It is perfectly feasable to have an assignment that a majority of students perform well on, placing the peak of the curve in say the upper B and A range, and also feasable to have an assignment that perhaps doesn’t relate much to the curriculum, where you would expect a pretty even distribution across the grade range (a better display of this distribution might be a bar graph or even a scatter plot).

Doing this sort of grade mapping is a great way to guage how well a set of students are doing and can be indicators of how well the teacher is teaching and whether the curriculum is too hard/easy, but as has already been said time and time again, we want students to BREAK the normal distribution curve. We should let them.

I think very few teachers want to fail students, although the concept of so-called “flunk out classes” would fit the bill. (If colleges are really concerned about students having the necessary expertise, it would be quicker, cheaper, and a better use of everyone’s time and energy to require placement exams prior to enrolling in particular classes.)

The situation you’re describing is two different things. One is simply doing well on a mastery exam, and we all want the students to have good understanding of the material. The other thing is, as you pointed out, recognising exceptional achievement.

A letter grading system determined by cumulative quantitative scores simply does not have the built-in means of expressing the differences between someone who does well through technical mastery, and someone who does well because of their insight and ability to apply critical thinking.

What can sort out the difference between those is the type of assessments an instructor uses, which for higher scores would require that a student demonstrated work at higher taxonomic levels.

Sorry if that sounds a little circular, but it’s up to the instructor to decide what kinds of things are important in the student learning objectives, and how those are reflected in the assessment and grading system. Good instructors make this process transparent at the beginning of the semester, and encourage students to increase the depth of their learning.

andrea

Is this feeling due to a desire to fail students, or is it due to a desire that the really good results should be recognised? In any normal class there is a variation in ability. If lots of students are getting A’s, then there’s no particular recognition of the truly great work, unless you have some other way of recognising it.

thanks

The Integral of athenivanidx, in defence of Kathleen Seidel