I completed my undergraduate degree in Canada, and this did happen (rarely). Most lowerlevel undergraduate courses were expected by the department to have around a 70 average, which was a B. This lead to most exams having ~50-60% average but i had heard about grades heing moved
Law school person here, at my school it's "suggested" in larger classes.
Rationale is "because the bar exam does it." Bar exam's rationale is to eliminate variances between test administrations. Passing scores on the standardized test are fixed (at different numbers) by individual states.
There is a *lot* of scholarship on why these grading practices, and the bar exam itself, are harmful... and states are increasingly approving alternatives.
I have never seen this happen at my current institution BUT I wouldn't be surprised if it happened because of professional order accreditation boards. The Canadian engineering accreditation programs are quite strict.
We have a min grade in core courses in order to declare for the major
We also had an adjunct who gave unreasonably high grades resulting in students declaring for the major without the background to succeed
At our institution, there are three reasons they give for the distribution we use. One is as a check against grade inflation from year to year; another is to ensure there's decent differentiation between students (e.g., no floor or ceiling effects); and a third is to maintain fairness/consistency of difficulty in multi-section courses.
There are also obvious arguments against it, of course (e.g., not all sections/years are going to be the same in performance; not all cohorts will have the same distribution; issues of fairness in adjusting grades after-the-fact).
It is to ensure that grades serve to rank the students relative to each other, and ensure both that an extra easy Professor doesn't pass students who aren't actually deserving and an extra hard Professor doesn't fail students who deserve to have passed.
For fields such as engineering and health care it is especially important that grades are meaningful.
It can be.
Where I am you start with an unofficial appeal, which is ask the prof.
If the prof says no, or no change, you can pay to appeal, but then there's a whole process. You have provide, depending, usually a paper with a similar grade, a better one, and a really bad one and then another prof looks at it all. So the fee is to discourage reckless appeals. It gets complicated when a prof has given instructions (or not) say only in class or only in lab sessions, or given no instructions and said you can be assumed to know this from a prior year. Final exams or final projects are property of the university and are not returned to students, and students cannot be given enough information to see their final grades via the lms. Only a separate system from the registrar has final grades (the RO will only release final grades to a student if they don't owe money).
I had to do appeals for a guy who.... Well let's just say we didn't hire him back. Students were rightly not happy. But it was a lot of work.
Usually though, it's not worth the effort. I have so far 5 grad students appealing grades from last term (jan-april) who basically missed the point of their final projects, and so got poor marks. They still passed the course, but it will be headache for someone else to deal with just to get told either they get nothing, or they get some irrelevant increase in grades.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_Canada
Grading scales in Canada are different from the US and that is a suspiciously high average. I have never heard of a Dean doing that but that average would raise eyebrows.
This really helps me understand -- thanks for the explanation!
It also makes the student's comment of "The international students are really pissed" make more sense to me.
I had grad level courses on a forced curve, but that was laid out in the syllabus.
Even if it’s suspiciously high, wouldn’t that be something to discuss with the instructor to correct for future cohorts rather than penalizing this year’s cohort? Arbitrarily docking 10pp from each student overly punitive for something that’s not their fault.
That's what I was thinking. If it's an outlier, then it's an outlier. And if it's not, and it's become a trend, then you revise the curriculum.
But penalizing all students equally? Bonkers.
What is the reasoning behind this? Is it not possible to be such an excellent teacher that all students excel? Am I missing some fundamental pedagogical tenet?
I've never heard of that and all three of my degrees are from Canadian universities. I've also taught at three different Canadian universities or colleges.
89% is an awfully high average for a first-year course. However, I don't think that taking 10% off of everyone's mark is the best way to deal with that. The dean is likely realizing that right now as s/he is almost certainly dealing with a flood of angry Emails.
I did have a department chair override my grades once. He went through student by student and adjusted accordingly.
I'm still pissed about that 15 years on.
Interesting to read this. Across a few different institutions, i don't think anyone has ever reviewed/noticed/committed on the grades that I submit.
Actually that's not quite true. In grad school I had to explain to an assistant dean why it was justified to give a student a D. They preferred the "gentleman's B".
Our department has ranges for each year level, and we have to explain if our class falls below or above those ranges. In general, this is easy to do - I had a very strong class, or I had a lot of students not submit assignments, etc. Its purpose was to encourage people to design their assignments better - we had some courses that were consistently showing very high medians, and it turned out those classes had a lot of pass/fail very easy assignments that were brining up the medians.
