Grading
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Frazz for 11/06/2025:
And for 11/07/2025:
The "difficulty" of organic chemistry courses is connected to their role as gatekeepers for admission to medical school. Such courses don't just teach relevant background information, they also calibrate students' ability (and willingness) to deal with certain kinds of methods and pressures.
This function applies in an even purer form to calculus courses, which are also required by med schools, though they lack any significant applicability to doctors' future educational or practical experience. As I wrote back in 2009,
The role of college calculus seems to me rather like the role of Latin and Greek in 19th-century education: it's almost entirely useless to most of the students who are forced to learn it, and its main function is as a social and intellectual gatekeeper, passing through just those students who are willing and able to learn to perform a prescribed set of complex and meaningless rituals.
Over the years, I've asked many clinicians and clinical researchers whether they've ever needed (or wanted) to apply in their work what they learned in their college calculus course(s) — and so far, the number of "yes" responses is zero. This is not to say that math is irrelevant in these disciplines, whose practitioners need a better grounding in statistics and linear algebra than they generally get. But expertise in integrating various types of equations is not the help that they need. (See "When 90% is 32%", "(Mis-) Interpreting medical tests", etc.)
Stepping back a bit, grading has at least three goals:
- Establishing how well someone knows something;
- Motivating people to learn something;
- Providing a basis for choosing some people over others.
If the goal is (1), then the best outcome is one where everyone gets the highest possible score.
If the goal is (2), then the best outcome is probably the same, where every participant is fully motivated, although it also works when there are some slackers who get lower grades or fail completely.
It's only for goal (3) that a broad distribution of results is what we want. In my own teaching, it's goals (1) and (2) that I've had in mind, so that I'm fine with results like this:
That distribution is suboptimal for goal (3), a fact that doesn't bother me at all. I'd be happier, in fact, if everyone in the class got an A — like Caulfield in the strips at the top of the post, I'm inclined to see lower grades as my failure to teach, not the students' failure to learn.
And this brings us to the recent fuss about grade inflation, starting with "Harvard College's Grading System Is 'Failing,' Report on Grade Inflation Says", The Harvard Crimson 10/27/2025, with broad media commentary.
If students are getting A or A+ without actually knowing the material, that's worth worrying about. Whether that's what's going on isn't clear to me, however.
It's interesting in this context to read Bertrand Russell's 1924 essay "Freedom or Authority in Education". Russell allows a role for authority, e.g.
It is obvious that most children, if they were left to themselves, would not learn to read or write, and would grow up less adapted than they might be to the circumstances of their lives. There must be educational institutions, and children must be to some extent under authority.
But nowhere in the essay does he mention grading, or the role of grades in choosing among students for subsequent opportunities. It's not clear whether this reflects the culture of the times, or his own attitudes and experiences.
In closing, I should also mention my own experience with organic chemistry in college, many years ago. The pre-meds in the course were so concerned about their rankings that they sabotaged each other's lab experiments, and razored out the crucial pages in the reference works on reserve in the library. This cancelled for me what might have been a career in molecular biology: "Do I want to spend more time in the company of these assholes? Hell, no."
Which was probably an over-reaction. But still…
Cervantes said,
November 10, 2025 @ 9:52 am
Yes, the main purpose of the premed curriculum is to weed out, an unfortunate phrase when we're talking about people. Physicians have no use for calculus, but they do need to understand Bayes theorem, which most of them do not. And Bayes theorem is not hard to understand, or teach. What they do understand of statistics is entirely Gaussian, and all about p values, which they also do not properly understand.
Rodger C said,
November 10, 2025 @ 10:14 am
It was organic chemistry and college calculus that made me an English major, for which I'm thankful. In WV then, where coal was king and chemistry was queen consort, there was a huge social pressure for any bright young male to become a chemical engineer. Instead, I did what the English and language faculties had been telling me all along.
Tim Leonard said,
November 10, 2025 @ 10:35 am
I've long felt the same way about requiring calculus as a prerequisite for Computer Science. I have asked only a few people with long careers in CS whether they've ever used calculus in their work, but they've all said "no". The time they spent learning calculus would have been better spent on other topics.
Roscoe said,
November 10, 2025 @ 12:19 pm
To be fair, who knows how many careers in the sciences have been cancelled by the thought “Do I want to spend more time in the company of these *nerds*? Hell, no.”
Gregory Kusnick said,
November 10, 2025 @ 12:36 pm
I've had a long career in software engineering and I will say yes, I have used calculus occasionally in my work. For instance, generating random numbers that obey some specified non-uniform distribution requires integration. Knowledge of calculus informs simulations of physical processes, even if there are no explicit integrations or differentiations in the code.
Calculus is more than just a toolkit for solving equations; it's a conceptual framework for understanding how processes interrelate. Epidemiology certainly depends on this kind of understanding (remember "flattening the curve"?), even if clinical physicians don't solve integrals in their daily work.
Peter Grubtal said,
November 10, 2025 @ 1:01 pm
With the humanities it doesn't matter if people get through who are not really up to it. But you should be grateful that the people who design air planes, nuclear power stations etc. or who are poised over you on the operating table with a scalpel in their hand, have had to satisfy stringent criteria before they're let loose on the public.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
November 10, 2025 @ 2:42 pm
When I was an undergraduate, my university’s physics and engineering physics departments were notorious for their grading policies and the long indentureships that grad students suffered through. I came to see it as a form of hazing.
