That's petty clever, I wonder if the they learned it from the labor movement.

I am getting the impression that the professor is either foreign or his family is fairly new to the states. An American professor would have flunked them, dressed them down for a few hours, and then shot them all.

/too soon?
//yes it is a joke so get over it...

5monkeys: This is ridiculous. It sounds like you had a chance to improve your grade with the curve. If the highest score was an 80 then your grade got bumped up by 20 points. I don't understand the logic in getting everyone to sit out.

/ never graded on a curve.
//am I misunderstanding it?

I can't tell FTFA, but a proper curve enforces a standard distribution on grades - 1 A, 2 Bs, 3 Cs, 2 Ds, and 1 F, for example, regardless of the actual spread of results.  This is hardly ever done any more, and the more common meaning of "grade on a curve" is that the highest score is now equal to 100%.  So, the smart kid gets 92 out of 100 on the test and everybody gets eight points added to their score.  So now the kid who only got a 75 is getting a B instead of a C, etc.  This is probably what this prof was using in his class.  So, the end result when the highest score is 0 is that everybody gets 100 points added to their score, which means everybody gets an A.

the ha ha guy: 5monkeys: This is ridiculous. It sounds like you had a chance to improve your grade with the curve. If the highest score was an 80 then your grade got bumped up by 20 points

If 90% of the class gets a score of 60, and the highest is 61, that 90% gets an A.

If 90% of the class gets a score of 60, and the highest is 98, that 90% gets a D.

Grading on a curve really does allow one person to mess it up for everyone else. Your score doesn't matter, only the highest score does, unless you can prove that your "incorrect" answers were correct as stated in the textbook, not covered in the class, etc.

I was that one person once. My networking class had a hard exam on IP addressing. I understood how to convert binary to decimal and hex. Knew how to do the wide range of IP addressing classes and subnets. Scored a 98%. The next highest grade was a 65%. The professor said he would of graded on a curve if it was not for the one person who scored a 98%. My friends found out it was me and I ran for my life.

YoungLochinvar: 5monkeys: This is ridiculous. It sounds like you had a chance to improve your grade with the curve. If the highest score was an 80 then your grade got bumped up by 20 points. I don't understand the logic in getting everyone to sit out.

/ never graded on a curve.
//am I misunderstanding it?

It depends - essentially the highest score is now "100%", and everything else is graded relative to that score. So, if everyone is clustered in a normal distribution then the curve should help.

In my experience, professors that graded on a curve generally wrote extremely difficult exams, and expected that the highest marks would be around 50-60% of the total. If, however, you happen to be in class with a freakin' genius who performs well above that expectation, then your grade would be totally shot. (Granted, *most* professors who do this will account for outliers and retool the curve so that it's more normally distributed... sounds like this guy might not do that, however.)

(Lot of assumptions in here, I know...)

I had one of these professors on college.

IIRC,the curve was something like:

> 80 was an A
60-79 was a B
45-59 was a C
35-44 was a D
 < 35 F

What's the point of teaching agiving exams where 75% of the students are retaining maybe 50% of the  information.

Grading on a curve is dumb, and this prof had it coming.  Just grade on an absolute scale; that way students compete with the test and the material and not each other.

FAIL tag beats ASININE?

Andrew Kelly, a student in Fröhlich's Introduction to Programming class who was one of the boycott's key organizers, explained the logic of the students' decision via e-mail: "Handing out 0's to your classmates will not improve your performance in this course," Kelly said.

If I were an employer, I'd be thrilled that this guy allowed his name to be used in the article, because he is so delusional I'd never consider for a moment hiring him.

Does he not realize exams are supposed to asses your understanding of the material taught in a class, and a grade is supposed to be a final reflection of your understanding of the material?

The professor should be rightly lambasted for his "curve" scheme as well- bringing the "A" grade down to the highest scoring student? Why should there be any reason to adjust the grading based on a particular group of students and their peers? If pre-med students taking anatomy were all idiots, and couldn't do better than a 60% at any time, you'd be damn sure I'd want most of them to fail, because they clearly do not understand the material. As such, I don't want them to be able to become doctors until they do. Not that employers place a great deal of importance on grades anyway, but saying you got a 3.5 GPA in our field of study when in reality it was just because everyone you took classes with was as stupid as you is tantamount to lying about your academic history.

There are times when a curve is acceptable- when the test has mistakes on it, or is worded so poorly that you can't help but get the question wrong. This is evidenced by a huge proportion of the entire test-taking base getting that question wrong, and generating a statistical aberration in the scoring. You then curve the scored upward by the value of the questions missed. This is how the SAT, ACT, and most other standardized tests do it.