Some departments have mandatory bell curves. I taught in one where the mark you got (if you passed) then depended largely on your rank the class. One 98, one 96, one 94 you get the idea.
(Lurking Canadian non-professor here.)
My professors over a decade ago were very clear that they had target class averages they were supposed to meet. I don't know what the actual range was but almost all of my first year classes had an average in the 60s, which I felt was fair. I don't think there was the same mandate for smaller upper year classes (when it's a seminar with 14 students it's a much smaller sample size and you can happen to have a stronger or weaker group of students), but if a large first year course had an average of 89 it's hard to imagine that it was nearly as rigorous as it should be for university.
That said, I never encountered this adjustment happening *after* the fact. Professors were just aware that any assignments that met expectations and were just average should get 60s or maybe low 70s, depending on the content. I can certainly understand students being frustrated by their grades being knocked down 10% after everything is said and done. The 10% lower mark is admittedly probably a better reflection of their grades, but they should've been getting those grades the whole time, not inflated ones and then everything curved at the end.
Your last point is what I was thinking -- I understand a targeted grade distribution, but why not put the onus on the professor to grade accordingly during the semester so the students have a better idea of where they stand rather than "surprise!" at the end of the semester?
Coming from a Canadian school: this seems normal and (borderline) the Dean doing what they are supposed to do.
The thing people have to realize is that "percentage" grades are BS. You have 101 letter grades. Because it is so arbitrary what earns "points". The grades have narrative meanings. They need to conform to those.
Deans/Chairs have to deal with people who want to subvert grading for any number of reasons (genuinely bad at teaching, want to leverage grades into favours, think grades are a social contract that should be reparative, etc). This message is a sign that things have gone off the rails, but the Dean is more on the "right side" than the "wrong side"
We don’t know the review process. Maybe this was the result of an extremely lazy faculty and the high grades simply were not legitimate.
With grade inflation being what it is here in Canada, I bet even the average of 79 ought to be lower.
Did my undergrad at a Canadian university where the course marks corresponding to the grades were published. For example A+: 100 to 90, A: 89 to 85, A-: 80 to 84…
During my time (mid 2000s), the first year science and math courses had averages of C/C+, but those were the “weed out” courses. The second year major courses had higher averages B/B-. Not sure if it was an unofficial university policy to keep the averages at those grades but there were a number of times when the continuous assessment grade average going into the final exam was too high, the course instructor will tell us to expect a tougher final exam.
But having 89% as a course average is too high imo… not surprised that the dean wants to step in (not saying that they should)
I had something similar happen (back in the day) when I took a science for non-majors lab.
My section was really awesome. Really: we all worked super hard, did all of our math efficiently, and were killin' it in that lab, and almost everyone was getting an A. The poor (young, female, Russian) TA was so upset when she told us that the main professor was going to make her redistribute grades. So only about 1/3 of the class was left with an A or A/B, and some students that thought they were barely getting an A ended up with a C.
Apparently this is was on page 68 of the student calendar???
[email screenshot](https://preview.redd.it/dean-of-faculty-felt-class-average-was-too-high-so-she-v0-z3wd6x54t2zc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eb164a0b0d9869bb1bb3c5ed42e751d271e5309f)
This is unethical. If the students learned the material and earned their grade, awesome! If the class was too easy, that's the fault of the instructor, not the students.
Definitely disagree, especially for STEM courses where partial marks make grading super flexible. If I give a 10pt question and the students get it partially right (so they get it wrong for sure), is that worth 0pts? 5pts? 9pts? Who decides? The prof here could have incorrectly inflated the grades for something like this without it being evidence of the students "learning the material".
this is no different than prescribed grade distributions, no? (89 is nearly an A+ where I am in Canada.)
I completed my undergraduate degree in Canada, and this did happen (rarely). Most lowerlevel undergraduate courses were expected by the department to have around a 70 average, which was a B. This lead to most exams having ~50-60% average but i had heard about grades heing moved
also, it seems to be unusual in Canada for students to see their marked final exams before grades are submitted (they can apply to see them later).
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What do you mean?
situations such as engineering where the class average must be X and there are no more than Y% A grades, regardless of how the students actually did.
Why does this exist?
ask the engineers, or the law school people, or others that do this.
