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Comment by nchelluri | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how the test score is 80% in the twitter thread and 95% in the article.

Given he's a UK prof if he was told the paper was given an 'A' in the UK that can be anywhere from 70-100, while in the US it is 90-100. He might have initially split the difference, and then corrected it/was corrected for the article.

> in the US it is 90-100

In a science or engineering class, it might be everything above 40%.

In a high priced private US university, you may get an A just for showing up.

I assure you neither "high priced" nor "private" are necessary for this. In fact, those institutions have more to lose for doing so than a "low price public US university"

Those private US universities are actually free. Their endowments are large enough they can provide 100% tuition aid if you can't afford them. The problem is getting in.

I really did not enjoy getting 40% on every test in math and physics and receiving a B. I do not feel like I learned the material that well. My very first freshman mechanics midterm grade, a 67, was an A+, and gave me a false sense of adequacy. Maybe they could figure out how to teach better?

You aren't supposed to learn everything in one semester. You are supposed to make adequate progress, and the tests are broad enough to catch as much as possible of what you've learned.

That sounds silly. Give me a test that I can actually reasonably learn the material for any day.

It's perfectly human to want to pass with a perfect score, but this undermines the purpose of a test.

A test which has a significant fraction of scores at the right side of the distribution has saturated the range: there are differences in comprehension and mastery between one 100% and another, which aren't being measured by the test.

The platonic form of a perfect test would have exactly one student per class who got every question correct, but that's impossible to reach except by luck. So a teacher is stuck between writing a test which is too difficult for everyone, and one which is too easy for a substantial fraction of the class. They should pick the first over the second.

While that can feel frustrating (I know, I've been there!) it's likely that you in fact learned the material better than you would have in a class where your level of mastery allowed you to score perfectly for an A+ and in the mid 80s for a B.

> So a teacher is stuck between writing a test which is too difficult for everyone, and one which is too easy for a substantial fraction of the class.

No, the teacher is not stuck here. It is rarely the purpose of an academic test to plot students on a wide distribution. That’s just something fun for teachers to do to look for exceptional students.

If the purpose of a test is to determine if an individual student passes some bar of understanding, then there is absolutely no reason to make it extremely difficult and then give A’s to those who got >50% correct.

I love tests like that, so long as there are some easy enough problems so you don't risk not knowing where to start.

It shows you what the next level is, reminds you that there's more depth to the subject than you can master in 12 weeks.

As long as you get the letter grade you deserve in the end, why not have an interesting challenge along the way?

When I held the information security basics course back in the university, I always made sure the grading scale was included on the exam sheet. 55% to pass, 95% for top grade.

Because of its wide applicability to business environments overall, the course was mandatory for some non-CS students. And boy, they hated it.

Boy it sure wasn't when I was an undergrad EE.

don't forget about the curve

I thought the same thing. Through the twitter thread references a magazine article, while the original article on talks about "something [he] wrote", so they might be different pieces.

EDIT: Or the imposter gave the interview and added a mark up ;)

Having done tertiary coursework in both the UK and the US, I can tell you that it's much much much more difficult to get an 80 in the UK than a 95 in the US. Even a 70 is hard. A 70 is like an A in the US thirty years ago.

In the original Vice article it's even 90%! https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp4gx/professor-catfished-b...

So, we've slowly grown from 80%->90%->95%.

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