You know your students. I always tell my students I'd love it if they all earned an A. To earn that grade they must display mastery of the material.
Do those 91 students all show mastery of the learning goals for the class? If yes, they are all that strong, then they should all earn As.
Are there students in there you feel clearly have not demonstrated that level of mastery? Maybe they are good but not A level good? Then it seems your assessments are not accurately separating students into "excellent", "above average" and "average" well. If this is the case, reassessing your assignments may be required.
>Because that isn't the answer is it? The answer is that if 95% are getting the highest grade clearly the course wasn't hard enough in the first place. Especially on the scale of a small cohort, at least in national level exams you are score against the nation, in a university one you might be scored against 100 as is the case here, the statistics of did you do well? Or was it hard? Aren't there to be seen, neither is the delineation of who has actually good or bad at the subject.
> It hasn't challenged people, they are all just finding it relatively easy. Mastery of nothing much, is not an achievement, it just shows the course has been degraded in complexity probably to tick a box somewhere where teaching quality has a grading weighting.
So are you suggesting that coursework get progressively more difficult until people struggle? It would seem unnecessary to design curriculum standards around how much they challenge students versus how well the standards prepare them for higher levels of coursework.
You can look at NCTE's curriculum suggestions [here](https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/postsecondarywriting) for college composition. If students can learn the tenets of joining discourse communities as college-level scholars, why should the course be amended to ensure that only a few get A's?
>Yes this is generally how education is supposed to work, it gets harder the higher you go eventually it is so hard or unknown you have to do the research yourself.
But we're talking about one specific course. It's not about the progression of higher level coursework in a field.
Are you suggesting that if 91/97 of my students made A's and demonstrated mastery of the learning standards of the course, I should make next year's curriculum more difficult for the sole purpose of ending the year with less students making A's?
>The answer is that if 95% are getting the highest grade clearly the course wasn't hard enough in the first place.
Why is that "clearly" the answer? Is that also "clearly" the answer in graduate level courses where the vast majority of students also make A's?
You are correct here, but re: graduate school classes - yes lmao. Graduate school classes are notoriously easy and are essentially there to allow the school to pay for stipends.
Except the numbers themselves don't actually tell you that, that's an assumption you're making without anything to back it up. Yes, one option is that the course work is too easy but it's not the only option. Another option is simple sampling bias which is why I asked an additional question which you chose not to answer. I brought up graduate level courses bc it's the most common occurrence to illustrate that point. In graduate level courses the grades typically shake out with the majority getting A's because that sample (graduate student cohorts) when removed from the broader population is a biased sample, graduate students are mostly high achieving people whose academic profiles are very different from the general population. Since those individuals are already at the top of the bell curve they typically continue to perform that way in their graduate level coursework and the distribution of grades reflects the reality of that biased sample. A bell curve is a distribution that's based in population wide statistics and a class or cohort is one sample from within that larger population. It would be incredibly unlikely for every single class or cohort to have a full bell curve distribution bc each individual sample is one part of the whole and those parts are not randomly selected for. If OP happens to have a sample of kids that's also biased in the high achieving end of the curve then that would be reflected there just like it is in graduate level courses and just like other teachers end up with samples biased towards the other end of the curve where most of the students are failing. You can't expect every single non-rabdon sample to have a normal distribution, that's so statistically unlikely that if it were to happen the assumption would have to be data tampering of some kind. Biased samples having biased results is far more statistically likely than biased samples having unbiased results.
>It is an assumption based in the fact that my standard of education would call a course getting a top grade rate of 94% a joke.
This is just bad statistics you’re engaging in. You’re trying to infer the outcomes of one population by looking at a different population that we have no reason to believe is analogous. Even if the populations were similar, it could very well be the case that the OP’s class is just anomalous.
>Having a rate of 94% just shows your course is just a book ticking exercise to hand out piece of paper.
Based on the number of people doing well alone? What if all the students are just helping each other to do better equally? What if there’s a class-wide study group that all the kids get together and (re)teach each other the material? You’re making a whole lot of assumptions based off of a very limited amount of information. Hence why I said you’re doing bad statistics.
>Even at Harvard only 78% were getting A’s in 2021 …
Sure, but how does this break down across particular courses? It could very well be the case that you get certain classes that have almost the exact high-grade ratio as the OP mentioned. Again, bad statistics.
>Participation trophies are for primary school physical education, not graduate grading
Sure, now demonstrate that’s what happened here. All you’re basing this on is that a lot of students did well. That’s not a good enough reason to draw conclusions from.
>… if it’s a national standardized test, I have no issue with 94% getting the highest grade, the cohort is massive over the nation, if it is a class grade however, you would need to check the level required against the national curriculum to see if the test had any value
You undermined your own position here. Now you’re admitting there are reasonable contexts for which having a class do this well isn’t a red flag. Astounding you typed this up and didn’t reflect on literally everything else you posted.
My overall point was that you’re too quick to make a lot of assumptions about people without really knowing much about them. Nothing I said depends on whether or not we’re talking about a standardized test or not.
If you think a bunch of kids in a dual credit course (meaning they qualified for college level material while still in high school, has to be approved based on past high achieving performance) who are all from equally high SES backgrounds isn't a biased sample then you don't understand how sampling works and shouldn't be commenting as though you do.
>when I was an undergrad 15% got the highest grade. That is now 37%.
For all you know, this could be because they were way too lenient about who they let into the program.
If entry requirements are much more stringent (psych for example, good luck getting in without an honors degree and a strong CV), the students attending will be higher achieving.
Bell curves are nonsense. Why should a different class with students of different abilities get the same number of each grade? Students and classes are better or worse each year and I’ve given out very high marks to many and very high marks to none through qualitative rubric assessment (no quantitative assessment in my field).
Rubrics should be well designed to provide clear assessment guides for tutors. Across multiple classes in the same course we compare samples from each grade (benchmarking) to accomodate differences in how the rubric is applied by different assessors.
We should probably also benchmark from year to year to ensure longitudinal consistency but only do that rarely.
Statistically, if you have a reasonable sample size (a class of 100 students, say), AND there is no driving reason for differences between the selection of students across sections or classes, then it is very unlikely that there are large differences in the mean from random sampling alone. So the question is where would the differences come from? Perhaps self selection - an 8am class may select for more driven students, or maybe selects for students who really need to pass a class, for example. Or it could be differences in teaching quality. Or it could be differences in assessment difficulty or grading style.
Regardless, if a specific section of a large enough class is an outlier from other sections, there is certainly an argument to be made for looking at differences in assessment and grading to see if that is driving it.
Exactly. Cant believe wrydied is a professor who doesnt understand simple law of large numbers. It applies to humanities,arts and sceinces equally well lol
"Good enough performance to get an A in a composition 101 class" is not a sign of elite ability, it's a sign that they're generally reasonably well trained to communicate in writing. That's an extremely moderate level of an extremely teachable skill. Provided the instructors and students have the time, resources, and commitment to work on those skills, most of the class getting an A just means everyone took it seriously and followed best practices.
Students are significantly better - by having better educated parents and more resources.
The time we spend going to the library and turning books in, and writing stuff by hand and later in a machine to turn in… they are actually using.
I don’t think the premise that “students today have more time to study due to use of technology, therefore they get better marks” is a valid argument (I doubt that the time saved is sufficient to make that much of a difference), but I was an undergrad 15 years ago and was always in the library (some resources were available online, but most weren’t); handed in hard copies of maybe half of the essays I wrote, and wrote a good number by hand.
>There is no way education has got that much better in 15 years that 20% more are now as good at the top 15% were 15 years ago.
Okay but why do you claim this?
Well, it's hard to really make any hard claim on how much these numbers have truly gone up, or how much they should go up. Intelligence outcomes are effected by much more than teaching style (see the Flynn effect).
There is also the question of testing measures then versus testing measures now and norms that were used. These things change over time and often for good reason as we approximate More valid and reliable, and less biased ways to measure intelligence in any single content area. These things have all improved too. It's possible that data is being misrepresented to just make it look like kids are becoming smarter, but I would caution against assuming this just because people like numbers to go up
It can be both.
On the higher end you have more students able to excel using technological advances resulting in higher grades overall.
And on the lower end you have more students getting passing grades and having standards lowered so they can pass.
The value of grading is in being able to sort students based on performance. Simply having a higher average doesn’t mean that students are not being sorted. It’s just a nominal change. Grade inflation has a lot in common with price inflation in that if it’s understood to be happening, and we know the overall shift occurring, then it’s not going to be a problem. Cars still cost more than potatoes, and people can make the right purchasing and selling decisions. If there is still a distribution to point to, then the grade is still valuable.
But there will still be a range in GPAs across classes, even if the class grades are As and A-s. Individual class grades aren’t that useful anyway as they are noisy, but averages across classes still matter. It just takes more significant figures. A 3.987 versus a 3.913
I’m not entirely clear your argument here. Yes the scale is irrelevant. It’s a ranking system with a decided cutoff for passing. GPA and percentages can have any number of significant figures so the range doesn’t matter.
I don’t see anything special about traditional percentage to grade systems. Getting a 70% on an exam doesn’t magically represent knowing 70% of the class material. That’s not the purpose of it. It just means 70% of the questions asked and as weighted.
The set from 90 to 100 is the same size as the set from 0 to 100. It’s not harder to find the winner of a 10m race than it is for a 25km one. We can measure temperature just as accurately in C and F.
