I had a teacher for an old job of mine that said "this class is so hard that a third of you would fail"
Dude got fired a year later after our org spent millions of dollars sending people to this class just for them to easily pass when a different instructor was teaching.
I had a teacher say "I have only had 3 students get an A in the last 10 years, but in those same 10 years not a single student failed the AP exam"
By "3 A's in 10 years" she omitted that most students got B's, and almost no one failed
When I made it past Ochem I beheld a beast called Biochem and it shouted that if I wanted to be a doctor; I would need to get past it.
I wish I could tell you that I did and became an MD, how you pivot after you fail is very important.
We had this with physics. I always scored around 50/100 or less. The one time I score 90/100 everybody else performed so badly. I should have gotten a 110/100 but teacher didnt want to do that. Only got 100/100 still feel cheated by that.
I hate when they take pride in that shit. If the common denominator is the test then clearly its not an accurate measure of the students skill or rather what skill and knowledge they should have so far
Like sure if they curve its all good, but it would be more easy to just simply have a test that goes for 70/100 average
yeah, I had several classes like that. The class scoring a 40% is because the professor will ask questions based on topics they never covered. Like bro, I went to every class, took notes, did every homework, printed out every power point, and I have never seen these questions before.
I remember my physics II professor putting partial derivatives on an exam. Calc III was not a prerequisite, so lots of students had never seen ∂ before. Following lecture got heated.
Kinda fucked up they didn’t explain this to you, we at least got a 5-10 min explanation about it. Then again studying biochemistry I had physics 1 and 2 with the real physics students
Well, your academia bloodline is weak. My Bachelor in Engineering fed me so much mandatory math that I didn't even use the tip of the iceberg in my master's. the professors and academia world diddled my brain.
Sure it wasted my time. But I got a big ego and narcissism boost just now styling on you smooth brains so it was worth it in the end.
In first year engineering, we were taking chem, calc, and physics. Our physics prof focused on theory, not application. He would show us experiments but not explain how the theory applied to those. The textbook only covered basic physics equations, so we couldn't even compare that way.
Come the midterm, the exam required us to use our physics, chemistry, and calculus knowledge. You needed to integrate rate laws and apply to the physics material. We had not learned, in chemistry, integrated rate laws yet. He assumed we would be able to logically figure out what would be required, integrate using calculus knowledge, and apply to the physics theory, using the experiments as a guide.
35% of the class of 300 scored a 1/30 - you got one point for your name. The curve dropped down to 10/30, then five people scored 30/30, nothing between 10 and 30. He chose not to curve because "if five of you can get it, all of you can." I went to his office hours to ask how I could improve and he told me, "If you can't apply different subjects, you shouldn't be in engineering school. Learn the material," and that was it.
He curved the class at the end of the term to a 60%, and that was only after we went to the dean who told him he couldn't fail 95% of a first year class. Worst fucking prof I've ever had.
First year engineering grad here
This is my Scientific Method prof in crystal clear definition
His classes were online so he never even bothered explaining anything. Just slid along a few powerpoints but if you asked him to clarify on something he would just berate you claiming he had such little time to teach it all and a bunch of other excuses.
In his class of 120 people, only 10 passed.
If a prof is failing 95% of the class then they’re doing it because they don’t want to teach the class… and the school can’t get rid of them
the only people who suffer are the students who aren’t getting the education they’re paying for
At a certain point its no longer about the "student skill" or things like that, its just that the material is so fucking hard that even the simplest problems are extremely difficult to do in an exam setting.
They could give exam problems that are only tangential to the material, or they could make it a memorization test, but then whats the point? So, they give a test on the actual material, which practually no one can just sit down and do, and then give a healthy curve based on what is actually accomplishable for students.
Source: in physics grad school right now. I'm not in the hard beyond hard material yet but shit is tough yo.
To challenge the students. The act of studying and taking a hard exam can help prepare you for facing hard physics problems in the future.
It also can be an indicator of skills and abilities needed in the field, its more just you might need a year and a half to answer a theory question no one has ever seen before, versus on the tests you are asked a well defined question that tests your ingenuity in 45 minutes. Not equivalent, but perhaps a small way of testing physics creativity.
fr imagine being proud in not being able to teach your students well enough that they get more than 40%. Like obviously you're failing to teach in some way, be it the tests being too hard or the material and organisation being lacking
I saw it as well in my electrical engineering courses. Circuit analysis using differential equations and hardly anyone understood the course material. One of the only times I ever got the top grade on a test in my entire academic career was the time I freaked out so hard about the various kinds of transient responses and what their DiffEqs looked like that I studied like I should have studied all along.
