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Comment by Kim_Bruning | Hacker News Reader

This is ... curve grading, right?

It's a bit alien to me. Where I went to school, you used get scores from 1(lowest)- to 10 (highest) where 6 is "Acceptable". You could curve the questions, but not the students. So theoretically the whole class could all score 1s, or all could score 10s. This makes more sense to me, if everyone works hard, they should all succeed, and if they're all lazy they should fail.

You couldn't arbitrarily decide that exactly 20% gets -say- an 8. I've always wondered what the steelman is for curve grading.

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It's a countermaneuver against grade inflation.

Students and their often overinvolved and influential parents put a tremendous amount of pressure on instructors to provide high marks regardless of performance. This was always an issue but has become more and more uniquitous in recent decades.

Although some manage, it's extremely hard for indivudal instructors to stand up for earnest critical grading in the face of all this pressure. However, an institional policy like this lets them point to that policy as a sheild that deflects responsibility from individual teachers to a faceless, indiffent bureaucracy.

That's not to say that this is the best possible such countermaneuver, but that's the role it's trying to fulfill.

The grading system is already long broken -- far removed from your own meritocratuc ideal -- and this is a meager attempt to do something about it.

> I've always wondered what the steelman is for curve grading.

assuming that by "steelman" here you mean "the justification", i believe the point is that a curved grade shows how you compare to others. the idea is that "getting 40% of the answers right" is meaningless if you don't know how hard the test is, so you'd rather have a grade that says "top 5% of the class".

this what i see as the justification, at least. not an endorsement of the idea

It's kind of curve grading I guess? There's no limit on A- and below, so you could have 20%(+4) A students and 80% A- if you really wanted. Or 100% Fs if you want to retire from teaching immediately. I wouldn't say I'm a curving advocate, but it seems to me 400 Calc 1 students or whatever is a large enough sample that statistically curving will not do any great injustice.

> Or 100% Fs if you want to retire from teaching immediately

it's crazy to see that mentioned so non-chalantly. my expectation is that the teacher, when they grade, is meant to be impartial, as if they were doing nothing more than taking a measurement of the student's work, you could say (this is why, i believe, we value standardized tests in some settings, even though they are worse in other aspects). it's the student who is responsible for the grade. a teacher not being allowed to give F's to everyone suggests a corruption of the system to me.

can you share more? what pressures teachers not to do this, for example?

Same argument about distributions cuts both ways to me imo. Like you taught 400 students and you couldn't get a single one over the line? I think the immediate suspicion would fall on the common factor of the teacher. For a crazy event like that it seems much more likely that the instruction or assessment was flawed.

Mostly though I was just chuckling in my head about an old curmudgeonly professor of mine who was literally retiring at the end of that semester. We were all actually quite scared he would go out with a bang given his disdain for us. We weren't like 100% Fs or anything, but I think it was obvious we thought the material was pretty phooey and the lectures interminable.

Ok, so this is where I really show that this is all foreign to me. For sure: There probably should be questions asked if a class scores all F's anywhere. Obviously. Something went wrong there.

But why would this automatically cause the teacher to be the one to retire?

Are there documents or books on this? This system seems so alien to me. And yet it does seem to produce some amount of competent graduates who can -eg- launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit.

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