5-year-old boy "voted out" of class.

[adciv]

So, the two are orthogonal then?

[StruckingFuggle]

Trying to get a good grade and competing for a good grade are not mutually inclusive.

Nor are they mutually exclusive.

So you agree. So don't say that you can't have the former unless you have the latter.

[Hirschof]

Also, Hirschof, way to totally not get or appreciate the issue on the red thing ... ugh. This <not entirely serious!> is why psychologists should rule the world ... </not entirely serious!> ... or at least why everyone should be forced to take Intro and Social. :/

Uh-huh, perhaps you should become a better reader/writer. I can't see what harm a good slap to the back of your head would do. If anything, might help.

[ampersand]

"Bell curve" means either 'let's show that I'm not that bad instead of giving 60% of the class F's'

So why is that okay for college professors to do in Engineering classes, but not for high school teachers to do? One or the other, man, one or the other.

or 'let's just put the whole class into competition where we punish everyone but the C students.' I consider it just as bad as grade inflation, and probably is a key reason for grade inflation.

So, students shouldn't need to try for a good grade? That competition gets the students ready for the real world. There is no instance in the real world that you can get everyone an "A" (figuratively speaking). Competition is part of life. There is no set limit to understanding the material. Putting the class into competition for their grades not only increases motivation, but actually helps prepare students for competing for jobs, contracts, etc. in the real world. This is not a bad thing. Or we could coddle them so that they are prepared for nothing and fail later in life. Your choice, I suppose.

No, I don't think an college professor in any hard subject, whether it is Engineering or in my case Physics should have to resort to a bell curve to show them any sort of kindness. If 60% of the class fails, they fail.

As mentioned before the real competition isn't against anyone else, but against the subject at hand. Do you know it or not? Your grade shouldn't be determined by comparing your results to that of the rest of the class, there is a standard, and that is the information that is presented on the tests. And not all jobs involve such a high dose of competition, which academia has provided for such experiments in high-stakes competition. For instance, Journalism students writing local newspapers and yearbooks can apply for a Pagemaker, or Crown awards from two student journalism centers in Minnesota and from Columbia University.

[spikegirl7]

Do I think this shuffling of students through grades is entirely the fault of the schools? No. I think that it has a good deal to do with the culture in which they are brought up. In fact I wrote a paper on this in college.

A personal example: I went to what some people might call a "magnet school." This is one of those schools that not only passes almost all of their students that take these state tests, but has most of them EXCEL in them (80th percentile or better). This was from a suburban community where all the kids were from middle class families and were taught that an education was something that they would need at least on some level. They were taught that it should be their goal to at least get through high school and that hard work was generally rewarded with positive results. This they learned FROM THEIR PARENTS and from the communities they lived in and they learned it from an early age.

Well my Junior year the district decided to bus in some kids from an inner-city school that were not preforming up to snuff. Most of these kids failed the state tests or barely scraped by. They come in and have no desire to learn, their test scores do not improve much. I had one in my economics class who passed by sitting next to me and copying off all my tests (this was amusing because the teacher figured it out when his answers would stop being right at about the time I finished and turned in my test). He did nothing all class period but talk to his friends and text on his cell phone. No interest in learning. Every student I saw who was failing had the exact same mentallity. They had nothing but disinterest and disdain for school, and didn't believe they needed the education. These kids came from families where their parents had not graduated, and they themselves had much lower rates of graduation. The district took kids from a school with a graduation rate of around 50% and put them into a school with a graduation rate of 98% and these kids did not graduate in higher numbers. All that happened was that the graduation rate of the school dropped.

[collegestudent22]

Ah, but the curve should not be changing someone's grade that much. You people are forgetting that the curve should already be there. If the teacher is teaching the material correctly and the tests are not too simple nor too difficult compared to the material, a bell curve should naturally be a result of the grades due to the Law of Averages. The problem is not the curve, but the teachers and the lax/extremely high standards. That is the problem that needs to be corrected, not the curve. The curve should really be used as a guideline. If you, as a teacher, do not end up with most of your classes having grades that fit a bell curve with a C average, you are not teaching properly...

[wocket]

Even if your class average is actually higher than a C?

[StruckingFuggle]

Ah, but the curve should not be changing someone's grade that much. You people are forgetting that the curve should already be there. If the teacher is teaching the material correctly and the tests are not too simple nor too difficult compared to the material, a bell curve should naturally be a result of the grades due to the Law of Averages.

Should be != is. That ideal case sure seems to be a divorced one, rather predicated upon a lot of factors being perfectly balanced and operating perfectly, unreasonable assumptions for a human system.

Additionally one: what would be the point of schools using such a system of grading and teaching structure where (ideally, nominally) it's based on how much test-passing power students can accrue relative to each other, rather than how much knowledge they can obtain against an objective standard?

Additionally two: Assuming this to be the case, wouldn't you see a large percentage of students drop out because no matter how well they were doing more absolutely, they were still being graded relatively and getting Cs or worse and thus saw no point in going? ... and it's not self-correcting, because then you just have a NEW fraction of the students, who were until now above average, suddenly being below average, repeat ad nauseum / ad-brokeum?

[adciv]

From what I have seen in Engineering Classes, the distribution generally starts out as an inverse bell curve, where you have A's and B's, few C's then D's and F's. The D's and F's and some of the C's then go to business school leaving the smarter kids in engineering.

