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Comment by master_lincoln | Hacker News Reader

That makes the point of grading a student's result senseless. I don't even mean the 'boycott' but that Froehlich adapts the grades to the highest received. That would mean if everyone is lazy/stupid they'll all be evaluated better than they are. So why have a grading system in the first place if it doesn't enable you to compare results indepently.

(btw I would vote for a grade free teaching system anyways)

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To me, it's a check against a teacher making an obscenely hard test that even the smartest students can't pass. The logic would be that if the best and brightest can only get a 60, then the exam should be curved.

This assumes that the best and brightest are actually really smart and knowledgeable.

It's not obvious until you try to create a test yourself that creating a fair test is hard. Particularly for an intro course, since it's material that you know so well that you barely think about it consciously anymore. I took the same approach, and I was cognizant of the fact that some of my students came in with prior programming experience.

I had a professor once (for modern physics, i.e. relativity and quantum mechanics) who said that if anyone could get 100% on his test, they'd saturate the "sensor" and make the measurement less accurate; he wanted to see the bell curve centered low enough that it didn't get clipped by the maximum score. He calibrated his tests so the highest scores would typically fall in the 50s or 60s, and then applied a curve. Actually getting 100 would require knowing all the material for that course in advance and then some.

An interesting, if nerve-wracking, philosophy. :) It's the only time I've ever left a test and not known for sure what grade I'd get.

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