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So a requirement for my major is to take an upper-level rhetoric class. This specific class is called "Methods of Rhetorical Criticism." The professor looks like that guy in the Atari shirt from Road Trip, and the premise of the class is everything means something. X-Men? It's a metaphor for homosexual/racial issues.
I hate this subject matter, and in four hours of class, I don't think we've actually covered anything of any significance.
What's the worst class you've taken?
My "Excursions in Modern Mathmatics" class I'm taking this summer sucks pretty hard. There are like 3 students left, including me.
"all reality is socially constructed" - karl marx (or something close to that).Quote:
Originally Posted by Schlep
Did you read the thread on X-Men 3 in this very board?Quote:
X-Men? It's a metaphor for homosexual/racial issues.
I liked all my classes.
I took a class in high school called "The American Dream".
I failed it because I didn't agree with the teacher. It was lame. We'd get into arguments every day.
Psychology of Adjustment taught by a senile, blind, black woman. Worst class ever. If I ever see her crossing the street, I will not hesitate to run her over.
It is a blatant metaphor for racial issues.Quote:
Originally Posted by Schlep
I hated one philosophy course I took with a passion. Bunch of fucking 18 year old kids acting like they had life all figured out. Coffehouse/artfag level "deep" discussions that made me want to slit my wrists. The other philosophy course I took was pretty good, because the professor kept shit on topic and reigned in the discussion when it got too stupid.
My least favorite, though still not that bad, was a Spanish Lit class I needed for my minor. The professor didn't appreciate it when I didn't read one time but proceeded to say that the story had to be about death or oppression, because every story ever written in Spanish is about one of those two things.
My english 101 class was a disaster. Worst prof on the whole campus and was beyond pointless. Almost all of my other classes were good though.
Took a class called Psychology of Human Relationships, or something like that. Awwwwful. By the end of the semester, there wasn't a single class period that didn't go by without someone (usually half the class) crying. It was not at all uncommon for the teacher's tests to have questions that were incomplete sentences (making the actual questions completely unintelligible). I didn't do a bit of reading and never participated in class ('cause honestly, at the time, my worst problems were tracking down a copy of Zone of the Enders and getting my roommates to do the dishes) but still managed a C somehow. Probably because all of the test questions--at least the ones that were actually coherent queries--had pretty obvious answers.
Oh yeah, it was a once-a-week class, so the period was three hours long. And it was at night. And I had to ride my bike seven miles to get home. I can't believe I stuck with that class.
Biomed Regulations. It was a 3 hour a night long class where the teacher talked about regulations by reading 40-50 powerpoint slides. You could fail the 3 quizzes, turn in the project, and show up at every class and get a "B". For the "group" project, one guy did all the work, including the presentation. And no, that person wasn't me.
There are courses within these subjects but Theology and Philosophy. What will these class do for me in the real world? I have no use for these but yet, I have to take them. I guess I get what I pay for when I attend St Johns University. Pay an overpriced tuition for classes that will not benefit me in the future.
I had to finish my Art History requirements for my major, so I figured History of Modern Design would be reletivly painless when it came to Art History. But I didn't realize by Modern Design they mean history of Queen Elizabethan chairs and sofa's. And by listing this cool Professor I had already taken another class with to teach the course, they really meant having a butch dyke who hates men teach the course.
It's not that I don't believe that X-Men could be addressing those issues, it's that I don't really care.Quote:
Originally Posted by Saint of Killers
The American City. The most useless course in the history of life. Professor Dikey-Dikerson managed to make the gang-related aspects of the course boring. The asian I was teamed up with for our group project complained to the prof that I was slacking off, even though I was doing all the work. Dude hounded me on MSN and through email. She didn't realize until the end of the course that I was right. Fuck asians.
Then she put questions on the exam that she told us would not be on there. Everyone failed. Fuck her.
Agreed. I dropped it after 2 months since I didn't need it from my SAT verbal score, which I didn't know. It was such a bullshit course, and U of MD's english 101 is one of the hardest in the nation. Who the fuck grades freshman classes on the bell curve? Hell, why do people grade ANYTHING on the bell curve?Quote:
Originally Posted by Mman
curved classes are EASIER.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
Most of my major courses were curved.
