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How about instead of curving their grade on a test, the teacher goes back, reteaches the material in a different way and then retests. Might eliminate the need to curve their grades in the first place.
Curving exams is quite common. I wouldn't get all crazy about it. The truth is your son got the highest grade in the class, so he should get an A.
When I was in college I went to one of my physics professors and told him that I was planning to withdraw from the class because I was doing so poorly. He took a look at his gradebook (this was back in the stone age) and told me there was no reason for me to withdraw from the class. I was earning test grades in the 40% range. I wound up with a C+ in the class. It was just a difficult class.
This was the case for the chemistry courses at my university as well, where freshman chem was a "weed out" class for potential chem majors and pre-meds.
If done properly, curving a grade is not a freebee to make someone feel good. It begins with the concept of the normal distribution and then fits the data, which are the grades, to the normal curve. The problem is to many people, OP included, get caught on the idea of 0-100 is an absolute scale, when it's really relative.
So you have several possibilities. One, the teacher was really bad at teaching that section. Two, the teacher did a good job, but the whole class were a bunch of dummies. Or, three, the teacher made a test that was intentionally designed to be well beyond the expected difficulty to see how the kids did. The teacher's expected average value on that test could have been, oh, say 40. Then all the curve would be doing is translating from the teacher's scale to the A-B-C scale parents expect to see.
Out of the three possibilities, two relate to how the teacher wrote the test. Only one relates to the student. Yet the OP and others want to immediately think "dumb students" and "free grades to feel good."
Oh, and yes, those big national tests DO curve. That's why you see so much reported in percentiles.
I was just talking about Miss Brickhouse, a tough-as-nails gym teacher (real name!) who taught for probably 16 yrs. Her girls field hockey team was unstoppable. Anyway, I was there the first year she taught, straight from college, she had all kinds of ideas. Her standards were so high we all disregarded her. She failed us. First grading period about 70% of her students failed. Parents were livid and wanted her fired. Principal stood behind her and we started paying attention to her expectations and actually trying! We had to work our tails off but we did it - at least some of us did. She was tough and expected a lot. But she knew we had it in us. She would never grade on a curve. RIP Ms. Brickhouse-Smith. Your legacy lives on.
Do not ask the teacher anything about your son and his grades on the curve. Anything that goes on in that classroom is a result of a direct order from the assistant principal (if they have one) or the principal. Any orders from the principal are from higher up in the organization.
Further, principals are under constant pressure to have high performing schools. If the school fails, the principal's job is at risk. Not only is his job at risk but so is his mortgage, and everything else he is financing in his life.
Teachers are the first to be blamed and in reality, they are only following what they are told to do. If they do not follow the rules they are subject to dismissal. I know this is all frustrating but it is the reality of the situation. I personally saw to my children's education by sitting with them each and every day and helping them if they needed it. At a certain point, they no longer needed my attention but that was somewhere either in or at the beginning of high school. I made very sure that they were on task and understood their work. After all, if we fail our children, we and society pay forever after.
My belief is that a person's test score should be a result of how the individual performed on the test, not a score based on how the rest of the class performed.
What motivation is it if a student does poorly and yet ends up with a grade higher than it is in reality. I would want to know the actual score for myself, or my child, to know how to improve going forward.
I almost bought it in a college course where even though I had numerically received a C, they were ready to give me a D or flunk me (t'was decades ago) because the class was doing so much better than me. But in the last second of negotiations, the prof relented, saying how he could not do someone in (not his words) who had missed the distribution curve by so little and granted me my C.
The basis for them grading this way was that this was the way it was done in the real world. That one was not graded by just numbers but how they rank with their comrades.
Right or wrong, because there is ethics to consider in such a system, I'll leave that there.
Your belief is wonderful because it is yours. It stops there. In reality, that is not how the system works, unfortunately. As for motivation, children need to be motivated at an early age and then constantly reminded and encouraged during their journey through childhood. Their motivation must be kindled and guarded by their parents until they are old enough the "take the ball and run with it."
If children have to look to scores as motivation, there is the trouble right there.
Towards the latter part of my career I (my department and all departments city-wide) were instructed to grade papers holistically. We were ordered to ignore grammar PERIOD! I ignored this order and continued to mark every paper totally. We were told exactly what to do, how to do it and if grades were too low we were called into the principal's office and threateningly questioned. Everyone knew exactly what was expected of them in order to make the school look "good".
My belief is that a person's test score should be a result of how the individual performed on the test, not a score based on how the rest of the class performed.
What motivation is it if a student does poorly and yet ends up with a grade higher than it is in reality. I would want to know the actual score for myself, or my child, to know how to improve going forward.
Let me turn that around. What motivation is it if a student does well on a test yet ends up with a grade lower than it is in reality?
The fundamental assumption you're making is that the test is representative of some absolute standard of what a person of a certain age should know. There isn't. Instead the standard is relative to the population. Historically we've always considered average to be C. So that sets the scale. (For the mathematicians, let's not get into whether the population is Gaussian; way beyond the scope of this.)
Every person on this board has had grades curved, many times. You may not know it, but you have. It's easy to write a test that most of the class will fail. It's hard to write one that actually tests the material taught properly.
What motivation is it if a student does well on a test yet ends up with a grade lower than it is in reality?.
Exactly my point! Thank you for agreeing!
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