Get used to feeling like you bombed. It doesnt get easier.

I got a 32% on one final. Thank god for CS curves

My friend's an engineering major and says the average for his tests is like a 40%. I don't even know what the point of that is. This isn't baseball, it's supposed to be science.

Memorizing function names is about the least useful CS skill I can imagine.

Yea I forgot another one I missed was that I guessed paint() instead of paintComponent().

infuriating.

I look at a 75% as damn good given the circumstances you describe FWIW.

Tests are pretty stupid for CS in my experience anyways. When you get to final projects instead, thats when you really get some good experience, and can make it whatever you want and get out of it whatever you feel is right.

88 after curve, yay. our final project(I think?) is to make an android app and the rest of the semester seems to be about networking, so no more swing. yay. I've decided GUI design is not my thing.

I feel ya buddy. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to learn x86.

For fiction I'm 100% with you but for everything else I need real books. There's usually markering and scribbling all over the place.
I can usually turboread them and get the essence really quickly once I've "studied" the book which is good because I don't really retain stuff all that well.

Not to be a dick because I'm sure it helps a lot of people but I really hate curved tests if they are what I think they are. I'm assuming those are the US style tests where the final grade depends on how well others did on the test?
Seems very odd that I should get a better grade because I took a test with a bunch of idiots or a worse grade because I stumbled upon a class full of the 30 smartest people in the world

That being said most exams I took were fairly dumb and pointless. Most German universities have the format of one final exam = 100% of your grade for that class which is a little crazy imo.

For anyone interested in going that route ARM would be a better way to go than x86 in my view.

Yeah I agree with the curved tests, that's just insane. It's not like it's high school either.

You pay a lot of money to goto uni/college. Having your grade be somewhat determined by the outcome of others seems stupid.

The professor probably thinks "but if we do it this way it creates healthy competition and will make students try harder!" but that's bs. It just as easily leads to students isolating themselves or being enemies because they want to pass.

Are curved tests standard in top schools that cost a ton per semester?

/rant

I'm generally anti-curved tests as well, but the argument for them has little to do with creating competition between students.

It's really hard to create a good test with just the right amount of difficulty. It's even harder to do that consistently across semesters. So the point of curving a test is to be fair to students. If the average of a test is 50% than its more than likely that that test was too hard - especially if the average of other tests for that course (either during the same semester or during other semesters) is typically very different. By curving the results you try to cancel out the inconsistencies of the test making process.

And yes, curved tests are standard in top schools.

Edit: I should add that I never had a problem with how tests scores were adjusted when I was in school. It was almost always a way to adjust marks up in the case of an overly hard test. And that might have been somewhat easier for our profs since all of our core courses were taken with roughly the same cohort of students so you know that large variations in test scores is unlikely to be because the group of students are dumb.

I'm willing to accept that, I didn't really think about it from that side of the fence. I just find it weird that your grade is out of your control.

Even if you did really well on the test you could just fail if everyone else did better. The odds of that happening are probably low but if you're paying like $100k and 4 years of your life that's not something I want to gamble on. If you goto a school like MIT I'm sure the odds aren't too low that you'll be surrounded by really smart people. If you're at the bottom of the curve then you're destined to fail even if you know the material quite well.

I would expect the professors to do their job and create proper tests from a top university.

Right, this is the type of curving that is just unacceptable imo. The curve that is based around the idea that a certain percentage of the class should fail.

As an aside, I think I remember a friend telling me that MIT doesn't curve tests. Not sure though.

This is kind of like "I would expect programmers to not make bugs".

It's even worse because the 'best' tests are ones that take a lot of creativity and effort and maybe even some subjective marking. And that just makes consistent difficulty impossible. Only ****ty lazy profs can make tests with consistent difficulty.

Answers get handed down from year to year as well, so you have to constantly change the test.

It's different because programs get iterated on to fix the bugs in the future. You only have 1 shot at the test.

That subjective grading is probably what separates online from offline education too. If you have an online course with 30,000 people who took a test and you only have 2 TAs you can't really expect them to read every test, the tests need to be graded automatically.

His type of curve was adjusting the whole class up, I'm almost certain. I know that's not a "curve" in the traditional sense. I think he just takes the top score and makes that the new 100%. I believe the top score was an 85.

As an economics major at a good school, I don't think I ever took a test that wasn't an average of like 72 or below, and scaled up to the 78-82 range. My school had some serious grade deflation relative to a lot of schools.

I took my last semesters as a visiting student at Harvard, and they don't ream you as badly on tests as a lot of schools. Had a test in a 200 person class that had an average of 82, which they proceeded to scale up to an 87... a bit of a different experience than I had for the rest of college. Smart kids (really just on the tail end of the bell curve, though) that had teachers that thought they were super smart. Self-fulfilling prophecies all around.

But generally, most schools don't want a test with an average of like a 90, so they'll err on the side of going a little low and scaling it up. I have no problem with that. It's not like if someone got a raw 95 on a test with an average of a 72 everyone else would fail. A 76 might still be an A-, despite the outliers... So you're not really tested against other people.

Having a raw test average of like 30 is really stupid. 60-75 is standard and good imo.

That's the only sense in which I've ever seen "grading on a curve" done - sorry guys, the test was too hard, here are some points so administration/parents/students don't yell at us.

This is quite stupid.

Many profs are teaching the same course multiple times and good ones are always iterating on the exams over semesters.

The prof I worked with who was the best at writing tests always started by looking at the last 2-3 exams he'd written and reviewing mark distributions for the questions and notes that he'd written after grading the exams.


Definitely.

Yep, that would make sense to do. I just meant as a student you have no chance to iterate on your test but if you were a programmer you would fix your bugs.

The user who suffered from your bug also has no chance to iterate on their specific experience.

Hope that this has not been posted before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KULAkpNXBD8

Not only this, but my proff in particular stresses on us to use eclipse to autocomplete code and stuff like that, and then has test questions that nit on tiny little details of a method's name.