Once upon a time, a long long time ago in a desert far, far away, I took a Physics class. The professor used one of them thar new-fangled personal computer thingies (pre-Apple, pre-IBM PC) to manage his grading tasks.\u00a0 He also introduced a solution to the “one genius makes the rest of us look bad” problem.<\/p>\n
For the uninitiated, the “one genius” scenario is the case where a test is graded on a curve and just one person aces the test while everyone else bombs it.<\/p>\n
His solution was simple: normalize to the second-highest score.<\/strong><\/p>\n I have adopted this approach for any of my classes with ten or more<\/em> students. If there are less than that, I’ll normalize to the highest score.<\/p>\n Here’s how it works.\u00a0 Let’s say a test is worth 200 points. A genius scores 190, but the second highest score is 150.\u00a0 What I will do is add 50 points (200 –\u00a0 150) to everyone’s grade.\u00a0 Everyone, that is, except for the genius-she will get 10 points to bring her grade to a perfect score of 200.<\/p>\n The rationale is simple: If two or more people do well, then my teaching methods seem to be working, but if only one person does well, we assume that person is a “genius” and treat their grade as an outlier to be ignored.<\/p>\n The bottom line: it’s my job to help you succeed,<\/strong> so it’s my responsibility to grade fairly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Note: Technically I’m applying an offset rather than normalizing, but you get the idea.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once upon a time, a long long time ago in a desert far, far away, I took a Physics class. The professor used one of them thar new-fangled personal computer thingies (pre-Apple, pre-IBM PC) to manage his grading tasks.\u00a0 He also introduced a solution to the “one genius makes the rest of us look bad” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10785,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-curriculum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10785"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.callutheran.edu\/jpdillon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}