What is a fair way to curve an Exam grade?

[orientbeachgirl]

On my Pharm exam this week there were 25 questions (4 points each) over 5 chapters! I got 6 questions wrong! That is a 76% which in my BSN program is an F!

So I went to the professors office to review my exam and she told me that she nulled 2 questions on the exam, however they were not questions that I got wrong.

In fact she told me that I was the one student to get both of the questions correct and that on one of the questions only 4 students got it correct. Okay....but I still lost 8 points! So another student that I know got 6 questions wrong, but two of them were the 2 that were nulled! Her grade is an 84% !!! How does this seem fair??

Okay and then in another class, the exam was 50 questions (2 points each). I got 6 wrong. So my grade before the curve was an 88% (which I was ok with since I was not able to study a lot for this exam since I had 3 exams in one day!) But this professor adjusted the grades on this exam too. So my friend that got 16 questions wrong...her grade is now 88% and my other friend that had 10 questions wrong ended up with a 92%. My grade after the adjustment was a 90% !!!! How is this fair????

Don't get me wrong, I am glad that my friends now have passing grades, but I don't think that I should have a lower grade than someone that got more questions wrong!! So frustrated!

I am not sure what to do...I am afraid that if I talk with the profs that they will just say screw it and will never adjust any grades again! I guess that I just don't understand how a professor can think that this is a fair way to adjust exam grades.

Doesn't it seem more fair to just add the # of points to everyone's grade so that it is more fairly distributed? I realize that this might put some students over 100%, but perhaps they could be given extra credit points or the professor could just make it a rule that everyone is maxed out at 100% no matter what....I just don't think that it is fair that I now have lower grades than other students that originally had more wrong than I did.

Please share your thoughts and ideas with me.....Thanks everyone!

[MN-Nurse, ASN, RN]

in our school, when they drop questions, the students who got the questions wrong get the points back. those who got them right don't get points back because they never lost them.

This is the wrong way to do it. If a question is judged invalid, then it should be thrown off the test and the test scored as if it never existed.

[MN-Nurse, ASN, RN]

A 76 is an F? Tough crowd.

Anyway, in my research Nursing class, bad questions are thrown out. In Fundamentals, questions aren't thrown out either.

At my school, what grade you earn is the grade you receive.

76 isn't an F at your school? It was at mine. Technically it was a D, but you need a C to pass so D=F.

[abiklags]

This is the wrong way to do it. If a question is judged invalid, then it should be thrown off the test and the test scored as if it never existed.

dropping questions in my school means the question was thrown out. if i got the question right to begin with throwing out the question does not change my grade. on the other hand, the students who got the question wrong get the points back when the question is thrown out.

does that make more sense?

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

yes, it does change your grade, although maybe not by much. the difference between 19/25 and 17/23 (or whatever it was) is small, but could make a difference to some folks.

try not to think of "points given back," or "taken away." it's really just a matter of scoring the exam as it is, as if those items never existed and none of you ever saw them.

and i still think that if people spent half the effort studying content that they expend figuring out exactly how many items they have to bully their faculty to throw out to eke out an extra .05 on their gpa, we wouldn't have this discussion nearly so often. it was one of the things that made me craziest when i was faculty.

[MN-Nurse, ASN, RN]

dropping questions in my school means the question was thrown out. if i got the question right to begin with throwing out the question does not change my grade. on the other hand, the students who got the question wrong get the points back when the question is thrown out.

does that make more sense?

No.

The question never existed. It was an invalid question, so it was thrown off the test.

No one gets "points back." They never "had" those points to "lose."

[MN-Nurse, ASN, RN]

and i still think that if people spent half the effort studying content that they expend figuring out exactly how many items they have to bully their faculty to throw out to eke out an extra .05 on their gpa, we wouldn't have this discussion nearly so often. it was one of the things that made me craziest when i was faculty.

this also depends on the skill of the faculty at developing, editing, and administering a test. often, the questions thrown out were nonsense due to errors generating the test.

it was very easy to tell when you were taking a test that was not carefully reviewed before administering.

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

and "curving" an exam has nothing to do with the number of items used/discarded/whatever. i regret i cannot draw here, but imagine a bell curve-- you remember bell curves, the ones shaped like bells, the horizontal axis being frequencey and the vertical axis being scores, with a low line at the bottom left, rising to a point at the top, then dropping symmetrically down to the right? they represent the natural distribution of... well, lots of things, but in this context, they show the distribution of the students' scores. very few people made really low scores, very few people made really high scores, and all the other scores in between are distributed on that curve.

now, relabel the horizontal axis, so the top of the curved line lines up on the bottom axis = a "c", and the low part of the line at the right lines up over "a," and the teeny line at the left an "f," with the b's and d's in between. that's one way to curve these grades. another is to pick up and slide the whole curve over to the right a little bit, so now people who made a b before are now in the a range, and there are fewer failures. everybody's average is up a bit. this is sometimes done for a very very hard exam, where the faculty realizes that anybody who achieves an 86, say, deserves an a; or for a really easy one, where everybody darn well better know enough to get an 85 at least, they slide it the other way and you get an f if you got a 77. for example, here; the real distribution of the grades might not be a symmetrical bell curve. but i hope you get the idea.

and this is why you take statistics as an undergraduate, so you understand this stuff. it helps a lot c research and evaluating it for evidence-based practice.

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

of course i completely agree c mn-nurse; we all know how easy it is to think the answer is obvious, when it's not at all obvious to others. this is why the item analysis i mentioned in my earlier post is so useful- it corrects for that and gives you good data for knowing what items should be discarded as either too hard or waayy too easy. it doesn't have to be all guesswork.

[MN-Nurse, ASN, RN]

and this is why you take statistics as an undergraduate, so you understand this stuff. it helps a lot c research and evaluating it for evidence-based practice.

curving grades is so rare, especially in nursing that i just ignored the term completely for the purposes of the conversation.

the only time in my nursing education anything was curved was when i took a social psych class from a lunatic. the high scores on his exams were in the low 60s.

[ThePrincessBride, MSN, RN, NP]

76 isn't an F at your school? It was at mine. Technically it was a D, but you need a C to pass so D=F.

A 76 is a C. Anything below a 73 is failing (C-).

[AZMOMO2]

I had this happen to me as well so I know how you feel.

I do not believe in curves for this reason exactly. The reason is that people like you are mistakenly adjusted into a lower grade. I think that if even 1 person gets a question correct that it should be considered a proper question.

But like you suggested, if the points are given to the masses as credit than that same number of points should be added to everyone's grade. Extra points if someone got the question correct.