I thought i did decent until i realized what a curved score was..
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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I got a B+ in organic chemistry with a 45 average. Class started with 30+ people. Only 6 people showed up to take the final
Exams were 5-8 problems. No partial credit
I had a 17% in a linear differential equation midterm and ended up with one of the highest grades in the class after the curve.
One of my current professors has straight up told us that the exams will be “painfully difficult” and that we should not expect to know all of the answers, and that a median of 60 would be considered good
I mean, if the curve drove your score up that much, it’s not entirely on you. Apparently nobody is learning the material or the test was beyond what the class had learned, that’s on the teacher.
I’m not sure why this is in this sub. You got a b+ on a test.
I would counter some of the comments here about the professor’s effectiveness at teaching. I had a professor for two of my higher level courses during undergrad who was *extremely* nitpicky on research papers, and told us as much, and you’d get 20 pages back with red all over them. Her concept was that it would continue to help us learn from all the corrections, but she would also issue positive grades based on effort (and if it was clear that we continued to improve).
Honestly, I learned more in her courses than a lot of my others, and the material was really interesting.
I got a 70% on a difficult business law exam only to find out the next closest score was in the 50s. I got lots of hate for that especially for the people who scored in the 20s.
Can someone eli5 marking to a curved score, and why it would be necessary? I am but a humble Brit, and this feels like some weird yank noise.
I took a test in college where the median score was about 31 (out of 100) – I got a 41, which was a B+. We had many tests where median scores were well below 50.
You did do decently though … that’s what a curve is for – adjustment to reflect your relative performance. Pretty sure a b+ is decent.
One of my classes had nearly every single student of the 500+ size class score below a 40 overall. The average for the midterm was a 2/40. I’m not even fucking joking.
Thankfully, he’s forced to curve like a mother fucker. But he said repeatedly that he’d “Fail all of [us] you if I was allowed to as to keep the sanctity of this field, you don’t get curves in real life”.
Like ok buddy, maybe don’t make your questions for juniors in college on par with what you’d make a doctoral student spend three years researching, but that’s just me.
I like it raw
Back during undergrad in my igneous petrology course I had the highest “raw” score on our fractional crystallization test… a 36%. The next highest was a 25% and after that a 12%. My score was “corrected” to a 100% and the next highest therefore was a 69.r%, with the next a 33.3%. Every remaining score was less than that.
The professor proceeded to scold us on how much the US cared about football and if we cared as much about education we would be leading the charge in every educational aspect. Instead, he told us, we only care about a sport played no where else in the world that “does nothing but drive greed, bloodshed, and alcoholism.” I’ll never forget those words.
I mean, you did do decent. That’s what the curved score means
So the professor is so bad that 30% of the material wasn’t learned by anyone?
Can someone explain what the hell a “curved score” is? Who came up with that nonsense?
Can someone explain exactly what the grade curve is? Does it increase your grade somehow? I study engineering in Portugal and we don’t have that system. The grade I get is the grade that stays. If I get a 49 out of 100, I flunk the teste even if it is the highest grade in the class
This is how every engineer makes it through college
There might be something wrong with the class if a curve that extreme was necessary…
In my econometrics class, I remember there was an exam so difficult that 45% and above was a B, and 60% and above was an A. This was a 300 level class with 14 people.
The raw score of the grade the teacher gets. The curved grade is the grade the student gets, because the teacher stinks at their job
Sooo is the teacher bad at teaching or is everyone a dumbass?
Rawdoggin’ a 58!
I had a physics class where a 60-65% raw score was consistently the highest a grade on any exam.
Anyone consistently getting mid 50s on exams was considered to be an exceptional student.
The average grade on exam was in the high 30s and low 40s. Only about 5 out of an original 60 students passed the class, and most barely scrapping by with Cs.
And usually whoever would be getting 60s had already taken the course before and was repeating it, and therefore had an edge over everyone else. Or was like an a crazy genius.
They were intentionally written to take up more time, than the pace that any first time student could reasonably complete the problems.
Essentially there was 40% more test than the time allotted. So if you could finish about 60% of it perfectly, you were an A student.
The only possible reason I can think of for a professor to do this, is to instil fear and doubt in students. They believed it pushed them to work harder. But really all it did was demoralize students and get them to change the direction of their studies. I knew of several students who gave up on physics and engineering degrees entirely because of overbearing professors. Its pretty sad and completely unnecessary.
Now alot of you will probably say, if you cant do physics you shouldn’t move on because you aren’t ready….that wasn’t this case. In this instance physics 101/102/103 was being intentionally taught at an upper division level to students barely becoming familiar with the material. Other professors eased students into the material at a reasonable level and those students did perfectly fine. Some professors tested sophomore students as if they had a senior level grasp of the material.
I passed my thermal and statistical physics final with a 23% the curve allowed me to pass with a 2.0