Try taking Chem I or Math 51 at an art school.
Chemistry had "labs" that consisted of playing with litmus paper, and testing diaper absorbtion.
Math consisted of the most basic of statistics. As someone who took AP Calculus in high school, this was the most worthless (yet still required) class I could have ever taken, given that I could have aced the final after the senile teacher handed me the syllabus. And of course almost every other kid in the class thought it was rocket science. Oh, right, I forgot. Art Students are fucking stupid. "Visual Learners" my ass.
High School. 1990-1994.
Yeah, that pretty much sucked.
If my french class wasn't curved I would not have a very good GPA.
Enivornmental Studies, or something like that. No one would be in the class unless it was a requirement for almost every major at school. So damn boring, the professor one time talked about homing pigeons for an hour straight. You could look around the room and see 2 people sleeping, a girl doing her nails, 2 others doing work from another class, 8 people staring off into space and the annoying as fuck adult student (35+ year old) paying attention and taking notes.
I got lucky and got to sit next to my gf, so that helped pass the time. I cheated on the final paper too, got my roomates ex-gf's final paper, copied it, fixed some dumb mistakes, added half a dozen more quotes from the book and got a B+.
The bell curve is a fucking negative curve.Quote:
Originally Posted by diffusionx
Your mom is a negative curve.
btw, no its not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_curve_grading
bell curves NEVER hurt you. Thats the point of them.
Fucking know-it-all college noobs.
Rich, how do you know this is one of the hardest English 101 classes?
i had an introduction to logic class that was not bad subject matter wise, in fact i enjoyed that, but it was a 3 hour night class, usually after a 6-8hour day of work, and the professor had this incredibly calm, quiet soothing voice, i would actually scratch my arm so hard to keep awake that i was bleeding. but i got through and got an A in it ,should come in handy next time i interact with a person who cannot lie and a person who cannot tell the truth, other than that, not so much.
I took a Psych 101 class where the professor literally read an entire chapter of the textbook word for word for every class. The really wasn't that hard but I got lazy and payed the consequences for it. Still it was incredible to see a college professor teach the class that way. C
Math 100 (retard math) was fun. I mastered the art of picking red marbles out of a bag of mostly blue marbles. As soon as attendance was taken at least 1/4 of the class would leave. A-
Women's Film in the 1940s. I originally signed up for what was supposed to be a class on Horror Film only to have it switched up on me at the last minute. Anyway, the professor would read some crusty old notes for 1/2 an hour, press play on the VCR and take a nice 2 hour break only to sneak back in before the credits and wrap it up with some more crusty notes. A-
Most of my film classes have been great but then I hit the "Narrative Media Theory" class. 2 and a half hours of my boring (but nice and sometimes funny in his own... really nerdy way) professor drag on and on about story structure on his powerpoints. A-
I also got an A- on History of Film to 1960, which was complete horse shit considering I was one of the more informed people in the class. Fucking A-.
Powerpoints are the worst innovation to teaching. I learn nothing from them and every year they look more and more outdated. All they do is artificially stretch the class time out.
God damned liberal professors.Quote:
Originally Posted by Revoltor
Worst class I ever took was any Philosophy course. Worst of all of them was my GER freshman year. The professor was this dickhead who had his own coursebook printed up and put together with one of those black plastic comb bindings and every class he would be like, "When I was studying under Heidegger, blah blah blah, I'm a pompous ass." Spo and I took this course together, never showed up after like the first five classes, "attended" the final (no test) and got decent marks in it. Bullshit.
Best class I ever took was any Italian one with Professor Vena from Urbino. He was this awesome, little, old Italian man with a prosthetic leg who somehow taught us Italian even though he mostly spent the whole class singing songs by Domenico Modugno. It was awesome.
Yeah, can NEVER hurt you; get a perfect grade along with everyone else in the class, and get a C. :rolleyes:Quote:
Originally Posted by diffusionx
A few points must be made:Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
1. So everyone in your class got a 100 on every assignment? Because, well, a 91 isn't a "perfect grade".
2. How the hell could it be one of the hardest classes in the nation (whatever that means) if everyone is getting great grades?
