I doubt it.
Sure the students were gaming the system, but they were gaming it with applied math, part of the very topic of the course. If it was true mean-spirited “cheating” then they wouldn’t have received the response they got from the teacher. The fact that he stuck to his agreement and gave them the 100s means that he took their action as a demonstration of their learning, even if it wasn’t in the form originally intended.
He could have just as easily given them all zeros, and replied to their complaints with, “F you it isn’t a contract I can grade however I want whenever I want.”
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Which if you’d read my comments, I agreed with. I’d never curve the grades, because it doesn’t help the students at all.
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Or he didn’t want to piss off their parents/administration?
Plus, it was a programming class…
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Lazy prof, lazy kids, nice lil feel good narrative. Womp womp.
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BTW, the comments in this case are worth reading, as it’s full of students who have taken classes with this professor.
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It teaches them that stepping on your fellow students is not the only way to succeed in school. Grading on a curve is a stupid idea. There are ways to give students an incentive to learn material without rewarding them by punishing their classmates. If I am in a class with someone who gets a high score on a test, why should that bring my score down? Likewise if I am in a class of morons, why should that increase my grade?
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Would grading them on a curve have caused them to learn any more or less than them not taking the test. If it matches any exam I’ve taken, there isn’t much learning happening in the exam process itself. I’m guessing they all studied anyway in case anyone broke the line. It works as an action against a grading system that discourages learning. When an exam is grading on a curve it provides a strong disincentive for helping your classmates understand the material.
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It was never not about the grades, though. It will always be about the grades, especially at an “elite” college.
I like to think that by not spending their time studying to a test, and by banding together and sharing information, the students may have ended up better educated. But they got there by caring about grades above all else, not education, so probably not. (Edit: although this functioned as a protest against curve grading, which is all about grades over education, so maybe…)
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I think there are three kinds of students
A) They get the answer right
B) They get the answer wrong but if you say, “Nope, sorry,” they say, “What??? Oh, yeah. Whoops. (minor tweak) Okay, now it’s right.”
C) You can give them a month. They’ll never get it because they don’t know the material well enough.
Unfortunately tests often treat group B as if it’s group C, even though in the real world group B often functions more like group A.
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I live near Hopkins’ Homewood campus and have to dodge these idiot kids crossing the street (against traffic) with their noses in their smartphones every damn day. They’re not that smart, trust me.
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Before you response to me in a fit of snark, please read my actual comments, where I agreed SEVERAL TIMES that grading on a curve is not a good policy.
thanks.
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Once again, I DID NOT ADVOCATE FOR GRADING ON A CURVE.
Please read my actual comments instead of making assumptions.
You lot DO know that I teach college for a living, right?
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Given that pretty much half of humanity does that now, it’s not exactly a good measure of actual intelligence.
And I said JHU is elite, that doesn’t equal smart.
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Okay. Sorry for doing a lowly paid job that garners little respect.
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What would happen if we arranged it so wealth was on that same normal curve?
Not this!
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Not really. I remember kids figuring this out from the moment grading on a curve showed up. I’m assuming my high school was not unusually clever or smart. The only unique thing here is that they had the nerve to go through with it and enforce it.
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Huh… I thought you were suggesting the professor should do his damn work:
- articulate clear expectations about learning objectives
- teach to a variety of learning styles
- let the students earn their grade.
Grading on a curve is some lazy-ass bullshit designed for the prof’s convenience, and not for the pedagogy of the students.
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