Do you think that practice produces better learning?
Standardised tests mean that if just one class does bad, it’s probably bad teaching, if the whole country does bad, it’s a more widespread issue. If any individual does bad, it’s their own issue.
In specific situations, professional testing is relevant. The Bar, the USMLE, etc. In many more situations, quality is driven by accomplishing goals and solving problems that are by definition nonstandard.
Every practicing physician and lawyer passed their professional exam, yet, some remain more effective than others. Standardized testing is a high-pass filter. You can enforce a minimum, but cannot evaluate maxima. In this situation, a whole class did bad on an exam they all took, and there is still no way to infer whether it was the students, the instruction, or both. Lots of energy spent, very little effective training and credentialing accomplished.
In practice, examiners who do this are usually inexperienced and they soon learn to discontinue the practice for all the obvious readons. That's why in this instance I'd be inclined to think the students are at fault as this NYC prof has long and extensive experience (he'd have learned not to so long ago).
Is it possible then, that this very experienced instructor, experienced a difficult time adapting to teaching in a new setting, and failed to adapt their examination?
The solution likely isn't for pandemic students to be told they have experience they don't have, but the structure in place created a situation where an entire class experienced the fallout from their professor's failure. In this case, the professor was fired. In many more, students bear the same punishments (both to their academic records and actual learning), while inexperienced instructors are simply told to do better next time.
Why shouldn't students have the same option to do better next time?
It's quite a while since I was at university and back then there would have been very little chance of a professor being fired that easy or on those grounds.
That said, back then, the system was very fair. Students were treated with respect and often given benefit of the doubt. There were appeals mechanisms in place if students failed and they could do so if they thought they had good reasons to appeal, and so on.
Looking in at much of academia these days I see a volatile, messy quixotic buisness and I'm glad I'm not there. (It's still not fully clear to me how things have gotten so off the rails in recent years.)
In direct answer to your question I'd repeat what I said above with respect to my university experience. The system should be fair and flexible and students should always be given a chance to do better next time.
>It is trivially simple for an educator to write a test that
while it is not trivial to write any test, it is trivial to have the test cover the material that was taught and not the material that wasn't, and that's how tests are written
> every student fails, curve the grades into a normal distribution,
then the bulk of students didn't fail under the normal meaning of grading on a curve (unless you clarify, do you mean the students had a normal distribution of "learning some material", but even the highest cohort didn't learn enough of the material to constitute getting credit for having taken the class?
> and place blame on students while showing a normal distribution of outcomes to administration.
what blame would there be to place on students if a normal distribution is shown to the administration? unless as above, all the students are failed and blamed for failure?
> Do you think that practice produces better learning?
testing students on material taught produces better learning, yes. Grading on a curve is more fair to students than not grading on a curve, as it simplifies the task for the professor to write the exam by better smooths any unevenness in the relative difficulty of the questions across different material.
1] Tests are written in many different ways. There is no regulatory body controlling pedagogy across institution at the college level. At best you can assume an invisible hand of the market for hiring graduates influencing student enrollment decisions, and you'll be introducing too many confounding variables to continue a productive discussion of individual tests.
2] I mean the bulk of students fail the test before the curve is applied. If even the highest cohort didn't learn enough material to constitute getting credit, I would hope they are not simply curved into a passing grade relative to each other and passed along. I would hope they are able to retake the course, learn the material, and demonstrate that learning.
3] The blame for poor performance necessitating grading on a curve to avoid bulk-of-class failure being placed on students for failing to learn, rather than an educator failing to teach.
4] Testing is not what produces learning. Testing attempts to measure competence. Receiving feedback from testing enables students to use the measurements in their learning, but the data point 'we all failed' hardly seems useful. // Grading on a curve evaluates student performance relative to each other. Grading without a curve evaluates student performance relative to the test. You can argue either is more fair if you want, but simplifying the task of the professor writing the exam is hopefully not the goal of college education. Hopefully the goal is to train students into highly competent graduates, who can perform across uneven difficulty in different material.
(edit: testing attempts to measure learning -> testing attempts to measure competence)
Yes it's done that and more. For instance, in many universities humanities courses have taken a hit because they're not as lucrative financially in either students numbers or in other ways. My profession is technical but I'm not in favor of nuking the humanities (especially so core subjects, history, philosophy, languages etc.).
What's really been lost from university education is the once-important notion of learning for its own sake—and of student life—the spirit of Gaudeamus igitur. Those notions were there but dying during my time quite some decades ago, today they've been completely subsumed or swallowed up by financial considerations. That, I think, is a shame.
In an era where financial considerations dominate, the whole issue of grades, passing examinations is crucially important because it's coupled more tightly than ever to one's livelihood than in the past. Hence, it's little wonder we're now seeing these issues looming much larger in students' minds than ever they've done in the past.
(In my time student protested and demonstrated and often did so violently (anti-Vietnam war rallies, 1968 student riots etc.) but from my recollection there was none of the angst about courses/grades that there is here today (except of course for usual level of time immemorial complaints that have always been part of the background noise of universities.)
I should say that he did not curve on 50% and grade on 90%: I think that a 50% was probably a B- or a C. But it was a while ago.
Fucking smart Alec, he'd have deserved it if students had let his tires down.
The only possible saving grace would have been if he'd demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that multivariate calculus would provide the means to get such precision, ipso facto the class results (complete with workings out). Even then, it's a ratshit idea of the worst order.
