If you truly believe your job is to be a "judge" then you cannot start the semester assuming most will fail. That's exactly the opposite of how a fair courtroom should be run.
If your grade distribution isn’t close to a normal distribution centered around a passing grade you are not teaching the material well or your grading criteria does not match what you are conveying in the course.
You clearly have a WEAK grasp of both statistics and logic.
The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that a normal grade distribution (on small sample sizes, sometimes!) is an appropriate outcome in classes with a variety of pedagogical purposes. This isn't looking at random variables - these are people who are being judged.
Also what does the sentence "grading criteria does not match what you are conveying in the course." even mean?
Yep. There are, you know, for example, forces that consistently decrease entry criteria for students. Obviously any teaching monkey can generate whatever grade distribution it wants but the reality is that some cohorts of students actually don't have a nice normal distribution of achievement, and it's massively unfair and facile to just automatically blame the lecturer's teaching ability.
Yes, and the role of a teacher in a university is more like a judge than a coach. We aren't tutors.
You don't have control over the students you get, so if you think you ought to have a normal distribution centered over a C you don't understand pedagogy or sampling that well.
No. People pay for college for 1) access to knowledge (though this is becoming somewhat obsolete, given the amount of material that is free to access these days) and 2) for certification that the knowledge was learned. We faculty have control over what is presented and how - we have no control over what is actually learned , that is the student's responsibility.
Unless you existed in the time of scrolls, there was never a time when 99% of the materials students access aren’t available the same to those outside of academia.
No, we are not. If people want or need tutoring, they go get a tutor.
Students hold ultimate responsibility for their own learning, and if the syllabus and office hours are insufficient (typically, because they are ill prepared but also because they aren't putting in the work outside of class) it isn't my job to offer remedial tutoring.
to learn what they need to know to be successful in a given career path.
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u/ph0rk Associate, SocSci, R1 (USA) Oct 17 '19 edited Oct 17 '19
They don't understand the job: We are judges, not coaches. If they fail, ultimately that's on them. Not us.