On average everyone got around 20% of the answers right. Grade curve or not the teacher would be within their rights to say no one here demonstrated that they knew the subject to a high enough standard and so just fail everyone. I think this is perhaps why we've got a picture of someone's answer sheet and not the return results sheet....
Yeah. When my class found out the teacher would curve our grades, we started jokingly planning to answer all one letter (in the middle of class). The teacher told us if she suspected foul play, she wouldn't curve the grades at all.
It's where your scores are adjusted based on the performance of your peers. Normally, 90+% is an A, 80-89% is a B, 70-79% is a C, and so on. Some classes, though, have very difficult tests, and the highest score might end up only being a 75% and the average is only 60%. In that case, they adjust it to something like (just an example, not exact numbers) 70+% is an A, 60%-69% is a B, 50-59% is a C, etc.
Actually. I think what the Americans are referring to here are grade boundaries. You know, if everyone in the country finds the paper difficult, it will be easier to get a higher grade because grade boundaries would be lowered. :)
School system I went to banned curve grading. Partly because of a controversy over the grades in an AP class a few years before I got to high school.
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The class aparently had a bunch of brilliant kids in it and were being given "failing" grades even though they were scoring low to mid 90's on their tests.
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When the dust settled, it turns out that the spread in a class of twenty or so students was eight percentage points. Not one of them scored lower than 92%... and were "failed" because the teacher was an asshole using an unfair, irrelevant and outdated grading system.
Aren't there two ways to curve a grade?
1: Curve based on relative scores, making it so that regardless of absolute score, the top say..5 scores automatically get A. next 10 get B. Everyone else gets C.
2: Curve based on a scale. For example a square-root scale. Take the score as a decimal, sqrt it, then there's your new decimal score.
Never heard of the sqrt one, but I suppose thatd work too. Although I'm sure there would be a lot of complaints about how it helps the lower grades a LOT more than the higher grades (a 90% would gain almost 5% while a 50% score would gain almost 21%)
Your 1st one is the original true "curve" grading, its based on normal distribution (a bell curve) so very few get the extreme ends, As and Ds/Fs, and most end up getting Cs/Bs. The problem with it is if everybody in the class does really well, somebody is still screwed.
Say you have 10 kids and they all scored above a 90% (what most schools consider an A) whoever got the lowest would still fail because somebody has to be on the low extreme.
The most common "curve" you see today though isn't really a curve at all, its just called that because its another adjustment to the student's real scores. The teacher takes the highest score, whatever it may be, and brings it up to 100%. Then they add whatever % they gave that student to everybody else's grade. So if the highest grade was a 90%, every grade gets 10% added on. If the highest was a 99%, only 1% is added on. So when you hear that *insert super smart student's name* "broke the curve" on a test, it means they scored super high on it, so there isn't much to add to them to make 100% meaning everybody else doesn't get to add much.
In this case, if every single student marks A, they would all get the exact same score. Since whatever score that may be is the top score, it would get brought up to 100% and every student would get a 100%.
The problem with it is all it takes is 1 kid to actually work on the test and get higher to completely screw up everybody else.
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The class aparently had a bunch of brilliant kids in it and were being given "failing" grades even though they were scoring low to mid 90's on their tests.
.
When the dust settled, it turns out that the spread in a class of twenty or so students was eight percentage points. Not one of them scored lower than 92%... and were "failed" because the teacher was an asshole using an unfair, irrelevant and outdated grading system.
1: Curve based on relative scores, making it so that regardless of absolute score, the top say..5 scores automatically get A. next 10 get B. Everyone else gets C.
2: Curve based on a scale. For example a square-root scale. Take the score as a decimal, sqrt it, then there's your new decimal score.
Your 1st one is the original true "curve" grading, its based on normal distribution (a bell curve) so very few get the extreme ends, As and Ds/Fs, and most end up getting Cs/Bs. The problem with it is if everybody in the class does really well, somebody is still screwed.
Say you have 10 kids and they all scored above a 90% (what most schools consider an A) whoever got the lowest would still fail because somebody has to be on the low extreme.
In this case, if every single student marks A, they would all get the exact same score. Since whatever score that may be is the top score, it would get brought up to 100% and every student would get a 100%.
The problem with it is all it takes is 1 kid to actually work on the test and get higher to completely screw up everybody else.