Current Events > Do College professors have a quota of students that should fail the class?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Just got my grades for General Chemistry 1 and Calculus 2

General chemistry 1: 108 students in the class, 39 failed. No one got A+ or A, highest grade was A-.

Calculus 2: 81 students in class, 39 failed. No one got A+, two students got A.

Both classes have the same number of fails. Hum. I got away with a B in both. Still waiting for physics.

The exams were awful. Especially in chemistry there were many questions worth a lot of points on totally random facts. Like, "What is the color of lead (II) iodide at room temperature?" I mean, were we supposed to memorize the color of every compound or something? And those kind of questions were made to worth the same amount of points as big calculations questions that took an entire page
---

How does 40-50% of the students fail a class? There's something seriously wrong with that kind of scaling.
---

Super Saiyan 3 Goku posted...

How does 40-50% of the students fail a class? There's something seriously wrong with that kind of scaling.

Well the calculus class was just extremely hard. The professor barely ever did example questions in class and basically spent the two hours just writing proofs on the board and jumping from one thing to the next with barely any explanations. You essentially had to learn the whole course by yourself
---

according to my prof, he said that he needed to keep the average around 70%
---

frozenshock posted...

Super Saiyan 3 Goku posted...

How does 40-50% of the students fail a class? There's something seriously wrong with that kind of scaling.

Well the calculus class was just extremely hard. The professor barely ever did example questions in class and basically spent the two hours just writing proofs on the board and jumping from one thing to the next with barely any explanations. You essentially had to learn the whole course by yourself

Doesn't mean the class is hard - you just have a bad teacher. Half the students failing your class would trigger my alarm bells if I were the dean or chairperson, but what do I know.
---

Gotta love paying thousands of dollars for someone to tell you to read a book
---

frozenshock posted...

Like, "What is the color of lead (II) iodide at room temperature?" I mean, were we supposed to memorize the color of every compound or something?

That sounds like a particular compound you likely encountered in your the text. It's pretty memorable if you've seen it because there's nothing else that looks quite like it, so you'd recognize it at the glance. The issue is, until there was a reason to talk about or research it, there's no reason for most of the students to pay much attention to it. So it's easily overlooked.
---

General Chemistry shouldn't have that high of a fail rate, Calc 2 however probably should.
---

I've had several professors who would limit the amount of A's and B's given out. Even if hypothetically all the students scored above an 80, they would adjust the grade ranges so a substantial amount would still receive C's.
---

If the course is fit to a normal distribution, then kinda, yes.
---

It's a little backwards, but it's more suspicious to a college/university if everybody is somehow passing the class with flying colors

It can mean that people are either cheating, doing some other non-policy things, or the class is too easy.
---

This is one question that the facebook group is up in arms about:



Some people are saying that the slide in which we covered it is confusing when it says "established separately"



That's one question I got right, but I was lucky since was watching a youtube video on Millikan not long before the exam so I remembered what the youtube video said.

Anyway I don't think the facebook group is going to be able to do much about this
---

DifferentialEquation posted...

I've had several professors who would limit the amount of A's and B's given out. Even if hypothetically all the students scored above an 80, they would adjust the grade ranges so a substantial amount would still receive C's.

This shit makes me rethink going to college. I wanna go in and try to get a really good gpa when I graduate, but this some shady shit
---

MarqueeSeries posted...

DifferentialEquation posted...

I've had several professors who would limit the amount of A's and B's given out. Even if hypothetically all the students scored above an 80, they would adjust the grade ranges so a substantial amount would still receive C's.

This shit makes me rethink going to college. I wanna go in and try to get a really good gpa when I graduate, but this some shady shit

It's also possible that, being DifferentialEquation, he's just making that shit up.
---

Chemistry and Calculus 2 are challenging Freshman classes. There is a high failure rate for both. This isnt surprising. Your schedule looks similar to the one I took as a freshman. What is your major? Mine was chemical engineering.

Super Saiyan 3 Goku posted...

frozenshock posted...

Super Saiyan 3 Goku posted...

How does 40-50% of the students fail a class? There's something seriously wrong with that kind of scaling.

Well the calculus class was just extremely hard. The professor barely ever did example questions in class and basically spent the two hours just writing proofs on the board and jumping from one thing to the next with barely any explanations. You essentially had to learn the whole course by yourself

Doesn't mean the class is hard - you just have a bad teacher. Half the students failing your class would trigger my alarm bells if I were the dean or chairperson, but what do I know.

Lol!

OP, you will love PChem where the average to an exam might be in the 30s