grade on the curve

Thu Jul 5 14:39:43 UTC 2007

As an education professional, I've always taken "grade on the curve" to mean what Charlie thinks it means: to redistribute grades along a bell curve so as to make them conform with a theoretically "typical" distribution.

  I don't mean to insult anybody, of course, but I've always felt that it's an idiotic practice. A any freshman logician should know, bell curves typically result from large numbers of instances, not necessarily from twenty or thirty test grades. In fact, on the few occasions when I've heard colleagues confess that they "decided to curve the grades," it always seems to have meant to "raise all grades" (because reconsideration - usually the simple realization that most grades are disappointingly poor - suggests that the test was unfair). hence "grade inflation."

  A pedagogical aside. (In fact, I promised to tell this story a while ago.) I once feared that a midterm exam I gave in American lit might have been too demanding.  Rather than "curve" the grades, I decided to give credit to short answers that were wrong but vaguely in the ballpark. For example, the identification of "Emerson" as the author of _Walden_ or "Mark Twain" as the source of "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself!"   Pretty lax, wouldn't you say?

  Anyway, once I'd regraded on the "what the hell, close enough" principle, I discovered - you'll laugh - that only one or two exams benefited, and in those cases the improvement was still less than a letter grade. That persuaded me that the poor grades belonged to people who just hadn't bothered. (My favorite answer was the one that attributed "Man the Fying Saucers!" [Joyce Carol Oates, 1965] to "Henry James" : no credit under either system. Admittedly, that was a toughie.)

  JL

  Laurence Urdang <urdang at SBCGLOBAL.NET> wrote:
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Poster: Laurence Urdang
Subject: grade on the curve
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It isn't clear from the correspondence that the correspondents know the meaning of grade on the curve. I don't mean to insult anybody, of course, but I wonder why there should be a difference between on a curve and on the curve.
L. Urdang
Old Lyme

Jonathan Lighter wrote:
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Poster: Jonathan Lighter
Subject: Re: A Grade Apart
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In my experience, few high-school pupils and college underclassmen know exactly what "grade on _the_ curve" means. They think it means "give everybody a higher grade." (In fact, this misapprehension is so frequent that it is probably the most common meaning of the phrase.)

"_A_ curve" follows since the assumption is that you're just boosting grades in some arbitrary way and not according to some specific statistical "curve."

That's my theory.

As for "hitting _a_ wall," that just gives you more walls to choose from.

JL

Wilson Gray wrote:
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Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: A Grade Apart
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Why have the "grade on _the_ curve" and the "hit _the_ wall" of my
lost youth become "grade on _a_ curve" and " hit _a_ wall"?

-Wilson

On 7/4/07, Doug Harris wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Doug Harris
> Subject: A Grade Apart
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I just spotted the following in The Daily Star (07/03/07),
> Oneonta, NY. (Please note emphasized phrase __xx__ in
> final paragraph):
> Signs against wind gone
>
> By Patricia Breakey
>
> Delhi News Bureau
>
> Signs stating, "Yes to green energy. No to industrial wind in Meredith,"
> have been disappearing from the homes of Alliance for Meredith members,
> residents said Monday.
> Sue Bailey, Alliance spokeswoman, said the signs began to vanish June 23
> when one was taken on Turnpike Road at about 11:30 p.m. The residents "heard
> this low muffler sound that sounded like someone turning around in the
> driveway and then speeding off," she said.
> The next night, she said, a white sedan with a loud muffler and at least two
> passengers __graded a sign__ on Dickman Road at 8:15 p.m.
> -------
> It would appear the writer meant the sign was 'leveled', or knocked down,
> but I can find no reference to such a use of the word 'grade'.
> If this usage DOES have a history, will you please grade me on a curve as
> it's a holiday?
> (the other) doug
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Sam'l Clemens

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