Anon studies Organic Chemistry

i've had professors that moved the passing grade based on how many where in the course. 100 people? if you make a single mistake you're out. he also bragged about this from the start.

i passed by waiting until most of the others left or passed.

It’s like they didn’t even try to make the story plausible.

Yeah, I studied and taught in STEM. There are true stories about professors who are monsters, but this is pure bullshit.

Professors don't work like that.

They do in conservatives' anti-intellectual fantasies
- Bullshit. I am one.
Yup, they have their TAs grade exams and grade on a curve so only a fixed percent passes.
- With the amount of tests I had where I was the highest grade at ~60% and still got the equivalent of a D, I would have loved some of this curve you guys keep talking about.
- I don't think the curve goes the other way tho. If everyone for above an 80 or so that doesn't mean 80 becomes a failing grade. Although tbh I'm not sure about that because I don't think I ever participated in an exam that had that happen.
- Exactly. OP described a very different process.

This is so fake that we managed to reach the {fake + gay} threshold without having to tap into the gay potential

anon waits until all the other students leave
asks the professor what he can "do" to pass
this is a classic porn script, gay/10
"gay potential" sounds like the cutest physics term.
- Gay potential is measured in homos
Um, the text is green, so it is clearly the unvarnished truth
- Clearly unvarnished. Left exposed to the elements to corrode

My first introduction to this bullshit was calculus. Teacher bragged about only passing halve his students. Like my man... that ain't the brag you think it's is 1, 2 this is a fucking prereq for the vast vast majority of us!

Yeah, when a prof or teacher says "my course is so hard, only a few people pass" then I immediately translate that to "I am a shit teacher".
So long as you do the work and aren't a lazy ass student, you should have a decent pass.
- Only exception I have seen was when the professor was kind of a troll. He was a good teacher. This was in a pretty entry level physics class at a tech school, so we basically got a high school level physics as a pre-req for our degree in whatever 2 year program we were in.
  He spent the week leading up to the first big test talking about how hard it was, how people needed to take it seriously, etc.
  He handed out the grades after and everyone was visibly upset, nobody had a passing grade. Then he explained, after letting us freak out for a minute, that the score at the top was out of 50, not 100 and I think everyone passed
  After that the class pretty fun.
State Universities lovee failing a student in an entry- level course, because the state will subsidize tuition twice for a given class per student.
They don't like doing it a second time because the student has to pay full tuition, and when classes triple in price they're more likely to drop.

This probably didn't actually happen, but I did have a physics class in college where we had an exam where the highest score was 35%, so it was graded on an absurd curve

My calc I class in college had a 23% average on the first exam. Later ones made it into the high 30%s. The professor was terrible, but since I had already taken calc in high school and he graded on a curve it was a breeze.
The main problem was that he would test for the stuff we had not covered yet because he "wanted people to work ahead."
- Now that's an asshole move.
- “wanted people to work ahead”
  Ah yes “not fucking doing my job that people are taking loans out for and pay off for years to come”
  Fuck that “professor.” A college degree is an overpriced commodity and they are falsely charging students by not teaching them the course
- It's fine to give points for "extra work", but the regular work should give you a passing grade at least. The extra work should maybe give you the difference between a 6 or an 8.
Grading on a curve is always absurd to me: it's a cop out for teachers who don't know how to set curriculum/exams properly and demeans the education process.
Should just be
here's a list of things you learn in this class
you demonstrate understanding and skill over about 60% of that list
you get a grade of 60%
- While I mostly agree with you, the grading on a curve idea comes from two factors On one hand, the idea that knowing some topics very well can absolve you from knowing other topics at a sufficient level. On the other, people making the exercises for the exams are experts and can easily overlook the hidden difficulties of an exercise. So it happens way too often that a professor would think “this exercise is super easy” and miss that it uses concepts from other courses the students are not super familiar yet.
I had a Chem class where the prof opened with "my goal is to fail as many Engineers as possible". The average on the final was 27%. Luckly some important admistrator in the Eng department's kid was in one of those classes and they got the tenured professor fired.
That seems so low that it makes the benefit of the class dubious. Can you really say you're making good use of the students' time when it's clear none of them are understanding the material? Maybe the material needs to be broken up into more digestible chunks.
- It's also possible to just write a bad question/exam and recognize you need to do better as a professor.
  I had a physics professor who graded himself on whether or not he wrote/taught well by the grade distribution. He was always transparent about it and had benchmarks of how it went previous years. He was also one of the most sought after professors.
  I also had s philosophy class where the best grade over the entire semester was a 30 and the professor was like yeah this is just expected. You get an A. This guy obviously derived enjoyment from not being a good teacher and for humiliating his students that they really knew nothing about philosophy. That guy sucked.
- Eh, I had a physics class like this and the test questions had so many moving pieces that missing one would give you the wrong answer, even if you remembered all the formulas and otherwise did the problem correctly. So getting 1/4 right was actually pretty good in the stressful environment of the testing center. And there were only like 4 problems anyway, and you'd get partial credit, so a 30-40% meant you probably got one right and had the right approach on the others. You also don't get full credit unless you show all your work, so even a savant probably wouldn't get 100%.
Had a similar thing happen in an intro geology course. Highest grade on the final was 41%, my grade. I got an A in the class. I do not understand why anyone would make an intro to geology course that difficult. Very few are going into the field. Most just needed an extra science course, like myself.
I was a physics major, and the whole department was famous for this. I think it's just lazy. They don't make the test for what they actually taught, they just throw shit against the wall and see what sticks.
- That's pretty common for math heavy classes, the tests are ridiculous and they grade on a curve.
I knew someone who had to pass a class where the failure rate was 85%. The worst part is this was only one of a few of these classes. She was studying physics, and even though I really don't want anything to do with her now for unrelated reasons, I still feel bad for her.
It would never happen as described in this post, but things like this are way more common than people think.
I still remember teaching >3 people a subject, because they asked me to, and then we all did the exam and I was the one who failed it. Now I'm, not error-proof but that's kind of ridiculous. I have experienced a truckload of these things but that one illustrates very well how random and/or unfit for purpose most exams are. It's like a coin flip +/- 5% depending on the depths of your studies beforehand.
My 3 terms of intro to o physics were like this. The mechanical engineers that suffered through statics couldn't even bring the curve up too much.
Even with that, it I didn't have two friends in those classes I never would have passed.

