I see it as a flaw system in that if you got a C than it should acceptable as in you just barely made it. I view C as a bronze medal and you still get praise for a bronze medal well smaller compare to silver and gold.
Curved average, that's how 80% of my courses have run, and that's the way to do it to be the most fair. The question is - should the professors be fair, or should they be filters?legend of duty said:After a test my teacher writes the class average on the board. If it is anything less than a "B" then he says you all did not do that well. This bothers me as a "C" is supposed to mean average however all of the teachers I've had have also felt this way. Not to mention many colleges also feel this way. So Escapists do you think the grading system needs to be redefined or is it fine just the way it is?
Your grading system is different than mine. If I were to write that essay, and used mostly verbatim of the textbook, I'd get an F to a D. If I showed only basic understanding I'd likely get a D. The letters do not have absolute interpretations, it varies (literally) from each course.Lilani said:C being "average" is not referring to a mean or a median. It's referring to the quality of the work. If you accomplish the minimum requirements and do only what is asked of you. As and Bs are when the work goes beyond what was asked of the student. For example, I'm supposed to write an essay on the effects of Industrialization on the southern parts of the US. If I simply describe exactly what it says in the textbook verbatim, then that would be a C paper. But, if I not only describe what it says in the textbook, but also provide further analysis relating it back to the problems of Reconstruction and show how it ties eventually in with the Great Depression, then that would be closer to an A or a B. I proved I have more than a basic or minimal understanding of the topic.Logiclul said:Who said that C = average? Because it is in the middle of "A B C D F"? I suppose that on average then people live to be L years, despite the fact that only 20 people do, and that it just happens to be at the middle of an arbitrary scale?
The interpretation is flawed. Subjective grading is flawed, which is the reality of many courses, but there is no superior option, as if we never do types of work which are graded subjectively, then we'll miss out on a lot of learning.
This is probably a bigger issue in the end. A lot of kids that want to go to med-school or law-school won't go to a school like mine simply because a 4.0 is nigh-impossible. It doesn't matter that it's (in my opinion) the best school in the nation (screw you, Harvard), long-standing post-grad schools weigh GPA far higher than they ought.SciMal said:Addendum: "Where" you got your GPA from rarely matters unless you're from the handful of schools known to be more difficult. There are 2,000+ 4-year institutions in the United States. Mine's in the top 1%, but since it's a Public University with a large student population and not on the coasts, it gets muddled into the mix of "Oh yeah, that one."
In many classes in medical school, 70% of the questions right is an A or B.Regnes said:The most popular example to use is a doctor, do you want a doctor who only got 70% in his classes? Do you want to trust your life with a man who only knows 70% of what he's supposed to? This is the same for anything, if you perform 10 tasks and 3 of them wind up being totally botched, you aren't doing very good.
I don't know where you're from, but in the US, C isn't really average. It's kinda supposed to be, but at a college level it's the lowest passing grade, and even in high school it's only 5% away from the lowest passing grade. Truth is, average is probably a B- or even a solid B in most classes.legend of duty said:After a test my teacher writes the class average on the board. If it is anything less than a "B" then he says you all did not do that well. This bothers me as a "C" is supposed to mean average however all of the teachers I've had have also felt this way. Not to mention many colleges also feel this way. So Escapists do you think the grading system needs to be redefined or is it fine just the way it is?
At my alma mater (the bulldogs to your tigers), I saw pretty much the same thing. Granted, this was about ten years back, so things may have changed nowadays, but the obvious thing was that as students learned what it was really like to struggle and get through real work, there was a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth.violinist1129 said:Here at Princeton we dealt with pretty bad grade inflation for a while, but now they limit how many people are allowed to get As or Bs in any given class. The mean grade is a high C which seems about as close to fair as possible. At first people complained about the limits, but there's never really a situation where enough people do well enough to warrant any more "high" grades.
I'm pretty sure the OPs getting C=Average from the fact that almost everywhere you see grade explanations a C is "average", a B is "above average", and an A is "outstanding"
On a side note, it is absolutely hilarious to watch people from private schools who are used to getting only As suddenly realize how much more work it takes to get a real A. That and the fact that their parents disown them when they see the B average their "brilliant, gifted wunderkind" is struggling to maintain.