I don't know what happened on this one...

 

[FrogPad]

Well every now and then you do get some strange professors. I had one professor who would say that an 80 on his test was an A and that the other 20 points were for him to amuse himself and test our IQ's! He actually said this. It was a discrete math course and not a difficult course. There were some very smart people in the class but not everyone could answer his 20 percent. I think he rearranged the grades so that 80 was an A.
It is true that often students are lazy and do not work hard, but then there are also professors who do not know how to test you on what you have learned and mastered.

That's actually kind of cool, it shows he is putting a lot of thought into the structure of his course. On similar lines, I had a math professor who would have only four questions the two "midterm" type tests. Each question got progressively harder. The first question was basically straight from the homework, the second was from homework but with a twist of some sort (different coordinate system, etc...), the third was a topic he talked about in class but required further research to understand, and the fourth was usually difficult and required the bulk of the test time to finish. I loved this professor. His motto was not to introduce something new and hurt us on the finals, it was instead to reward interest in the course.

A test I just took in an engineering course was designed to lower the class average. The professor told us that we did too well on the last test, so the next one will lower the average into the range he thought more appropriate. The test definitely did :( - Just goes to show you how a student is at the mercy of the professor.

 

[mr_coffee]

On the 2nd exam we just took i got an 86 which was the 5th highest score out of everyone with the higest being a 95, so I must be doing somthing right!

The professor said now there is no way unless i get like a 30% on the final that I won't get a C or better in the class yay.

Also the class average was even lower than the pervious so by the looks of it about 18/71 are going to pass with a c or better in the class w/ a c being a 65%.

 

[balletomane]

Sweet! Congratulations.

 

[plusaf]

mathwonk, I work quite hard for my grades and high school did not cheat me.

I have a 3.9 GPA goign into my jr. year, so if I could make it through calc 1-3, diff EQ, matrices, stats, physics mechanics, E&M, and quantum physics and waves as well as all the other BS courses...I don't see how my high school cheated me.

I also didn't just now realized "oh crap I gota work, I'm in college." Thanks for the pep talk though.

yeah, "pep talk"... right...
if you've made it to your junior year, you've gotten past the "i didn't learn how to study" part of college which flunked me out at the end of my sophomore year.

the distribution you describe is strange, in itself. if the testing material really reflected the class work and the homework, any mortal would expect something vaguely resembling a gaussian distribution. at best, the one you describe is vaguely bimodal.

that tells me there's something wrong somewhere.

my suggestion is for you to contact some of the gang that got over 90 on the exam, some that got in the 60s and some that got in the bottom rank, and see if you can figure out what they were doing right or wrong.

the flunkies might have been general screw-offs. the gang acing the exam might have figured out "what the prof was really up to" when he created the test, and just psyched out the game plan. sometimes that's part of succeding, too.

finally, go directly to the prof and fess up that you're disappointed in your grade, thought you could have done better, and want help to figure out how to do better the next time.

if the prof isn't a psycho, he'll appreciate the attention and be willing to help you figure out why you didn't score higher.

and sometimes profs just create lousy tests. they can screw up, too. if they're honorable, moral, and interested in advancing knowledge in their students, they'll give various credits for all parts of the total efforts you guys put out during the year, then grade everone on one scale for the total.

on the final hand, some profs are incompetent, and you need to determine that, maybe, too. i had a logic (boolean) prof at RPI whose teaching methods were so crappy that my room mate and i deliberately signed up for two different sections so we could compare and contrast notes from both classes. we discovered that he didn't always teach the same material in the two sections, but by pooling our notes and reviewing together (and doing some research over vacations in college libraries near home), i scraped a B out of the course and my room mate got a C. (and was really pissed, because he was way brighter than i was.)

later i went to the Dean of Students and described the situation as calmly as possible, and after the next term, the prof retired.

amazingly enough...

good luck!
+af

ps. i made it to the Dean's List for my final semester at RPI, too...

 

[plusaf]

Ohh God, I hate it when people blame the teacher. Though I'm still in high school, I don't blame the teacher. But many of my peers do. I kinda rely on the teacher to be some inspiration and motivation. I could also be a better student and study more and a lot harder than I do (eg right now i should be concentrating on studying but I'm not).

yeah, and if you continue that all of your life you'll end up depressed or suicidal, and you don't deserve that.

you're NOT responsible for everything that happens, and neither are they.

share the blame and share the responsibility.

a good teacher, even in high school, CAN be extremely motivational. i had a few who got me really fired up about science and engineering and i turned that into a 34-year career in electronics and computers, from which i recently retired.

some teachers were just so-so, and i had to provide my own inspiration. if i provided it, i did well, if i didn't, i scraped by.

as i wrote in a separate post here just now, i also discovered some really good AND some really bad teachers in college, and i went to one of the engineering and science schools with one of the best reputations in the USA, RPI in Troy, NY. i got one of the "professors" to get early retirement because he was so bad, probably a bit senile, and even got the womens' dorm counsellor ("house mother") fired for being alcoholic and incompetent. (her replacement was excellent, by the way!).

don't put teachers too far up on a pedestal or look at it as if everything is your fault, either. if you don't do the work, it's less likely you'll do well. if you have good or bad teachers, they can have a tremendous impact in either an up or down direction.

if they're good, love it and work your butt off. if you think they're not doing a good job, ask your classmates if they think you're on the right track. if they agree that the teacher isn't doing a good job, try to take the message to your guidance counsellor or parents or school board to try to make a change.

and remember, as this will be true all the rest of your life: sometimes that will work and sometimes it won't work. But you've got to try and find out.

all the best.
+af

 

[plusaf]

I recall when I took an electrical engineering course on semiconductor devices back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the professor was, for the lack of a better term, insane. He would regularly give exams where the average was 12% or so. No normal distributions here, just exponential ones...