3. Bell curves have low ends and a fat center, normally (no pun intended) a guy with the highest grade gets marked as perfect, and then the teacher assigns the next 10% as A's, the 30% after that as B's, the next 50% as C's, and then the worst 10% as what is deemed necessary. You can clearly see how this benefits the students.
It's Maryland. If it were even in the top 50% of hardest classes, everyone would flunk. He's full of shit.
One could make an argument that curves allow substandard grades to pass and such thereby doing a disservice to the student allowing them to be not as good. But yes, numerically speaking a curver should always help unless the teacher's a dunce and can't do it properly.Quote:
Originally Posted by diffusionx
Powerpoint is going to lead to the fall of civilization. It's even worse in corporate America. About 99.3% of all executives are too lazy or too stupid to read and comprehend anything more in-depth than a 5 bullet PPT chart. Thus, all content has to be squeezed into that format, and retarded business decisions are made. During the Cold War, we should have "leaked" Powerpoint to the USSR. The wall would have come down in 1970.Quote:
Originally Posted by Revoltor
Calculus I taught by O'malley at the university of houston. Its a lecture/lab class in a department where none of the teaching assistants spoke English. O'malley is an incompetent teacher, his TAs were nice but its kinda useless when they cannot explain things he refused to answer questions on.
Had to take that fucker under him twice. He was the only one teaching it.
Then there was communications research methods. Easily the worst, most book/power point driven class I've ever had the misfortune to sit in on. Later I found out that my teachers had been trying to get the class dropped as a requirement for a journalism degree for years.
double true.Quote:
Originally Posted by Yoshi
There's a guy online that is waging a sort of crusade against PP using those exact arguments. He even came out with a book. I can't remember his name.
I don't know how bad it is once you get up higher but we don't use PP at all in my office. My bosses are all actuaries and care about substance.
That's true, but I think used judiciously by a good professor who weighs each person on their individual merits, it is a good and fair method of grading. Of course you won't find many of those in state college freshman classes - none of my big seminar classes were curved. But nobody gives a shit about the grades in those anyway.Quote:
One could make an argument that curves allow substandard grades to pass and such thereby doing a disservice to the student allowing them to be not as good. But yes, numerically speaking a curver should always help unless the teacher's a dunce and can't do it properly.
It's bad. If you look at our org structure, It goes like this:Quote:
Originally Posted by diffusionx
CEO
GM
Senior VP
Global VP
Director
Me
The only reason that is important is that I regularly see what is presented and what I am asked to present above me. It's all Powerpoint. To make matters worse, there is so much CYA in today's corporations that 17 people need to agree on every word before anyone sees it. By the time t is presented, it's useless. Then, potentially millions of dollars are spent, based on that useless PPT.
I meant U of MD's intro to freshman writing class is one of the hardest freshman english classes.
Anyway, a bulk of the class should not be getting Cs, especially in a freshman class. My 2 other classes that semester were 40/30/20/10 percent.
The real world is going to kick your lilly white ass.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
The only class I didn't really like was biology, dissecting frogs and pigs and whatnot. Everything else was peachy, although most of my college classes were about composition and typography theory and easy stuff like that.
Yes they should.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
Agreed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Josh
Screw that, bulk should not get Cs in an intro to writing class, or any intro class at that. I've gotten 1 C through 49 credits, and it wasn't in engilsh cuz I dropped that.
And I'm at work right now. I'm bored. :(
Do you mean they should be getting less or getting more? A bell curve represents our society: a few really great people, a few truly shitty people and a whole lot of mediocre folks. A "C" is not a bad grade.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
A C is a terrible grade. I guess I just can't understand how stupid some(most) people can be, but alas, i don't think I should be punished for there being no students stupid enough to fail in a class, and also students shouldn't be punished with failing grades just so people can get As.
Worst class for me was "Discoveries & Inventions", the class was so bullshit and bush league that there wasn't even a book, we had to pick up copies of Newsweek (yeah, I didn't get it either) and write entries in a journal about it.
