I took orgo as an undergrad from a brutal professor. His name is Marcus Tius, and he is legendary at UH Manoa for being hard. He got his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Harvard from EJ Corey. Most people on here probably don't know who EJ Corey is, but he's widely considered to be the greatest chemist alive. And Corey's lab is insanely intense. A few of his grad students committed suicide in recent years from the pressure. Supposedly, I don't know if this is urban legend, but EJ Corey told several others that Tius was his best student ever at the time.
Anyways, I just wanted to share a few of my orgo stories. Our first exam mean scores were in the 20%'s. Only 10 of us got above 70%. There is NO curve in his class. He talked about this after the first exam, and he said, "Many of you are asking me if there's a curve. I wouldn't hesitate to call 90% and above an A." The first test was so brutal, that after he called the 15 minute left mark, a whole sea of "HOly shit! WTF?!" spread throughout the lecture hall. It was shortly after that, one of the students was escorted out by a grad student proctor because he peed his pants. I was already light headed from the intensity of the exam, but seeing a guy literally pee in his pants almost made me pass out.
In retrospect, orgo isn't that bad. If I had taken it the previous year with another professor who was using the McMurry textbook, I would have even said it was pretty easy. But, no. I was stuck with Tius, and I was stuck with an entry level graduate textbook on organic chemistry--this part is no joke. However, in retrospect, I also realized Tius wasn't bad either. I realized that if I just worked on his assigned problem sets and studied those for the exams, I would have done fine. The exam mostly consisted of the problem set. So, he was very fair. However, all of the urban legend stories made me so scared, I was doing all the problems in the chapter which often took 50-60 hrs a week to complete.
For anyone thinking about taking orgo, it's really not that bad. However, like any other course, the professor and books can make it incredibly hard. Just be wary of that.
BTW, I did get an A in both orgo courses. I majored in math and chemistry, and I have to say, that class with Tius was by FAR the hardest shit I ever had to go through. And that includes a general chemistry course with another brutally hard chem professor in which I stood up three nights in a row to study for the third exam because I was so behind. I got an A in that class too.
It seems necessary to make exams that hard when they do not determine the grade anyway (the OP got an A- with a B on the final exam).
Let me expand on how it works in a German university. There are no curves, the concept is completely foreign here. Your grade is 100% determined by a final exam. You do exercises only to get approval for writing the final exam in the first place.
It sounds like your exams are more like Microsoft Certifications rather than US university exams. At top US universities, it is common to include questions that only one person in 100, or zero in 100 will get right. I took plenty of Math exams with 10 questions, where getting 5 would earn an A, and 8 is how many grad students would get right, and the 10th question was a joke, like Fermat's Last Theorem. The exams were not to demonstrate you are certified in a subject, but rather to show your ability and limits.
Not grading on a curve is a horrible idea. It means the exam must be limited to material that is taught, rather than limiting it to known knowledge in the universe. German University sounds like a big ass certification program, not a real university.
Maybe I misunderstand what this curve grading is all about, but doesn't grading on a curve mean the grade is not a measure of how good one is, but how one compares to other people who happened to be taking the exam at the same time? So you don't have to be any good to get a top grade - just better than other people taking the exam at the same time? And likewise, you could be the world's tenth greatest living chemist, but if the other nine people taking the exam are the world's top nine, you'll fail.
This is a complex issue. Harvard grades everyone on a curve, and basically never gives lower than a B. They use "A+" as a system to identify the truly exceptional people.
My point is that a professor should be able to write 20 questions that are relevant and interesting, and just look at the distribution of results to assign grades. I think that makes sense, rather than turning university exams into certification style exams.
My answer to why, it is a horrible idea to not grade on a curve requires and anecdote:
I took an impossibly hard math course with about 15 students where the average grade was a 2, I got a 4, one guy got a 6, and another guy got an 8. The professor gave me an A, but in reality, I was 4 orders of magnitude dumber than the best student. Professors have discretion. The main reason I tell this story, is that the guys that got a 6/10 and and 8/10 have both gone on to have an 8-figure net-worth (fuck-you money). One through finance, and another through a startup. It has been awesome to see the people that I know are insanely smart become insanely wealthy.
The important part of this anecdote is that the professors that wrote the exam wrote two questions that one of smartest humans on earth could not answer. How fucked up would the world be if the professor had only written the 4 questions we all got it right? Asking impossible questions creates greatness. Grading on a curve enables professors to find truly exceptional people.
What you've written here doesn't make much sense; possibly because the reason you wrote it wasn't to support your argument but to tell us you went to school with some people who became very rich.