I love the correction system we have at my university. All the exams are pseudonymized with a sticker you receive during the exam and scanned after completion. About 10 to 30 people are involved in correcting the exams for one course. We don't know who the exams belong to as we only see the scanned version on our tablet or computer. Each task is corrected by a different set of people. We can select to see only a single task or subtask to streamline the process of correction, too. Furthermore, all the tasks are checked twice independently. Once done, the system can assign the exams back to the students. I love how it's fair and "anonymous" by design.

Wait... are there universities that don't have an anonymous exam system?
- In early 2010s I had a TA give me an A without grading. When I confronted him he said "Why do you care, you know you're getting an A anyways?" Lol. He got reprimanded though.
- I have never heard of this in my life, and I have no idea if my school does that. US student if that matters. I've either done exams online (but logged in), in person, or just had a final project that served as an exam. Hell, even popular HS exams like the PSAT and ACT should have our names on them, as far as I remember. Like maybe when they grade them via scantron they don't see it, but idk.
- Probably. We have a system where you only need to write your student id number but often people also write their names since it makes kt easier to find your exam when going to see what you did right and wrong.
i think multiple-choice-exams are even better because they're corrected by a machine by scanning the checkboxes and saying either "yes" or "no". it's 100% fair and also really effective.
where applicable
- Multiple choice often fails to allow full demonstration of understanding, and especially at college level, that matters much more.
- I had so many horrible multiple choice tests where the number of correct answers was stated and I was 100% sure that that wasn't correct, but there was no room for additional remarks to explain my thoughts.
- Our exam system supports multiple choice and, indeed, collecting that part automatically. (We can still go through the boxes recognized as tick or blank en-masse to check for recognition mistakes.) However, they're only allowed to make up 20% of an exam according to university-wide rules.

suuuuurree

This post doesn't pass peer review

If the story was about peer review it would probably be more believable. No way a professor does that to a fee paying student less still admits it to them. But do it to a competing prof where they are anonymous... Much more tempting.

organic chem(for life science majors, the one for scientists is more harder) was brutal in my CC, surprisingly, and i found out they made stem courses extremely ivy league level on purpose, because a UC said so or they wont accept transfer students with an "easy grade" i think its bs to keep students perpetually in the school to continue paying for admission.

I keep reading about people grading on a curve and I still can't grasp what that means. Do those teachers have like a set number of A B C, or whatever, they can give out? And if they've run out of A then you get a B? And if the B run out you get a C and so on? That seems a completely intellectually bankrupt practice! If you don't want more than X people passing, then just grade people with percentages and let only the first X highest through and that's it, but don't lie with fake grades! How insane...