Ideally, every one gets 100% every time that's completely efficient learning. But it's an ideal that will never happen unless you're giving peeps with PhD's tests from 1st grade.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
The generality of life is that,
a few peeps get A's
a few peeps get B's
most get C's
a few peeps get D's
a few peeps get F's
Hence the bell curve
This threads reminds me of what I hated most about college, spoiled brats who whined when something didn't go their way 100%. Just by being in college you're ahead of most, and not having to take out loans, you're ahead of more than 9 of 10. Stop bitching about a C in a class nobody cares about.
Sounds like a pretty good subject though.Quote:
Originally Posted by g0zen
Holy shit, that's right, I had a class just like that, too. Wow, I'd forgotten about that douchebaggery.Quote:
Originally Posted by g0zen
A C is not a terrible grade, you uppity prick. And nobody gets punished with failing grades in a bell curve!!! Did you even read the link diffx posted?Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
The bad thing about a "C" grade is that if you get more C's than B's, you can't file for your degree plan at most schools. Unless that's a problem, I don't see why anyone would care.
I'm only ocmplaining about the bell curve. nothing didn't go my way; i really don't care. I didn't get the damn C. And yes, a C is a bad grade.Quote:
Originally Posted by diffusionx
A C is an average grade. It wont make your gpa look awesome, but you did satisfactory in the class. "Fullfilled basic requirements" if you dont like, next time bust your ass Rich.
My worst class was a Biology class, dissecting pigs. it was a saturday class, once a week. It took 3 classes to complete dissect the pig fetus. (thats three weeks of those things, guts open, stewing in thier juices) also the teacher lied about what would be on a test, which many people bombed. after that, everyone studied everything, dissregarding what she said. using that valuable lesson, i got like a B. I bitch her out after that test with another girl, and she was Scared afterwards. I was like "hey, i have nothing against you personally, but your teaching sucks."
another terrible class was at Seattle Central Communtiy College, Introduction to Anthropology, a survery class. Holy shit, group work stuff due everyweek, papers, presentations, same group all quarter. By the end, I hated all of them. I ended up having to lead the group and deal out assignments and threathen them to get the work done. I busted my fucking ass to get shit done. and I got a 4.0 That was a fucking interesting but hard class.
Introduction to Film. I thought this would be a great class, watch some movies, discuss about them and learn terms and what not. It was the worst I've ever taken. Not only did we just watch Marlon Brando movies, there was no class work. Actually you had to write reviews on the movies(only 4). Now i know lots of people would love to have a class were you have to do nothing but write 4 reviews, but they were just on boring old ass Marlon Brando movies! I know alot of his movies were classics, but the name of the class was introduction to film not introduction to marlon brando.
Why don't people understand that I didn't get a C? Stop replying as if I did.
and intro to film was one of my favorite classes ever, mainly because of awesome my professor/TA/and the films were.
I wish i had your professor, mine had a fucking Marlon Brando fetishQuote:
Originally Posted by Rich
We finished the semester w/ run lola run, dirty pretty things and city of god. :)
My film 101 class had us watch:Quote:
Originally Posted by Daitokuji
Breathless
Rear Window
Taxi Driver
The Spanish Prisoner
The Big Sleep
Shit, I forgot the rest. I had a pretty good time anyway.
<3 <3 <3 <3Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
I guess the worst class I took was Calc 1, because the prof gave us this stupid courepack that he wrote himself. It didn't contain any examples of any sort, just straight up text about calculus. I had already taken calc in high school so I knew the basics, but the class was just insanely hard and his stupid book didn't help. One time I came in 5 minutes late along with like 4 other people and he wanted us to come to front of the room (in a lecture hall of about 200 people) and show him our IDs so he can take 2 points off our test. LOL we just walked out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
So much for comprehension, eh Dave? That was a hypothetical example of everyone being perfect. I dropped it, like I've already said, when I found out my SAT verbal score fulfilled my req.
Never the less, that is not how a curved grade works. If you get a C on a test with a curve it means that you got some of the questions wrong. A curve can NEVER lower your grade, it can only raise it.