"How fucked up would the world be if the professor had only written the 4 questions we all got it right?"
This just doesn't make sense. What are you trying to say? Did you mean to ask "What happens if there were only four questions and we all got it right?"
"My point is that a professor should be able to write 20 questions that are relevant and interesting, and just look at the distribution of results to assign grades."
Fine. My point is that this means you're being marked on the basis of how well you did compared to everyone else who took the exam, which means it's not a measure of how good you are; it's a measure of how good you are compared to the others taking the exam. If the purpose of taking the exam is to demonstrate you know the material, grading on a curve subverts and corrupts that purpose. Any exam in which your mark depends on how well other people do in the exam is a nonsense; your mark should only depend on how well you do in the exam. If the professor knows the exam is horrifically difficult and thinks that to score twenty percent is amazing, you should get a good mark for reaching twenty percent, even if everyone else scores fifty percent.
Grading on a curve helps normalize the resulting letter grades based on how well everyone else in the class understand the material, as it was presented. You are correct in this.
I believe it acts as a check to make sure that the class is well taught, and the questions of an appropriate difficulty level.
If every student receives an F for a 40% correct (and they all only get 40% correct), a curve normalizes that. Students who understand the material as it was presented and tested better than others receive a higher grade.
Makes good sense to me. The problems arise in the Harvard situation, where nobody is curved down. If you down curve inflated scores downward, then a curve only serves to inflate grades and is less useful.
"If every student receives an F for a 40% correct (and they all only get 40% correct), a curve normalizes that. Students who understand the material as it was presented and tested better than others receive a higher grade."
If every one in the class was lazy to study/prepare for the exam and every one ended up getting less than 40% correct, then they all deserve to get F. Normalizing with a curve means, it's possible that someone who got only 39% in that exam in a class full of lazy folks who all scored much less than him, can earn a A or A+ ! Compare this to similar class/exam taken by different set of students (all brilliant) at a different time or place, who all worked hard and scored above 80% but still some of them could get B or C's due to curve grading. Wouldn't it be unfair to the 80% scorer who got a C whereas some one who scored a 39% on the same subject got A+ due to circumstances (time and peers he took the exam with) !! How is that fair at all?
This is an invented objection. In reality, in classes of sufficient size, there is always a subset of students who work hard (or are extra smart, or whatever), a subset who is average, and a subset who slacks, or just doesn't understand the material well. The objection that there might be a mass class conspiracy to all score 40%, or that everyone in the class will be lazy, just doesn't make sense.
Who says it's a conspiracy? It's more a matter of culture. I have seen it happen: there's a trend in the class where the homework grades, on average, are high, but the exam grades are low, even though the material is mostly the same. This happens at reputable schools and at "low tier" schools.
It's quite difficult to write new tests that are unique enough not to be trivialized by access to old exams but of consistent difficulty semester after semester. Even if you could it might not give the result you want: if your university moves upmarket or the high school preparation in your subject improves should the average grade in your class increase to reflect these exogenous factors?
It's hard enough writing a good exam -- maximally descriminating, useful pedagogically, not unintentionally ambiguous -- without also requiring it to be mechanistically translatable to a semester grade.
Rampant grade inflation at Harvard and other Ivy leagues does not make grading on a curve a good idea. What does grading on a curve even mean if everyone is getting B's and higher anyway? If the class cannot grasp the material at hand, they should be graded poorly. If they learn it well, they should be rewarded. It is perfectly fine to write difficult (even near impossible) questions on an exam, with or without a curve. The only classes where I saw a grading curve used effectively were the weeder classes at <my well known research university> for high-demand majors. Like ochem for pre-med and electrical engineering prereqs, there were not enough spots in the program for everyone, and a certain percentage would fail the class, therefore assuring that only the strongest students would be admitted to those high priority majors.
We have a fetish for measuring and ordering people. Imagine what would happen if that professor couldn't "find" that one person who scored an 8. We would never be able to find brilliant thinkers.
I don't know how you would arrive at that conclusion from the information I've provided.
Exams are not at all restricted to the material taught; usually, knowing all the covered material and being able to reproduce it will only get you as far as 50%, allowing you to pass. Points above that will come from novel applications of the material you learned, or tests on the general concepts and approaches you should have learned.
>tests on the general concepts and approaches you should have learned.
The difference is that top US universities will ask questions that there is no reason you should possibly know the answer, and questions that only a person obsessed with the subject matter would possibly know. Grading on a curve allows the professors to ask really hard questions. Both knowledgeable students and exceptional students get the same grade, but the exceptional students get recommendations.
