When the first sentence of the article is “Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve” it sure does make it seem like he grades on a curve. Turns out it’s not the usual thing I understood as “curve” grading - under his system your grade can only be increased, and no fixed fraction of the students have to fail or ace it.
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As a lecturer as well*, i strongly agree here that way too many students treat their education as a quest for grades with the teachers as the enemies. I know it’s more of a problem the closer to ‘general education’, the suite of classes that everybody has to take like history or math, one gets. And i suspect that the cut-throat attitude that people are reporting the background radiation of Johns Hopkins to be makes this problem worse.
* By the way Mindysan, VL? I assume the ‘L’ is for ‘lecturer’, but the ‘V’?
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I would imagine that most if not all of the students still did the work and studied for the final. If one student broke from the others and sat for the test, the others would have to go in and take the test as well or risk a zero. They would have been well served to plan for that very possible outcome.
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It is more or less the same for me. (Usually not quite that low.) I find that not making the exam out of 100 points significantly reduces their expectations that 90+ is an A, 80+ is a B, etc.
Added:
Since I’m teaching stats this semester, I have to add that scores are almost never normally distributed anyway (and using the central limit theorem doesn’t really make sense here).
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That’s just being a distractable kid; completely independent of smarts.
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The last two points are harder than you might think. For one thing, the idea of different learning styles doesn’t hold much weight. Some people will understand information better when phrased differently, but in order to know how to explain information to people, you really need some sense of the individual. If a professor doesn’t know their class very well, it could be their fault… or it could be because they’ve been given a massive class. I work as a TA for classes between 100-500 people. Good teaching is nearly impossible in those situations because it’s not possible to give meaningful feedback to that many students. Not sure what the class size is here, but it’s not really an issue because of…
Grade inflation! Which brings us to your third point in the list. Most instructors would love to actually give people the grades they deserve, but that’s gotten harder and harder. Some people put it down to the influence of the Vietnam War, where a lot of professors would be more liberal with their grading to keep students in college, and away from the draft. Other factors, like increasing tuition, may also cause more liberal grading. Now that everyone is doing it, however, it’s become a new standard. If you give students the grades they actually earn, it’ll look like they did worse than reality, because the rest of the country no longer considers a “C” to be average. Universities have even tried to set policies to reduce grade inflation, and haven’t found anything that works.
In terms of getting the students to actually learn, however, what’s more important is that they get tested over the material. In a way, curving a test can be a good compromise, because you can include more challenging test questions, and increase the educational value of the test, but you don’t have to give out grades that aren’t adjusted for inflation. Of course, that does mean the solution employed by the students here doesn’t work, because they didn’t take the test at all.
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Been a professor for a decade. Feelin’ a bit ‘splained to. Just sayin’…
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My apologizes. I still feel like there are plenty of situations where grading on a curve is a reasonable and justifiable metric, for the above reasons, but I’d be willing to listen to your take on the matter, and I apologize for the splainyness of my response. Bit hard to tell on the internet what people have experience in what areas and how much one needs to actually explain and all.
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Thank you.
I think the push back against learning styles is misplaced, at least in the sciences where I am:
- Present same material synthetically (draw links with other ideas and materials)
- Present same material algorithmically (step-by-step process, motivated by specific aims)
- Present same material analytically (abstract formulas, derivations, general theorems, laws, etc.)
- Present same material visually (graphs, charts, wildly choreographed gesticulations, animations, etc.)
- Present the same material verbally/written with carefully curated and precise concepts, and with jokes, and anecdotes. Code shift.
That’s what I mean by different learning styles… but I know some people mean a more restricted set of categories (verbal, aural, kinesthetic), and that there is contention about the usefulness of those categories for guiding pedagogy.
As I said, I am, and have been, willing to let me students all earn As or all fail (before and after I was tenured). My students are generally bad-asses (in my view 
), and I certainly have had the privilege of institutional, and fellow faculty support for my grading style. The “inflation” pressure just hasn’t hit me.
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When I taught at a place where grubbing for points was a thing (delightfully it isn’t where I am now), I made my exams out of ridiculous numbers, like 23,467 points for a midterm. That way, when students wanted a point, I’d just give them the point.
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They’re pretty stupid, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Also, Hopkins undergrad is not the same as post-grad.
I’d think you want someone, who not only can think on their feet, but understands how coding works. Again, theory only takes one so far, but they’re not applying coding skills here, but social engineering skills - they are gaming the system. Again, it caused the professor to change his assessment, which is positive, but at some point, you have to put the rubber to the road or in this case, fingers to the keyboard, and actually make something that does what it needs to do.
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Great!
So why are you directing your ire at the people doing something about it?
No doubt.
Visiting lecturer - it’s a salaried position, but for a short contract (2 years here). Different schools have different lengths or titles they use. It’s not an adjuncting position, but not a full time lecturing position with ability to move up in that separate track.
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That makes it all the odder to me. I mean, if they just wanted to all get A’s, then yeah, that’s pretty screwed up. But if they boycotting on the demand that the prof not “curve” the grade as you and others describe, then wouldn’t that amount to demanding that he not inflate their grades? I too was under the misapprehension that the prof graded on a normal distribution.
@Auld_Lang_Syne: Visiting Lecturer? Never mind, simul-post with Mindy.
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I don’t doubt it, being JHU and all. The question is how is that measured (and you can certainly argue that the means of measurement the prof had created was not effective - but we don’t know what his test looked like, so we don’t know either way).
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It’s probably too late for him to enroll…
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I don’t think they acted altruistically, for one. This wasn’t trying to fix a problem, it was gaming the system - from people attending an elite institution, where just going and getting a degree is going to guarantee an upper middle clas lifestyle. I can’t say the same for many of my students, who struggle just to get through their courses that are probably much easier than something at JHU. They had other options, too, such as talking to the professor as a class instead of treating him like the enemy.
But once again, maybe people should actual read what I’m writing instead of just assuming what I mean. This keeps happening here.
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But they clearly did talk to him? It’s not like he didn’t know what was going on, nor why, yet chose to do nothing. Well, after the fact he did; changing the rules to more firmly embed the curve. Yay?
You talk about an adversarial relationship between lecturers and students, and yet implicitly take this lecturers side against his students. THEY didn’t create the system.
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The students waited outside the rooms to make sure that others honored the boycott, and were poised to go in if someone had.
This sentence implies that they did actually study.
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