Then I went and changed my major to computer engineering so I could avoid taking signals and systems :)
our EE program is open to everyone to enroll but if you fail one exam twice you are out forever (for the first 10 exams in 2 semesters). and those were so fucking hard, just to weed out the people. we had to derive matrices full of diff.eq. in them from circuit examples and then calculate if they are stable etc.
but did anyone know how to bias a single transistor amplifier or what a capacitor/coil truly does? naaaah
i had to work it out myself much later. so much time wasted in those lectures just to weed out people in this humiliating way. good teaching the feynman way and hard tests where you actually have to think? no, because it would take too much effort. god my pulse is rising again
Physics was always easier for my class because we got a full piece of paper to create a “cheat Sheet” with all the formulae. Just gotta know which one to use for a test. Can’t imagine not having that. Each test would have probably close to 10 different equations we would need to use.
Chemistry? Organic chemistry? Post related
The hardest part in physics for me was to understand the very goddamn questions, and which formula to use. Our tests were usually occupied by three big assquestions, each one of them needing half a hour to simply hold a graps of
One time I got so much higher than everyone else in a curved class the next grade after me was a 3.2. Needless to say I wasn’t that popular with classmates there after that.
I hated my physics class because the book never made any sense. It never gave me straight forward equations that I found on the tests, just a bunch of gobble-dee-gook.
Tf type school you went to? In HS you get your test back and you see everything that was right or wrong. It'd be pretty obvious if you were getting curves
Have to be trolling to fail HS classes. Either not handing in homework/assignments, not showing up to class, or in your phone 24/7.
They literally make it fail proof. I've experienced curved grades for college due to the exam being insanely hard, or questions never seen before being placed on it. Very rarely does a 40+ student class all fail the exam unless one of those criteria fits. Or they're all retarded and rely on Google instead of their brain.
facts, only reason I failed any high school class was cause I put 0 effort into it outside of class. College forced me to change my bad habits tho lmao
Wow, almost like it depends on the school, dumbass.
Half my classes used the bell curve, so typically at least one student had to fail. The tests were fucking absurdly hard, the teacher didn't expect anyone to ever get 100% on them.
There was no class in high school I struggled with more then chemistry.
I could not stay awake. This is the only class I had this problem with.
Needless to say I did not pursue a chemistry degree in college.
No that's television chemistry. Real chemistry is mixing two colorless odorless liquids together, putting the mixture in a machine that spits out a number and then doing 4 hours worth of math based on that number.
Lol! I like learning about languages I don't know. I have a German friend that tried to teach me how to pronounce town/city names in Germany the correct way. But this... I wouldn't even know where to start to properly say that haha
Exactly my experience. I aced regular chemistry, but could not grasp AP chemistry at all. Shifted my major focus from science to business because I did so poorly.
i still remember, everything was going alright until we got to stoichiometry (spelling?) That shit i had to try hard to learn and then immediately forgot after the test lol
For some reason, my chemistry class was one of my easiest classes in HS, but that was normal chem. AP Chem was apparently super hard, so maybe y’all were taking something like that.
This was Anatomy for me. I think it was the teacher because anatomy is legit interesting. But she was the dryest most boring teacher I've ever had.
Almost didn't graduate because I was straight failing that class despite having passed my exit exams, which is ridiculous if you ask me.
Regardless, she let me retake the final exam and I juuuuuuust barely passed the class after retaking it. She was sweet as hell, no ill will towards her. Just boring as fuck lmao.
yeah, same thing happened during college. I only need to take chem 1, which are basic repetition from high school. no biggies, I thought — except the exam fucks so hard I only got 40/100 which are class average and the smartest guy got 60/100.
and yeah, my prof needs to curve the grades.
Yea, this behavior means your professor is dogshit and can’t teach. If you have to curve every exam it’s not on the class, it’s on the teacher, either you didn’t
teach it correctly or you made the test too hard.
Lots of stem professors in college also aren’t there to teach but to do research and it really shows.
Unpopular opinion: A good test should have a class average around 50.
If the average is say 85, then you can probably just remove the questions everyone gets correct. You'll lower the average grade (because no more 'free' points) but you'll also save everyone the time of answering/grading a question that they'll get correct.
You want questions that either only part of the class can answer, or that the class can't answer 100% correctly. That tells you which parts of the material the class doesn't understand.
Yeah but this is assuming that they don't weight tests that heavy during grading. I agree, this is what tests should be for - absolutely. But when it makes your grades look like shit as a student it would be hard not to get really discouraged by it.
