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0 pointsthrowaway6138348y ago0 comments

To be honest, the fact that 60% is a failing grade is a failure of the grading system, not a fact to take for granted. We've basically lost the entire dynamic range of 0-60% for no good reason.

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andrewflnr8y ago

I would actually say it's often not strict enough. In what serious field is it acceptable to only know, say, 70% of the material? Do you want to drive on a bridge designed by an engineer who only got 70% on their exams? It depends on how the test is structured, really, but unless it was one of those tests designed to bring smart people to their knees, I'd rather not.

adrianratnapala8y ago

We probably cross bridges designed by engineers who only got 70% on their exams all the time. That was pretty satisfactory score when I was in Uni.

antod8y ago

Yeah - Exam performance from a decade or two ago is quite irrelevant for evaluating senior design engineers.

I wouldn't trust an engineering graduate who scored 100% on all their exams to design a bridge at all. Where as someone with 10+yrs relevant experience but who got 60-70% in their exams would be preferable to me.

Mastery of the math isn't that relevant due to all the design standards you have to understand and comply with anyway, while all the little pragmatic solutions to real world constraints (incl how the builders work and what they need to be effective) learnt from experience and mentoring from your senior peers are far more important.

logfromblammo8y ago

So you're saying that the measurement of student mastery has no noise floor?

waterhouse8y ago

It depends on how things are graded. On a multiple-choice test with four choices per question, someone with no knowledge who guesses randomly will get ~25%. On a true-false test, someone with no knowledge gets ~50%. On a project graded by a human, or a worksheet whose answers are real numbers, someone with no knowledge and a hard-eyed grader might well get 0%. Different classes will have different proportions of these things that contribute to the overall grade (at least, I haven't heard of any requirement that classes have the same proportions of such). The simple approach of summing total points achieved over each graded item, divided by total points possible, is straightforward to calculate, but I think there's no mathematical justification for choosing one percentage-based grading scale and applying it uniformly to all classes.

hanbura8y ago

>On a multiple-choice test with four choices per question, someone with no knowledge who guesses randomly will get ~25%.

That would be terrible test design. At my (German) university, most Multiple Choice tests give one point for a correct answer, minus half a point for a wrong answer. That way you expect negative points from people who think they know everything but are no better than random guessing, zero points from somebody who knows nothing, some points from someone who can always narrow it down to two choices.

I guess my point is that you can arbitrarily raise the floor with a bad grading scheme, but there's no inherent reason to do that.

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