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

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674 points peterkshultz | 3 comments | 19 Oct 25 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.796s | 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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airstrike ◴[19 Oct 25 17:56 UTC] No.45636312[source]▶
I don't think I'll ever understand/accept the idea of curving grades.
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buildbot ◴[19 Oct 25 18:21 UTC] No.45636554[source]▶
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?)

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airstrike ◴[19 Oct 25 22:21 UTC] No.45638564[source]▶
Even in that case it doesn't make sense. Why should the underperforming cohort be rewarded for doing poorly?
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1. joshvm ◴[20 Oct 25 02:04 UTC] No.45639623[source]▶
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.
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2. airstrike ◴[20 Oct 25 05:48 UTC] No.45640435[source]▶
Tests can be consistent over time without being a true standard. Student competency can vary much more greatly than test content.
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3. lan321 ◴[20 Oct 25 14:46 UTC] No.45644529[source]▶
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.