You probably think the US is very unfair. It is.
In the US, it is common that half the class gets a 50%, 10 people get a 70%, and one person gets a 90%. That one person is not lumped in with the rest. She is tracked to win a future Nobel prize.
Top US university exams are not the same as Microsoft certifications.
In the US, it is common that half the class gets a 50%, 10 people get a 70%, and one person gets a 90%.
And that is precisely the same in Germany; I've seen my share of exams where anything above 70% was the equivalent to an A, because nobody could realistically be expected to get 90%, let alone 100%; with questions where "there is no reason you should possibly know the answer, and questions that only a person obsessed with the subject matter would possibly know". I've seen courses where four out of five students failed the exam.
I have absolutely no idea where you get the idea that it's like a Microsoft certification. The difference in Germany is that if nobody gets an A, then nobody gets an A, period [1]. If everybody fails the course, then, well, everybody fails the course.
Part of the reason is that German universities traditionally have had pretty open admission policies; which meant that there never was much room for a C for effort. Grades had to mean something, namely that the student was deserving of a degree. And that meant that students had to be graded relative to the degree requirements, not relative to the rest of the class. And they ask really hard questions so that they can differentiate between the good and the brilliant.
For what it's worth, I've taken graduate math courses both in Germany and in the US; I think I have a pretty good idea what it's like in either country.
[1] Actually, Germany doesn't have an alphabetic system for grades, but you get the idea.
> It means the exam must be limited to material that is taught, rather than limiting it to known knowledge in the universe.
To turn that around, grading on a curve means that the test can have nothing to do with the material taught in the course--and so cannot be used paired with a pre-test to calculate the effectiveness of the course (and of the professor) in teaching the material. (Not that such things are even measured in Universities, especially for tenured professors...)
German University sounds like a big ass certification program, not a real university.
Degrees in Germany were traditionally research degrees (this may have changed when they introduced the Bachelor), and this explains why exams are done the way they are done.
The thesis at the end is substantial (a Diplom or Magister thesis was a year of genuine research), you would hand it in, they would examine you, and if you passed you would be admitted to the club. That's what German universities are, exclusive clubs.
Of course, before you can go and start writing, there are all sorts of prerequisites to be fulfilled. There is sufficient interaction between the students and faculty to spot the geniuses, the good and average students, and the hopeless cases. The hopeless ones would be failed out within the first two years.
I think you might misunderstand. Typically there are at least a midterm and a final exam, and sometimes homework counted into the grade. So, depending on the respective weighting of each exam and the homework, a B on the final with an A- in the class is entirely plausible.
I used to work at a biotech startup (late '90s) and our senior management was trying to get Corey to join our scientific advisory board.
Eventually, he agreed and our company drafted a press release (it was a big coup for us). Apparently, the initial draft that was sent to Corey said something like, "Dr. Corey's lab is one of the premier laboratories in the world for organic synthesis...." The revision that Corey sent back crossed out the words "one of".
Anyways, I just wanted to share a few of my orgo stories. Our first exam mean scores were in the 20%'s. Only 10 of us got above 70%. There is NO curve in his class. He talked about this after the first exam, and he said, "Many of you are asking me if there's a curve. I wouldn't hesitate to call 90% and above an A." The first test was so brutal, that after he called the 15 minute left mark, a whole sea of "HOly shit! WTF?!" spread throughout the lecture hall. It was shortly after that, one of the students was escorted out by a grad student proctor because he peed his pants. I was already light headed from the intensity of the exam, but seeing a guy literally pee in his pants almost made me pass out.
In retrospect, orgo isn't that bad. If I had taken it the previous year with another professor who was using the McMurry textbook, I would have even said it was pretty easy. But, no. I was stuck with Tius, and I was stuck with an entry level graduate textbook on organic chemistry--this part is no joke. However, in retrospect, I also realized Tius wasn't bad either. I realized that if I just worked on his assigned problem sets and studied those for the exams, I would have done fine. The exam mostly consisted of the problem set. So, he was very fair. However, all of the urban legend stories made me so scared, I was doing all the problems in the chapter which often took 50-60 hrs a week to complete.
For anyone thinking about taking orgo, it's really not that bad. However, like any other course, the professor and books can make it incredibly hard. Just be wary of that.
BTW, I did get an A in both orgo courses. I majored in math and chemistry, and I have to say, that class with Tius was by FAR the hardest shit I ever had to go through. And that includes a general chemistry course with another brutally hard chem professor in which I stood up three nights in a row to study for the third exam because I was so behind. I got an A in that class too.