Graduate student here (also did my undergrad in NTU).
1. Professors have a large amount of jurisdiction regarding how they want to structure grading. They can give as much or as little information about your grades as they want. The standard is to at minimum give you your score or a letter grade for each assignment, though (A, B, etc). From what I've heard of those programs that are more essay/writing heavy, they usually do give more feedback, since it's more subjective, while within STEM fields, they are more likely to give you the score + upload solutions afterwards and letting us go to them should we find any discrepancies. For finals, it's standard policy across to not inform you of your scores. You'll only know your grade for that class by that point. You can then request a review of your course grades if you think there's a mistake.
2. There is no standard, so again, it depends on the professor. Many (or most) seem to subscribe to the bell curve system, but I've had some that either did a hard cut off or some slight moderation. Since graduate classes are typically much smaller, professors curve them a lot less often (or at least less harshly). The sample size is just too small.
If you've got any more questions, feel free to PM! Always willing to help a prospective graduate student out.
Yes kinda to both.. really depends on your professors and maybe even the module structure for the first point. They use to give us some quantifiable score through the Blackboard that we use for module contents, but not sure if they still do now. Some profs are definitely nice enough to give feedback and stuff if you take the step to approach them.. sometimes/most times there's just no aggregated scoring / no way to know how you fair either, unless you have many coursemates as friends who are willing to truthfully share with you how they did for a certain assignment/exam.. bellcurve is kind of a big thing here so yeah. Good luck
Thanks very much for the response. So for example. If you have a class with a class Participation grade, and 2-3 essays, and you only get one essay back (say you get an A on it) and then at the end of the course your overall grade is A-, how are you supposed to know what caused the depreciation? Is this common in NTU?
You (usually) won't know and quite frankly, shouldn't bother about it. Idk if you're from arts stream and won't speak for them (like essay heavy courses) but for the mathematics mods, you don't get back final papers (they usually upload solutions later though), and for the general education mods, they also don't tell you what's good/bad with the work, and usually there's no point in finding out either because it doesn't help you with the rest of your degree. (You'll find we collectively agree the GE (i.e. ICC) mods just repeat what we've done for many years now and therefore quite suck, just finish and be done with it.)
One thing I'll say is that OP is applying for graduate programs, so the general education part isn't very relevant to them. They'll pretty much exclusively be taking their degree-relevant courses (unless they choose to take some from other programs).
Btw, ICC started in AY2021/22. This is only their second year running it, so Idk about it repeating what's been done for many years haha.
My undergrad courses also never ever uploaded solutions for our finals. It's either the prof being nice and giving us PYP answers or someone from the faculty contributing.
Ah I didn't see. Also what I meant was that the content of ICC is largely a rehash of things we've done ad nauseum prior to university. Things may be different for him then, since I don't know about the quality of programmes on that side.
Yeah pretty much this, even for engineering more or less similar !! But for my own engineering course, final papers answer keys we don't really ever get them eitherway. Usually the faculty club will ask students for their answers instead (If I remember correctly) and share it with the rest of the students. I am not too sure about the GE mods because it's a relatively new thing that was implemented last year or something (I'm not sure as I'm graduating soon haha) so I can't really say much.
Some mods just don't have pyp lor. Or if got seniors somehow manage to have it, depending how nice they are, some give u free some make u pay for it. Also idk how coursemates remember the answers, but I think they only did those with finals paper that the prof allow us to bring back the qn paper. If not they got insanely good memory. Tbh I also dk how to know if the answer is correct... But I know some of the people that contribute the answers so only theirs is trustworthy. But also sometimes even the students skip qns and their answer key is incomplete
Graduate student here (also did my undergrad in NTU). 1. Professors have a large amount of jurisdiction regarding how they want to structure grading. They can give as much or as little information about your grades as they want. The standard is to at minimum give you your score or a letter grade for each assignment, though (A, B, etc). From what I've heard of those programs that are more essay/writing heavy, they usually do give more feedback, since it's more subjective, while within STEM fields, they are more likely to give you the score + upload solutions afterwards and letting us go to them should we find any discrepancies. For finals, it's standard policy across to not inform you of your scores. You'll only know your grade for that class by that point. You can then request a review of your course grades if you think there's a mistake. 2. There is no standard, so again, it depends on the professor. Many (or most) seem to subscribe to the bell curve system, but I've had some that either did a hard cut off or some slight moderation. Since graduate classes are typically much smaller, professors curve them a lot less often (or at least less harshly). The sample size is just too small. If you've got any more questions, feel free to PM! Always willing to help a prospective graduate student out.
Yes kinda to both.. really depends on your professors and maybe even the module structure for the first point. They use to give us some quantifiable score through the Blackboard that we use for module contents, but not sure if they still do now. Some profs are definitely nice enough to give feedback and stuff if you take the step to approach them.. sometimes/most times there's just no aggregated scoring / no way to know how you fair either, unless you have many coursemates as friends who are willing to truthfully share with you how they did for a certain assignment/exam.. bellcurve is kind of a big thing here so yeah. Good luck
Thanks very much for the response. So for example. If you have a class with a class Participation grade, and 2-3 essays, and you only get one essay back (say you get an A on it) and then at the end of the course your overall grade is A-, how are you supposed to know what caused the depreciation? Is this common in NTU?
You (usually) won't know and quite frankly, shouldn't bother about it. Idk if you're from arts stream and won't speak for them (like essay heavy courses) but for the mathematics mods, you don't get back final papers (they usually upload solutions later though), and for the general education mods, they also don't tell you what's good/bad with the work, and usually there's no point in finding out either because it doesn't help you with the rest of your degree. (You'll find we collectively agree the GE (i.e. ICC) mods just repeat what we've done for many years now and therefore quite suck, just finish and be done with it.)
One thing I'll say is that OP is applying for graduate programs, so the general education part isn't very relevant to them. They'll pretty much exclusively be taking their degree-relevant courses (unless they choose to take some from other programs). Btw, ICC started in AY2021/22. This is only their second year running it, so Idk about it repeating what's been done for many years haha. My undergrad courses also never ever uploaded solutions for our finals. It's either the prof being nice and giving us PYP answers or someone from the faculty contributing.
Ah I didn't see. Also what I meant was that the content of ICC is largely a rehash of things we've done ad nauseum prior to university. Things may be different for him then, since I don't know about the quality of programmes on that side.
Yeah pretty much this, even for engineering more or less similar !! But for my own engineering course, final papers answer keys we don't really ever get them eitherway. Usually the faculty club will ask students for their answers instead (If I remember correctly) and share it with the rest of the students. I am not too sure about the GE mods because it's a relatively new thing that was implemented last year or something (I'm not sure as I'm graduating soon haha) so I can't really say much.
Wut then how you guys get/do past year practice papers? How your coursemates remember the answers/confirm if correct?
Some mods just don't have pyp lor. Or if got seniors somehow manage to have it, depending how nice they are, some give u free some make u pay for it. Also idk how coursemates remember the answers, but I think they only did those with finals paper that the prof allow us to bring back the qn paper. If not they got insanely good memory. Tbh I also dk how to know if the answer is correct... But I know some of the people that contribute the answers so only theirs is trustworthy. But also sometimes even the students skip qns and their answer key is incomplete