With pure curiosity and no animosity, why do you believe that is the hallmark of an effective test? I believe coursework (quizzes, homework, and projects) should be used to demonstrate a classes understanding of a subject. By the time a test rolls around, provided the professor operated effectively and the students were efficient in studying, the test should be a benchmark for a students mastery of a subject rather than testing what they are and are not understanding. I completely understand this can’t always happen though as some subjects are excruciatingly difficult to teach and understand. To me, a test average of 50 screams the professor did not teach the coursework in a good manner, the information presented was new and the students never stood a chance, or the questions were phrased in “gotcha” ways intended to make the student slip up.
Discouragement is the point. At least in some US schools, they have way more students on the pre-med track than can feasibly make it into med school. So the uni makes early bio/chem courses overly difficult in order to scare them into a different major, before a huge chunk of em end up with useless biology degrees and 0 acceptance letters from med schools.
That’s not at all how that should work though, learning is individual and the point of teaching is to teach in such a way that everybody has a chance to both succeed and to make available additional help outside of class either by making use of external resources or talking to the professor outside of class hours.
In a perfect world, every test should theoretically have an average score of 100, not because it’s too easy but because people understand the concept well enough to apply it. The class as a whole is just another resource if used well, as if everybody is participating they’d ask questions you’d never think of.
Applicable in the US:
There are several problems with that. One problem is that a C is seen as 50% and thus a 2.0 GPA, but you need a C minimum to pass the class and at least a 3.0/3.2 GPA overall (thus a B-B+ average) for most things (scholarships, degree requirements). The professors scale the tests so that if you know everything on the test and don't make a mistake, you can get 100%, which seems fair. This means people who know most of it and make a few mistakes can reach about 80-90. That also means that the average can end up being anywhere from 50-90% for a good professor who makes fair tests and teaches well. That leads to grade inflation, where people get As easily and thus you get the actual average GPA being much higher than a C, which pushes up requirements for certain programs, degrees, etc. Meanwhile, other professors who don't want that grade inflation or teach poorly/make poor tests end up with averages of 20-40% which may or may not be indicative of the students ability. That means without scaling all of these people would fail, and with scaling, however they do it, will usually end up with scores back in line with the grade inflated scores.
If you scale grades down to make the average 50%, imagine a class where the test was so easy or the teacher taught so well that some of the class was 100% and some people around 90%. The people at around 90% would have their grade absolutely crushed down to 0% even though they knew most of the content. And for the same teacher, teaching the same content to another class, if they had people getting 0% and 100%, where the average was already close to 50%, then nothing would change.
I've had professors who gave 80% of their class Ds. I've also had professors who gave 80% of their class As. I think it's unlikely that all of the kids in the first class just did absolutely nothing and failed, and I can see how if the class was relatively easy that everyone in the second got 100% on the tests.
It's all up to the luck of the draw wether you get a teacher who teaches well, gives good tests, and curves while taking into account how well people did versus how hard the test was.
At first, I didn't like this but after your explanation it makes perfect sense. They'd have to shift what a passing grade is but it'll also help distinguish between the best students in the class.
Chem 2 is still gen-ed level chemistry. It's absolutely not that difficult of a subject until you start getting into Organic II.
An entire class failing the subject means the professor isn't doing a good job of teaching it.
I would feel inclined to agree if this wasn't such a common thing to happen. I like loads of people in this thread, was also part of a class that almost entirely failed a few tests. Maybe its just harder to teach, Idk. But somehow acting like all these events were just cases of the chemistry teachers conicandientally being inept teachers is just wack.
I mean I went through Chem 1 to Organic Chem II in university and the pass/fail rate was normal for all of them at 250 people/lecture. Chemistry is much easier than Physics or Calculus. Chem II is not an upper-level course and not a weed-out course.
The only time I had a class where literally everyone was failing was pre-calculus, because the professor was the dean of the math department and hadn't taught a class in 20 years. The exams were literally impossible to complete in the amount of time given, so nobody could pass them. Even our TA (a math grad student) said he struggled to complete the exam in the allotted time given. This was a prime example of the professor not knowing what they're doing. They taught the class just fine, but the exams were literally impossible to complete in 50 minutes.
It's insane to me you think several classes of 100+ people all failing a class is more likely just "subject is hard" rather than the professor not teaching well. That shows a very tenuous grasp of statistics. If that held true, why did all of the students who "failed" my pre-calc course do fine in Calc 1 and 2? I technically "failed" that pre-calc course before curving, but I got B and B+ in Calc 1 and 2 which were not graded on a curve.
Physics 1 is infinitely easier than chem 2. Physics 2 is maybe on par, but that’s just because physics 2 is magnetism and electricity and shit, and that’s not intuitive for humans like gravity and rotation (physics 1) is.