[collegestudent22]

Even if your class average is actually higher than a C?

That should not occur except in a few outlying classes. And then there would be a few with averages lower than a C. If you teach for, say, ten years, you should have an overall grade average of a C. Otherwise, the material is too easy, or the students are not trying hard enough/you are not teaching well enough. The problem arises when teachers are more likely to do well the more students they pass, even if they lower the standards to do so.

The bell curve should not be forced upon individual classes, but if the teachers cannot teach well enough in the difficult classes to fit the bell curve, why should they be teaching? And conversely, if a class is so easy that everyone can gets A's and B's, why is the class being taught at all? Clearly, the knowledge is easy enough to pick up without a competent teacher.

And adciv, that is true of lower level Engineering classes, but in the more difficult classes, the normal bell curve should once again be where the grades fall.

[adciv]

Interesting, then, that in the grad school courses the bell curve (of what little it exists as) is shifted higher. Why should the average be a C if most of the students know the material and know it well?

[StruckingFuggle]

The only way that works is if you're trying to measure not how well they know the material, but rather how much better or worse they know it than others.

[collegestudent22]

Interesting, then, that in the grad school courses the bell curve (of what little it exists as) is shifted higher. Why should the average be a C if most of the students know the material and know it well?

1) Grad school is different. Due to the fact that a professor must sponsor you to get into grad school, the professors pick only the best and the brightest. If you take A students only into a class that is harder, the average will not necessarily fit that bell curve.

2) In undergrad classes and high school, the students should start with little familiarity with the material, as well as starting with a C average, especially in high school.

3) If the students know the material that well, shouldn't we be using harder tests and require them to learn more material and broaden out a bit more. Not only would it allow graduate degree students to graduate with even more knowledge in their field (or faster if you put more material into the classes), it might allow those same graduates to be better researchers or inventors, improving our way of life and possibly other countries as well.

[adciv]

1) Grad school is different. Due to the fact that a professor must sponsor you to get into grad school, the professors pick only the best and the brightest. If you take A students only into a class that is harder, the average will not necessarily fit that bell curve.

A) I don't recall being sponsored by any professor. I applied and was admitted.
B) How is this any different than applying for admission as an undergrad?
C) You do not fit an average to a bell curve. You fit a distribution to a bell curve.

2) In undergrad classes and high school, the students should start with little familiarity with the material, as well as starting with a C average, especially in high school.

D) "start with little familiarity" is no different than in any other class, regardless of level.
E) With regards to the C Average, the point of the grading is to grade how well you know the material that the class was designed to teach, not grade you in comparison to the rest of the class.

3) If the students know the material that well, shouldn't we be using harder tests and require them to learn more material and broaden out a bit more.

F) Harder tests do not necessarily correlate to anything other than knowing the material.
G) And now you want to change what the class is about by adding more material? In engineering, we are hard pressed to cover the material in the classes as is, regardless of the grade distribution.

Not only would it allow graduate degree students to graduate with even more knowledge in their field (or faster if you put more material into the classes), it might allow those same graduates to be better researchers or inventors, improving our way of life and possibly other countries as well.

H) And now you go off making a declaration that has no basis in fact or reality. Research ability, inventiveness and possible improvements are independent of how well you do in class.
I) Further, as I said before, we have a hard enough time covering the existing material in classes. If more is added, we would need to add additional class time, which means increasing the number of credit hours. Engineering degrees are already have one of the highest credit requirements as is and they still need to keep finding ways to push stuff earlier into the curriculum.

[collegestudent22]

C) You do not fit an average to a bell curve. You fit a distribution to a bell curve.

The average would be a C. The basic distribution should be a bell curve regardless. The only differences would be the mean and standard deviation.

D) "start with little familiarity" is no different than in any other class, regardless of level.

I know of many graduate classes that go over a review of the basics learned in undergrad classes before moving on to the new material. There is at least an understanding of what exactly you are learning in more depth as opposed to starting a degree without really understanding what it consists of learning.

F) Harder tests do not necessarily correlate to anything other than knowing the material.

So make the material harder to know. Require a higher standard of knowledge for A's. Many classes do this. If it is really that easy to get an A in the class, why would higher standards be a bad thing. Higher standards allow a high GPA to mean more in a job search, as well as producing more intelligent, knowledgeable graduates.

H) And now you go off making a declaration that has no basis in fact or reality. Research ability, inventiveness and possible improvements are independent of how well you do in class.

Not necessarily. How well you do in class has a correlation to those qualities. Thus if the standards are higher, these qualities can be improved upon more during the years in college and then brought to the job where they can be used to do exactly what I said they could do. When an engineering problem has several solutions (such as a design problem), higher standards cause the students to think harder and be more creative in their answers. While not allowing students to spontaneously gain skill at research and creativity, it can improve those skills when they do research and solve problems that require a creative approach. Obviously, this would not need to be done for every class, but teachers should be held accountable, not for passing as many students as possible, but having an average grade distribution that is pretty close to a standard bell curve. Granted some classes may not fit this mold (like P.E. or Intro classes designed to basically let students know what the degree is like before they commit to it) but most will. Having no personal experience with grad school yet, I cannot determine if my suggestions would help or hurt in that arena, but I believe they would most certainly help before that point, and would allow bad teachers to be replaced, which can only be a good thing for the students.