alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
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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.
> 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?