Confirmed. That movie is the hot shit.Quote:
Originally Posted by Brisco Bold
mine had Citizen Kane, Battleship Potempkin and North by Northwest that i remember. it was all black and white. one night a week, 6-8:30.Quote:
Originally Posted by Revoltor
And if a test had everyone get 100%? Everyone gets a C. Granted the test was likely too easy, but it's possible for the entire class to study their asses off and all get 100%...and what if one person doesn't get 100%? He gets a D or F while some random person gets a B or A?Quote:
Originally Posted by Mman
No, it's not. If a test is well-designed, the "book smart" people, who memorize shit and don't understand the concepts, get Cs, no matter how much they study.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
I bet everyone's ItF class was way better than mine. Best movie that was shown was the Godfather. I skipped the Apocalypse Now and rented it instead
If Rich is too stupid to understand the Bell curve then I call bullshit that he made anything above a D+
"And if a test had everyone get 100%? Everyone gets a C. Granted the test was likely too easy, but it's possible for the entire class to study their asses off and all get 100%...and what if one person doesn't get 100%? He gets a D or F while some random person gets a B or A?"
But if everyone DID get a 100% but you, don't you think you deserve a mediocre grade for being worse than everyone else? I don't buy this WAH MD'S ENG 101 IS HARDEST IN NATION crap. Well, it might be, but what does that make it? The equivalent to English 102? It's not rocket science either way.
I never said I personally found it hard; I was just stating what i heard from my teacher.
I dropped it because I didn't need to take it, but regardless it sucked hardcore as a class with stupid essays and shitty material to learn.
And yet everyone has avoided the scenario so far in which everyone gets a 100%, and joust conveniently left out the part of the second scenario in which everyone else but the one without a 100% still gets Cs, except one random person to balance out the non-100%. The bell curve sucks because its not only based on your ability, but everyone else's, and not having full control over your grade is complete bullshit.
So I left out a situation that would never happen? You want to fit this into some perfect bell curve for some reason. No one is going to say, "Well I choose this guy to be the A, the others that have his score get Cs and this guy fails". Not to mention that the term bell curve is misused when talking about grading on a curve.
That's the big trendy-ass thing in teaching now. Group Work. ANother winner of a class I took was Medical Terminology. It consisted of the teacher handing you a sheet of which terms from the book that WERE'NT on the test every week, and the next 1 1/2 had us doing pointless group projects. The group projects were nothing but filler, were a waste of time, and dreaded by all groups week after week. We learned nothing doing these projects. All you needed to do in the class was spend 2 1/2 hours a week making flash cards and studying them 2-3 times a day.Quote:
Holy shit, group work stuff due everyweek, papers, presentations, same group all quarter. By the end, I hated all of them. I ended up having to lead the group and deal out assignments and threathen them to get the work done. I busted my fucking ass to get shit done. and I got a 4.0 That was a fucking interesting but hard class.
That fact that it could happen is why it sucks. Your grade is btoh dependent on you AND the rest of the class, and that's why i hate both the bell curve and every curve its based on. And I'm not misusing the term; the class WAS based on the bell curve, which is completely different than the curve that my business and econ classes use, where the curve is only used to bring students UP to the percentages of the desired grading criteria .e.g.: lower an A requirements so a pre-determined 15% or so can egt the A.Quote:
Originally Posted by Joust Williams
Works ends in 75 mins. Hooray! Too bad I won't get home for another 165. Stupid Manhattan-SI commute.
I've had two film classes so far, History and Genre Study. Both were pretty awesome.Quote:
Originally Posted by Revoltor
History was:
Lumiere Bros. First films, A DW Griffith short, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Battleship Potemkin, City Lights, Several Buster Keaton films (Sherlock Jr. being one), The Blue Angel (which we watched with no goddamn subtitles on), Citizen Kane, 8 1/2, The Bicycle Thief, Breathless, Strangers on a Train, Trouble in Paradise, The Awful Truth... I'm missing a few. Great class though.
Film Genre was broken into three major genres: western, noir and musical:
Westerns: Stagecoach, High Noon, Shane, The Searchers, The Wild Bunch
Noir: Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Sunset Blvd, Touch of Evil, Chinatown
Musicals: Singin in the Rain, Some Ernst Lubitsch film that I don't remember the title of, 42nd Street, Top Hat and Caberet.
In the crappy film course I took on Narrative Theory we watched three movies: Avalon, The Maltese Falcon and Cocteau's La Belle et La Bette (ugh)
But North by Northwest is in color.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dragonmaster Dyne
Maybe the TV was broken.
