Kinda the opposite, but I took a physics exam once where everyone else did so badly that when the professor curved the exam grades mine went up to 114%. Still not quite sure how I managed that.
I once faced the anger of my entire class because my Inability to pay attention to lessons meant i was the only one that knew how to brute force reverse engineer formulas using the fancy calculator and oblivious to the fact the teacher had forgotten to teach that specific material.
My Imposter syndrome peaked when we got the test and teacher pointed at me directly as proof we had covered the material.
I never really understand what the point of grading on an average is. An individual’s ability isn’t measured against everyone else’s ability is measured against the test. So then to take that and change the grade to something else based on what is essentially arbitrary doesn’t seem to have any point except to make it look like more people passed than didn’t.
A class of 200 students performing much worse than the last class is very unlikely. 200 Students is enough to make even small differences statistically significant.
A single test being much harder than the last test is much more likely, since it isn’t an averahe of 200, it’s a single datapoint.
That’s why if this semester’s class performed much worse than last semester’s, you can assume it’s because of the test, not the students.
Or when there are 1000 students over multiple classes getting 5 different versions of the test (to make looking over someone’s shoulder more difficult.)
If one of those has a significantly lower average it’s more likely it just had a few badly worded questions than that those 200 randomly picked students are all bad at the given subject.
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Yeah, that’s unfair.
I’m okay with scaling grades up because that implies either the test or instruction was bad, and the curve accounts for that. Going the other way unfairly punishes things like misreading questions.
Or more likely, instruction was lacking and didn’t cover the material on the test properly.
Not unlikely enough, even something as simple as more students studying harder between years would mean the next set of average students drop in score despite the same performance.
Grading on a curve is always unfair when the grade carries forward and isn’t just for a one-off application. More unfair when classes are smaller and student cohorts differ.
It wasn’t a regular thing in my class; the professor just realized he had screwed up and made the exam way too difficult. I agree that doing it for every exam is a bad idea.
Most professors don’t have the time or desire to actually make a good test so the curve is a way to compensate for the poor test. There is more pressure in the current day to also pass more than may deserve it as well.
Your prof curved to the third quartile. Interesting.
Yeah it was originally 20 points, but the highest score aside from mine was 17.5, so he changed it to 17.5. Putting my score at 20/17.5. :D
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Were you in Hogwarts?
Got 4% on my first (and only) calc midterm. I statistically should have gotten a better grade by randomly picking multiple choice questions and leaving everything else blank… Sadly it didn’t provide anything to the rest of my class and I had actually studied for it.
Your calc exam was multiple choice?
They say leave the rest blank, so there was some multiple choice questions, which is fairly normal. Well, at least I think it is, all the maths tests ive done have had at least a few multiple choice qs (UK)
Well not the whole thing. Maybe a third of the questions or something like that.
Depending on the question, many answers in calculus are:
- 1
- 2
- 0
- invalid
This is especially true if they don’t let you have a calculator.
This is especially true if they don’t let you have a calculator.
Maybe I’m old and come from a time before calculators could do integrals and derivatives, but I never needed a calculator for calculus as it would not have helped in any way.
And I don’t think there being four possible answers that come up frequently is a reason to make a calculus test multiple choice. What about partial credit? If you show all of your work, but make a small error at the end and get the wrong answer, you’re just fucked I guess? That’s dumb. Not a great way to teach.
Statistically an outlier like that shouldn’t count.
Yep. Should have used q2/median
For anyone who wants to repeat OP’s experience:
Also I once scored a 3 out of 200 on a final exam and failed the fuck out of a class.
I will never understand churros. Chocolate or cream stuffed churros? Sure, that’s a mini hot ice cream pocket. But churros by themselves? Maybe the first 20 seconds after they’re cooked they taste alright, but anything after is like eating granulated sugar on styrofoam
You’ve hit the nail on the head.
There’s precisely a 3 minute window of time, between the churro being the temperature of the sun and it being unpleasantly cold, where they’re good.
Also it must always be served with the chocolate sauce, even in the window they’re a bit lacking without
I just feel like anything that needs granulated sugar (not even powdered sugar, how lazy is that!) added to its surface probably doesn’t taste that good in of itself.
Prime example are jam donuts. If the dough is good and the jam inside is good, then it’s a good donut. If you have to sprinkle literal sugar on it’s skin, then you can bet your ass that the dough is bland and they skimmed on the jam
Maybe the first 20 seconds after they’re cooked
Yup.
Well, to be fair, OP did smoke weed and ate churros, so that might have influenced how OP could eat so many churros.
Listened to a podcast yesterday where the lesson was don’t procrastinate except when it helps you because someone else implements the solution for you. Same vibes.
Mean vs median.
Math prof ought to know better than to include outliers.
Maths prof, not statistics prof.
They are the ones who introduce this topic, don’t need to be an expert to active few brain cells.
True self-sacrifice.
