Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/general/...

There were several courses that were considered easy, and as a consequence were well attended. You had to do significantly better in those classes to get a high grade, versus a low-attendance hard course where 50% in the test was curved up to 75%.

I don't think I'll ever understand/accept the idea of curving grades.

So another strategy to do well might include tempting your classmates to distraction or perhaps offering to "help" them but in fact feed them misinformation? Got it.

That won't work at elite schools like Stanford where a hard class average is like 98% and 94% will give you B+ due to the opposite curve being applied.

It makes sense when applied across multiple instances of a test, if one cohort does terribly curve up, one really well curve them down relative to the overall distribution of scores.

But yeah within a single assignment it makes no sense to force a specific distribution. (People do this maybe because they don’t understand?)

You are typically the average of the people you keep around you. If you feel like you're going to get ahead by tricking your friends/peers then it likely means that you're not going to gain much when compared to the rest of the class (unless you're somehow able to deceive an entire class of 100+ students). On the flip side, if you and all your friends are supportive of each other then you're more likely to succeed when compared to the rest of the class. This does have the opposite effect of making it harder for students that don't have the same support/study groups but it goes completely against the point you're trying to make.

This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and modern colleges.

I went to Stanford and that was absolutely not the case. I once got an A on a midterm with a 65%

What I mentioned was the case in some hard CS classes I took there.

The act of grading itself is what's wrong with colleges. Different people learn at different paces. Forcing everyone to work at the fastest rate and then judging them for not performing is what kills interest in subjects. People should be allowed to write tests when they want to, learn at the pace they want to decide for themselves when it's time to move on, because lets face it, not everyone cares about some prof's pet subject.

The problem is that higher education became something marketable and universities decided to sell diplomas instead of giving people a chance to learn skills they think might help them reach their goals.

Even in that case it doesn't make sense. Why should the underperforming cohort be rewarded for doing poorly?

It is, among other things, a way to adjust for the quality of evaluation and/or the quality of teaching.

It's one solution to a problem. Which is that the results of tests are not strictly measuring how well the students understood the subject matter, but are heavily influenced by the quality of the rest and course as a whole.

That is generally hard to measure and frankly there is little accountability for bad courses. At the worst end you have bad profs who are proud of high failure rates because they don't understand it as a failure to teach but as a seal of quality how rigorous their standards are complex the subject matter is that they are teaching.

Not that grading on a curve solves any of that, but it eases the burden on students.

The idea is to identify if there is a particularly easy/hard exam and the average score of the cohort is significantly different to how they perform in other classes. "Doing poorly" is quite hard to define when none of the tests, perhaps outside of the core 1st and 2nd year modules, are standard.

Did the cohort due poorly or were the tests given to that cohort harder than in previous years? Or was the teacher a more difficult grader than others? You're jumping to the conclusion that the cohort was underperforming just because the grades were lower when other things out of their control could have been involved.

I think the prior probability in the bayesian sense is that the two entering cohorts are equally skilled (assuming students were randomly split into two sections as opposed to different sections being composed of different student bodies). If this were the case, the implication is that performance differences in standardized tests between cohorts are due to the professor (maybe one of the profs didn't cover the right material), so then normalization could be justified.

However if that prior is untrue for any reason whatsoever, the normalization would penalize higher performing cohorts (if it were a math course, maybe an engineering student dominated section vs an arts dominated cohort).

So I guess.. it depends

> One really important factor is the grading curve, if used.

I never use it to grade, because it is empirically unfair.

The further you move in the educational system, the less people's aptitute matches a Gaussian or "normal" distribution.

(I also often fought a lot with management and HR when I was a manager in industry, as my team was hardly statistically normal (100% Ph.D.s from top places) imposing a Gaussian for bonus payments on a strongly left-skewed distribution is unfair. Microsoft introduced this and got into legal trouble, and many companies followed late and didn't realize the legal trouble part.)

I know that's the argument but it just leads to grade inflation and a diluted signal for the students ability

Any specific uncurved grade is already ultimately adjusted by the being put in a basket of other grades that the student obtained across many courses, which are generally uncorrelated (or at least just as uncorrelated before curving as they are after)

Right, and if it depends, maybe we just don't do it then?

Intuitively and in my experience, course content and exams are generally stable over many years, with only minor modifications as it evolves. Even different professors can sometimes have nearly identical exams for a given course, precisely so as to allow for better comparison.

Tests are generally almost identical YoY where as humans are all very different! I think I'm making the simpler argument here

Tests can be consistent over time without being a true standard. Student competency can vary much more greatly than test content.

Depends on the rigor. The typical grade school curriculum is expecting you to keep up and get 80-90% of the content on a first go. Colleges can experiment with a variety of other kinds of methods. It's college, so there's no sense of "standaridized" content at this point.

For some, there's the idea of pushing a student to their limit and breaking their boundaries. A student getting 50% on a hard course may learn more and overall perform better in their career than if they were an A student in an easy course. Should they be punished because they didn't game the course and try to get the easy one?

And of course, someone getting 80% in such a course is probably truly the cream of the crop which would go unnoticed in an easy course.

Depends, is your goal in college to get a high GPA and look good for a job, or to truly learn and master content but not look as attractive on a resume without other projects?

Grading curves aim to mitigate punishment for the latter. It's part of why I could get a 2.5 GPA but still overall succeed in my career.

Not really since then all students can learn the exam as a template after 2-3 exams leak.

The curving I know at uni was targeting to exmatriculate 45% by the 3rd semester and another 40% of that by the end so the grades were adjusted to where X% would fail each exam. Then your target wasn't understanding the material but being better than half of the students taking it. The problems were complicated and time was severely limited so it wasn't like you could really have a perfect score. Literally 1-2 people would get a perfect score in an exam taken by 1000 people with many exams not having a perfect score.

I was one of the exmatriculated and moving to more standard tests made things much easier since you can learn templates with no real understanding. For example an exam with 5 tasks would have a pool of 10 possible tasks, each with 3-4 variations and after a while the possibilities for variation would become clear so you could make a good guess on what this semesters slight difference will likely be.

The foundational purpose of universities is truth-seeking, not job training. There's universities like Bologna, al-Qarawiyyin, Oxford or Cambridge that are more than 1000 years old.

The ultimate goal is knowledge cultivation.

You're more adapt to intellectual work only if you actually cultivate knowledge.

If all this college circus is, farming grades, then universities are ultimately failing at their job.

I don't disagree with you at all. But we both probably know that that isn't the reality as of the last half a century or so.I'd love to properly separate acedemia and create a bolstering apprenticeship/trades programs for several sectors to properly train a workforce, but there's basically zero momentum for that among white collar work.

Also note that GPA isn't just for jobs. Applying for school post bachelor's cares the most about a GPA. So a bad grade but learning a lot on a rigorous course can still male it hard to progress as a researcher or any other kind of specialized knowledge seeker.

The university I went to had student run test banks of previous exams that the administration sanctioned. If the following year you get the same question as the previous year, then you’re going to do better than the year that got the first version of that question.

You’re also ignoring the human element of grading particularly in subjective parts of an exam.

Further reason to remove grades in university, if anything.

If job prospects are the focus then we should invest in proper trade schools detached from universities that focus on teaching marketable skills.

This is a thing in countries like Germany. My uncle works in maintenance of nuclear reactors there and he went through a trade school that focused on learning the relevant parts of the job.