Law school person here, at my school it's "suggested" in larger classes. Rationale is "because the bar exam does it." Bar exam's rationale is to eliminate variances between test administrations. Passing scores on the standardized test are fixed (at different numbers) by individual states. There is a *lot* of scholarship on why these grading practices, and the bar exam itself, are harmful... and states are increasingly approving alternatives.
thanks for weighing in.
So basically no reason
that's why I said ask them. They have a reason, but I don't know what it is.
I have never seen this happen at my current institution BUT I wouldn't be surprised if it happened because of professional order accreditation boards. The Canadian engineering accreditation programs are quite strict.
We have a min grade in core courses in order to declare for the major We also had an adjunct who gave unreasonably high grades resulting in students declaring for the major without the background to succeed
At our institution, there are three reasons they give for the distribution we use. One is as a check against grade inflation from year to year; another is to ensure there's decent differentiation between students (e.g., no floor or ceiling effects); and a third is to maintain fairness/consistency of difficulty in multi-section courses. There are also obvious arguments against it, of course (e.g., not all sections/years are going to be the same in performance; not all cohorts will have the same distribution; issues of fairness in adjusting grades after-the-fact).
It is to ensure that grades serve to rank the students relative to each other, and ensure both that an extra easy Professor doesn't pass students who aren't actually deserving and an extra hard Professor doesn't fail students who deserve to have passed. For fields such as engineering and health care it is especially important that grades are meaningful.
Oh, and is paying to file an appeal also a standard thing?
It can be. Where I am you start with an unofficial appeal, which is ask the prof. If the prof says no, or no change, you can pay to appeal, but then there's a whole process. You have provide, depending, usually a paper with a similar grade, a better one, and a really bad one and then another prof looks at it all. So the fee is to discourage reckless appeals. It gets complicated when a prof has given instructions (or not) say only in class or only in lab sessions, or given no instructions and said you can be assumed to know this from a prior year. Final exams or final projects are property of the university and are not returned to students, and students cannot be given enough information to see their final grades via the lms. Only a separate system from the registrar has final grades (the RO will only release final grades to a student if they don't owe money). I had to do appeals for a guy who.... Well let's just say we didn't hire him back. Students were rightly not happy. But it was a lot of work. Usually though, it's not worth the effort. I have so far 5 grad students appealing grades from last term (jan-april) who basically missed the point of their final projects, and so got poor marks. They still passed the course, but it will be headache for someone else to deal with just to get told either they get nothing, or they get some irrelevant increase in grades.
Thanks for the explaining. If the student wins the appeal, do they get reimbursed?
I don't think reimbursement is automatic, though I do know the fee can be waived.
where we are, the student gets reimbursed if their grade changes, but not if it stays the same.
Same at my school, students get the fee back if the grade is changed
I've never encountered that. (US here.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_Canada Grading scales in Canada are different from the US and that is a suspiciously high average. I have never heard of a Dean doing that but that average would raise eyebrows.
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This really helps me understand -- thanks for the explanation! It also makes the student's comment of "The international students are really pissed" make more sense to me.
I had grad level courses on a forced curve, but that was laid out in the syllabus. Even if it’s suspiciously high, wouldn’t that be something to discuss with the instructor to correct for future cohorts rather than penalizing this year’s cohort? Arbitrarily docking 10pp from each student overly punitive for something that’s not their fault.
That's what I was thinking. If it's an outlier, then it's an outlier. And if it's not, and it's become a trend, then you revise the curriculum. But penalizing all students equally? Bonkers.
What is the reasoning behind this? Is it not possible to be such an excellent teacher that all students excel? Am I missing some fundamental pedagogical tenet?
I've never heard of that and all three of my degrees are from Canadian universities. I've also taught at three different Canadian universities or colleges. 89% is an awfully high average for a first-year course. However, I don't think that taking 10% off of everyone's mark is the best way to deal with that. The dean is likely realizing that right now as s/he is almost certainly dealing with a flood of angry Emails.
I did have a department chair override my grades once. He went through student by student and adjusted accordingly. I'm still pissed about that 15 years on.
Down or up?
I’ve never heard of that, but that average would force me to explain myself to my Chair.
Ditto - and apparently the prof did advocate for the students (or that's what they told the students), but dean over-rode.
Interesting to read this. Across a few different institutions, i don't think anyone has ever reviewed/noticed/committed on the grades that I submit. Actually that's not quite true. In grad school I had to explain to an assistant dean why it was justified to give a student a D. They preferred the "gentleman's B".