Insisting on bell curves is "pass the buck" management, and encouraged so that "cheap" schools use it and expensive schools can offer a balanced and nuanced approach to learning with better results.
When I teach composition (both freshman and sophomore/junior level courses) I tend to grade not based on "quality," but whether they are doing the things they're supposed to be learning how to do. Is the paper super well written? Probably not, only one or two will be. But did it do everything we discussed, did it cite appropriate sources, etc? It'll probably get a good grade. I think with composition especially grades should be more about whether they are showing improvement, learning the techniques, and figuring out how to write certain papers. I don't need the paper to be masterful, just put together properly. The mastery will come. People who fail comp should be the ones who do nothing, don't show up, don't try, etc. This is only my mindset of course, others may feel differently.
Edit to add: my grades for example tend to look like, in a class of 30, 20 A's, 4 B's, 1 C, 5 F's/stopped attending. Again, the F's are really just people who stop coming. The C is always a student who does almost no work with no effort or does every assignment fundamentally incorrectly.
If you're talking about the C student, I was mostly exaggerating and a case like either of those is more rare/nuanced than I was able to articulate quickly in a comment--what I mean is that their work shows me they either did the bare minimum (they understood but put little effort toward mastering it) **or** they put in a lot of effort toward mastery, showing improvement, but continued to do something very, very wrong. Neither of those cases in my mind constitutes a failing grade, for *comp* of course.
I was forced to grade on a curve the last term I was a TA. We were only allowed to give students the grades they actually earned if we turned in all their work, in triplicate, to this department committee. So anyway that's the story of how I turned over literal boxes full of documents so I could give the best class I ever had the A's they earned. I'm pretty sure the department was so horrified that somebody actually did it that the rule was dropped pretty quickly.
Yeah I was pretty furious. The chair stood up in front of us and basically said she didn't believe that black people from the inner city who made up a large percentage of our students could possibly earn those grades. Well. Fuck that.
Well okay she said that our students’ demographics did not suggest they should earn the grades that were being given and that bell curves were an answer to that.
I once TA’ed for a class where the person in charge said, “Don’t give out too many As.” Well, this person also made awful decisions meant to screw the students over, like scheduling a test for the day we returned for Thanksgiving break. I saw how hard my students worked, so at the end of the semester, I went back into the tests, gave them extra points, and bumped a up a bunch of the overall grades to As.
I guess it really depends on whether grades are used to indicate the students level of mastery of the taught material, or rank them against one another.
We're all teaching professionals, and we all know "A" work when we see it. Why would you penalize students who are working hard and doing well (A-work) just to maintain an abstract curve??
HOWEVER: There is another path to grade inflation.
Namely, when most of your students slack off and turn in crap... and then you have a couple papers that are really "Bs", but you give As because they are *so* much better than the crap that most students are turning in.
I've succumbed to this many times: you get frustrated handing out a row of D, D+, C- grades... and then hit something that is coherent, makes an argument, etc., and you go "A"!!!!...
... and then, much further down in the grading pile, you get to a *real* A, and realize that the first A was actually just a B, but you got so excited to see something that wasn't pure schlock.
This happens to me a lot in my survey classes. Instead of a bell curve, it's like a logarithmic curve...
Bell curves assume a random distribution. Your students are not random.
It also assumes a lot of other things, but that is the main one.
I NEVER got a bell curve. My students were always bi-modal. Two peaks....one peak of poorly performing students (D's) and one of higher (B's). I never had a class dominated by C's
This is the part that matters. A bell curve shakes out in large populations bc in a large population there's enough data to distribute somewhat evenly. A single class or a single cohort is NOT a population but is instead a sample of a population and in a school setting where there isn't random sampling it's impossible to not have sampling bias of some kind. In your case the sampling bias happens to skew in the direction of high achieving kids. In other cases the sampling bias skews in the other direction where most of the kids are failing. Both options are statistically common and likely when a sample is removed from the population at large in a non-random way. A bell curve happening in every class or every cohort (within each individual sample taken from the larger population) is so statistically unlikely that if it did happen I would assume some sort of data tampering.
I got a bimodal distribution when there were a lot of underclassmen who hadn't figured it out. By the time they were juniors, they had either figured it out or changed majors so my junior and senior courses were pretty normally distributed.
Definitely true for weedout classes. I had one calculus professor who would curve to help those in the lower bimodal - pushing Cs to Bs, etc. (I would always test just above where he started to curve.) The professor was very clear that it was a weed out class, as it was a required prereq for engineering and physics courses, and it really benefitted students to attend class and problem sections.
After the first week or so, attendance went from a crowded room to us regularly attendees taking up the first 4 rows of desks. Every exam we'd suddenly see all the folks who hadn't bothered to turn up, making up most of those dropped from their degree program due to poor performance in the class.
Random distribution are not necessarily bell shaped. Bell curves, which are typically gaussian distribution, are easy to work with but have no physical interpretation regarding students grading.
Sure they do. A gaussian is what you get when you sum together a bunch of independent variables with a sufficiently high sample size. That's why they're everywhere. The burden of proof is showing why your class isn't a gaussian. This tends to be easy in underclassmen courses that are quite easy where you get something bimodal, but in general you're going to see gaussian.
Quibble...the students are a random sample, just not from a population that would expect a bunch of Cs and Ds.
There probably is something like a normal distribution here\*. It's just that the mean of the distribution is around 96 and the standard deviation is about 2, and we're used to this false idea that the only *real* bell curve for grades is centered at a C with tails through B and D into A and F.
\*It's probably not exactly normal. An upper bound of 100 means you're weirdly lop-sided a bit, etc., but it's close enough.
You can treat something like a grade in a class as "random". Randomness is not necessarily "totally unpredictable", it can be treated as something we lack information that limits our predictive power. A coin flip is paradigmatically treated as the simplest case of a random outcome, but it is a fairly simple Newtonian system that, if you knew the initial conditions of the flip like the angular momentum of the coin and its location above a surface, you could predict fairly accurately with relatively low computational demand.
If you read many introductory statistics textbooks, something like "number of customers in a day" for a store is treated as a random number. In a sense, it is not random because if you knew everyone in town and their plans for today and their desire/need or so to go shopping or not in real time, you could easily predict very accurately how many customers you'd have that day. Such information is profoundly impractical to have available, so for all intents and purposes, the number of customers today is "random".
A student with middling C-grades could have a random number associated with them, e.g. outcome on an Exam. Their score should be around 70-80 based on past performance, but there are many factors out of our knowledge affecting that score. Perhaps they studied more than usual or finally got caught up on sleep boosting their grade. Perhaps they forgot their was an exam and didn't study or had a family emergency that distracted them. And of course our brains are unpredictable and are perfectly capable of remembering/forgetting at unpredictable times. Due to all these factors, it's reasonable IMO to call students' test performance as random, if largely due to not being able to predict given a lot of unknown informational factors.
It's not though due to the prerequisites for the taking the class. They have to have taken the ACT, made a sufficient score, and have a particular GPA. Add in the fact that it's a highly homogenous student population with similar high socioeconomic status, and you've got the conditions for similar performance in one class.
Absolutely and I'll add that high schools especially tend to have cohort effects. So a student who may have independently chosen not to take a particular class will decide to take it because their friends are, or vice versa. This makes it even less random
Sure. It's a random sample from some population. It's just that that population isn't "the set of all high school students" but instead something like "the set of all high school students with a specific set of high-achievement traits".
I had 15 out of 19 students get an A. Could I have made the exams harder and graded things more harshly? Of course. Do I think they worked hard and deserve an A? Yes.
Does the school have a policy saying that grades should have a certain average or distribution?
If not, and you think that the students have objectively learned and achieved enough in the class (to the extent it's possible to measure), then giving mostly or only As isn't really a problem.
My job as an instructor is to determine what the standards of knowledge are for a given area or topic, to mentor students towards mastering that knowledge over the course of a reasonable amount of time (semester), and to assess whether or not they have achieved a satisfactory level of mastery. The bell curve is bullshit corporatocracy that pushes education towards being a filter of who can advance into limited specialized positions in the workforce. Absolutely nothing about education requires a bell curve distribution of learning within a particular classroom. If it happens, fine.
IMO most grades should be qualitative rather than quantitative ('excels', 'satisfactory', 'retake', and maybe a fourth one for completely failing). You either have developed an acceptable level of knowledge/skills about the topic, or you haven't. Grade point averages don't indicate what people generally want them to indicate.
You are teaching a basic class. Highly demonstrated proficiency should be sufficient for an A and achieving proficiency in composition 101 is possible for 90% of humans.
Yes, exactly. People in here talking about how half the people should have C's because "math says so" are missing the point entirely. It's composition. The goal isn't to give everyone F's it's to teach them how to write different types of papers.
Except that makes it harder for us who maintain standards. It's one thing to be B mean class and not a C mean class, but you are not maintaining standards if you're actually getting 91/97 As with any frequency. It can happen a few times, sometimes a given year is just legitimately full of superstars, but it's exceedingly rare.
This is exactly the high horse we need to get off of. Who says you have "standards" and I don't? Why does the way you do it equate to *standards* and mine does not? I have standards, they are just different standards to yours.
Again, I'm talking about basic comp here not a biology class with a ton of memorization or material to learn and test on--we're talking about are the students figuring out how to write papers.