basically that, yes.
though in my experience, they'd make the tests so hard that everyone would get failing or nearly failing grades, then curve up so that more people pass and some get As
only issue for them is if the average is 36% but 3 students got high 90s.. makes the curving math a lot more awkward
Wait until you hear that universities are just literal paywalls to seperate social classes so poor people can’t get good jobs that once were apprenticeships.
- I mean, not the whole world is the US. Plus, at this point you'll get a better paying job if you go into trades.
- That's not fair, they're also debt slavery scams where they sell false hope to people. They even have entire military boot camp lite night release prisons where they brainwash you into going
- I assure you that's not how it works in Europe. Nowhere near as bad as the US, in any case.
  I guess that's what happens when education is deeply ingrained in the culture.
- Yeah there are plenty of degrees that shouldn't really be an area of study at university. But there are plenty that justify it as well
- That's a pretty jaded way of thinking about it.
  Universities don't exist to train you for a job, they exist to teach you how to learn. That's why you take a bunch of seemingly irrelevant classes, such as history, science, and English before you get into your specialization. Basically, half your education is unrelated to your specialty, and much of the rest is theoretical since you're expected to learn what you actually need in the field.
  At the end of the day, most jobs don't require formal education and they're happy with practical experience. But most companies won't hire you wlfornyour first job without some indication you know what you're doing, and companies trust university degrees as that form of evidence. After your first couple jobs, they really don't care as much about your formal education.
  There are other ways to get that experience, they're just a lot harder than going through formal education. I've hired self taught people that have been fantastic, it's just a lot harder to prove yourself.
  That said, I wish there was a better way to tell kids what other options are. Everyone seems so focused on traditional university education that they don't consider alternatives.
In Delft, corrections of the curve are only ever used upwards, in case the passing rate is very low. If everyone completes the test without mistakes everyone gets a 10.
- This was my experience at a US university as well.
At my uni they'd take the highest grade of the class and reset that as the max points and grade from there.
So if max points on an exam was 120 and no-one scored higher then an 85, then an 85 would be an A, 75 a B, etc.
I'm a mediocre student but an amazing test taker and used to compete on math teams. So some of the math heavy engineering courses I would get perfect exam scores and sometimes the prof would ignore me as the highest grade. I was frustrated at first because my A didn't mean the same as someone's but I realized later it was to stop me from getting beat up by a bunch of 30 yo guys.
- I still think the ABCDF system sounds so... childish? But presented like that I can see how it makes sense. I always thought about more absolute systems as more, eh, honest? More of an absolute value of our worth, but in truth it depends completely on our teachers, so it's not really any "truer" than the letter system. Just a different bias.
  I'm glad there are so many interesting answers in this thread :)
Grading on a curve is indeed that, and it should be criminalized because of how much it harms students
- How does it harm students? A curve is only used if the grade distribution is below expectations. All it does is cover for a bad test or something.
It's only ever worked to the benefit of the student in my experience
The curve means the class's scores is fit onto a bell curve. X% pass, Y% fail, etc all according to the predetermined standard bell curve. Doesn't matter if the class is full of Einsteins or dunces. If 30% is the highest mark in the class then that's an A+, and so on.
- Usually if everyone gets high scores, a curve isn't used. The curve is only used if most people score poorly to make up for a bad exam or something.

You forgot to fuck the professor.
Dean time!

I hope you were smart enough to record that interaction, anon.

My major in college for my BS included all but 2 credit hours of a physics minor, so my final semester, I took Thermal Physics to complete that minor. I've never met a physics course I didn't ace, so I figured "easy A".

I'm quite certain I was the highest scorer in the course and was a solid B+ before the final. I took the final and felt really good about how well I did. I thought sure that professor would curve (or otherwise adjust the grades) and I'd be the one that threw off the curve.

I got my grades back. I got a C. My only C ever, in fact. An A (what I expected) would have gotten me summa cum laude.

The same semester, I took a statistics class. Paid exactly zero attention in class. The class took place in a computer lab for no good reason other than I'm guessing the other classrooms were booked. I played a fast-paced Quake-like FPS every class all class. Got an A in that course.

But that fuckin' thermal physics class.

Years later, a coworker of mine who was an alum of my alma mater told me that they'd taken the professor who taught that thermal physics class off of teaching permanently due to his completely unreasonable grading practices.

I remember that my statistics professor was so smug about grading on a curve because it was using statistics. It was also a class that he gloated about as a class where you "needed an a" if you wanted to get into grad school. In other words, the asshole was making sure only a certain number of people even had a chance to get into the graduate programs. It was rumored that he even ran tests on students in the different labs, telling the grad students teaching the labs to teach in certain ways and seeing if there were any differences. Wouldn't put it past him.

I have had teachers try to grade on a strict bell curve distribution, but if your goal as a school is to accept promising talent then train them better you should expect your students to fall within a part of a bell curve and not spread across the whole damn thing.

Sorry, can't pass you cause my morals oblige me to give 2 As, and 2Fs, and I'm all out of everything but FS (no matter how many points you were away from someone with a better final grade).

Anon is just making a fake post. Literally no college would authorize this type of shit and I'd argue there could be grounds for a civil lawsuit if they did. Paying them tens of thousands of dollars and one of their professors admits to just auto failing students because there's too many in the class? Nah, I've attended 3 different schools before I graduated (I moved a lot), and every single one would drop you before class even began or within the first week if the class was too full.
If this did actually happen to OP, I can guarantee there's more to the story they're not telling us. But I'm going to assume it's made up or extremely exaggerated/altered.
- Yeah, it's way too easy to prove that the exam was graded wrong. Given the economic incentives, some of the failed students are definitely going to sue if you're going to be that blatant about it.
IfIf the class is graded on the curve and you're on the bottom half of the curve you should get a refund

This is a certified this totally happened moment

But he didn't write anything

gay: anon was fucked by the professor

fake: anon left the house