A significant proportion of my time this week has been devoted to This trick should work whether you grade on a true curve or straight scale, but because I only use a straight scale myself, I shall assume y'all are using a straight scale too. Here is the golden rule of grading: never let the students know what scale you are using.
"But Angry Professor!" you protest. "It isn't fair to hide your grading scale from your students! How will they know how well they need to do to get an A?" Go ahead and give them a scale, of course, but make sure the scale is stricter than the one you really use.
So suppose you tell the students they need 91% or better for an A, 81% or better for a B, etc. It is important to maintain this fiction throughout the quarter/semester. If the student shows up during your office hours and asks you how well he is doing (and you feel so inclined), compute his grade, make a big show of pulling out the syllabus and looking up the scale, and tell him that you're very sorry but it looks like, with a 70% going into the final, you see no way that he could do better than a C as a final grade, and only then if he works very hard and aces the final. The student will leave in tears, and sit in the front row staring at you with puppy-dog eyes for the remaining two days of class.
When it comes time for determining final grades, toss that syllabus in the trash. Pull out your double-super-secret scale which differs from the syllabus in that the grade boundaries are at least a point or two below the boundaries in the syllabus. Puppy-dog eyes, who studied his ass off and aced the final, gets a B-! Imagine how happy he is!
But here's the best part: Suppose your cutoff for a D- is 57, and Lori Loser finishes up with a 56.99. Guess what she gets? An F. You don't have to agonize about it and she doesn't ever know that she was only .01 percentage points from a D-. A computer can assign the final grades for you and you can walk away without wasting precious minutes of your life struggling with the decision to bump her up or not.
I find it is important not to release the letter grade before you ship in those final grades, but only let the students see the final percentage. Then they have to pull out their syllabi and figure out what they're going to get, further reinforcing those high boundaries. If what comes back on their report card is higher than they expect, they're very happy. All those students more than two points from the boundary see their expectations matched in their report card, and of course they are too far from the boundary to legitimately launch a grade appeal.
It is noteworthy that in the 15 years that I have used this sort of strategy I have never had a single student ask me for a bump up to the next letter grade -- at least not on the basis of how close he came to it. (I have, however, had students ask me for the ridiculous: "I got an F but I need a B- to graduate so would you please?") It is also noteworthy that not a single student has come back to tell me that I made a mistake and gave a grade higher than he deserved.
13 comments:
Your students are far better at math than mine were.
A student complained on RMP about me that s/he was failing the entire semester but somehow, mysteriously, managed to get a C.
The idiot was innumerate and didn't understand the grading scale on the syllabus. That's the *ONLY* explanation.
But your advice about "wiggle room" on the scale is wisdom I learned years ago. It's golden. As is the mystery "participation" grade, which allows one to fudge grades by a few points up or down at the very end.
My syllabus also says, "All fractional points will be rounded down."
Good advice.
Here's mine: in classes where the boundaries aren't so sharp and delineated, never give plusses. B+, C+, and D+ are just invitations to grade grubbers to come ask/beg/plead/appeal for an A-, B-, or D-.
I've given up on B+, C+, and D+.
A further refinement - Instead of grading on a 100 point scale, simply multiply everything by 10 and present your grading scheme based on 1000 points.
So, instead of 3 exams counting for 20% each, they become 3 exams counting for 200 points each (out of 1000). For some reason, a student missing the cutoff by 15 points out of `1000 appears to them to be much greater than 1.5 points out of 100. Then, add your 1-2% curve (which become 1 10-20 point curve).
This becomes more important if your school grades on a +/- basis, since on a +/- system, there are 3x as many breakpoints.
Since taking this approach, I haven't had a single student tying to whine to me about bumping up their grade.
Unlike dr. k, I love the plus grades, as it enables me to "reward improvement" without bumping them up to a higher grade they don't deserve. But then, my institution does not give minuses on final grades (I do use them on assignments).
I do something similar, when I have a particularly over-entitled student.
