i give pretty simple minded grades, 90 percent or better is an A.
but i give lots of extra credit, so a 90 is often 90/110 or evn over 115 or 120.
still so few stduents actually master the material in depth that such scores are very unusual.
they are increasing now that our hope scholarship program encourages more well prepared stduents to stay in state, but they are stilll pretty rare.
i will give a simple example that may or may not surprize you. a very good prof and teacher who predated me here used to tell his students on the first day of every class that he would ask them to write down the limit definition of a derivative on the final exam, as question one.
then he would patiently tell them the answer. in over 30 years of teaching he never had a class in which every student answered this question correctly.
the full credit answer is this: f'(a) = the limit as x-->a of [f(x)-f(a)]/(x-a).
thats all.When he told me this I also began to do it. he retired a couple years ago and I have continued this practice. In almost 30 years of my own teaching I also have never have everyone get even this simple predictable question right, whose answer is given in advance.in fact it is much worse than that. once when i taught an honirs calc class to abut 8-10 students, i said i would ask the statement of the fundamental theorem of calculus part 1, on every test, and if i ever failed to ask it, they could write it down for extra credit. (I imitated this practice too from another top prof).the full credit correct statement was this: if f is continuous on the interval [a,b] and if G(x) = the integral of f from a to x, then G'(x) = f(x).
The entire semester i gave between 4 and 8 tests, and never had all 8 people state it correctly, although on the last test, 7 people got it right.Encouraged then, on the final i decided to test whether they understod what they had memorized, so i asked whether the function f(x) = e^[x^2] has an antiderivative, i.e. a function G such that G'(x) = f(x).
Not one person said yes, even though the FTC says that every continuous function f has an antiderivative, namely, G(x) = the integral of f from a to x, is an antiderivative. recall this was honors calc.
later i learned that one of my B students had never earned less than an A in any other clas in his college career.
By the way I gave a makeup test for every test, so the 8 tests actually only counted for 4 test grades, the higher of each grde being counted.so getting an A is not really that hard for someone who is actually prepared and does the work. some of the students getting low grades in my class are not even attending regularly.
so a really truthful average evaluation of my class might read like this:
"I was a good math student in high school, and got all honor grades even though I did very little work. The grades were easy, everyone got high ones so we could get a hope scholarship, and i thought college would be the same.
of course my SATs were only around 470/800 in math but so what? I had mostly A's in my courses and really knew the material, just did not function well on tests. But Dr Smiths class was a terrible experience.
I went to class most of the time, well not on fridays, and i went to the lab to get help on the homework almost every week, well not when there was a football game, but the grad student couldn't even do dr smiths hw!
How are we expected to do it?? I admit my notes were not so good from class, but i never looked at them anyway, and the book was too hard to read so I ignored it most of the time. the problems are what counts anyway right?
then dr smith crossed me up by asking theoretical stuff on the final like: define the derivative. we never had any definitions in high school, and i got a 3 on the AP exam.
He was way too strict, and I heard he was not always helpful to the people who went to his office, although I never bothered to go myself. I am no gong to walk all the way over to the math building when the tutorial lab is closer.
I got out with a W, because he made sure we all knew our running grade going into drop day, but what a waste of time, I would not recommend him to anyone wantng a good GPA, that's for sure."
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