Above the curve

Universities and policy-makers need to be more aware of the managerial systems put in place, what incentives they provide to students and how they fit into the educational landscape altogether.

The concept of curve-grading has been around for a long time. Different schools and classes have different policies, but I’m sure all of us have encountered at least one test or class that was graded on a curve.

One of the biggest problems with curve-grading classes is simply how to measure the amount students have actually learned. Curve-grading evaluates how students perform relative to one another, but it doesn’t factor in how well the exam was written, how proficient the professor taught the material or how students compare to students from years past.

You can take a set of mile-times from a group of first graders and another set of mile-times from a collegiate men’s cross-country team and apply them to the same curve. And here lies the problem.

If every year an instructor is adjusting the test scores to a curve, who is to say the students aren’t performing worse and worse every year? Curved scores only tell how students within that class perform relative to each other and not how well they performed relative to another group.

Additionally, teachers who administer the same test could curve their scores to match each other. What if one professor’s students perform much worse than another’s? Does it imply the first professor wasn’t effectively teaching his students? These questions don’t get attention when every teacher applies their test scores to a standard curve.

Instead of leaving it to the curve, teachers should take the responsibility upon themselves to write exams that yield the desired results.

Curved exam scores are in no way a measure of someone’s knowledge of the material. The only way to truly measure that is to give a similar test to each group of students, and compare the results over a long period of time. Curved scores only measure how well a student mastered the class material relative to her peers.

Curved exams create competitive environments with a “me versus you” attitude. Sometimes students take drastic measures to ensure their spot well above the mean on that curve. And cheaters aren’t stupid — they know what professor might be willing to let it slide.

Ultimately, curve-grading classes and exams are extremely convenient for instructors, even when it may not be the best route for education.

It’s possible for teachers and professors to lose sight of what material they actually should be teaching students and how absolute scores may be sliding over time.

I hope to eventually see all professors building exams and not needing to curve scores upward to adjust for students’ poor performances. I would like to see fair exams that are a realistic measure of how well a student retained the material taught in the class.

— lliskey@indiana.edu
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