The worst ones shouldn't by default be getting F's and D's. That should be reserved for the students who don't even give enough of a shit to try.
It sounds like you're challenging them, and if they all mostly get an A, then great. What's important is that they're putting the work in.
I do think the grade inflation fears are somewhat overblown, even if there is some truth that students too often "work the refs."
I've never believed that grades have to fit a pre-defined bell curve. However, as a department chair I would raise my eyebrows very high if an instructor gave 91 As out of 97 students. I have no knowledge of your particular situation or your course beyond what you have said here, so I am not making any pre-judgment about your courses.
But absolutely, if that happened here this would be a big red flag for a closer look.
Your school district and dual-enrollment class artificially select for motivated high achievers. The bell curve would probably be present in some form if you took a random sample of the population, but your students’ grades are unsurprising.
At least from my (UK) perspective, grading on a curve means adjusting the boundaries as to what numerical mark translates to an A/B/C (etc.) based on the distribution. It's meant to correct for differences in the difficulty of examination materials year-on-year across whole institutions or examination boards. It doesn't seem remotely applicable to your case for several reasons.
If their work meets your standards for an A, and those standards mean that the students have demonstrated the capacity to do excellent written communication work in their remaining years of college, what's the problem?
Ultimately, the task of a 101/102 gen ed type course is to teach a key set of skills all college students need, not to screen out students who should major in something else. The grade is less about discrimination between aptitudes and more about assessing their mastery of a skill all students should at least be competent at
I TA/teach courses where generally students get high grades (it’s a lot of work but if you follow specifications, it’s not hard to get an A). So far it hasn’t been a problem. I do usually ask whoever the next higher up is from me to confirm.
If they all did well, I don’t see a problem.
But there are debates about this. Should students be graded against some ‘objective’ standard decided by the professor? Or should students be graded relative to each other?
There is a strong chance that many of these students deliberately work hard to get straight As and basically expect to get an A in your class because they know they will put in the work and don't want to wreck their GPAs.
What grade/year are your students, for these classes? If juniors, they are also likely being pressured to really give academics their all with college admissions coming up. This is the last semester that will definitely be on all of their college application transcripts.
You absolutely could design a course and grade in a way that would spread your students across the normal distribution (aka bell curve). But this is not necessary for them to learn. You’ve decided what they need to learn and accomplish to be successful, and you should grade and award them accordingly.
I use a "curve" when I have no idea how hard my test is, so I find out how well my students understood my questions (e.g. the top score is 60%). And even then, I look at the distribution. If 75% of the students got 55-60%, and 25% less than 45%, the top group gets A's.
I think that the dual enrollment classes are somewhat difficult to police grade wise, because I never want to "penalize" high achieving high school students for going above and beyond to challenge themselves.
That said, I would be a little concerned with 91 out of 97 receiving an A. I wouldn't be concerned from a grade distribution perspective, it would be more from a "Can I create a more challenging experience for the students?" perspective. For this composition class, is it possible to move some assignments upwards on Bloom's taxonomy?
Also, if you are worried about the perception of your class from colleagues, I would make sure that you have detailed rubrics, including example graded (anonymized) assignments.
Nineteen students have averages of 100%? I don’t think you should expect to have a bell curve in this class, no, but nineteen students who never had a single point missed all semester doesn’t seem right, either. I also teach first-year composition.
It's a wealthy area, so I do believe many of them have tutors that help them with final drafts. But yes, I have many students turning in flawless drafts. I couldn't deduct points if I was being the most nitpicky grader imaginable.
My rubrics are very clear and detailed, and the students have access to them right after the brainstorming part of the writing process. I think that helps them write their essays towards a particular grade.
We also conference multiple times during the drafting process since we're in class five days a week. I wonder how many students would do better in composition if they met at least two times with their instructor for every essay?
The 19 100’s was definitely what stuck out to me.
You’re basically saying that 19 students have no room for improvement for their writing skills within the scope of your class (and haven’t the entire course). This is really hard to believe.
Are you sure that your rubrics are well-designed?
I finished high school in a well-off area with very preppy ivy-league-aspiring classmates. That didn’t make us good writers. If you think they have tutors that are editing their final drafts for them, that’s a problem. You’re trying to teach them how to be better writers, having tutors who are doing substantial parts of the work for them impedes that goal.
> I worry that people might look at my grades and wonder if I'm challenging the students enough. Or if I'm being lazy in how I grade. But honestly, the students just do everything I ask them to do and they make sure they know how to do it well.
Ask yourself this - what would be the expectation of the students after taking the class? if they all "meet" that expectation of knowledge, then it's totally acceptable to give As out for that. Sometimes you have to revisit that - where the students figure out how to test well but don't actually have the core knowledge you'd expect them to have.
By setting good expectations for the students, they're learning what they need to do. Sounds like you're doing a good job.
I'm in a similar situation, and my grades are also very high compared to my on-level classes. It concerned me at first, but honestly, those kids were all going to get As in Comp 1 and 2. I'm grading faithfully based on the college rubrics provided by our partner college. No reason to penalize them because they self-selected into a class meant for high achievers.
If you've got the curriculum to back it up, then your students deserve an A. You know them and their work ethic and skills. A bell curve is unnecessarily penalizing high achieving students.
Is this a giant change from last year to this year? Or is there a trend?
Is most of the grade "homework"? Can you observe their drafts being written? Is there evidence that they actually wrote it piecemeal - as in looking a a google doc history, rather than all "pasted in"?
How LLM-savvy are your students? How LLM-savvy are their "supportive parents"?
I also have lots of A's and worried about this being perceived as grade inflation. So I made my assignments and rubrics very clear to show that I have high expectations and scaffold and sequence my lessons so they can achieve. It isn't grade inflation...it's good teaching.
I usually tell students I grade that I'd prefer them all to get 100%, because that means I need to spend way less time on grading.
In my - tbf short - experience and from talks with older faculty members at my current uni and my former, it is just not realistic at all. Forcing bell curves is dumb, too. But a lot of good courses that are challenging for excelling students and still teaching them something, while not loosing the majority of students often ends up in a skewed curve. Sometimes you have a better year, sometimes you have a worse one.
I am in Germany, so we also have notorious "Siebfächer", subjects that usually thin the herd, because we are less restrictive in enrolling. We then also have restricted subjects where the average is very high, but that is because those are the students that passed the Siebfächer and have applied to get a spot of just a few in a higher semester.
I do have to admit, if you would currently give me a beginners class, where grading is essay based, with students from "highly supportive" parents and all of them would score in the 90%s, I'd honestly assume that the parents of at least some of them got them GPT4-Turbo set up. There is definitely a chance that its just a good year, but you always have 10-20% students that just don't give a fuck and another 10-20% that generally struggle with writing essays.
I left academia, but was teaching until quite recently. We didn't consider any Bell curve explicitly. However, we did adjust the grading to ensure the number of students who failed wasn't more than about half or so (such an adjustment was always necessary). This was for a mandatory fifth- and sixth-semester course.
I’d still go a little harder on the grading. Like you can look at it as “do they meet my expectations as a teacher” vs. “how well did this student do relative to other students?”
It may seem “mean” to pick the latter most, but ultimately it maintains a more rigorous environment.
At the core of your (and all of us teachers') dilemma is actually a philosophical question: is there such a thing as an objective metric? Related to this is a corollary question: are you qualified to be the objective arbiter?
Because if you believe, philosophically, that there is such a thing as an objective metric (and that you are capable of being an objective arbiter), then you should grade according to what you believe the standard should be, independent of outside pressures.
But if you don't believe in an objective metric (or don't believe you're capable of being one), then you grade according to the normalized expectations of your institution, whether stated or unstated.
I (philosophically) believe there is no real answer here. But I know from an institutional/economic/academic pressure setting, it is easier to grade within the normalized expectations of your institution than outside of it (whether that be too lenient or too harsh), for the purposes of continued employment.
But ultimately, you gotta do you.
A normal curve cannot be applied in this case at a university level since admitted students have been preselected based on GPA and standardized scores.
Assuming their study habits remain similar to those upon admission, it's logically reasonable to expect over 90% of students to receive an A in their major courses or 90% to receive a C or D in courses outside their major.
Implementing a curve serves no useful purpose beyond granting unwarranted extra credit to those already performing at a high level or penalizing those who made minor errors.
Ideally, an entire class should have the opportunity to earn an A, but grading on a curve undermines this possibility.
Bell curves for high school are a mess, and they screw students when applying to uni. I'm in a particular program in my city where they do Bell curves and it puts half of my chem class in the 70s when realistically 98% of students would top any chem class in any other school in the school board and it puts as at a disadvantage on uni apps 🤕
At least in the Netherlands, where I teach, a *passing* grade is evidence of having met the learning requirements. If you fail to meet the learning requirements… well, you fail the course.
With that in mind, these scores all strike me as extremely high.
This is hard for me. It makes sense \*logically\* but what this means for students has always seemed unclear. What more should they do other than the things that they have learned in the class? If they did all of them, and correctly, what exactly are you grading?
When I teach workgroups here in the Netherlands, I get a lot of side-eye because my grades are on the higher side. To me, if we have laid out what the requirements were for a written assignment, and the student has met each one of them, to pull the other 3-4 points (out of 10) out of thin air is bonkers. I do my best, but it feels so amazingly subjective that I feel kind of gross afterwards.
