Comprehensive Exams and Curves
As you can see from the mean (47) and standard deviation (22) of my comprehensive exam results, the numbers are a lot lower than I expected. I thought the exam would be tough, fair, but tough. I did get comments from students saying things like that but nevertheless, the numbers are lower than expected and basically show more than 23rds of the class would be failing. I mentioned a few weeks ago at GEARS that grades in engineering programs are skewing towards the 80-90 range. I would prefer a system that grades 0-100 (0r 0-10) where above a 50% is passing. While that won’t fly academically, it’s probably a true representation of the material learned by the average student. But because educators must deal with this grade inflation and dissatisfied students in a course are more likely to write negative reviews than satisfied students writing positive reviews, this presents a significant problem.…