I was recently surprised to hear the teenage daughter of a friend say that she earned a “72 that would become an 82 with the bell curve.” I went to school and college in Canada and later graduate school in New York and in all of those places the grade you got was the grade you got — each class/assignment had a grading rubric with specific criteria independent of how the class performed. The only exception to that were a few times when teachers saw that too many people did badly on a test and either gave everyone some extra points or made it count only if it improved one’s grade.
Since moving to the US, I’ve been hearing people talk of bell curve grading and was wondering how that would work in practice.
39 comments
It’s very rare to actually grade on a bell curve. When students and teachers talk about “grading on a curve” they usually mean “taking some points off the total possible to make the highest score anyone got into the highest score possible.”
I have seen a college professor use an actual bell curve, but it was very infrequent.
Probably a little over half of my computer science classes curve. I had one class with an extremely terrible professor that I got an A in with like a 70% or so, just because everyone was doing so badly. For my non-CS classes nobody curves.
No and I graduated college two years ago.
I was in engineering so took a lot of science and math classes as well. Some professors make tests very hard where the average is like 50% and the high score is in the 60s.
“Grading on a curve” is where then the professor will line up the scores people get and group them into As, Bs, and so on. So in my example getting in the 60s might be an A, 50s is a B, 40s is a C.
Other times the professors look at a test and if most people got a question wrong then they figure that means they didn’t teach it well or something was wrong or misleading about the question and they might throw that question out.
I had a history class where I got a 110 on a multiple choice test… I got every question right and the extra credit. No one but me and the professor knew this.
One kid asked if the test was going to be graded on a curve. The professor smirked at me, then asked the class: “do you want me to grade on a curve?”
Entire class: YES
Me knowing what that will do: NO
The teacher took mercy on them and did not grade them on a curve.
Some of my AP tests were, if the teacher determined they were excruciatingly difficult. But that was super rare.
Ive never had a grade curve in my life and i am a sophomore in college
Never in highschool.
About half of the time in college.
I never liked the idea of failing grades becoming the standard. One physics professor in particular seemed to get enjoyment from initially failing people on tests like some sort of victory that nobody could actually pass. Then the final grades come out and there are A’s, B’s, C’s like normal after the curve was applied.
As an engineering graduate, I was frequently graded “on the curve,” but it was never described as being a bell curve (and to that point, I never knew of any tests scores being lowered because too many people did well on the test)..
I’ve only had this in STEM courses. I was a chemistry major and our p-chem professor would do a sort of curve on exams due to the difficulty of the content. As many a physicist has said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t.
Some had different scales but you were not really compared to other people so much. I had one math professor where a C went to like 55%, but his tests were notoriously difficult, he was aware of this so he made it easier to pass but frustratingly hard to get an A. I had a physics professor who would throw out your worst tests. So only your top 4 of 5 tests counted.
I took a welding class which was mostly people who were already welders who were getting formal training to get their certifications. I took it as a general college student who never touched a welding machine in my life, I was partnered with someone who was in his late 40s or early 50s who had been doing it for most of his adult life. He had a much more difficult set of objectives than I had and he was also tasked with training me how to do the basic welds I was doing. The exam work we all had to do was the same.
Never but I ha e heard of it.
Very rarely and if it was done on a bell curve the teacher usually made into a big deal by spending half the period explaining how it worked.
I majored in biochem and my biochem and chemistry classes were almost all graded on a bell curve because the exams were designed to be so difficult that the average scores were always 30-50%. (And yes, it was awful).
My non-biochem classes were not like this.
>each class/assignment had a grading rubric with specific criteria independent of how the class performed
That’s how my school did it. Any teachers who “graded on a curve” just didn’t count any question(s) that a lot of students got wrong and/or graded relative to the highest score in the class.
There was no “standard” grade curve and plenty of teachers didn’t do it, so there was no way to know ahead of time whether you’d be able to add an extra 10% or whatever to your grade.
nope. never had anything graded on a curve
Very rarely did it happen. Mostly specific unfair questions would get thrown out. However, some science classes would do this.
Grading on a curve only helps your grade so much as you’re still bring measured against the best student on the test.
Never. Not in any class at any level.
not a *bell* curve, but many of my college classes were not graded on the standard 90-100 = a, 80-89 = b, etc scale because getting scores that high was unrealistic for most
Every once in a while, but it definitely wasn’t the norm. One time in a neuroanatomy and physiology class we had a professor who decided to grade on a curve because the top score was a 72 lol
I never saw a true bell curve, but in several cases, the high grade in the class became 100% and everything below that was adjusted to that score.
I did work for an employer that implemented a true bell curve for performance appraisals. Top 10% got a 1 rating, bottom 10% got a 5 rating. Next 20% got a 4 and 2 and 40% got a 3.
On a practical level, I get it; the US has much higher %s corresponding to its grades than most places (e. g. Australia, where a 50% is the minimum for a C grade equivalent). You can adjust for that by either including weekly assignments that are open book & give 100% grades easily, or you can boost scores from the tests themselves. But, there comes a time when that curve gets a little extreme in my experience.
