Hey class sorry about the delay for this post, I must not have hit publish last night. Well anyway here you go...
As we have been having this on going discussion about the way in which we should be graded in class, I thought the idea of the power law system was a great topic for this post. The concept of the power law system to me seems crazy. The article says "We are so used to the evenness of a bell curve, where the median position has the average value, that the idea of two-thirds of the population being below average sounds strange." In class we all made a huge deal that some people would always have to get a bad grade per assignment if we had a bell curves in place for all of our assignments. I thought it would only be bad if nobody deserved a failing grade. For instance what if the worst work for that particular day was C worthy, I don't believe that person should be bumped down to an F because of the bell curve. I think curves should help not hurt you.
However, imagine if our class was on a system like the power law system? Imagine having 2/3rds of the say 15 students in class being below the median...that would mean that 10 of us on every single thing would receive a grade worse than a C. Also, in this power laws system, many of us would assume that a rising number of students (in my class example from above) would cause the curve to flatten out, but in fact, increasing the size of the system would increase the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot. This is making me start to believe that the bell curve idea for our class isn't that bad.
I understand that I just compared this power laws system to our classes predicament over the bell curve but I wanted feedback from everyone about what they were still thinking about our classes grading situation. Professor Dean sent us to the web to sort out this discussion on our own and I think that this article was a great way to get this discussion up and running.
What does everyone think? Should we have the bell curve, no curve, or perhaps something as extreme as in this article? Please let me know!
I totally agree, I was going to bring this up in class but I remembered Professor Dean saying to discuss it on our blogs instead. Anyway, I understand exactly what you are saying. Based on the bell curve I believe that the way our blogs will be graded on Friday will perfectly demonstrate its negative effects. In fact I view the bell curve as doing this to our blogs: If person one has 8 Post he/she will get an A, but if person two has 9 blog post he/she will get an A and then person one will get a B, and so on and so on; maybe I can be overanalyzing it but this is how I see the bell curve. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteI feel the exact same way. If someone is doing A work with only 8 posts and someone with 9 post is doing the same quality of work and is deserving of an A then they both should get A's. I just feel like people are going to seriously get screwed over for work that isn't deserving of such a bad grade.
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