Is Failing a Midterm the End of the World?

[JasonRox]

BUMP.

It's against school policy to do so. You'd have to find another way around it, like a bonus assignment or knock out a question that everyone got wrong.

 

[Moonbear]

It's against school policy to do so. You'd have to find another way around it, like a bonus assignment or knock out a question that everyone got wrong.

Okay, no bell curve, but what about just setting a fixed scale that bumps everyone up or giving everyone a free 20 points for spelling their name right or some such? I used to have professors who would start out the term by telling us no bell curves, and when we all freaked out, at the end of the term, they pointed out that we really didn't want a bell curve, because that would mean most of us would get Cs even if we really deserved Bs. It was a ploy to make us work as hard as we could to do the best we could without relying on adjusted scores to get our grades up, and also taught us a lesson on what a bell curve really is.

 

[JasonRox]

Okay, no bell curve, but what about just setting a fixed scale that bumps everyone up or giving everyone a free 20 points for spelling their name right or some such? I used to have professors who would start out the term by telling us no bell curves, and when we all freaked out, at the end of the term, they pointed out that we really didn't want a bell curve, because that would mean most of us would get Cs even if we really deserved Bs. It was a ploy to make us work as hard as we could to do the best we could without relying on adjusted scores to get our grades up, and also taught us a lesson on what a bell curve really is.

Well, that becomes a problem because someone already has 100%, so how is it fair to her? (It's a girl.)

Sometimes they'll do things like if the highest mark on the test out of 35 is 30, then the test will be out of 30. Therefore, someone always gets a 100%, but again we can't even do that.

I'm not sure what's going to happen. People aren't taking the class too seriously though. You can totally tell people are copying off each other on assignments and the test displayed those in the group that actually did work.

 

[JasonRox]

Okay, no bell curve, but what about just setting a fixed scale that bumps everyone up or giving everyone a free 20 points for spelling their name right or some such? I used to have professors who would start out the term by telling us no bell curves, and when we all freaked out, at the end of the term, they pointed out that we really didn't want a bell curve, because that would mean most of us would get Cs even if we really deserved Bs. It was a ploy to make us work as hard as we could to do the best we could without relying on adjusted scores to get our grades up, and also taught us a lesson on what a bell curve really is.

Yeah, but this isn't a ploy.

The first year Calculus class had an average of 38% on the midterm. The professor asked our class (3rd year class) on possible solutions to correct this and such. He directly said no bell curving.