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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: 0.199s | 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. johnnyanmac ◴[20 Oct 25 09:00 UTC] No.45641550[source]▶
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.