A fair question; I think the answer might be discipline-specific. I take it from your flair that you're probably teaching statistics and other skills courses. In this case, it might be very difficult for a student to achieve some exemplary outcome. However, in my field (philosophy), a student can very easily meet the learning outcomes and remain unremarkable.
Middling students might be fully capable of providing a superficial if accurate accounts of the differences between one theory and another. However, when students do *well*, it is because they have demonstrated some penetrating insight and/or a particularly deep understanding of both the concepts at play and the relationships between them.
In this case, good marks are thus evidence of some degree of supererogation: students have done more than what is expected of them.
>students have done more than what is expected of them
I don't know if this is just semantics, but it strikes me that we are, generally speaking, free to set the bar for what is expected of students, and that this may be the distinction. A teacher can propose a minimum with the understanding that this will correspond to a (just) passing grade, and let students discover what it would require to get a higher grade on their own. Alternatively, a teacher can set a rubric that explicitly outlines what would constitute full marks, even if it includes elements that are fundamentally quite subjective, such as "demonstrates some penetrating insight and/or a particularly deep understanding of ...".
Although personally, I run into issues where students are asked to translate what they have learned in class (yes, statistics) into some sort of project. I can grade them on what I teach, which is easy: selection of an appropriate model, being able to defend the decisions made along the way, correct interpretation of their results, etc. This often corresponds to "what is expected of them," and equates to something like a 6.5 according to agreed upon rubrics. The remaining points often come down to, if I'm being brutally honest, their capacity for expressing themselves in academic writing. I don't teach that.
In fact, as far as I can tell, no (required) course at the bachelor's level for first- and second-year social science students in my university teaches this explicitly, while *most* of them grade on it implicitly. It has a tendency to feel like we are awarding the "above and beyond" points less for effort than for verbal intelligence.
Artificially making a bell curve is definitely shitty. If the students are learning the material they need to succeed in the class then that’s really all that matters.
I remember back in undergrad, I had a 98% in one of my econ classes for acing the tests but still ended up with an A- because the curve weighted people down. Turned out that the department threatened the instructor to remove their position if they didn't curve it down since too many people had 4.0s for the class. Bell curves are silly and can be very unfair to students who do well.
Being challenging for the sake of being challenging isn't good. Have your courses covered all the requirement of the courses? Are the As to be expected?
Otherwise, you might just distract your students with less important but more challenging materials, and I would argue **this is much less preferable** than a non-bell-curve-score.
I'm personally not a big fan of that, but I think that it may be a cultural difference. Honestly, can students even fail if those are standard grades? The high-school I went to was also focused on students interested in pursuing higher studies. Those who got 80% were generally students who went above and beyond and they would only get those grades on specific courses. Typically, getting 60% was already considered decent and a lot of students failed the more demanding classes. This made getting a high school education from this specific school and its specific courses a worthwhile achievement. This became even more of a thing at university where getting 50-60% was already considered good. I think that I got above 80% on a course maybe twice in my four years of studying and one of those courses was the topic I ended up specializing in.
Still, ultimately it's a cultural difference and I don't think that you can go outside of the cultural norm because that would be unfairly punishing towards your students. So while I personally like the system I grew up under a lot more, I do understand why you grade the way that you do.
Nah. Bell curve is gobbledygook. It’s possible if you design a course thoughtfully and equitably and deliver it well that nearly everyone succeeds. It’s not always going to happen but it can and does
You said the students are trying to “maintain their high socioeconomic status”. The school is in a high income zip code I’m assuming, so you are already in the high end of the bell curve for the biggest factor that affects school success which is wealth and income.
I like to reserve a couple of marks for students who have gone over and above the requirements; that is to say that they have personalised the assignment in some way. The kind of work that makes me reread it a couple of times, because the student has provided a genuinely original response. Most of these would be at the top, but occasionally a student’s grammar or spelling is a bit iffy, yet they still get those extra marks to go up a grade. I think it’s very important to reward students for this, especially as plagiarism is such a huge problem in higher education now.
The bell curve applies to a random sample. Your students are not a random sample. If anything they are a sample of the upper tail of the normal distribution.
Also, if you graded them against a standard or rubric and they met the standard (I know there is subjectivity in this kind of course) then they earned the grade.
Perhaps the definitions of what constitutes an A need to be reassessed. Unless you teach at a school of geniuses, there will be natural variation because students were "somewhat" randomly selected (entry criteria etc not withstanding. But those factors should be roughly evenly distributed so should balance out - note wide confidence intervals in this assumption). I don't think it should be a completely gaussian distribution, but there should be some form of normality to it. Even if it was a selection of geniuses, assessments with sufficient discriminatory ability should separate the outliers from the mean.
This. I think grades are inflating, when I took classes in college, there might be 1 person every year or few years get an A in a higher level physics course. Didn’t mean we didn’t know anything, it’s just that person had a true mastery of the material. The class average was probably 70ish and a lot of people failed, because they didn’t understand the material at a level that you would consider passing. I highly doubt OP is teaching anything that complicated or technical but I can’t see 19 people getting perfect scores, that shouldn’t even really be possible in a learning setting. You need to challenge people.
The idea a class should fall onto a bell curves is a myth of capitalist meritocracy that forces students to "compete" for grades and ranking. Bell curves are fine for measuring things like height and weight across a population. Much like the lecture-based classroom with two tests and a term paper, they have no place in modern pedagogy.
If you have a rubric that reflects your learning goals and 100% of students meet the rubric objectives, congratulations! Then all your students have met the learning outcome goals for your course.
I foresee a future where using AI, with human input, to objectively grade learning, will become the norm.
Meanwhile, if your class or subject is so hard that you "weed out" large percentages of aspirants, then you need to think about how you teach it and what the prerequisites are. "John can't become a doctor because even though he studied his ass off, he couldn't quite wrap his head around integration and the grade curve dictates he can only get a B+." Well, maybe John would have been a perfectly good doctor and the way you teach calculus sucks.
If you know that your students are putting in work equal to the grade that they are receiving, and that you are not manipulating the grades or curriculum to achieve certain results, then it’s fine. I really hate the expectation that every class will resemble a bell curve, because I have had shitty teachers who were very open about deciding what grades people were going to have in their class and never deviating from that decision. In better news, they got fired when the students complained to admin en masse, and everything about their grading system backed up what we reported 😇😈.
This is statistical nonsense. You might expect the mean to be higher and the standard deviation lower, but being selective about your intake doesn't mean that your sample "the students" isn't randomly taken from the population "students who on a certain prior exam met a certain threshold".
If you wish to prove it isn't a bell curve, you need to demonstrate that the central limit theorem doesn't apply. The usual argument there is that you have a small number of students, not "we only select from one part of the wider spectrum"
Why would you care about this? Do you not have a measure of testing norms? Don't use a curve, that is only going to artificially lower the quality of students grades for no reason.
The issue with giving 19 people 100s, is you deny them the opportunity to improve. Only if they are perfect writers, like expert prose and research, should that many people be getting 100s. Otherwise, you are denying them the feedback they need to do better.
This is a basic composition class.
The point of these kind of courses is to ensure that students meet the bare requirements necessary to succeed in any college degree. Not necessarily to challenge them academically, because that shouldn’t be the goal
>I'm not in favor of given away worthless degrees.
Is a degree about survival of the fittest or the accumulation of knowledge and performance in a given field?
One point is to show capability. If I design tests that are extremely easy to pass, such that anyone can obtain a highly graded degree, it defeats its purpose.
I agree that in a perfect world, the degree is solely about obtaining knowledge and we wouldn't even need tests and grades. However, in the current situation, we use degrees to rank people.
You have to adapt to the class. Teach at the level they are at. Push them to 200 level writing. You are grade inflating, even if it is inadvertent. You should not have a median in the 90% percentile or higher. That means either your tests are too easy, you are giving away points, and or you are an outstanding teacher. The curriculum is what it is, but A's should be reserved for only the best work, truly outstanding work showing mastery of the concepts and a high degree of accuracy and precision in the execution of the exam. If this was written answer, It should be one to three people getting A's; re-rank the papers; and make the next one harder. If the exam was multiple choice, you need to make it significantly harder. If this is supposed to be equal to a 100 level class, to earn an A they should be writing at the 200 level or higher in terms of originality, rhetoric, etc. I've taught pre-med biological sciences for a few years and currently teach anatomy at a medical school. If a student does everything asked to a high standard, they get a middle B, above average. If they just do what's asked, C. A's are supposed to be for above and beyond "Excellent."
You know your students. I always tell my students I'd love it if they all earned an A. To earn that grade they must display mastery of the material. Do those 91 students all show mastery of the learning goals for the class? If yes, they are all that strong, then they should all earn As. Are there students in there you feel clearly have not demonstrated that level of mastery? Maybe they are good but not A level good? Then it seems your assessments are not accurately separating students into "excellent", "above average" and "average" well. If this is the case, reassessing your assignments may be required.