I went to a pretty average public university in a degree (EE) that has some pretty hard classes, like senior-level electromagnetics and digital systems. In these classes, maybe 30% of people actually passed the class, and almost all of the failed students weren’t even close to passing; they got well below 50% on tests. The percentage of people who switch out of engineering for easier majors is massive, and even among those who stay a lot are just too stubborn or beholden to their parents to accept that they can’t hack it and need an easier major, or at least a major closer to what they actually like to do.
Professors would vary between two approaches to “everyone failed my test except for a few people who actually understand the content”:
* Adjust the average score to match a C. That way, the class failing percentage is reduced from ~70% to ~35% when you take into account that a C is necessary for the degree; the class is still gonna filter out the people with *no* understanding, but some people with fragmented understanding will scrape by.
* The score you got is the score you got. I can’t give you an ABET-accredited certification for content you didn’t pass, even if that means most people fail. Sorry.
I didn’t see curves much in high school but in college I had several classes that were steaight up graded on a curve.
The philosophy was that if you have multiple people getting 90-100% on the test and the lowest grades are atound 50% then you aren’t seeing the true spread of knowledge/understanding. Instead our tests were ridiculous and the median score was generally around 40-50%. It was set up something like 15% would get an A, 30% B, 40% C, 10% D, 5% F.
It’s weed out classes in college. Almost all the large lecture hall weed out classes at my large university graded on a curve. I never bothered to look into the actual mechanism they used but the day test scores arrived they would put a slide up saying 83-100= A 72-82=B ect. These were all classes needed for med school so I assume they wanted a normal distribution of As, Bs, and Cs class to class.
Not in public school or undergrad, but definitely in law school. The majority of students got Cs, Ds and Bs on either side, maybe one or two As. Fs otherwise.
Fucking sucked.
Only ever down. Like if there were too many Bs, some became Cs.
Yeah, in college there were some occasions in which we had a curve. No don’t know that it was a “bell curve”, but essentially if everyone in the class did poorly, the professor would take the highest grade and the difference between the highest and lowest scores and set the curve off of that. Honestly, idk exactly how that worked, all I know is that I had a Finance course my senior year in which they highest score on the exam was like a 68. My score was in the 30’s, lol. The tests were truly ridiculous. Took the entire 90 minute class period to complete and many of the questions were taken straight from the CFP exam. I somehow ended up with a C on that particular test. But yeah, if scores are all low enough, many teachers would grade on a curve to essentially say it isn’t you all, it’s my fault you’re not learning.
No, it’s not fair to the kids who worked and put the effort in.
The only time it’s reasonable is for organic chemistry, or macro economics or something that is similarly impossible for everyone even those who work super hard. (or so I’ve heard, since I didn’t take those classes. And now I’m wondering if maybe the people who did take them were rationalizing their Bell curves. Food for thought.)
Not on a bell curve, but I had a science teacher in high school curve test grades.
If the highest test grade in the class was 89, he’d add 11 points to the grade to make it 100, then add 11 points to all other test grades. So if you scored only a 59 on the test, the 11 points brought it up to 70, meaning you passed.
Test grades counted double when it came to calculating final grades for the quarter or semester, so that gave you a better chance at passing the class, even at a bare minimum.
Not usually, no.
Some college professors did it. I had one who had extremely hard tests that were graded on a curve. He had an interesting justification.
He said that on a test where the curve is Something like:
70 = A
50= B
35 = C
Then a C is half of an A, or put another way the difference between an A and a C is half of what you know.
On a straight scale (90-80-70-60) the difference between an A and a C can be as little as 11%.
He believed the first system was fairer. I can see his point even though I hated studying for and taking his tests.
No and I can’t imagine a dumber way to grade assignments
Some were, some weren’t.
It can work both for you and against you. I once got an “A” on a test with a 48 because the class average was under 40. In another case though (different class), I got a “D” on a test with a 92 because the class average was 96.
I had teachers talk about it but say they would not use it. They said it was not fair.
Grading in a curve is done when everyone performs so badly on a test that the grade distribution (bell curve) is below where it should be.
Not in high school or undergrad unless the test was particularly difficult, it may get curved up a few points.
In law school, almost all law schools grade their classes on a bell curve, and the school sets the median.
Yes, I think most of my classes at Yale were graded on a curve. Not a bell curve, but basically the top so many would be As, the next so many A-, etc. I imagine it differs from place to place. But even if a curve isn’t used, the grading is still probably calibrated such that they more or less follow a distribution that the teacher or school wants.
Very rarely, and even then the teachers very seldom knew how to actually grade on a curve. It was usually some half-assed system where they added points to the lower grades and took some away from the higher ones, so everybody got a more average grade. Those were usually protested by the top students (and their influential parents) and the teacher would end up just raising the lower grades and leaving the top ones alone.
A few times they’d just consider the top grade to be “perfect” and grade everyone else against that, so if the top student got 80%, he’d get 100, and someone who got 72 would get a 90. Since that raised everybody’s score, nobody really protested it. And, of course, they’d usually mess that up, and instead of figuring percentages, they’d just add 20 to everybody’s score.