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

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674 points peterkshultz | 1 comments | 19 Oct 25 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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joshvm ◴[19 Oct 25 17:50 UTC] No.45636243[source]▶
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%.

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epolanski ◴[19 Oct 25 18:49 UTC] No.45636823[source]▶
This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and modern colleges.
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1. Yaina ◴[20 Oct 25 01:52 UTC] No.45639573[source]▶
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.