The icing on the cake is the fact that this was an INTRODUCTORY level course, not some 500-level advanced programming study. If you can't handle the intro courses in your major, it's time to change majors.

/had a math teacher who always offered to curve our test scores
//he'd mention he was planning on using a bell curve to statistically normalize them
///we never took him up on it

5monkeys: This is ridiculous. It sounds like you had a chance to improve your grade with the curve. If the highest score was an 80 then your grade got bumped up by 20 points. I don't understand the logic in getting everyone to sit out.

/ never graded on a curve.
//am I misunderstanding it?

That's an adjustment, on a true curve the highest grade is always a 100 and the lowest grade is always a 0. Most professors who "grade on a curve" actually just adjust the mean grade to 2.8-3.2 depending on thethe performance of thethe class and then adjust everyone elses hrade relative to the mean.

R66YRobo: Gerald Tarrant: Call me crazy but I have always felt when marking my students that their mark should be related to how much they know not how much the others in the class do.

The idea behind a sliding scale (is that the best term for this type of gradaing....I hate when people call it a curve because grading to a curve is something completely different) is that it helps cancel out issues such as ambiguous or poorly worded questions, poor explanation or coverage of a subject,  and other testing issues.  The idea is that if a question is "bad", for whatever reason, such that the majority of the class misses it, then it is more likely that the fault lies with the test, the professor, or the text.  Ideally you would review the results of each question to weed out the bad ones, but practically you accomplish the same thing by adjusting the grading scale to the top score.

Trust me when I say that if this method of grading wasn't used, you'd have more of the piss poor profs whom seem to revel in the "lets see how many students I can fail this term" tests.  It can promote grade inflation however and should be not be used as a crutch by professors to justify lazy / bad test writing (which it does at times from my experience).

I like how you explained that. I just had an IT ethical class midterm and one of the questions had "right" answers (one of those choose which answers fit questions). I, as well as the majority of classmates, got it wrong. I argued that that question was indeed a bad question because ethics is defined as where a person grew up and world view (broad definition I know). And that technically all the answers were indeed the right answer to the question. It worked and the question was thrown out to allow easier grading. Which raised everyone's grade by over 20 percent.

Oh, and a CSB

Had a high school teacher who graded this way and even told the class flat out that if everyone handed in a blank test he would give everyone a 100%.  Of course, if one person answered a single question, everyone else would get a 0.  He had been doing it for 20+ years when I had him and as far as I know no class ever even attempted to game it, even with him admitting the loophole.  Of course, as it was high school you couldn't set up outside the door to ensure no one came in like these college students did.  You'd have to sit the test hour with you test blank in front of you the entire hour and just trust that the other 30 people in class were doing the same.

Don't like the way a teacher grades?  You find out all about it during the first week.  Just drop the class.  Problem solved.

grinding_journalist: FAIL tag beats ASININE?

Andrew Kelly, a student in Fröhlich's Introduction to Programming class who was one of the boycott's key organizers, explained the logic of the students' decision via e-mail: "Handing out 0's to your classmates will not improve your performance in this course," Kelly said.

If I were an employer, I'd be thrilled that this guy allowed his name to be used in the article, because he is so delusional I'd never consider for a moment hiring him.

The guy got dozens of other people to follow him in on a risky proposition - a group which MUST have included people who would have gotten an "A" anyway.  There are plenty of places that WOULD hire him just because of this....

hahaha, I used this same grading system on a group of about 60 people working for me.

I based it off the work they were doing (tickets, meetings, etc.). -It worked wonders.

They were used to people smoozing their way to the top without doing any real work. When this got implemented, those same jerks were revealed for their lack of work.

Tickets got done faster, people started attending meetings (I included grading for participation -meaning if you promised something at the last meeting and didn't have it or didn't show up, you got a zero that day), and I promoted the ones who worked.

The only ones not happy with the system were the lazy farks who eventually were either let go at the end of their contracts or left on their own.

Interestingly enough, when I started, I didn't know who to trust, so I had a meeting discussing our new way of working, and gave them a handwritten "test" on it (but I allowed them to cheat). I used the results for handwriting analysis... which works really well if you do it right by the way.

If only the rest of the business world was run this way.

Gerald Tarrant: Call me crazy but I have always felt when marking my students that their mark should be related to how much they know not how much the others in the class do.

What you said.