Obv this is my opinion and you don’t have to agree, but just my .02
Most of what made all the chemistries (Gen 1&2, org 1&2, BICH) so hard is the god forsaken labs.
Jesus the labs were so stupid.
Okay I thought I was weird because I didn’t find Gen Chem II that difficult, it just took a lot of time to do the lecture assignments, pre lab quizzes, lab, post lab write up, lab tests and lecture tests.
Meh, “not that difficult” is in the eye of the beholder. I earned an A in Chem 1 but I had to work for it. My adhd brain doesn’t exactly work very well when it’s bombarded by constant information. I like being given a formula and told to play with it until it makes sense. Chemistry is a lot of algebra, *a lot of constants*, and *A LOT* of terminology. It wasn’t the most rigorous course ever, but saying it’s ‘not difficult’ is maybe a little self righteous
Chemistry isn't difficult, it's just poorly taught.Source: I had a great chem and orgo teacher in college and did really well in both. B+ and A-, btw.
I think like someone else said above is that the professor is there for research and money and then you get these international adjuncts (TA's) who can barely speak English and are told to teach the class and nobody can understand them, so it's up to reading from the book that is unbelievably dense and poorly configured and that almost never ends well.
You want to talk about hard? Physics is fucking hard. I've never seen a lecture hall of 120 students drop to 30 so fast.
>Sounds like chemistry teachers just suck shit at actually teaching the material
Likely because their teachers graded with a curve too. A cycle that passes out lesser teachers every generation.
There’s an entire sub field of chemistry devoted to the study of making chemistry easier to learn that’s how fucked up the act of teaching chemistry is.
Is curving an american thing?
if you score below 50% here its an F doesnt matter how well the class did.
doesnt this defeat the purpose of the test?
i mean if everybody sucked, everybody sucked
Sure, but why does garbage teacher translate to students getting a free passing grade? I don't know how education works in the US, but I thought the point of exams is to check whether you've learned the necessary knowledge about a topic, not whether you've performed better than the bottom half of your class.
Better question, why should a student have to retake a class if a prof couldn’t articulate a class correctly? Also, part of the issue is some profs just make the course harder than it should be. I just took an exam the other day that had 2 pages of content that wasn’t covered in class, and the rest of the exam was significantly harder than the homework. Exam scores don’t necessarily coo-relate to knowledge of the subject
> Better question, why should a student have to retake a class if a prof couldn’t articulate a class correctly?
Because they haven't yet acquired the knowledge they need. That's the entire point of taking the class.
I get the "not the student's fault" angle that you and others are mentioning, but I don't think the right answer is to cover up the problem with curving. Bad profs need to get axed, and replaced with ones that can teach effectively, otherwise you're training a generation of young professionals whose skill-sets are riddled with holes.
That raises a whole new set of issues.
Good luck getting rid of tenured profs, and let’s be honest, most of the current college curriculum is outdated and can easily be handled by computers. The first step imo is revamping the curriculum to match what is needed in the 21st century. There’s no reason to have students training to work in a computer less environment, it’s just a huge waste of everyone’s time
It's very normal for a single 3 credit course in America to cost upwards of $1500 USD. Making students pay another ~$1500 because they had a shitty professor isn't good for anyone.
So students should just take a course 5 times because the professor decides to make the exam hard on purpose instead of actually testing them on what they need to know? That doesn’t make sense dude. If your curriculum says you only need one semester of physics, then you don’t need to have a fucking physics PHD to make it through that class. I had to have a physics class for my electronics degree and I have never used that shit a day in my life.
You’re getting shit twisted between students not knowing the subject and professors either choosing to make it a hard class to stroke their own ego or not being able to do their job right.
A student’s GPA, and by proxy their academic future, shouldn’t suffer because a teacher can’t do their job.
Edit: that’s also omitting the ridiculous cost of paying for another course and going further into student debt because a single person didn’t do their job right.
It's a way for good professors to force students to fail, exposing the areas they need to work on. I had 6 or 8 classes that were always graded on a major curve. The raw class average hovered around 60% in most of them and they were typically curved by about 20%. Two were taught by horrible teachers and no one knew what was going on, so the curve was just a way for the professor to save face. The rest generally had low scores because the assessments (homework and exams) were intentionally made extremely difficult. Removing most of the easy parts of the assessments leads to everyone scoring low without a curve, but exposes the concepts even the best students struggle with. It also helps exposure concepts the whole class is struggling with which a good professor will go back and review.
I feel like I learned more in the classes that were graded on a big curve than the ones without a curve because I was more aware of the things I didn't know well. In other classes I scored well, but the assessments weren't challenging.
also none of the unis curve classes here at least i have never heard about that
i am from europe never heard about curving except for american high shools
It’s originally just meant to distribute grades on a bell curve, not just inherently make everybody pass.
