“At the end of the semester, the total scores for all students will be arranged in numerical order, the score that corresponds to the 99th percentile (S99) will be determined, and then letter grades will be
assigned based on this percentile score as follows:
A: Total Score ≥ 0.90 x S99
B: 0.80 x S99 ≤ Total Score < 0.90 x S99
C: 0.70 x S99 ≤ Total Score < 0.80 x S99
D: 0.60 x S99 ≤ Total Score < 0.70 x S99
F: Total Score < 0.60 x S99 or if you fail to complete 10 of the 12 lab
projects”
This is the explanation the department of chemistry for my college gives. But I don’t understand, so please explain it to me like I’m five.
In: Mathematics
In college, we had a thing called “curve busters”. The idea is that if a test is graded on a curve, one genius in the class can ruin it for everybody. Everybody gets mad at the curve buster in the class.
So to make it fair, when you’re calculating the curve, you ignore the very best 1% of the class. Whatever the top score in the remaining 99% was, that’s the score used to calculate the curve.
It looks like the grades are then calculated as a percentage of what that top score was. If you do better than 90% of that top score, you get an A. 80% gets you a B, and so forth.
Now when I was in school, many of the TAs had a different method: grades on a test typically don’t fall on a bell curve as you might expect. Instead, there tends to be clusters. A smart grader will put the boundaries between grades between those clusters. This reduces the number of students who come and complain about their grades that were just short of the boundary to the next letter grade.
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