Fizpez: The guy got dozens of other people to follow him in on a risky proposition - a group which MUST have included people who would have gotten an "A" anyway. There are plenty of places that WOULD hire him just because of this....

Another way of looking at it would be: This guy convinced dozens of other people to do an ethically questionable gaming of the system for personal benefit. I wonder if he'd do that with his pool of office co-workers at our company? He clearly has no problem with it, and here, it might cost us money.

grinding_journalist: Another way of looking at it would be: This guy convinced dozens of other people to do an ethically questionable gaming of the system for personal benefit. I wonder if he'd do that with his pool of office co-workers at our company? He clearly has no problem with it, and here, it might cost us money.

meh.  A company with a strong union wouldn't even notice the difference.

Dogberry: I'm amazed that that one guy who asks all the stupid questions right at the end of class didn't fark it up for everyone else by showing up for the exam.

Some of my Dad's classmates in med school would play "Bimbo Bingo", with the names of all the suckups on cards.

Gerald Tarrant: Call me crazy but I have always felt when marking my students that their mark should be related to how much they know not how much the others in the class do.

Yeah I'm not sure what the point of it is unless it's to prop up bad students (ie everybody is a winner). The grades are supposed to reflect an individual's performance, where this is like you're grading the group as a single unit.

They changed the conditions of the test; got a commendation for original thinking. They don't like to lose.

You just know that ONE of these students will ask for a letter of recommendation from this guy, and that is where he will exact his revenge.

I guess congratulations are in order for the whole class getting 100% on this exam, but from the sound of it the organizers at least put in more work to get out of the exam than they would have had to put into studying in the first place.

/was always the "curve breaker" in middle and high school
//enjoy the Ds you earned, you jock bastards
///I've gotten much dumber with age, unfortunately

Clever, and you win on a technicality (which isn't even really a technicality, the professor's syllabus and grading style are not legally binding), but come on you whiny entitled bastards. It's just a test. Seriously.

I'd have failed all of them on principle.

AngryPanda: fireclown: 

/do the work and you shouldn't have to worry about failing

I bet most of them weren't in any danger of failing.  However, many of them were likely in danger of getting a B.

The My Little Pony Killer: Don't like the way a teacher grades?  You find out all about it during the first week.  Just drop the class.  Problem solved.

They did like the way the teacher grades, though. They liked it a whole lot.

Adolf Oliver Nipples: pyrotek85: Gerald Tarrant: Call me crazy but I have always felt when marking my students that their mark should be related to how much they know not how much the others in the class do.

Yeah I'm not sure what the point of it is unless it's to prop up bad students (ie everybody is a winner). The grades are supposed to reflect an individual's performance, where this is like you're grading the group as a single unit.

You are making the assumption, usually but not always correct, that tests actually test knowledge. In my experience, admittedly anecdotal, all tests prove is that people like me can easily pass without studying while the people on the bottom end of the class spend hours studying to get mediocre grades.

Normalization of grades have been happening for a long time, I see little reason to object to it now.

It sounds like the problem lies with the tests, though I wouldn't know how to go about solving it myself. Maybe it's just wishful thinking and this is the best way to compensate.

If this was a literature class, yeah... the professor should fail/incomplete them all.  For classes in a field where it is a valuable skill to be able to spot edge cases, and put together a system that makes sure this doesn't blow up in your face (one student takes test)... i thinkthe prof did the right thing.

blatz514: What dangerous curves may look like

A methed up redneck?

thurstonxhowell: StrangeQ: /would have failed them all if I was the professor

Not if you didn't like being sued for not following the syllabus that you printed and handed out. This was at Johns Hopkins, at least one of those kids would have had the dough to make that hurt.

Oh really?  Most curves work by setting the lowest score as the max and then adjusting the rest proportionally from 0 to 100.  The range in this case is 0, and mathematically anything/0 is undefined, so I could set their grades anywhere on the scale from 0 - 100 and still have mathematically graded on a curve.  I choose 0.

Quaker: That's true for now. But as a general rule, when you find a system that can be exploited, it's never helpful in the long run to take that exploitation to the extreme. They could have coordinated their efforts in a more subtle way so that everyone gets a reasonably good grade without necessarily alerting the professor to the collusion. Instead they risked ruining it for everyone else down the line so that they could all get A's.

Or you could look at it this way:
Kevin Mitnick now uses his computer hacking skills to help companies protect their systems and networks.
FrankAbagnale started the same thing to help protect companies from scammers, fraudsters and forgers.
You could call these kids 'White Hats' if you really wanted to.

