Seriously???
I had calculated my mid-term grades as percentages, but only letter grades are assigned for the mid-term grades.
So, I looked high and low on Small Liberal Arts College's site, trying to find what the policy is for the correspondence of letter grades and percentages. Not finding the policy, I emailed the registrar's office to ask.
The answer: SLAC doesn't have such a policy and each department is free to define the correspondence between number and letter grades as they see fit.
Seriously???
Students will be meeting with their advisors in the next few weeks to evaluate their performance and their course selections for next semester. But how can an advisor know how a student is doing if an A in one department is 75%+ but 90%+ in another department?
The lack of policy strikes me as just stupid.
This is one of those moments in which I'm glad that this is only a one-year position...
4 comments:
One time, I was teaching a class and the director told me that the average is a B+/A- for the program. So, I just moved up their grades from an average of C+ (already marked) to an average of B+/A-. They asked me to come back and teach again. I didn't. Not because I didn't want to though, I was just busy. ;-)
Ask around as to what the average is, and just ball park it. That's my two cents worth.
Oh oh oh... you'll like this one.
I once had a post-grad instructor who told me that marking is a political thing. His dean gave him a master's student to mark a thesis together with another professor.
He strategized it this way: The other professor gave the student an 87, and he decided that he would give an 86. Why? Because to give too high a mark would suggest that he is too easy on grading, to give the same mark would suggest that he didn't have a mind of his own, and to give too low a mark would cause his dean to perceive that he was trying to be "too smart."
Over the years, I've come to agree with him that there is politics in anything involves humans. Except that I would not necessarily use the word "politics." It's just... human nature.
LD: at my doctoral institution, the doctoral student who reads the masters' thesis isn't allowed to know what grade the prof assigned. (The registrar told me, however, that on each of the theses that I graded, my mark was exactly 1% lower than the prof's!)
I did ask around about the averages. And I've been consistently inflating my marks on written submissions to match that average.
But the class average was 80% on the mid-term and the highest grade was 99%.
There really isn't any room to bell...
Finally, I like to say that "wherever two or three are gathered, there you will find politics." =)
i had a prof who "belled" to the point where about 15% had over 100% on a midterm.
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