Coursework marks

[baratron]

I have started to get my coursework back. Yay. The really amusing thing, for some values of "amusing", is that I got an A+ for the carbohydrate coursework That Almost Killed Me. Also the Terrifying Lecturer said "Congratulations" to me when she handed it back, and stopped me after the lecture to tell me how wonderful it was (but I shouldn't boast about it because of how late I handed it in) :O Apparently, I Do Not Suck at coursework. Now, if only my paranoid and over-anxious brain could *learn* that...

Marks:
Organometallic - A
Lipids and Membranes - A+
Carbohydrates - A+

Theoretically I should know my Transition Metals and Biological Chemistry I marks too, but that lecturer gave us a small exercise to do every week rather than one big one at the end, so I'd have to add up all the individual marks to find it out and I'm a bit too scared to. Mind you, I'm fairly sure my average for both of them should be at least 70%, which is an A-.

I don't have the marks for Atomic Spectroscopy or Mass Spectrometry yet, though we've been given the model answers for the Mass Spec course and they all look rather familiar. And we only had to hand in the Bioinorganic last week.

Comments

[aineotter.livejournal.com]

70% is an A- there? Wow...we've got this stupid 7 point scale where 92% is a B+...

[baratron.livejournal.com]

What are you studying? These things vary from subject to subject. In chemistry, it's considered miraculous to get over 90%, and I'm assured that in philosophy marks over 70% basically do not exist.

[aineotter.livejournal.com]

I'm in veterinary medicine; the 7 point scale thing is a vet school phenomina. The rest of the university has a 10 point scale, where 90% is the lower cutoff for an A-. In some classes professors will curve the grade artificially, so that it's a bell curve centered on 'C', usually by adding points.
They're all somewhat arbitrary systems, I just hadn't encountered the one you describe before.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Ahh. This is pretty usual for the UK. Here, 70% is typically a First Class, which is the highest mark obtainable. However, it's not that our degrees are ridiculously easy compared to yours; rather the opposite. We get asked insanely hard exam questions, meaning that the average student is expected to get 50-59% :) And the pass mark is 35 or 40% for different courses, which might well correspond to 75% on a much easier exam paper.

[aineotter.livejournal.com]

Oh, I figured. One physics class I took must have had a raw class average no more than 40%, because I had an average in the 50's and got an A.
It's all in how the tests are done, and how the grade is curved, so you can't really measure difficulty by percentage scores. And with multiple guess heavy grading (which my school is) it's hard to write really good tests. Still, I think I'd panic if I saw a 70% on a paper...

[a-musing-amazon.livejournal.com]

FWIW, when I was a senior lecturer here in the UK we never applied any sort of normalisation to our marking. 70%-79% was a A-, 40% was a D-,a bare pass; as to final degree calassification an average 70%+ was a First, 60-69% a 2.1, 50-59% a 2.2 and 40-49% a Third. There was a small amount of fuzzing but only at the final exam boards when we might decide to draw the boundary slightly lower if it seemed to make more overall sense.

It did seem to work - the (anonymous) marks did seem to laergely reflect how we subjectively thought of what the students were capable of. though it did rather worry me that we were turning out as qualified, engineers who were only right 40% on the time.

[aineotter.livejournal.com]

Well, we're apparently turning out qualified vets who are right at least 73% of the time (a D is essentially failing in vet school; 3 D's and you're out), as long as the animal comes in with answers A, B C and D to choose between. :p

[a-musing-amazon.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, it may be reasonable to expect real-life multiple choice answers when it comes to animal diseases, and therefore to test that way, but you can't design a bridge or even do real-life statistics (which is one of the subject I taight) quite so easily.

[rhialto.livejournal.com]

The Dutch system is even different. One gets marks from 1-10, where you need at least 6 to pass. How the number of correct answers is mapped to that, however, can vary considerably, and is often normalised to the subjective difficulty of the test. Sometimes only integral marks are given, sometime marks with one decimal. Sometimes 0,5 is rounded up to the next integer except when it is 5,5. But you can be reasonably sure that to get a 10, you need all answers to be correct, in my experience. (On my secondary school national chemistry exam I had the stupidest of small mistakes, and therefore only got a 9,9... but since then I'm sure I forgot most of it)

[kshandra]

Oh, I needed good news today.... Congratulations, love.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Heh. The current question is whether I should still try to see my doctor in the morning about my mental health when I have cheered up considerably? On the one hand, I am saner and rather happier today. On the other hand, I was useless and crying from, er, last Tuesday until this afternoon.

I think I'd better call the doctor anyway, don't you? *So* bipolar at the moment, up and down. So very stressed.

[kshandra]

That's the joy of it, innit? You don't go when you're up, because you don't see the need...and you don't go when you're down, because you just can't be arsed. *wry laughter*

So yes, do please call. *hugs*

[barakta]

Yes call, because it's better to try to do something than not try.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

You rock at coursework.

[kyte.livejournal.com]

You do not suck :>

(Well, only when you *want* to ;>)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

You are amazing!