Students Fail -- and Professor Loses Job | Hacker News Reader

Students Fail -- and Professor Loses Job

insidehighered.com

26 pointsechair14 comments

I always thought this was an issue at my school. Fail the students who need to fail. Supposedly we had a rule that no more than 25% of a class should fail. I was in classes where more than that deserved to fail.

I also seriously considered dropping out when I received a D+ in a class that I felt deserved a solid F. I rarely went to class, I did none of the homework, and consequently received 3% of the total available test points.

I was also in the top half of that class. I considered dropping out because I felt my degree would be worthless if the standards were so low. Instead I started working hard and found that getting A's and B's was still appropriately difficult, even if getting a D+ was not.

My mental models for grades today: B is the median. A is above average. C means you showed up and handed things in, but didn't really "get it".

So, on this scale, D and F aren't really distinguishable. Either pretty much mean you didn't make an effort.

I've been taking CS graduate classes part time with (who I consider to be) pretty smart people, so I am happy with an A and satisfied with a B. If I try and still get a C, I'll know that I didn't really belong in that class, at least without more preparatory work.

My professor's view was also that D and F were pretty much the same also, you can't get very many Ds and stay in school. D is kind of like a "high fail." I believe we were limited in the number of Ds on our transcript for graduation, although I don't remember anymore.

I've always called those "pity passes", as in you really failed, but the prof took pity on you and bumped up your 45% to 50%.

I know that at my school I need an average of 60% to graduate with an honours degree (not that that matters, because I need a 70% average for Co-op).

Only one problem (at many places): D is no longer an acceptable grade for required classes. Where I teach (a top US university), neither is C-.

Of course, we don't want to require people to take the class again. So C is the new F.

In grad school, one of my favorite professors accused over half of a class of cheating and ended up failing them all. In a way they deserved it. It was a computer science class in a master's degree program. If students at that level don't know not to submit an exact duplicate of a function, they deserve to fail.

I've also encountered students who I thought deserved to fail. One in particular was a criminology student. He spent more energy trying to simulate the "Ah ha!" reaction and sucking up to me than actually trying to get it for real. I kept thinking that this guy was studying criminology because he was trying to become a con man. Apparently, the system had rewarded him up til then for his faking behavior.

I had over half of the class accused of cheating in an undergrad class.

He let them off the first time without including the grade on that assignment, but warned that it would not be acceptable on future assignments. When people did it again they failed.

Two of them were caught cheating in another class, and attempted to withdraw after they were told they had Fs for failing. They were kicked out of school.

But it really should take less than 3 instances of cheating in class and 1 of cheating on the system to get kicked out.

This reminds me of how Romania grades its universities by the number of students they pass. The result? Easy classes.

Really? Do they _ever_ stop having stupid ideas? Not that I'm much surprised...

One thing nice about the Swedish systems is that students can retake the final exam. So, yes I will fail up to 30-40% of a class on the first exam, and then they usually buckle down and most can pass the second exam. Of course I make the second exam harder so most of the student who do pass, get a 'C' at that point. Kinda of sucks for me having to write and grade all these exams though. :-)

Whoever wrote that article is super into the em dash.

Holy crap, no kidding. I count 23, including the one on the guy's signature... maybe that is his signature? :)

Not to threadjack, but are there any guidelines for that? He seems to use dashes where most writers would use commas to separate out a sentence subphrase. His "Aird — who is white — has failed..." would normally be "Aird, who is white, has failed..." I'm curious if it's just a matter of choice to use the dash there.

But yes, he overdoes the dash. I'll bet he has Microsoft Excel set to export as DSV.

Reminds me of Hockey

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