Classes with Ridiculous Curves

[Cegar]

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Yeah. I am in agreement.

That is absolutely ******ed.

 

[kedrin]

Thats BS. 20% average with the passing grade being twice the mean and an A being 4 times that? Yeah right. SDNers find the craziest ways to boast.

thats not BS that is just about how it was in my o chem class

 

[kedrin]

Like you said its true for many schools. All schools have too many premeds. At all schools premed attrition is high from freshman year to application time. Nowhere do they try to fail >50% of their premed students.

It is a ridiculous thing to misrepresent but people on SDN tend to find the silliest things to exaggerate so forgive me for being skeptical of your extremely unlikely claim.

lol here is the make up of my o chem I class at the end
75 started
60 finished

4 got A's 88% and up (i dont remember the rest of the %'s)
8 got B's
28 failed
the rest got C's and D's

so yes drogba O chem I is a weed out class. have you taken o chem or any of the pre reqs yet? maybe your school is different but im pretty sure there are still ******ed people at just about every school around the nation.

 

[MNIkid87]

Advanced Macroeconomics

Class Average around 53 (I think 55 is a pass here but I am not sure).
After he curved it we suddenly had a B- average 😛

 

[novastorm]

I got a 44% once and ended up with an A.

How's that for a curve.

And for the record I think passing(above F) in my O Chem class usually hovered around 40-50%.

 

[Drogba]

lol here is the make up of my o chem I class at the end
75 started
60 finished

4 got A's 88% and up (i dont remember the rest of the %'s)
8 got B's
28 failed
the rest got C's and D's

so yes drogba O chem I is a weed out class. have you taken o chem or any of the pre reqs yet? maybe your school is different but im pretty sure there are still ******ed people at just about every school around the nation.

I've taken all the prereqs except the second semester of physics and I've taken basic science and math courses at two different colleges and in no class have I seen 50% of the students failing. You don't need to fail someone to weed them out. Perhaps this has to do with the quality of the students, I don't know, but that sounds insane to me. What type of school do you go to?

 

[novastorm]

I've taken all the prereqs except the second semester of physics and I've taken basic science and math courses at two different colleges and in no class have I seen 50% of the students failing. You don't need to fail someone to weed them out. Perhaps this has to do with the quality of the students, I don't know, but that sounds insane to me. What type of school do you go to?

At my school they don't fail people easily (you REALLY have to do poorly), but they have no problem doling out the C's or D's.

 

[amph119]

Average on my analytical chemistry final 3 semesters ago was a 40. I got a 67 and the 2nd highest grade in the class.

Choo choo

 

[kedrin]

I've taken all the prereqs except the second semester of physics and I've taken basic science and math courses at two different colleges and in no class have I seen 50% of the students failing. You don't need to fail someone to weed them out. Perhaps this has to do with the quality of the students, I don't know, but that sounds insane to me. What type of school do you go to?

3rd or 4th largest (i think) state school in texas, around 30k students i think. UNT

He was a good professor too, Chair of chemistry actually. O chem II is alot different, we have alot of high grades and no curves (he doesnt give any).

 

[Lokhtar]

My calc IV class (that I failed) had an average of 61 for the midterm and 51 for the final. There were only 16 people in the class, but 9 failed. I'm not making excuses, as I should have put in the work and I didn't, but that was a harsh grade, without a curve.

I've never had an actual curve more than 5 points.

 

[Myuu]

Well its crazy how it was a multiple choice test with less than a 25% average.

I'm pretty sure there were at least six options per question (which is actually not the worst I've seen--some engineering exams gave choices a through l)

 

[sciencebird]

I have class and ridiculous curves. I have a long tail too.

 

[Tiger26]

A 45% was a "C" in both my organic classes.

Since I had already been accepted to med school before ever taking either organic class, it made for a pretty relaxing two trimesters when all I had to do was pass and pretty much just throw down some structure diagrams on the test.

Of course, learning organic on my own for the MCAT took a little bit of extra work.😉

 

[digitlnoize]

My Physics I class had a really insane curve.

The professor would take the square root of your test grade, then multiply by 10. Then at the end of the semester she did the same thing for the final grade. So a 49 would result in a 70, then an 80-something at the end of the semester.

Her tests were WAY unfair. At one test review session, it took the physics graduate student 45 minutes to work ONE problem from our test. Not figure it out. Not explain it. 45 minutes to WORK it. We had 50 minutes and 10 problems.

She was also a horrible teacher...among the worst I've ever had.

 

[SketchLazy]

So I just got my genetics exam grade back, and let's say that I didn't do too well... but there was a big curve, not big, huge!!! The average was in the upper 50's. The lowest number grade you could get for the C was a 35! I was really surprised. I wanted to know if anyone else experienced ridiculous curves. Not only that, but do you think that the professor would change the way he writes his exams because of the low average/huge curve.

Any input would be great.

Thanks!

Yes. I had genetics with Nesbitt at UCSD and she curved. The average for the second exam was thirty-something. I got an A on the exam with a forty-something! She did not change her style at all. Went through the whole quarter like that. If the class is curved, there is no real point to change the test difficulty level, because you would still get a normal grade distribution anyway. Take comfort though. You could still get an A with a curve like that.

 

[Maxprime]

Is there a way to calculate the greatest possible STDEV for a range of scores and a population of students? Where is maxprime when you need him... Who curves the mean to 20 below an F anyway? Obviously bs.

Here he comes to wreck the day! 🙂

I'm rusty on stats formulas (it's sad, I know - but use it or lose it). But, off the top of my head, you could definitely maximize the least squares fit instead of minimizing it - of course, that'd be called something crazy like a "most squares fit". I'm willing to bet that there is someone that has proven an actual term for the maximum stdev of a non-parametric population, I just don't know what it is.

In my experience, math profs love lower scores because they don't lose any data by truncating the data at 100.

 

[Maxprime]

I have class and ridiculous curves. I have a long tail too.

😆 ! Well played, sir. Well played.