My roommates my sophomore year were friends with a senior engineering student I will call Paul. One evening he burst into our apartment, furious. A couple of days before, the required EP fall course for seniors had held an exam. It was brutal, and the distribution of scores was idiosyncratic — something like 30 students taking an exam scored on a hundred-point basis, in which all the student scores clustered from 52 to 59. The professor then “graded on the curve” and flunked out several students with scores around 52 and 53, while treating the students with scores of 59 as though they had earned scores of 100.The scores from 54 to 58 were distributed from D to B. (The letter grades were then translated back into points, so a 59 on the test became a 4.0.)
There was a lot of anger from the class members — allegations that material on the test had been in the text but never covered in assignments or lectures — and questions about the mathematics of the grading “on the curve.” Students felt that the test results were so close numerically that no one should be kicked out of the course, and they requested some tutoring in preparation for a replacement exam. But what had really fired up Paul was the claim by the professor that his job was to “weed students out” even though the weeding was based on a one- or two-point difference, not a 10 or 20 point difference. Students who could not complete the course could not retake it until the following fall, making it impossible to finish their degrees in four years. Paul felt that any necessary “weeding” should have been completed before the students were seniors.
Meanwhile, over in the physics department, many students failed out of the introductory physics classes. Imagine my surprise then, 40 years later, attending a lecture for alumni during reunion in which a physics professor explained the various ways the department was monitoring student understanding in order to ensure they learned the material. The punitive, sink-or-swim approach had been abandoned, and a significantly larger percentage of students were successfully completing introductory physics courses.
Michael Vnuk said,
November 10, 2025 @ 4:09 pm
Looking at the graph, I'm puzzled why some students have more the 100 (assuming that 100 is the maximum). Also, when I add up the proportions of the class, based on the bars, I only get around 0.3, when I would be expecting the total to be 1.
David L said,
November 10, 2025 @ 5:36 pm
Calculus: piece of cake
Organic chemistry: fundamentally incomprehensible.
Which is why I became a physicist.
Mark Liberman said,
November 10, 2025 @ 8:22 pm
@Michael Vnuk: "Looking at the graph, I'm puzzled why some students have more the 100 (assuming that 100 is the maximum).":
Extra credit.
"Also, when I add up the proportions of the class, based on the bars, I only get around 0.3, when I would be expecting the total to be 1."
The R histogram() function did it — I'm betting it's correct or there's a good explanation, but I don't have the time or energy to track down the actual 2006 grade distribution and work out the details…
Gokul Madhavan said,
November 10, 2025 @ 9:53 pm
@Peter Grubtal: There is an argument to be made that improper or inadequate training in the humanities is responsible for a lot of people holding (or retaining) half-baked, ahistorical, or sometimes utterly poisonous ideas about other human beings. A bad engineer may be responsible for some spectacular failure, but with the humanities the effects may only be visible over decades or even centuries.
~flow said,
November 11, 2025 @ 2:58 am
> they sabotaged each other's lab experiments, and razored out the crucial pages in the reference works on reserve in the library
sounds like some of the goons employed by the present adm. did visit some place of higher education after all
Richard Hershberger said,
November 11, 2025 @ 5:04 am
When I was an undergrad there was a freshman physics course and a freshman engineering course that covered the same material. The difference was the physics course was a full year, while the engineering was half a year. It was widely understood that the engineering version was a weed-out course, while the physics department didn't see theirs that way. Much less widely known was that engineering students were allowed to take the physics department version. The engineering school didn't publicize this, but anyone who had the wit to read the catalog and graduation requirements could figure it out. Upon reflection, that perhaps was a different sort of weeding out.
Andreas Johansson said,
November 11, 2025 @ 6:08 am
When I was at university, there was a half-semester course in German aimed at humanities students. There was another course with essentially the same content aimed at engineering students, but it only counted as one sixth of a semester.
bks said,
November 11, 2025 @ 6:26 am
Barbara Phillips Long reminds us that the one thing all academic committees agree on, regardless of discipline: An undergraduate degree should take four years.
Joaquim Roé said,
November 11, 2025 @ 6:49 am
I have taught Linear Algebra (and occasionally Calculus) many times to Engineering students. Most are uninterested and learn the bare minimum to pass the exams.
My feeling is that the colleagues who teach them the Engineering courses also believe that they don't fundamentally need to understand the math. I have tried asking them what points in the curriculum should be given more importance to, because they will become useful later, but my feeling is that the math is there only because "it has to be". Electrical engineers do need complex numbers, it seems. Videogames programmers use rotation matrices, but they don't need to understand them.
Be as it may, the amount of math that is taught to non science majors has declined steadily during my professional life, and I'd say the number of courses required is about half of what it used to be. I doubt we work as gatekeepers anymore.
Maybe in past times engineers were elite who had been weeded out, and now they are just workers with some particular technical skills.
(All this in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain)
Brett said,
November 11, 2025 @ 11:16 am
My father said that he did sometimes use calculus in his medical career; it wasn't common, but it happened. However, he was certainly atypical, having been in the applied mathematics doctoral program when he decided to leave the field and go into medicine. So he was almost certainly much more inclined than most physicians to look at physiological processes from in terms of mathematics descriptions of their physics.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
November 11, 2025 @ 1:21 pm
@bks — When I was an undergraduate, I certainly accepted that the standard undergraduate degree took four years. But I ended up spending two decades in my university town, and listening to people talking about how department enrollments determined who got the corner office or the bigger budget or the larger share of library books — and many other aspects of academic administration — made me more flexible about many things. I remain lukewarm, however, about claims that two years of community college are as good as two years at a high-ranking university or that AP courses are equivalent to college courses. But my opinions are colored by learning, working at, and living in proximity to a major research university.