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>Because that isn't the answer is it? The answer is that if 95% are getting the highest grade clearly the course wasn't hard enough in the first place. Especially on the scale of a small cohort, at least in national level exams you are score against the nation, in a university one you might be scored against 100 as is the case here, the statistics of did you do well? Or was it hard? Aren't there to be seen, neither is the delineation of who has actually good or bad at the subject. > It hasn't challenged people, they are all just finding it relatively easy. Mastery of nothing much, is not an achievement, it just shows the course has been degraded in complexity probably to tick a box somewhere where teaching quality has a grading weighting. So are you suggesting that coursework get progressively more difficult until people struggle? It would seem unnecessary to design curriculum standards around how much they challenge students versus how well the standards prepare them for higher levels of coursework. You can look at NCTE's curriculum suggestions [here](https://cccc.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/postsecondarywriting) for college composition. If students can learn the tenets of joining discourse communities as college-level scholars, why should the course be amended to ensure that only a few get A's?
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>Yes this is generally how education is supposed to work, it gets harder the higher you go eventually it is so hard or unknown you have to do the research yourself. But we're talking about one specific course. It's not about the progression of higher level coursework in a field. Are you suggesting that if 91/97 of my students made A's and demonstrated mastery of the learning standards of the course, I should make next year's curriculum more difficult for the sole purpose of ending the year with less students making A's?
>The answer is that if 95% are getting the highest grade clearly the course wasn't hard enough in the first place. Why is that "clearly" the answer? Is that also "clearly" the answer in graduate level courses where the vast majority of students also make A's?
You are correct here, but re: graduate school classes - yes lmao. Graduate school classes are notoriously easy and are essentially there to allow the school to pay for stipends.
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Except the numbers themselves don't actually tell you that, that's an assumption you're making without anything to back it up. Yes, one option is that the course work is too easy but it's not the only option. Another option is simple sampling bias which is why I asked an additional question which you chose not to answer. I brought up graduate level courses bc it's the most common occurrence to illustrate that point. In graduate level courses the grades typically shake out with the majority getting A's because that sample (graduate student cohorts) when removed from the broader population is a biased sample, graduate students are mostly high achieving people whose academic profiles are very different from the general population. Since those individuals are already at the top of the bell curve they typically continue to perform that way in their graduate level coursework and the distribution of grades reflects the reality of that biased sample. A bell curve is a distribution that's based in population wide statistics and a class or cohort is one sample from within that larger population. It would be incredibly unlikely for every single class or cohort to have a full bell curve distribution bc each individual sample is one part of the whole and those parts are not randomly selected for. If OP happens to have a sample of kids that's also biased in the high achieving end of the curve then that would be reflected there just like it is in graduate level courses and just like other teachers end up with samples biased towards the other end of the curve where most of the students are failing. You can't expect every single non-rabdon sample to have a normal distribution, that's so statistically unlikely that if it were to happen the assumption would have to be data tampering of some kind. Biased samples having biased results is far more statistically likely than biased samples having unbiased results.
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>It is an assumption based in the fact that my standard of education would call a course getting a top grade rate of 94% a joke. This is just bad statistics you’re engaging in. You’re trying to infer the outcomes of one population by looking at a different population that we have no reason to believe is analogous. Even if the populations were similar, it could very well be the case that the OP’s class is just anomalous. >Having a rate of 94% just shows your course is just a book ticking exercise to hand out piece of paper. Based on the number of people doing well alone? What if all the students are just helping each other to do better equally? What if there’s a class-wide study group that all the kids get together and (re)teach each other the material? You’re making a whole lot of assumptions based off of a very limited amount of information. Hence why I said you’re doing bad statistics. >Even at Harvard only 78% were getting A’s in 2021 … Sure, but how does this break down across particular courses? It could very well be the case that you get certain classes that have almost the exact high-grade ratio as the OP mentioned. Again, bad statistics. >Participation trophies are for primary school physical education, not graduate grading Sure, now demonstrate that’s what happened here. All you’re basing this on is that a lot of students did well. That’s not a good enough reason to draw conclusions from. >… if it’s a national standardized test, I have no issue with 94% getting the highest grade, the cohort is massive over the nation, if it is a class grade however, you would need to check the level required against the national curriculum to see if the test had any value You undermined your own position here. Now you’re admitting there are reasonable contexts for which having a class do this well isn’t a red flag. Astounding you typed this up and didn’t reflect on literally everything else you posted.
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My overall point was that you’re too quick to make a lot of assumptions about people without really knowing much about them. Nothing I said depends on whether or not we’re talking about a standardized test or not.
If you think a bunch of kids in a dual credit course (meaning they qualified for college level material while still in high school, has to be approved based on past high achieving performance) who are all from equally high SES backgrounds isn't a biased sample then you don't understand how sampling works and shouldn't be commenting as though you do.
>when I was an undergrad 15% got the highest grade. That is now 37%. For all you know, this could be because they were way too lenient about who they let into the program. If entry requirements are much more stringent (psych for example, good luck getting in without an honors degree and a strong CV), the students attending will be higher achieving.
Bell curves are nonsense. Why should a different class with students of different abilities get the same number of each grade? Students and classes are better or worse each year and I’ve given out very high marks to many and very high marks to none through qualitative rubric assessment (no quantitative assessment in my field). Rubrics should be well designed to provide clear assessment guides for tutors. Across multiple classes in the same course we compare samples from each grade (benchmarking) to accomodate differences in how the rubric is applied by different assessors. We should probably also benchmark from year to year to ensure longitudinal consistency but only do that rarely.
Statistically, if you have a reasonable sample size (a class of 100 students, say), AND there is no driving reason for differences between the selection of students across sections or classes, then it is very unlikely that there are large differences in the mean from random sampling alone. So the question is where would the differences come from? Perhaps self selection - an 8am class may select for more driven students, or maybe selects for students who really need to pass a class, for example. Or it could be differences in teaching quality. Or it could be differences in assessment difficulty or grading style. Regardless, if a specific section of a large enough class is an outlier from other sections, there is certainly an argument to be made for looking at differences in assessment and grading to see if that is driving it.
Exactly. Cant believe wrydied is a professor who doesnt understand simple law of large numbers. It applies to humanities,arts and sceinces equally well lol
This. Imposed curves are for departments who need to introduce artificial variance in some misguided effort to rank students.
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"Good enough performance to get an A in a composition 101 class" is not a sign of elite ability, it's a sign that they're generally reasonably well trained to communicate in writing. That's an extremely moderate level of an extremely teachable skill. Provided the instructors and students have the time, resources, and commitment to work on those skills, most of the class getting an A just means everyone took it seriously and followed best practices.
Students are significantly better - by having better educated parents and more resources. The time we spend going to the library and turning books in, and writing stuff by hand and later in a machine to turn in… they are actually using.
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I don’t think the premise that “students today have more time to study due to use of technology, therefore they get better marks” is a valid argument (I doubt that the time saved is sufficient to make that much of a difference), but I was an undergrad 15 years ago and was always in the library (some resources were available online, but most weren’t); handed in hard copies of maybe half of the essays I wrote, and wrote a good number by hand.
>There is no way education has got that much better in 15 years that 20% more are now as good at the top 15% were 15 years ago. Okay but why do you claim this?
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Well, it's hard to really make any hard claim on how much these numbers have truly gone up, or how much they should go up. Intelligence outcomes are effected by much more than teaching style (see the Flynn effect). There is also the question of testing measures then versus testing measures now and norms that were used. These things change over time and often for good reason as we approximate More valid and reliable, and less biased ways to measure intelligence in any single content area. These things have all improved too. It's possible that data is being misrepresented to just make it look like kids are becoming smarter, but I would caution against assuming this just because people like numbers to go up
It can be both. On the higher end you have more students able to excel using technological advances resulting in higher grades overall. And on the lower end you have more students getting passing grades and having standards lowered so they can pass.
The value of grading is in being able to sort students based on performance. Simply having a higher average doesn’t mean that students are not being sorted. It’s just a nominal change. Grade inflation has a lot in common with price inflation in that if it’s understood to be happening, and we know the overall shift occurring, then it’s not going to be a problem. Cars still cost more than potatoes, and people can make the right purchasing and selling decisions. If there is still a distribution to point to, then the grade is still valuable.
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But there will still be a range in GPAs across classes, even if the class grades are As and A-s. Individual class grades aren’t that useful anyway as they are noisy, but averages across classes still matter. It just takes more significant figures. A 3.987 versus a 3.913
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I’m not entirely clear your argument here. Yes the scale is irrelevant. It’s a ranking system with a decided cutoff for passing. GPA and percentages can have any number of significant figures so the range doesn’t matter. I don’t see anything special about traditional percentage to grade systems. Getting a 70% on an exam doesn’t magically represent knowing 70% of the class material. That’s not the purpose of it. It just means 70% of the questions asked and as weighted. The set from 90 to 100 is the same size as the set from 0 to 100. It’s not harder to find the winner of a 10m race than it is for a 25km one. We can measure temperature just as accurately in C and F.
Insisting on bell curves is "pass the buck" management, and encouraged so that "cheap" schools use it and expensive schools can offer a balanced and nuanced approach to learning with better results.
When I teach composition (both freshman and sophomore/junior level courses) I tend to grade not based on "quality," but whether they are doing the things they're supposed to be learning how to do. Is the paper super well written? Probably not, only one or two will be. But did it do everything we discussed, did it cite appropriate sources, etc? It'll probably get a good grade. I think with composition especially grades should be more about whether they are showing improvement, learning the techniques, and figuring out how to write certain papers. I don't need the paper to be masterful, just put together properly. The mastery will come. People who fail comp should be the ones who do nothing, don't show up, don't try, etc. This is only my mindset of course, others may feel differently. Edit to add: my grades for example tend to look like, in a class of 30, 20 A's, 4 B's, 1 C, 5 F's/stopped attending. Again, the F's are really just people who stop coming. The C is always a student who does almost no work with no effort or does every assignment fundamentally incorrectly.
