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Re: grading schemes



Wait a min, most of my spouse's better friends are attorneys. Her co-madre
(married to a Judge, former TIC, and member of the Mayoress's firm), her
first spouse, and the spouse of her best friend. Gate Keeper (kinder teach.)
knows only attorneys and teachers. However, all the attorneys got their
start as paralegals in CRLA (that commie org. to protect the farm workers
Jerry Brown started).

About grading: Yo tambien, in nearly all of H.H.'s points. The diff.: I
scaled them, but usually I was able to make the breaks when there were
canyons. i.e. I'd plot the frequency -- raw score. Rarely would I have to
make a grade break where the frequency didn't dip. I'd post the plot with
the "bunches" labeled A, B, C, D, F. They'd get the raw score and run to the
display window to find their grade. This meant that sometimes there were ~
40% A's and rest B & C. and in one class only two A's (in 30).

As expected from the CLT, this would result in close to a Gaussian when the
three classes were combined, and more so when combined for the course grade.

I attended a ruling class (residential) HS, where, curiously, the grades were
arbitrarily 95%, 90, 80, 70. I don't know how they did it, as the result
approximated a scaled method, and none of us ever complained. Perhaps it was
because the teachers had been there more than ten years. (After the first
year there were no D's, F's, and very few C's.) The school's rep. was so
high (fifties) that on their recommendation alone one was accepted to Yale,
Harvard, MIT, etc.

Hugh Haskell wrote:

At 19:41 -0500 12/17/01, Joe Heafner wrote:

How many of you assign (test) grades based on a "raw" score vs. some
kind of "scaled" score? By "raw" score, I mean the ratio of points
earned to total possible number of points. For example, if there are
60 possible points on a test and a students accumulates only 15
points, the raw score would be 25%, which is clearly a failing
performance (isn't it?). How many of you take these raw scores and
scale them somehow?

I did when I was teaching (now retired). That is, I used a shifting
grade scale. The student got the raw score on the test, but the
letter grade

cut

good during my tenure, and I guess that's
about all one should reasonably expect. Unfortunately, I also
produced about 10 lawyers. I'm not proud of that.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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