Does Veeky Forums like Bellcurve grading?

Yes anyone who doesn't like it is a brainlet who is mad they got a bad grade

My advisor used this method for most of his upper-division courses. It was stressful as fuck sometimes, but it almost always worked out in my favor.

No if everyone in the class knows the material required to pass the class and get a degree/certified they should pass

>but muh arbitrary benchmark to make people fail so I can feel better about myself

I really like it because I work much harder than most of the other students. sadly most of my professors don't use it

>when you end calc II with a 122

Grades should curve to a B

> test scores dont matter just do your best

average should be a 50% if you want it to be symmetric

But those professors are the best.

>At MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard
>Everyone there is going to contribute well to society
>Let's just give them all Cs so cletus from University of Bumfuck Nebrahoma can get into grad school but they can't

the average should be targeted to 30 or so. nobody cares about the differences between failing terribly and failling horrendously, but we do care about the differences between doing well and doing amazing in a course. if the average is 30, that gives us the majority of the scale to separate differences in the most intelligent

Bell curve grading just means you go to a low tier university with a hard ass professor.

Ivys all have grade inflation because administrations just got tired of privileged students whining.

>career already fucked because low tier uni
>professor has an ego complex and ass fucks me even by bell curve grading
>students at top tier unis don't have to deal with this shit because their professors are well paid and have fruitful research

why is this even a thing

grade inflation is the result of poorly applied grading curves

the standard 70/80/90-C/B/A system is also a grading curve

there's nothing about grading curves that inherently leads to grade inflation

I like bell curves so long as the professor doesn't average down. For example, if the average on a test is 85%, then rounding that down to a C instead of letting it be a proper B is frustrating as fuck since you essentially have no margins of error.

Best grading scale is a bell curve with the caveat that if you score a

>get a 50
>automatic A

Sounds autistic and unfair. Can someone explain the reason behind it?

Some professors have this notion that "their class is only for serious students", so to them, a 100% pass rate would mean they are doing their job wrong.

The teacher makes a judgement call about what the minimum level of mastery they expect from students is. That level of performance is then assigned a D or a C (depending on your institution's policies). They then assume that grades will tend to follow something somewhat like a normal distribution with standard deviation of about ten points, so as a shortcut they set the boundaries between grade bins as roughly standard deviation marks away from the mean.

The most common implementation is that the minimal level of mastery of material tends to be associated with an overall score of 70-75 percent in a course. A B is then 80-85, A is 90-95, and D is 60-65. In this model, a grade of A represents an enormously high score relative to the mean - you scored about two standard deviations higher than the rest of the class.

However, sometimes a professor decides that their material is harder than normal, and minimal level of mastery is actually associated with a different grade. They might decide that minimal mastery is associated with an overall score of 50, or 80. The bins are adjusted accordingly.

wow it's almost as if engineers aren't actually that smart

>be genius in a class of brainlets
>100sigma up from the average
>get one grade above the 2sigma guy with a B

Sorry, I meant >90%, mistyped.

Sorry I meant to not post here ever again.

It's an easy way to structure a class. You make the class as hard as you please, then fail the lowest 20% of the class and give an A to the highest 20% of the class. This is somewhat fine, but it's dependent on the assumption that high test scores indicate mastery, which some people claim that they do not.

Rude

they indicate a combination of effort and mastery. either alone shouldn't get you an A, and if you have mastery without effort why are you even bothering with college in the first place

Let's say you have a bunch of material to cover but you're a shitty teacher and half the class would fail to learn. Instead of adding new course materials (bookwork, etc.), just give insanely hard tests and curve it to where a 50 is an 80.

I agree with you, but sometimes I get an A in a class and then 6 months later I can't remember much about what we learned

Everyone forgets things if they don't keep practicing the material, I don't think that really says anything about the course.

bell curve grading is the most retarded thing a teacher could do

If you get a 90% on the every test you should get a 90% in the class, it makes no fucking sense that you'd fail the class if everyone else got a 91%

absolutely nonsensical, a 90% is an A, that's the only consistent way to do it

So if you got a 1%, you got bumped up to 31% and if you got 0% you stayed at 0%? That seems kind of bullshit.

meant to reply to

teachers do this because they're insecure with the difficulty of their class, there's no other reason. premeditating failing 20% of the class before anything even happens is absolutely brain-dead

Yep.
Tbh if you didn't get 1% you probably deserve to get zero.

>Pretend to be a genius
>Concerned with marks rather than mastery of material
Bad news for you

C- means failed class?

no. C- is slightly below the average.

he means that the entire grading is centered around the students themselves, so only like 2% of people get an A, and only like 20% get a B or higher and 50% get a C or higher, 75/85% get higher than a D, and like 15/25% fail

this is all determined before the class starts. some teachers do it like this. so your entire grade is centered around how other people do.

a C could theoretically be a 95% if that was the class average. unlikely, but this is why it's nonsensical to do it like this.

some people will call you a brainlet for hating this system

This

the engineering dept at my uni uses a bell curve w/ average at C+, fucking gay

I got a 95% raw score in a class and got a D+

thank god I'm in physics which doesn't use retarded curving

Yes, I fucking love socialist grading schemes

>>You had an hour long session every week with the professor where you orally presented your solutions and talked about any problems you had in the class one-on-one
Your professor spent ONE HOUR PER STUDENT PER WEEK on this one class?

More like
>wow, engineers actually work with challenging material instead of marhfags' pretty sudoku puzzles

This has to be bullshit. There's no way the average of the class was well above 95%.

sounds retarded
when you do a class, the grade you get is a way of telling if you are able to pass the class or not. Coparing your students to the rest of the class is pointless

He said it was a topics course, which means like 5 people max.

>he's unable to be in the top 2%

>he thinks the HYMPS don't have massive grade inflation

Not really, especially if the question count is low.

The only "curve" I saw was a uniform shift of all grades so that the highest scorer on a given test was shifted to 100%

Even more like
>wow half the class knew it was all a bullshit waste of time and they're gonna pass anyway so they got wasted in their dorms the night before, as usual

Grading "on the curve" assumes that class performance will be
distributed as a bell-curve. Is there any basis in fact for that assumption?

>TFW you get a 90%+ on a hard test, fuck up the curve for everyone else, and they hate you for it

It's pretty common, but you're right, it's not guaranteed. It's also pretty typical to see bimodal distributions or long-tailed distributions.

> ywn be judged before an all knowing based professor

>ywn bang your professor for an A

not in this life

Bell curve grading doesn't exist here. Still graduated with a 9,6 of 10 average.

>there's no such thing as value
No, I do not like Bellcurve grading. Being the top 1% of a group of people unable to do simple math does not mean you get to ace math.

No, because it fails to measure individual competence, which is the purpose of grades. If you get stuck in a class of geniuses, you will get a poor grade even if you have sufficient mastery, and vice versa for a class full of retards. Both are completely out of your control.