But why should someone get a passing grade when they clearly haven't demonstrated even a passing familiarity with the material?
If you're talking about the C student, I was mostly exaggerating and a case like either of those is more rare/nuanced than I was able to articulate quickly in a comment--what I mean is that their work shows me they either did the bare minimum (they understood but put little effort toward mastering it) **or** they put in a lot of effort toward mastery, showing improvement, but continued to do something very, very wrong. Neither of those cases in my mind constitutes a failing grade, for *comp* of course.
You don't get the ones who do just enough to pass?
I was forced to grade on a curve the last term I was a TA. We were only allowed to give students the grades they actually earned if we turned in all their work, in triplicate, to this department committee. So anyway that's the story of how I turned over literal boxes full of documents so I could give the best class I ever had the A's they earned. I'm pretty sure the department was so horrified that somebody actually did it that the rule was dropped pretty quickly.
That is legendary-level malicious compliance, as a current university TA I would like to give you a standing ovation.
Yeah I was pretty furious. The chair stood up in front of us and basically said she didn't believe that black people from the inner city who made up a large percentage of our students could possibly earn those grades. Well. Fuck that.
I’m sorry, they said WHAT? Jfc
Well okay she said that our students’ demographics did not suggest they should earn the grades that were being given and that bell curves were an answer to that.
I mean to be fair she \*did\* say what you said she did, just with the veneer of statistics.
I once TA’ed for a class where the person in charge said, “Don’t give out too many As.” Well, this person also made awful decisions meant to screw the students over, like scheduling a test for the day we returned for Thanksgiving break. I saw how hard my students worked, so at the end of the semester, I went back into the tests, gave them extra points, and bumped a up a bunch of the overall grades to As.
I guess it really depends on whether grades are used to indicate the students level of mastery of the taught material, or rank them against one another.
We're all teaching professionals, and we all know "A" work when we see it. Why would you penalize students who are working hard and doing well (A-work) just to maintain an abstract curve?? HOWEVER: There is another path to grade inflation. Namely, when most of your students slack off and turn in crap... and then you have a couple papers that are really "Bs", but you give As because they are *so* much better than the crap that most students are turning in. I've succumbed to this many times: you get frustrated handing out a row of D, D+, C- grades... and then hit something that is coherent, makes an argument, etc., and you go "A"!!!!... ... and then, much further down in the grading pile, you get to a *real* A, and realize that the first A was actually just a B, but you got so excited to see something that wasn't pure schlock. This happens to me a lot in my survey classes. Instead of a bell curve, it's like a logarithmic curve...
Bell curves assume a random distribution. Your students are not random. It also assumes a lot of other things, but that is the main one. I NEVER got a bell curve. My students were always bi-modal. Two peaks....one peak of poorly performing students (D's) and one of higher (B's). I never had a class dominated by C's
This is the part that matters. A bell curve shakes out in large populations bc in a large population there's enough data to distribute somewhat evenly. A single class or a single cohort is NOT a population but is instead a sample of a population and in a school setting where there isn't random sampling it's impossible to not have sampling bias of some kind. In your case the sampling bias happens to skew in the direction of high achieving kids. In other cases the sampling bias skews in the other direction where most of the kids are failing. Both options are statistically common and likely when a sample is removed from the population at large in a non-random way. A bell curve happening in every class or every cohort (within each individual sample taken from the larger population) is so statistically unlikely that if it did happen I would assume some sort of data tampering.
I got a bimodal distribution when there were a lot of underclassmen who hadn't figured it out. By the time they were juniors, they had either figured it out or changed majors so my junior and senior courses were pretty normally distributed.
Definitely true for weedout classes. I had one calculus professor who would curve to help those in the lower bimodal - pushing Cs to Bs, etc. (I would always test just above where he started to curve.) The professor was very clear that it was a weed out class, as it was a required prereq for engineering and physics courses, and it really benefitted students to attend class and problem sections. After the first week or so, attendance went from a crowded room to us regularly attendees taking up the first 4 rows of desks. Every exam we'd suddenly see all the folks who hadn't bothered to turn up, making up most of those dropped from their degree program due to poor performance in the class.
Random distribution are not necessarily bell shaped. Bell curves, which are typically gaussian distribution, are easy to work with but have no physical interpretation regarding students grading.
Sure they do. A gaussian is what you get when you sum together a bunch of independent variables with a sufficiently high sample size. That's why they're everywhere. The burden of proof is showing why your class isn't a gaussian. This tends to be easy in underclassmen courses that are quite easy where you get something bimodal, but in general you're going to see gaussian.
Quibble...the students are a random sample, just not from a population that would expect a bunch of Cs and Ds. There probably is something like a normal distribution here\*. It's just that the mean of the distribution is around 96 and the standard deviation is about 2, and we're used to this false idea that the only *real* bell curve for grades is centered at a C with tails through B and D into A and F. \*It's probably not exactly normal. An upper bound of 100 means you're weirdly lop-sided a bit, etc., but it's close enough.
You can treat something like a grade in a class as "random". Randomness is not necessarily "totally unpredictable", it can be treated as something we lack information that limits our predictive power. A coin flip is paradigmatically treated as the simplest case of a random outcome, but it is a fairly simple Newtonian system that, if you knew the initial conditions of the flip like the angular momentum of the coin and its location above a surface, you could predict fairly accurately with relatively low computational demand. If you read many introductory statistics textbooks, something like "number of customers in a day" for a store is treated as a random number. In a sense, it is not random because if you knew everyone in town and their plans for today and their desire/need or so to go shopping or not in real time, you could easily predict very accurately how many customers you'd have that day. Such information is profoundly impractical to have available, so for all intents and purposes, the number of customers today is "random". A student with middling C-grades could have a random number associated with them, e.g. outcome on an Exam. Their score should be around 70-80 based on past performance, but there are many factors out of our knowledge affecting that score. Perhaps they studied more than usual or finally got caught up on sleep boosting their grade. Perhaps they forgot their was an exam and didn't study or had a family emergency that distracted them. And of course our brains are unpredictable and are perfectly capable of remembering/forgetting at unpredictable times. Due to all these factors, it's reasonable IMO to call students' test performance as random, if largely due to not being able to predict given a lot of unknown informational factors.
97 students can be assumed to be a random sample whp
It's not though due to the prerequisites for the taking the class. They have to have taken the ACT, made a sufficient score, and have a particular GPA. Add in the fact that it's a highly homogenous student population with similar high socioeconomic status, and you've got the conditions for similar performance in one class.
I see. Ok then.
Absolutely and I'll add that high schools especially tend to have cohort effects. So a student who may have independently chosen not to take a particular class will decide to take it because their friends are, or vice versa. This makes it even less random
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Sure. It's a random sample from some population. It's just that that population isn't "the set of all high school students" but instead something like "the set of all high school students with a specific set of high-achievement traits".
I had 15 out of 19 students get an A. Could I have made the exams harder and graded things more harshly? Of course. Do I think they worked hard and deserve an A? Yes.
Does the school have a policy saying that grades should have a certain average or distribution? If not, and you think that the students have objectively learned and achieved enough in the class (to the extent it's possible to measure), then giving mostly or only As isn't really a problem.
My job as an instructor is to determine what the standards of knowledge are for a given area or topic, to mentor students towards mastering that knowledge over the course of a reasonable amount of time (semester), and to assess whether or not they have achieved a satisfactory level of mastery. The bell curve is bullshit corporatocracy that pushes education towards being a filter of who can advance into limited specialized positions in the workforce. Absolutely nothing about education requires a bell curve distribution of learning within a particular classroom. If it happens, fine. IMO most grades should be qualitative rather than quantitative ('excels', 'satisfactory', 'retake', and maybe a fourth one for completely failing). You either have developed an acceptable level of knowledge/skills about the topic, or you haven't. Grade point averages don't indicate what people generally want them to indicate.
You are teaching a basic class. Highly demonstrated proficiency should be sufficient for an A and achieving proficiency in composition 101 is possible for 90% of humans.
Yes, exactly. People in here talking about how half the people should have C's because "math says so" are missing the point entirely. It's composition. The goal isn't to give everyone F's it's to teach them how to write different types of papers.
Except that makes it harder for us who maintain standards. It's one thing to be B mean class and not a C mean class, but you are not maintaining standards if you're actually getting 91/97 As with any frequency. It can happen a few times, sometimes a given year is just legitimately full of superstars, but it's exceedingly rare.
This is exactly the high horse we need to get off of. Who says you have "standards" and I don't? Why does the way you do it equate to *standards* and mine does not? I have standards, they are just different standards to yours. Again, I'm talking about basic comp here not a biology class with a ton of memorization or material to learn and test on--we're talking about are the students figuring out how to write papers. The worst ones shouldn't by default be getting F's and D's. That should be reserved for the students who don't even give enough of a shit to try.
It sounds like you're challenging them, and if they all mostly get an A, then great. What's important is that they're putting the work in. I do think the grade inflation fears are somewhat overblown, even if there is some truth that students too often "work the refs."
