Because of these negative effects of curving, the act of curving has often been disputed in the academic world. Curving still has several benefits in learning. One is the way it fights grade inflation. A little competition is always healthy and curving, if used right, can drive students to do better. The practice of curving grades has its advantages and drawbacks. Students, on the other hand, should continue to study and not let curving change the way they try to earn their grades.
How Does Grading on a Curve Work? By ThroughEducation December 29, Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Share on linkedin. But what does grading on a curve mean? Grading on a Curve: Background. Katherine Lee July 9, Is the D Important in Pharmacy? Why Pharm. Katherine Lee September 17, In this method, the teacher takes the square root of the raw score for each student and multiplies it by For example, the square root of 90 rounded up to two decimal places is 9.
Multiplied by 10, the final score will be With this method, lower scores will be bumped higher, but higher scores will not exceed Grading on a curve has its advantages and drawbacks. The advantage of grading on a curve is that it prevents the teacher from inflating all grades and fixes those situations where the test was poorly designed. For example, if 50 percent of the students in the class get an A, this A might not mean much. On the other hand, if nobody got above a C, that just means that the test was too hard and not representative of the material taught.
In that case, the grade curve might help remedy it. Some teachers recommend that to avoid creating an environment where students are pitted against one another, test curving should only be done to boost student grades and not deflate them. Tanya Mozias Slavin is a former academic and language teacher. Finally, add that number to every student's grade. For example, if the highest score in the class was 90 percent, you would subtract 90 from and get Then, you'd add 10 percentage points to every student's grade, including the student who scored the highest.
To learn other ways you can curve grades, like using a flat-scale curve or a linear-scale curve, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great.
By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings. Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article methods. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Article Summary. Method 1. This is one of the most common if not the most common methods teachers and professors use for curving grades. This means that you subtract the highest score in the class from the hypothetical "perfect" score, then add the difference to every assignment, including the highest-scoring one.
If done correctly, the highest-scoring assignment will now have a perfect score and every other assignment will have a higher score than it previously did. This method also works using absolute scores, rather than percentages. Implement a flat-scale curve. This technique is among the simplest of the methods used to curve grades.
It is especially useful for when there was one especially difficult item on an assignment that a large majority of the class missed.
To curve grades according to a flat-scale curve, simply add the same number of points to each student's grade. This can be the number of points that an item most of the class missed was worth, or it can be some other arbitrary number of points that you think is fair.
In this case, you might choose to add 10 points to every student's score. If you think the class doesn't deserve full credit for the missed problem, you might also choose to only give out 5 points. This method is closely related to the previous method, but it isn't exactly the same. Set a bottom limit for F's. This curving method mitigates the effect that a few very low scores can have on a student's grade.
Therefore, it's especially useful in situations where a student or an entire class bombed a certain assignment but have since shown serious improvement and, in your opinion, deserve not to fail. This makes it so that particularly low-scoring assignments have a less drastic effect when averaged with a student's good scores. In other words, a few bad scores are less likely to drag a student's overall grade down. It's not a great score, but it's probably fairer than failing a student who's shown real promise.
You may choose to set separate lower limits for assignments that are turned in vs. Use a bell curve. Often, the range of grades on a given assignment are distributed in a way that resembles a bell curve - a few students get high scores, most of the students score mid-range scores, and a few students get low scores. Do the very best students in your class deserve low B's and the average students deserve low D's?
Probably not. By using a bell curve grading method, you set the class's mean grade as a middle C, which means that your best students should get A's and your worst students should get F's, regardless of their absolute scores. Add up all the scores in the class, then divide by the number of students to find the mean.
Set this as a mid-range grade. Next, decide how many points separate the letter grades in your new bell curve. Generally, bigger point intervals mean that your bell curve is more forgiving to low-scoring students.
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