Over all, I think I had 36% in his course. But he graded on a curve, so despite my demonstrated lack of understanding of what he considered important, I ended up with a rather high A, and very little understanding of semiconductor devices.

Yes, I feel cheated and blame the professor.

i agree completely. a professor who beats everyone into the ground has a psychological problem which should be brought to the attention of the Dean of Students. they're there to impart knowledge, and the tests are the measurements of the success of their efforts. in theory, the fact that mr_coffee made it to the junior year attests to his being bright and hard enough working to have filtered himself out from the pond scum, and shouldn't be in the bottom of the deep end.

i worked for a company whose management lost that view for a decade or more, nearly destroying the company: they professed to hire "the brightest and the best" and then actually believed Neutron Jack Welch's ranting about whacking the bottom 5% of the employees every year.

it works if the measurements are valid, like "output" and "worthwhile ideas" are measured, but the process too-easily falls into the pit of popularity contest and power-struggles between fiefdoms, which it did for us. some of the best employees were "off'd" for some of the worst reasons. it took a major upheaval of upper management to even begin to fix the damage.

+af

 

[plusaf]

The math that schools teach, elementary to high school, only seems to prepare one to take calculus. There is hardly any emphasis on discrete and proof-oriented math. I have been a victim of this myself and have had to make up for it.

Does anybody agree that ratio of stupid to smart students in college is getting smaller? I mean this guy in my algorithms analysis class actually asked "Is log2(3) always less than 2?" LOL. BWT, I'm sick of people associating grades with knowledge. At least from the high school level.

tony, it might be worse than you think... if there more and more stupid students entering college, compared to the nunber of smart ones, the "ratio of stupid to smart students" will be getting bigger, not smaller.

as for the guy who asks questions like the log2 of 3 question, well, it's hard to tell. his forte may not be in math. we had a guy like that in my high school, son of a rather famous local doctor. he couldn't understand basic logic in algebraic or geometrical proofs to save his life, and we made lots of fun of him for that.

he became a doctor. math might not be as important.

likewise, i served as foreman of a jury in CA many years ago, and as we sat in the jury box, we watched the prosecution's lawyer struggle while trying to figure out how much ten times something was, in his head. several of us almost tried to shout out the answer to him. so, maybe lawyers can make a lot of money without knowing a lot of math, either.

ps. the prosecution's lawyer did a better job and we convicted the defendent company of fraud. that's a big deal for a company.


figure out what you can do well and get really good at it. hopefully, it'll be something you also enjoy doing and you'll also have the flexibility to be able to change jobs or even career paths as things change in the world around you during your life.

i went from hard-science semiconductor theory and discrete circuits to minicomputer marketing over a period of about fifteen years, and enjoyed both tremendously.

learn a lot about a wide range of things and have as much fun as you can.

+af

 

[whitay]

Two girls originally in my maths class complained about my maths teacher. They were changed out of my class and put in another. There marks have no improved since, so that says everything about the student.

 

[Cyrus]

Two girls originally in my maths class complained about my maths teacher. They were changed out of my class and put in another. There marks have no improved since, so that says everything about the student.

High school is not college, don't compare the two.

 

[whitay]

sorry :\

However high school teachers don't even need full qualifications to teach sciences. Merely a minor, which can be something like 3subjects for education in australia.

 

[matt grime]

High school is not college, don't compare the two.

That would depend entirely upon your cultural predispositions and prejudices. Since what an American calls college means University for the rest of the world, and what the rest of the world refers to as college may well mean 'the last two years of compulsory education' to the majority of the rest of the world, I think you should be careful about making such absolute assertions, unless you believe that the minority view of an American is the only one that exists.

 

[D H]

I recall when I took an electrical engineering course on semiconductor devices back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the professor was, for the lack of a better term, insane. He would regularly give exams where the average was 12% or so. No normal distributions here, just exponential ones...

Over all, I think I had 36% in his course.

I had that same prof, back when megafauna roamed the earth!

Did he perchance assign homework of the ilk "an electrician mistakenly wires a transmission line into a Moebius strip. Describe the transients when the line is excited by ..."?

I did the same as you, got a 60 on the midterm when the average was in the 20s. Guaranteed A. Did I learn anything? Yes. Some profs are complete jerks; they won't teach anything of use. Did I learn anything useful? No.

 

[Cyrus]

That would depend entirely upon your cultural predispositions and prejudices. Since what an American calls college means University for the rest of the world, and what the rest of the world refers to as college may well mean 'the last two years of compulsory education' to the majority of the rest of the world, I think you should be careful about making such absolute assertions, unless you believe that the minority view of an American is the only one that exists.

Ah, quite right.

unless you believe that the minority view of an American is the only one that exists

Does any other view matter?