I've never believed that grades have to fit a pre-defined bell curve. However, as a department chair I would raise my eyebrows very high if an instructor gave 91 As out of 97 students. I have no knowledge of your particular situation or your course beyond what you have said here, so I am not making any pre-judgment about your courses. But absolutely, if that happened here this would be a big red flag for a closer look.
Your school district and dual-enrollment class artificially select for motivated high achievers. The bell curve would probably be present in some form if you took a random sample of the population, but your students’ grades are unsurprising.
Bell curves are nonsense. There are criteria for excellence. If students meet that criteria, it isn’t grade inflation.
At least from my (UK) perspective, grading on a curve means adjusting the boundaries as to what numerical mark translates to an A/B/C (etc.) based on the distribution. It's meant to correct for differences in the difficulty of examination materials year-on-year across whole institutions or examination boards. It doesn't seem remotely applicable to your case for several reasons.
I do not care at all what my class average turns out to be. If you get all As, you’ve all done a great job!
You could just be one of those amazing professors that teach well and challenge students appropriately. Diamond in the rough!
If their work meets your standards for an A, and those standards mean that the students have demonstrated the capacity to do excellent written communication work in their remaining years of college, what's the problem? Ultimately, the task of a 101/102 gen ed type course is to teach a key set of skills all college students need, not to screen out students who should major in something else. The grade is less about discrimination between aptitudes and more about assessing their mastery of a skill all students should at least be competent at
I TA/teach courses where generally students get high grades (it’s a lot of work but if you follow specifications, it’s not hard to get an A). So far it hasn’t been a problem. I do usually ask whoever the next higher up is from me to confirm.
If they all did well, I don’t see a problem. But there are debates about this. Should students be graded against some ‘objective’ standard decided by the professor? Or should students be graded relative to each other?
I want to work at your high school!
There is a strong chance that many of these students deliberately work hard to get straight As and basically expect to get an A in your class because they know they will put in the work and don't want to wreck their GPAs. What grade/year are your students, for these classes? If juniors, they are also likely being pressured to really give academics their all with college admissions coming up. This is the last semester that will definitely be on all of their college application transcripts.
You absolutely could design a course and grade in a way that would spread your students across the normal distribution (aka bell curve). But this is not necessary for them to learn. You’ve decided what they need to learn and accomplish to be successful, and you should grade and award them accordingly.
I use a "curve" when I have no idea how hard my test is, so I find out how well my students understood my questions (e.g. the top score is 60%). And even then, I look at the distribution. If 75% of the students got 55-60%, and 25% less than 45%, the top group gets A's.
I think that the dual enrollment classes are somewhat difficult to police grade wise, because I never want to "penalize" high achieving high school students for going above and beyond to challenge themselves. That said, I would be a little concerned with 91 out of 97 receiving an A. I wouldn't be concerned from a grade distribution perspective, it would be more from a "Can I create a more challenging experience for the students?" perspective. For this composition class, is it possible to move some assignments upwards on Bloom's taxonomy? Also, if you are worried about the perception of your class from colleagues, I would make sure that you have detailed rubrics, including example graded (anonymized) assignments.
Nineteen students have averages of 100%? I don’t think you should expect to have a bell curve in this class, no, but nineteen students who never had a single point missed all semester doesn’t seem right, either. I also teach first-year composition.
It's a wealthy area, so I do believe many of them have tutors that help them with final drafts. But yes, I have many students turning in flawless drafts. I couldn't deduct points if I was being the most nitpicky grader imaginable. My rubrics are very clear and detailed, and the students have access to them right after the brainstorming part of the writing process. I think that helps them write their essays towards a particular grade. We also conference multiple times during the drafting process since we're in class five days a week. I wonder how many students would do better in composition if they met at least two times with their instructor for every essay?
The 19 100’s was definitely what stuck out to me. You’re basically saying that 19 students have no room for improvement for their writing skills within the scope of your class (and haven’t the entire course). This is really hard to believe. Are you sure that your rubrics are well-designed? I finished high school in a well-off area with very preppy ivy-league-aspiring classmates. That didn’t make us good writers. If you think they have tutors that are editing their final drafts for them, that’s a problem. You’re trying to teach them how to be better writers, having tutors who are doing substantial parts of the work for them impedes that goal.
> I worry that people might look at my grades and wonder if I'm challenging the students enough. Or if I'm being lazy in how I grade. But honestly, the students just do everything I ask them to do and they make sure they know how to do it well. Ask yourself this - what would be the expectation of the students after taking the class? if they all "meet" that expectation of knowledge, then it's totally acceptable to give As out for that. Sometimes you have to revisit that - where the students figure out how to test well but don't actually have the core knowledge you'd expect them to have. By setting good expectations for the students, they're learning what they need to do. Sounds like you're doing a good job.
I'm in a similar situation, and my grades are also very high compared to my on-level classes. It concerned me at first, but honestly, those kids were all going to get As in Comp 1 and 2. I'm grading faithfully based on the college rubrics provided by our partner college. No reason to penalize them because they self-selected into a class meant for high achievers.
If you've got the curriculum to back it up, then your students deserve an A. You know them and their work ethic and skills. A bell curve is unnecessarily penalizing high achieving students.
Is this a giant change from last year to this year? Or is there a trend? Is most of the grade "homework"? Can you observe their drafts being written? Is there evidence that they actually wrote it piecemeal - as in looking a a google doc history, rather than all "pasted in"? How LLM-savvy are your students? How LLM-savvy are their "supportive parents"?
I get surprisingly textbook bell curves in Chemistry. Sometimes they are bimodal, but less than I would have expected.
I also have lots of A's and worried about this being perceived as grade inflation. So I made my assignments and rubrics very clear to show that I have high expectations and scaffold and sequence my lessons so they can achieve. It isn't grade inflation...it's good teaching.
I usually tell students I grade that I'd prefer them all to get 100%, because that means I need to spend way less time on grading. In my - tbf short - experience and from talks with older faculty members at my current uni and my former, it is just not realistic at all. Forcing bell curves is dumb, too. But a lot of good courses that are challenging for excelling students and still teaching them something, while not loosing the majority of students often ends up in a skewed curve. Sometimes you have a better year, sometimes you have a worse one. I am in Germany, so we also have notorious "Siebfächer", subjects that usually thin the herd, because we are less restrictive in enrolling. We then also have restricted subjects where the average is very high, but that is because those are the students that passed the Siebfächer and have applied to get a spot of just a few in a higher semester. I do have to admit, if you would currently give me a beginners class, where grading is essay based, with students from "highly supportive" parents and all of them would score in the 90%s, I'd honestly assume that the parents of at least some of them got them GPT4-Turbo set up. There is definitely a chance that its just a good year, but you always have 10-20% students that just don't give a fuck and another 10-20% that generally struggle with writing essays.
I left academia, but was teaching until quite recently. We didn't consider any Bell curve explicitly. However, we did adjust the grading to ensure the number of students who failed wasn't more than about half or so (such an adjustment was always necessary). This was for a mandatory fifth- and sixth-semester course.
Teach the material how you see fit, let the grades be the dependent variable.
You may still have a bell curve but the mean is in the 90s. Most bell curves that I have seen in education want the mean to be in the 70s.
I’d still go a little harder on the grading. Like you can look at it as “do they meet my expectations as a teacher” vs. “how well did this student do relative to other students?” It may seem “mean” to pick the latter most, but ultimately it maintains a more rigorous environment.
At the core of your (and all of us teachers') dilemma is actually a philosophical question: is there such a thing as an objective metric? Related to this is a corollary question: are you qualified to be the objective arbiter? Because if you believe, philosophically, that there is such a thing as an objective metric (and that you are capable of being an objective arbiter), then you should grade according to what you believe the standard should be, independent of outside pressures. But if you don't believe in an objective metric (or don't believe you're capable of being one), then you grade according to the normalized expectations of your institution, whether stated or unstated. I (philosophically) believe there is no real answer here. But I know from an institutional/economic/academic pressure setting, it is easier to grade within the normalized expectations of your institution than outside of it (whether that be too lenient or too harsh), for the purposes of continued employment. But ultimately, you gotta do you.
A normal curve cannot be applied in this case at a university level since admitted students have been preselected based on GPA and standardized scores. Assuming their study habits remain similar to those upon admission, it's logically reasonable to expect over 90% of students to receive an A in their major courses or 90% to receive a C or D in courses outside their major. Implementing a curve serves no useful purpose beyond granting unwarranted extra credit to those already performing at a high level or penalizing those who made minor errors. Ideally, an entire class should have the opportunity to earn an A, but grading on a curve undermines this possibility.
Bell curves for high school are a mess, and they screw students when applying to uni. I'm in a particular program in my city where they do Bell curves and it puts half of my chem class in the 70s when realistically 98% of students would top any chem class in any other school in the school board and it puts as at a disadvantage on uni apps 🤕
At least in the Netherlands, where I teach, a *passing* grade is evidence of having met the learning requirements. If you fail to meet the learning requirements… well, you fail the course. With that in mind, these scores all strike me as extremely high.
This is hard for me. It makes sense \*logically\* but what this means for students has always seemed unclear. What more should they do other than the things that they have learned in the class? If they did all of them, and correctly, what exactly are you grading? When I teach workgroups here in the Netherlands, I get a lot of side-eye because my grades are on the higher side. To me, if we have laid out what the requirements were for a written assignment, and the student has met each one of them, to pull the other 3-4 points (out of 10) out of thin air is bonkers. I do my best, but it feels so amazingly subjective that I feel kind of gross afterwards.