Both of those pretty much sum up the one class I took; Lumiere, Potemkin, DW Griffith, the Bicycle Thief, Stagecoach, Singin' in the Rain, Ju Dou, Run Lola Run (excellent!), Dirty Pretty Things, City of God, Psycho (the only one I missed..grr), Nanook of the North, Cannibal Tours(terrible), Last Year at Marienbad(even worse), and an escape movie about the military that I loved and can't remember the name.(In B&W and french, i think) I'm sure I'm missing a few others, too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr-K
French Nu Wave sucks.
i know this.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr-K
the professor was broken. he could never figure out how to get the projector to work.Quote:
Originally Posted by Josh
I was just telling you why people think you got a C. Because you can't articulate.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
A Man Escaped, probably.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
It's New Wave. And nope it doesn't. This thread is not going very well for you.Quote:
French Nu Wave sucks.
Nah, it wasn't. They were POWs, and had a tunnel in their room and at one point they all dressed up and started dancing and i like wtf. Grr; i remember that it's a escape movie without ever seeing the escape too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sqoon
Fine, New Wave...I still hate it...especially because of Last Year at Marienbad. The only movie I fell asleep during.
:lol: at the irony..I got the name and it's a New Wave film... Grand Illusion.
There was also one other movie I loved, filmed in Dutch with a handheld about a brother who was sexually abused by his father and let everyone know at his father's birthday/family reunion. I can't remember the name of that, either.
Yeah, I understand, "but I dropped it" in my first post is difficult to decipher.Quote:
Originally Posted by OmniGear
Haha you got a C!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
First off, in the unlikely event that this did happen your prof would be a complete moron. Also, I doubt they would curve that test. Every prof I have ever had who curves only curves your grade up. They say exactly that you cannot get lower than your actual percentage on a test. I think this is the way all profs do it. If everybody got 100% they would not all get Cs, they would all get 100%.
Anyway, if a test is that easy that everybody but one person gets a 100% then that 1 person deserves to get an average grade of a C. But again, nobody curves like that.
I took a film class. It was interesting, but I got fucking tired of watching Hitchcock films at the end. I love his work, but man do you not want to watch lots of it back to back to back. I'm taking a class next semester on documentarys. Should be interesting.
Grand Illusion, we watched that in my history class too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
French New Wave is really cool, Breathless ftw.Quote:
French Nu Wave sucks.
The two documentaries I watched in class were terrible, so i hope you get better crap than Nanook of the North and Cannibal Tours.
Tell me about it. I have to deal with this every day. :(Quote:
Originally Posted by diffusionx
As for Power Point presentations, I've found that they are quite useful in second language courses. They're a powerful visual component and help students follow the flow of the material presented. You can't and shouldn't rely on them for everything, as they do tend to zombify people after a while.
The same thing can be said for group work. Community Language Learning has its place, but you can't do everything that way. Putting people in groups doesn't always work.
I'm sure we will watch Nanook of the North. It is a classic and I enjoy it.
Grand Illusion is not a New Wave film at all. French New Wave was a late 50s/60s movement, Grand Illusion was made in 1937Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
:lol: you're right; I was looking at a New Wave site and misread: it said "New Wave Origins," "I read it as "new wave originals"...I didn't think it was a new wave film..oh well.Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr-K
Quote:
Grand Illusion: Jean Renoir was certainly an influence on Truffaut, among others.
Aren't you the kid who got a C in English 101?Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
Note to self: Rent more New Wave movies this weekend.
:lol: I hate you. I hope your commute sucks more than mine next week (which it will)Quote:
Originally Posted by OmniGear
Nah son, I fly to work on a giant dildo.
The karma police bit me in the ass. I waited 45 mins in the rain for a bus to get home.
THE SEAL THEY CATCH WAS ALREADY DEAD!Quote:
Originally Posted by Mman
:-0
are you serious, or being clever?Quote:
Originally Posted by Josh
example please?Quote:
Originally Posted by Saint of Killers
I hope you are talking from experience. Every class that Ive had that was curved was balls hard and everyone thought they were failing until the very end when they fgot Bs, and yet made 56s on all of the test.Quote:
Originally Posted by diffusionx
EDIT: After reading through the entire thread, I have to say Rich is a tad dumb. Curving grades never hurt anyone. When a teacher says they curve, it usely means they round all the grades up.
