Hacker News Reader

> When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade.

In France you only need half of the points. When I was in college, you had to have at least a mean of 10/20 (we grade on 20 points), and have no course below 8/20. The best students were usually around 16, 17. The worst were around 5. Most of the students were between 10 and 12. I like that system because it gives a vast field to grade people, and most people can always improve. You can also compensate some courses with others, but only to a point.

> Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes.

Meh, if your goal is for students to learn from mistakes, you can give them those any time during semester. No reason to put them on test. The best students will try to crack them, in fact, will spend more time that test allows on them. The difficult questions, especially in math or computer science, may take multiple days and attempts to solve. Going through that frustration is definitely learning experience. Putting time hour limit on it during test just weakens it.

> Highest grades are only available for those who demonstrate understanding well beyond the scope of the class or the degree.

In that point, it becomes in scope. Because "beyond scope" is infinite you have people guessing what "beyond scope" they should learn to gain it. The tests and exams should not be game.

Let it be know what are you going to test in advance.

The first exam type tests what you are expected to have learned. A good student can assume that they can solve every problem and get a close to 100% score. Each problem must therefore have a small solution that is easy to find without any special insights. That requirement alone limits the applicability of such exams to confirming that the student has a sufficient understanding of the topic to continue to more advanced topics.

In the second exam type, even a good student can't assume they can solve every problem within the time limit. They have to prioritize the problems based on how easy they expect them to be. The exam tests not only what the student has learned but also how well they understand what they can do and what they can't. The same can also apply to other types of assignments. For example, even a good student can't assume that they can solve every homework problem before the deadline.

The third grading approach is usually used for most important works. Under this scheme, the highest grades are reserved to those who do something exceptional. No matter what the expectations are, if you only meet them 100%, it's not sufficient for the highest grade.

As an example of the third approach, when I studied CS, our department gave the highest grade to only around 1 thesis in 100. There were no set criteria for the highest grade, except that the faculty had to agree that the work was beyond what one would expect from an excellent thesis. It was something not even a smart determined student could expect to gain, except by accident. Even the theses that got the highest grade were rather unexceptional in the grand scheme of things. Except the one that described an OS that runs on billions of devices today. That's the proper bar an undergraduate student should aim for if they want to guarantee the highest grade under this grading scheme.

> The first exam type tests what you are expected to have learned. [...] Each problem must therefore have a small solution that is easy to find without any special insights. That requirement alone limits the applicability of such exams to confirming that the student has a sufficient understanding of the topic to continue to more advanced topics.

This untrue implication. You can have difficult exercises that do require special insights with long solutions and still keep it within curriculum or "what you was expected to learn". What you cant do is to give them exercises that require one more chapter or invention of difficult to prove theorems that were not taught.

You are absolutely right! The only thing I would add is that it is important to choose the appropriate type of exams for intro classes (the ones that verify understanding and hopefully intellectually entertain but do not excessively challenge) and for advanced classes (the ones that might even have unsolvable problems, there is an established understanding that a 100% is not expected, and that provide for a great sense of intellectual challenge (and achievement)).

>sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident

Sure we can learn some techniques and the way we approach things may let us tackle problems in a way that is more likely to work.

And yet I find it baffling that sometimes formal education wants a student to reach by themselves a conclusion that the brightest minds of mankind had a hard time getting there by themselves.

While spending a fraction of the time thinking about the problem, of course.

If you are meant to reproduce the way to the solution (having studied the method already), that's one thing. But if you are asking some student to come up with some bright idea that people spent years without being able to get it? Now that seems a little too much.

> There are several approaches to exams and grading. Testing what the students have learned is a common one. In that approach, the highest grade is the expected one. You earn it if you have learned everything you are supposed to, or at least 90-95% of it. Lower grades are signs of failure.

> In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade. Even the best students were expected to fail some assignments, because they would then learn from their mistakes. It was nice when it worked, but sometimes the problems just too difficult for no reason or required an insight nobody would ever find, expect by accident.

On a more holistic level, the second approach seems better in some ways. Except for exceptionally talented students, it removes the ability to achieve "perfection," so good students would become a little more resilient because their exposure to failure.

>One grading approach is open-ended from the top and more common >with theses than classes. If your work is everything one would >expect, you get the second-highest or third-highest grade. Highest

the problem with this, in the US at least, is that the STEM people might do this, but then the social science and humanities departments were using the other grading scheme. It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.

(which again brings us back to the thread topic I guess, when graduating with latin honors was hard it was a good way to indicate likely entry into the elite. Now that many can achieve latin honors they are no longer good for entry into the elite, but people still expect them to be.

> It got to be running joke that 90% of the social science students earned latin honors, while in the business school it was a small fraction of that and in the science school it was even smaller.

Grade inflation in a nutshell.

> In another approach, the exam is supposed to challenge the students. When I was undergrad, you only needed 80-85% of available points for the highest grade.

I've seen a system where they grade on a curve, A is 4.0. But there's A*, which still gives a 4.0 on the transcript, but denotes that a student (or a group) were statistically far enough from those who got an A that they deserved special recognition (ie, the threshold for an A is 85% but someone managed to score a 98%).

How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information? It doesn't display understanding along any axis of intrinsic knowledge.

Education needs to take a step back and reexamine what knowledge and understanding means. Right now it's basically a factory for memorization.

How does getting a grade in an exam demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate information?

Just about every exam I had at university involved solving/proving at least one novel problem that we'd never seen before. For example we might have seen the proof of a statement under certain conditions, but on the exam you where asked if it was also true for a slight different condition. That isn't something you could do just through memorizing the proofs you'd been shown in class.

Memorizing and 'regurgitating' would most of the time get you a passing grade, but never a top grade.

That is true about bad exams like the SAT and the GRE. And to be fair, even good exams (text problems that take the student on an adventure through deriving a curious phenomenon, for instance) suffer as their results are confounded with whether you deal well with stress. However, it has long been trivial to make good exams that are explicitly not about memorization: take-home exams, open-book exams, exams in which collaboration is encouraged, project-based exams, some forms of oral exams, and more.

Almost all of my engineering exams were open book, and the ones in EE sometimes had difficulty curves such that a 50% score would get you top marks.

It worked pretty well

I still have stress nightmares about op amps though