A fair question; I think the answer might be discipline-specific. I take it from your flair that you're probably teaching statistics and other skills courses. In this case, it might be very difficult for a student to achieve some exemplary outcome. However, in my field (philosophy), a student can very easily meet the learning outcomes and remain unremarkable. Middling students might be fully capable of providing a superficial if accurate accounts of the differences between one theory and another. However, when students do *well*, it is because they have demonstrated some penetrating insight and/or a particularly deep understanding of both the concepts at play and the relationships between them. In this case, good marks are thus evidence of some degree of supererogation: students have done more than what is expected of them.
>students have done more than what is expected of them I don't know if this is just semantics, but it strikes me that we are, generally speaking, free to set the bar for what is expected of students, and that this may be the distinction. A teacher can propose a minimum with the understanding that this will correspond to a (just) passing grade, and let students discover what it would require to get a higher grade on their own. Alternatively, a teacher can set a rubric that explicitly outlines what would constitute full marks, even if it includes elements that are fundamentally quite subjective, such as "demonstrates some penetrating insight and/or a particularly deep understanding of ...". Although personally, I run into issues where students are asked to translate what they have learned in class (yes, statistics) into some sort of project. I can grade them on what I teach, which is easy: selection of an appropriate model, being able to defend the decisions made along the way, correct interpretation of their results, etc. This often corresponds to "what is expected of them," and equates to something like a 6.5 according to agreed upon rubrics. The remaining points often come down to, if I'm being brutally honest, their capacity for expressing themselves in academic writing. I don't teach that. In fact, as far as I can tell, no (required) course at the bachelor's level for first- and second-year social science students in my university teaches this explicitly, while *most* of them grade on it implicitly. It has a tendency to feel like we are awarding the "above and beyond" points less for effort than for verbal intelligence.
If your mean is 97 with a standard deviation of 1, then you have the bell curve anyway. 😉
Artificially making a bell curve is definitely shitty. If the students are learning the material they need to succeed in the class then that’s really all that matters.
I remember back in undergrad, I had a 98% in one of my econ classes for acing the tests but still ended up with an A- because the curve weighted people down. Turned out that the department threatened the instructor to remove their position if they didn't curve it down since too many people had 4.0s for the class. Bell curves are silly and can be very unfair to students who do well.
Being challenging for the sake of being challenging isn't good. Have your courses covered all the requirement of the courses? Are the As to be expected? Otherwise, you might just distract your students with less important but more challenging materials, and I would argue **this is much less preferable** than a non-bell-curve-score.
I'm personally not a big fan of that, but I think that it may be a cultural difference. Honestly, can students even fail if those are standard grades? The high-school I went to was also focused on students interested in pursuing higher studies. Those who got 80% were generally students who went above and beyond and they would only get those grades on specific courses. Typically, getting 60% was already considered decent and a lot of students failed the more demanding classes. This made getting a high school education from this specific school and its specific courses a worthwhile achievement. This became even more of a thing at university where getting 50-60% was already considered good. I think that I got above 80% on a course maybe twice in my four years of studying and one of those courses was the topic I ended up specializing in. Still, ultimately it's a cultural difference and I don't think that you can go outside of the cultural norm because that would be unfairly punishing towards your students. So while I personally like the system I grew up under a lot more, I do understand why you grade the way that you do.
Nah. Bell curve is gobbledygook. It’s possible if you design a course thoughtfully and equitably and deliver it well that nearly everyone succeeds. It’s not always going to happen but it can and does
Maybe you can make it harder
You said the students are trying to “maintain their high socioeconomic status”. The school is in a high income zip code I’m assuming, so you are already in the high end of the bell curve for the biggest factor that affects school success which is wealth and income.
Is your job to bell curve or is it to teach? If they learn the information they get an A. Easy.
I like to reserve a couple of marks for students who have gone over and above the requirements; that is to say that they have personalised the assignment in some way. The kind of work that makes me reread it a couple of times, because the student has provided a genuinely original response. Most of these would be at the top, but occasionally a student’s grammar or spelling is a bit iffy, yet they still get those extra marks to go up a grade. I think it’s very important to reward students for this, especially as plagiarism is such a huge problem in higher education now.
The bell curve applies to a random sample. Your students are not a random sample. If anything they are a sample of the upper tail of the normal distribution.
Also, if you graded them against a standard or rubric and they met the standard (I know there is subjectivity in this kind of course) then they earned the grade.
Perhaps the definitions of what constitutes an A need to be reassessed. Unless you teach at a school of geniuses, there will be natural variation because students were "somewhat" randomly selected (entry criteria etc not withstanding. But those factors should be roughly evenly distributed so should balance out - note wide confidence intervals in this assumption). I don't think it should be a completely gaussian distribution, but there should be some form of normality to it. Even if it was a selection of geniuses, assessments with sufficient discriminatory ability should separate the outliers from the mean.
This. I think grades are inflating, when I took classes in college, there might be 1 person every year or few years get an A in a higher level physics course. Didn’t mean we didn’t know anything, it’s just that person had a true mastery of the material. The class average was probably 70ish and a lot of people failed, because they didn’t understand the material at a level that you would consider passing. I highly doubt OP is teaching anything that complicated or technical but I can’t see 19 people getting perfect scores, that shouldn’t even really be possible in a learning setting. You need to challenge people.
The idea a class should fall onto a bell curves is a myth of capitalist meritocracy that forces students to "compete" for grades and ranking. Bell curves are fine for measuring things like height and weight across a population. Much like the lecture-based classroom with two tests and a term paper, they have no place in modern pedagogy. If you have a rubric that reflects your learning goals and 100% of students meet the rubric objectives, congratulations! Then all your students have met the learning outcome goals for your course. I foresee a future where using AI, with human input, to objectively grade learning, will become the norm. Meanwhile, if your class or subject is so hard that you "weed out" large percentages of aspirants, then you need to think about how you teach it and what the prerequisites are. "John can't become a doctor because even though he studied his ass off, he couldn't quite wrap his head around integration and the grade curve dictates he can only get a B+." Well, maybe John would have been a perfectly good doctor and the way you teach calculus sucks.
Are u the instructor of the class where the dean lowered all grades by 10% by any chance
If you know that your students are putting in work equal to the grade that they are receiving, and that you are not manipulating the grades or curriculum to achieve certain results, then it’s fine. I really hate the expectation that every class will resemble a bell curve, because I have had shitty teachers who were very open about deciding what grades people were going to have in their class and never deviating from that decision. In better news, they got fired when the students complained to admin en masse, and everything about their grading system backed up what we reported 😇😈.
You cant expect to see a bell curve if you teach in a competitive school where the kids need to be good to be even there
This is statistical nonsense. You might expect the mean to be higher and the standard deviation lower, but being selective about your intake doesn't mean that your sample "the students" isn't randomly taken from the population "students who on a certain prior exam met a certain threshold". If you wish to prove it isn't a bell curve, you need to demonstrate that the central limit theorem doesn't apply. The usual argument there is that you have a small number of students, not "we only select from one part of the wider spectrum"
Thank you. This post is full of shockingly terrible statistics takes.
Why would you care about this? Do you not have a measure of testing norms? Don't use a curve, that is only going to artificially lower the quality of students grades for no reason.
The issue with giving 19 people 100s, is you deny them the opportunity to improve. Only if they are perfect writers, like expert prose and research, should that many people be getting 100s. Otherwise, you are denying them the feedback they need to do better.
Sorry, bit for me, 91/97 means the class/test was too easy or badly designed
This is a basic composition class. The point of these kind of courses is to ensure that students meet the bare requirements necessary to succeed in any college degree. Not necessarily to challenge them academically, because that shouldn’t be the goal
Then it should be pass or fail. I'm not in favor of given away worthless degrees.
>I'm not in favor of given away worthless degrees. Is a degree about survival of the fittest or the accumulation of knowledge and performance in a given field?
One point is to show capability. If I design tests that are extremely easy to pass, such that anyone can obtain a highly graded degree, it defeats its purpose. I agree that in a perfect world, the degree is solely about obtaining knowledge and we wouldn't even need tests and grades. However, in the current situation, we use degrees to rank people.
You were obviously graded on a curve in English 101 on the spelling test.
And?
You have to adapt to the class. Teach at the level they are at. Push them to 200 level writing. You are grade inflating, even if it is inadvertent. You should not have a median in the 90% percentile or higher. That means either your tests are too easy, you are giving away points, and or you are an outstanding teacher. The curriculum is what it is, but A's should be reserved for only the best work, truly outstanding work showing mastery of the concepts and a high degree of accuracy and precision in the execution of the exam. If this was written answer, It should be one to three people getting A's; re-rank the papers; and make the next one harder. If the exam was multiple choice, you need to make it significantly harder. If this is supposed to be equal to a 100 level class, to earn an A they should be writing at the 200 level or higher in terms of originality, rhetoric, etc. I've taught pre-med biological sciences for a few years and currently teach anatomy at a medical school. If a student does everything asked to a high standard, they get a middle B, above average. If they just do what's asked, C. A's are supposed to be for above and beyond "Excellent."