Personally I don't like it when teachers curve, becuase in the few classes I've had it, it was used as an excuse by the teacher to make stupidly hard test, H.W. and class material and still pass enough people by the end of the year to keep their job.
I fucking understand what a curve is; but a bell curve isn't a normal fucking curve.
The distribution of the bell curve can bring people down in some situations...what is so difficult to understand? Say, as is generally accepted, a B is an 80%+. If a class average is 88%, then what should be a class average of B/B+ is now a class average of a C.
Well excuse me. I thought you were talking about the curve in regards to your class, not a hypothetical discussion of the concept of the bell curve itself.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich
Yes, many educated people laugh at the bell curve. It has been used to justify racism and makes unfounded assumptions about humans. One being that a small group will do well, a small group will suck, and a majority will do so-so. And yes, that IS an assumption. There are things that the majority of people can do well. Like pick their nose, or wipe their ass.
But there really isn't any reason for you to be getting your panty's in a twist. No one here is talking about a real bell curve. They are talking about rounding a bunch of shitty grades up so more people pass. You will never see a teacher lower grades in a curve.
EDIT: I guess you could say that some people are better than others at wiping their ass, but I feel that would end up being pretty subjective.
Yes it is.Quote:
I fucking understand what a curve is; but a bell curve isn't a normal fucking curve.
Unless the teacher is a total moron they will not use a curve in a situation like that.Quote:
The distribution of the bell curve can bring people down in some situations...what is so difficult to understand? Say, as is generally accepted, a B is an 80%+. If a class average is 88%, then what should be a class average of B/B+ is now a class average of a C.
question, was there a bell curve, before the book Bell Curve?
because if there wasn't, I really have to wonder why some of you think it is so wonderful. It has some pretty nasty stuff in it like
1) intelligence exists and is accurately measureable across racial, language, and national boundaries,
2) intelligence is one of -- if not the most -- important correlative factor in economic, social, and overall success in America, and is becoming more important,
3) intelligence is largely (40% to 80%) genetically heritable,
4) there are racial and ethnic differences in IQ that cannot be sufficiently explained by environmental factors such as nutrition, social policy, or racism,
5) nobody has so far been able to manipulate IQ long term to any significant degree through changes in environmental factors, and in light of their failure such approaches are becoming less promising, and finally,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
"The distribution of the bell curve can bring people down in some situations...what is so difficult to understand? Say, as is generally accepted, a B is an 80%+. If a class average is 88%, then what should be a class average of B/B+ is now a class average of a C."
;/
Give me an example of a class you took where people that got 88% on a test got Cs. BTW, I took a test once where a 40% was like a 3.6...lucky for me, I looked at the whole test to find the easiest question at the end and got half of my points from it.
A "bell curve" is just a normal distribution. It can be found in a gazillion different places in the universe. It was discovered hundreds of years ago.
This discussion is getting really, really dumb.
Your mother is getting really really dumb, King Asshole.
O'rly?Quote:
Originally Posted by diffusionx
http://members.aol.com/jeff570/b.htmlQuote:
THE bell curve, with its implication that there is only one bell-shaped curve, does not come naturally to statisticians or probabilists and I could find no use of this term in any of the statistics or mathematics journals on JSTOR. However the term has become very common outside the professional literature of probability.
Bell curve is found in 1938 in Public Personnel Problems from the Standpoint of the Operating Officer by Lewis Meriam: "Within recent years a tendency has developed to require that the distribution of efficiency ratings shall conform to the normal frequency or bell curve of distribution." [Fred R. Shapiro]
A JSTOR search found, "we had fewer C’s than the normal bell curve indicates and more B’s" in W. E. Aiken & P. D. Carleton "Freshman English at the University of Vermont," College English, 3, (1941), p. 281. The phrase "an almost perfect Bell Curve" appears in D. T. Sisto "Aural Comprehension in Spanish," Modern Language Journal, 41 (1957), p. 30. The bell curve became more common in the following decades but it really took off in the 90s with such widely discussed works as Richard J. Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994).