Both of these people went to extremes, and have now seen how damaging those extremes can be, deciding now to help fix those problems. If these students hadn't done this, the loophole still would have existed. The only thing they "ruined" is that nobody else can exploit that particular loophole, and if they hadn't "ruined" it, someone else would have farther down the road, and THOSE people would have "ruined" it. The curve still exists, he's just adding a clause that you actually have to take the exam now, which should go without saying anyway. I don't see anything ruined, except that someone else can't exploit the loophole later. I se it as a learning experience for all, and a chance for the professor to make his system more realistic and fair...

In my professional program, the comp finals were assembled from all the tests given previously in the semester. Our class organized and had each student memorize 2-3 questions and all answer options off of each test. Then we reassembled each test afterwards with all correct answers. For the comp final we then had 100% of all the questions and answers that had been given that term to study by.

Not cheating, and we were pretty organized about it. Then the dean found out what we had been doing and threatened to expel anyone cooperating. Yay for college in the south?

StrangeQ: Oh really?  Most curves work by setting the lowest score as the max and then adjusting the rest proportionally from 0 to 100.  The range in this case is 0, and mathematically anything/0 is undefined, so I could set their grades anywhere on the scale from 0 - 100 and still have mathematically graded on a curve.  I choose 0.

As pointed out in the article, his grading policy is to apply an adjustment to the grades equal to the difference between the highest score and the maximum grade.  Under those rules, if the entire class makes the same grade (including 0) then they are entitled to 100%.  If that's specified in the syllabus, he really has no choice in this matter.  As class performance can have financial impact in a student's life (both immediately, i.e. grants and scholarships) and long-term (job market), the syllabus is an important document for letting a student evaluate their expected performance, and should be treated like a contract.

BafflerMeal: In my professional program, the comp finals were assembled from all the tests given previously in the semester. Our class organized and had each student memorize 2-3 questions and all answer options off of each test. Then we reassembled each test afterwards with all correct answers. For the comp final we then had 100% of all the questions and answers that had been given that term to study by.

Not cheating, and we were pretty organized about it. Then the dean found out what we had been doing and threatened to expel anyone cooperating. Yay for college in the south?

There were almost certainly sections of your academic policy that prohibit copying and redistributing tests, which is what you were doing.  It doesn't have anything to do with "the south."

My experience taking classes graded on a curve included students sabotaging other students' lab experiments, books being stolen from the reserve library, pages ripped out or blacked out, cheating on a massive scale, you know, just the sort of behavior you want to encourage.

There are many good reasons not to grade on a curve, I suppose this might be one of them.


Although, if they were actually fit to a curve, all students should have a middle C, not a 100.

Whoops.

Dokushin: BafflerMeal: In my professional program, the comp finals were assembled from all the tests given previously in the semester. Our class organized and had each student memorize 2-3 questions and all answer options off of each test. Then we reassembled each test afterwards with all correct answers. For the comp final we then had 100% of all the questions and answers that had been given that term to study by.

Not cheating, and we were pretty organized about it. Then the dean found out what we had been doing and threatened to expel anyone cooperating. Yay for college in the south?

There were almost certainly sections of your academic policy that prohibit copying and redistributing tests, which is what you were doing.  It doesn't have anything to do with "the south."

Wow. Memorizing is copying? I think we just created a new DMCA crime.

This was a very risky idea. Imagine, if one student had signed the agreement, but been legitimately sick on the day of the exam and in the infirmary, thereby qualifying for a make up exam.

Meh, who cares?  Tests are easy, it sounds like they were just having some fun with the prof.  It was a low-level class, if you didn't bother to learn the material because you were too busy gaming the system, good luck on the next tier of classes that builds on the base you were just tested on.  If anything the big loser here will be the guys teaching the 2000 level classes, who find out on the first day that a bulk of the class spent more time organizing a social event instead of putting their knowledge to use.

From my experience in the world of project/program management and general successful business, nobody is handing out grades, but you will damn sure be judged on your competance.

The people organizing this little event probably got some valuable experience in managing people out of it.  They found a way to convince a group of people to work together, albeit in an unorthadox manner, to achieve a common goal.  That is always a good skill to have.

/Me?  I would have taken the test, but only because I would rather take it quickly, and leave as soon as I am done, typically well before the allotted time.  Sitting in a hallway for the entire testing period sounds boring as hell.

Pair-o-Dice: They divided by zero. Worlds colliding!

Nope, they didn`t divide anything. They averaged the scores (all zero) found the highest mark (zero) and said if you got the highest mark you got 100%.