The business school is hacksaw , but in STEM fields its always ranked around 15 so it’s not that hacksaw. I am mathematics/CS so I don’t care about the business school which is hacksaw.
So, it didn’t matter if you got 80% or 89% correct? Still got a B either way? That seems more hacksaw than the +/- system.
No, A- existed (3.66), and the + and - still existed for B, C, D. B+ was (3.33) etc.
Wow, very precise with their grading. I’m sure the differentiation is meaningful. Did a class in statistical analysis or psychometrics have the same scale?
Professors sometimes underestimate how much the students are absorbing, particularly if they are inexperienced in teaching or they are new to the particular university and therefore simply guessed wrong about what the abiliities of the students are. In those cases, lots of students will get low scores in terms of percentage points scored, but that doesn’t mean they will all be failed. You just get a situation where the A students only got 50% of the points or something.
Other professors like giving hard exams on principle so that it’s easy to tell who the good students are. You can’t very well figure out who deserves an A if everyone gets a perfect score, so they ask hard questions and see who manages to get through.
Richard Feynman was known to have put some of the unsolved problems of physics on his students’ exams, knowing that these problems had never been solved. His idea was that students may not suffer the same degree of groupthink as those in the field and might find an approach that no one had considered before. I don’t know if that exercise ever bore fruit.
In general, petitioning the professor for a better grade doesn’t work out well unless there is a clear error (like adding up the points wrong or something). If it’s just that the student thinks that the exam was too hard, that will carry very little weight and the prof will remember the student as a whining little twerp.
Students are always whining to get their grades improved. And if the exam was too hard for the entire class, the prof already knows it and spent time compensating for it when trying to decide where the A/B/C dividing lines go and has already spent time thinking about it. A few professors will let the entire class fail, but only if they have a lot of experience with the students from that program and thus are reasonably sure that the scores accurately reflect their ability compared to the entire pool of students.
Finally, a student whining about an A- and trying to morph it into an A is really really whining. If your paper or test wasn’t perfect, and there’s no addition errors in summing up the points, then suck it up and do better next time. Whining about wanting an A+ instead of an A is even worse.
When I taught courses, one of the nicest compliments I received from my students was when they said “The test you gave was really hard, but every question on it was totally fair.”
Crying between an A- and an A is ridiculous. I have heard profs mention that they are likely to help students out who may fail a class if they can see they try hard and dont want them to fail out of school, but if I were a prof and some kid came crying about wanting an A instead of an A- I would most certainly give them the A- at that point, might even be tempted to go through their assignments with a comb and see if I can dock some points and take them to a B+ out of spite
Agreed, I had a professor who I dont think anyone ever got over a 70 on his exams. He obviously curved them but he enjoyed challenging students during the exams. I enjoyed that class and learned a ton more than in a class with easier exams. Everyone put in extra effort because they knew the exam was going to be a impossible.
I think Freddie deBoer hit the nail on the head:
In every college I went to (and there were many), you either got an A, B, C, D, F, W, or I. There was no + or - about it.
Glad my school has grade non-disclosure policy
In my last year of university, I took a stochastic calculus class which had a final exam requiring 50% minimum to pass. I scraped home with a 52% and was one of only a handful in the class to avoid having to repeat in the summer. There was an option to take stochastic calculus II the following semester which I politely declined! I knew I had reached my level right there.
It is funny, more difficult the material, better i do relative to peers
My school, that I hope is not considered hacksaw yet, gave +/- grades, including A+, which was weighted as 4.3 points. I have some mixed opinions about this policy. On one hand, the top 1% of people in such a place are true, genuine geniuses, and perhaps deserve maximum recognition. On the other hand, one of my (male) friends enrolled in a feminism class to fulfill some social studies requirement, and got an A+ because the people were so impressed that he was “forward thinking”.
Columbia?
Sometimes I don’t get this place.
How did this spiral into a topic about f’ing grades when this was by far the bigger issue at play here. What was the joke? What was the breakfast? Did he tell the joke while chewing?
“My university blah blah blah this, blah blah blah that…”
“Sam is a cry baby yadda yadda yadda…”
Do you realize a third of his professors were smoking crack?!
Literally!
Nice Richard Feynman reference! (I still have my copy of the “Feynman Lectures in Physics” on my bookshelf) I can second that about testing in Physics. The tests were rediculous… the curve was generous.
STL had a good point too. Fundamentally, the eduacation is about learning … not grades. A professor that sees you care more about the former is likely to be on your side when it comes to grades.
(ps…cool Feynman sidenote… he used to work physics problems while hanging out in gentleman’s clubs 
)
Do you mean like what happens when you pass through the event horizon and enter a black hole?
I think it was more conservation of angular momentum kinds of things…
Or perhaps solving variations on the constrained three-body problem.
^^he worked on equations and lectures …and would occationally draw the dancers