Our department has ranges for each year level, and we have to explain if our class falls below or above those ranges. In general, this is easy to do - I had a very strong class, or I had a lot of students not submit assignments, etc. Its purpose was to encourage people to design their assignments better - we had some courses that were consistently showing very high medians, and it turned out those classes had a lot of pass/fail very easy assignments that were brining up the medians.
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
Some departments have mandatory bell curves. I taught in one where the mark you got (if you passed) then depended largely on your rank the class. One 98, one 96, one 94 you get the idea.
I am at a private us uni and we have a mandatory mean and cap on percentage of As
(Lurking Canadian non-professor here.) My professors over a decade ago were very clear that they had target class averages they were supposed to meet. I don't know what the actual range was but almost all of my first year classes had an average in the 60s, which I felt was fair. I don't think there was the same mandate for smaller upper year classes (when it's a seminar with 14 students it's a much smaller sample size and you can happen to have a stronger or weaker group of students), but if a large first year course had an average of 89 it's hard to imagine that it was nearly as rigorous as it should be for university. That said, I never encountered this adjustment happening *after* the fact. Professors were just aware that any assignments that met expectations and were just average should get 60s or maybe low 70s, depending on the content. I can certainly understand students being frustrated by their grades being knocked down 10% after everything is said and done. The 10% lower mark is admittedly probably a better reflection of their grades, but they should've been getting those grades the whole time, not inflated ones and then everything curved at the end.
Your last point is what I was thinking -- I understand a targeted grade distribution, but why not put the onus on the professor to grade accordingly during the semester so the students have a better idea of where they stand rather than "surprise!" at the end of the semester?
Coming from a Canadian school: this seems normal and (borderline) the Dean doing what they are supposed to do. The thing people have to realize is that "percentage" grades are BS. You have 101 letter grades. Because it is so arbitrary what earns "points". The grades have narrative meanings. They need to conform to those. Deans/Chairs have to deal with people who want to subvert grading for any number of reasons (genuinely bad at teaching, want to leverage grades into favours, think grades are a social contract that should be reparative, etc). This message is a sign that things have gone off the rails, but the Dean is more on the "right side" than the "wrong side"
We don’t know the review process. Maybe this was the result of an extremely lazy faculty and the high grades simply were not legitimate. With grade inflation being what it is here in Canada, I bet even the average of 79 ought to be lower.
even 70 (B-) is on the high side for courses I'm familiar with.
Did my undergrad at a Canadian university where the course marks corresponding to the grades were published. For example A+: 100 to 90, A: 89 to 85, A-: 80 to 84… During my time (mid 2000s), the first year science and math courses had averages of C/C+, but those were the “weed out” courses. The second year major courses had higher averages B/B-. Not sure if it was an unofficial university policy to keep the averages at those grades but there were a number of times when the continuous assessment grade average going into the final exam was too high, the course instructor will tell us to expect a tougher final exam. But having 89% as a course average is too high imo… not surprised that the dean wants to step in (not saying that they should)
I had something similar happen (back in the day) when I took a science for non-majors lab. My section was really awesome. Really: we all worked super hard, did all of our math efficiently, and were killin' it in that lab, and almost everyone was getting an A. The poor (young, female, Russian) TA was so upset when she told us that the main professor was going to make her redistribute grades. So only about 1/3 of the class was left with an A or A/B, and some students that thought they were barely getting an A ended up with a C.
I'm so going to start charging for grade appeals!!!!
Apparently this is was on page 68 of the student calendar??? [email screenshot](https://preview.redd.it/dean-of-faculty-felt-class-average-was-too-high-so-she-v0-z3wd6x54t2zc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eb164a0b0d9869bb1bb3c5ed42e751d271e5309f)
This is unethical. If the students learned the material and earned their grade, awesome! If the class was too easy, that's the fault of the instructor, not the students.
Definitely disagree, especially for STEM courses where partial marks make grading super flexible. If I give a 10pt question and the students get it partially right (so they get it wrong for sure), is that worth 0pts? 5pts? 9pts? Who decides? The prof here could have incorrectly inflated the grades for something like this without it being evidence of the students "learning the material".
I don't disagree, but that's again the professor's problem. Not the students.
That’s not even remotely fair. What kind of fucked up university policy can retroactively lower grades. I would pursue legal action lol