Since I mark questions on an exam by 'subtracting' points from the total for the question, rather than 'giving' points. When I have a grade grubber I total up their accurate marks on a separate paper and randomly subtract a few extra points here and there from the more complex questions on the exam itself.
When all the grades from all the questions are added up, it looks like I made a mistake in the student's favour and they never come to get it corrected. But they actually get the grade they earned.
I aways felt bad about the deception, but I have only done it to particularly annoying and overly entitled snowflakes.
I do something similar, but I have a tendency to tip my hand to individual students and sometimes to whole classes: unless it throws things way out of whack, I use the highest raw score in class as 100%. Usually it raises everyone's scores by a few points, and it acknowledges that nobody ever really gets 100% in my classes: students seem to respond quite well, and it lets me use a fairly rigorous absolute quality grading system on essays without completely trashing people's final results.
There have been classes where the top score was far enough from 100% that it raised clearly undeserving students into absurdly high grades. So I do something more like AP's system.
Is grade grubbing a relatively new phenom?
Granted I am a litte long in the tooth, but I cannot imagine going back to a prof and asking for a grade change.
Yep. And I have in my syllabus: "emails and communications which ask for a a particular grade or a higher grade for graduation, probation, etc. will be considered an attempt to artificially inflate your grade. This is cheating. Cheating is against the academic honesty policy of this course, and you will receive a grade of "F". If your grade is of importance to you, you should strive to maintain your grade throughout the semester."
It has dramatically reduced those annoying "But I need this to graduate!" emails.
Do you think your method results in your getting lower evaluations from the students as they think they are getting lower grades? Not, of course, that their grades and how they evaluate us is related...
You are all a bunch of condescending assholes. Now that I've got that out of the way, let me explain.
Obviously these students are willing to put in more effort to get a better grade, so why not let them put in more effort? Maybe let them turn in some extra special assignments?
The problem with professors is that they really suck at teaching, which in my opinion and in my experience, is the single biggest reason why not every student is able to get an A. I had some very good teachers in highschool who utterly surpass any instruction I received in college(as evidence I cite the fact that many of my classmates and I earned a score of '5' on the AP physics exam). I'm more of a science person, but I had excellent English teachers as well.
I think they really cared about us as individuals, which should be a prerequisite to accepting students. In fact, if I were a teacher I would think of each of my students as an apprentice rather than a student. The word 'student' has developed an impersonal and uncaring connotation in my mind over time as I've been more exposed to the educational system.
In highschool it was possible to study the teacher's notes, memorize them and apply them to the quizes and exams. But when I went to college(UCLA if you must know) it was complete chaos. The notes were complete crap and in most cases were irrelevant to the exams.
Note to teachers: if the average score on your exam is 40% then you suck at being a teacher. And sadly I've seen much lower averages then that.
Wow Bertrand, you've opened my eyes! Thank goodness for you and your insightful comments. UCLA? Color me impressed! 5 on the AP Physics? Bend me over and fuck me silly! Time for me to return my Ph.D. You are truly in possession of everything needed to understand and evaluate those who strive to teach you things. Study the teacher's notes? Memorize and apply them to exams? Man- that's pedagogical gold. That's what it's all about, Bertrand. You've got it all figured out.
It's great students like you, students who know it all (by memorizing notes of course), who have seen it all (average scores much lower than 40%?!?! do tell!), that make our day - that make us keep doing what we're doing.
Bertrand--I hope you're capable of recognising sarcasm.
What the heck makes you a more qualified analyzer of the teaching ability of University professors than anyone else? If you wanted a good and more personal education you would've been better off at a small Liberal Arts College. And at least some of those English teachers would've been on the University level.
You must be one of those overly-entitled students whose parents agreed to whatever you wanted. You sure as heck sound like one, especially since you remark upon how easy it is to get an A. As for where you went to college, nobody asked, and nobody would have either. You have no comprehension or empathy for the lives of people outside of your community, and I doubt you care about them either.
I have a father who is a Ph.d. and who is an absolutely wonderful teacher--and a far better conversationalist than you.
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