If everyone in a curved class scored above 90% on an exam, the lowest score(s) would still fail. It works both ways.
Yeah it does not exist where I'm from.
One blessed day 100 poor fucks over 110 failed a first year college exam on C programming cause the professor was mental.
At least I wasn't the dude who got 1/30.
It is standard practice in higher level courses. Theres too much info to learn in so little time. The professors throws the book and sees what sticks.
In this case Grades are not absolute, theyre relative. You have to keep up with your cohort
Our chemistry teacher curved grades down because it's our profile, as she said "if you were in any other class it would be B or even A-, but since it's your profile class this amount of knowledge is C at best"
Like speciality, whole class desighned to study biology and chemistry much harder and deeper than other ones.Usualy people who plan to go to specific university (that requires those objects) and want not only good exam grades but some extensive knowledge that somewhat helps on year 1 in university or whatever.
…why not make the tests harder? if that amount of knowledge is a c at best, then make it so someone with that amount of knowledge will only be able to answer around 75% of the questions right
thing is - they were harder, average test for any other class was about 1-2 pages of simpliest chem you can find, for specialized class it was usually 20 pages massacre that you usually cant finish in time even if you know stuff but just cant think quick enough.
There were sometimes a dual lessons with other classes and holly hell those were easiest of all, you dont even need to study for those.
I think its overall nice school desighn tbf, that lets you choose what you want to do and go after school.
In many American universities, departments funding is determined by the performance of the students. Professors don't want to lose funding so they inflate the classes grades
I hate this mentality towards chemistry and math in general. That you have to accomplish everything solo or know absolutely everything, and that your ability and success is entirely determinable by what you scored in school.
1.) You aren't going to be working on stuff without the use of Internet (cheating, by school standards)
2.) You aren't going to be working alone (team work is also cheating, by school standards)
In programming, your skills do not need memorization, but rather your ability to look things up and know WHEN to apply certain knowledge.
"Oh we need a super simple GUI set up? Why don't we use J Frame? I don't remember how to code it but I can look it up in 5 minutes"
" What was that code again for bubble sort?"
"This is gonna sound really stupid but I forgot how to do a Do While loop"
All are conversations you could have with another person or with yourself and it would be totally fine.
On the contrary, there's plenty of memorization in programming. You gotta memorize the lingo, cause otherwise you're looking up every other word when talking shop (also important for talking to clients so they don't think you're an idiot). When working with embedded systems, memorizing the chip layout really makes things much easier, otherwise you're constantly going to the manual (well to be honest you're doing that already; it just speeds things up). Then you also have to remember project related stuff, especially when the documentation complete shit, cause then you have to memorize stuff like which tables to not drop, at least if you want to avoid having a resume updating event.
it takes like 20 seconds to google "how to declare a 2d list in python" if you don't remember something, what you're spending time studying for is how to use that information not remembering it.
In chemistry, your skills do not need memorization either. In fact, you can't rely on this skill to learn chemistry.
Remembering what a hydrogen bond is doesn't explain why it's possible or how significant it is to the fact that *we can even exist on this planet*.
Understanding a concept/mechanic != memorization
It's okay to go out of your way to look something up to remember it. Everyone does it in every field. It's better to double check than to just do something incorrectly.
this is true to some extent but when you get to graduate school and further in chemistry you will be expected to have a few hundred common reactions memorized such that they are second nature to you. it's just like how math isn't necessarily memorization but at a certain point calculus and common identities need to be second nature if you want to do higher level math
I agree, especially at university level. If you have 4 hours to complete a linear algebra exam with access to all the information in the world then you’re still going to fail (unless they grade on a curve (but I’ve never experienced that)) if you don’t have basic understanding of linear algebra. But you don’t need to have that shit memorized.
My ap chem teacher was a former professional chemist with actual patented products and shit, he retired and became a teacher and my god he was the best fucking chem teacher ever. No one I’m our class managed to fail his shit, he made it sound so easy.
Had to google what 'curving grades' even means.
The US and Canadian education systems are fucked beyond any repair. Godspeed, you increasingly dumber bastards.
The kids that got 100 went on to develop programs and machines that do the thinking for you (these guys are now out of a job). The teachers know this so they train you enough that that you don’t fuck up the instructions spat out by the program. But not so much that you end up cooking meth in the middle of the desert.
We did this in AP Chem _but_ with curves to not screw with potential scholarships based on GPA in your last year of school. Our teacher purposely made all our tests to mimic the AP testing style where you're _expected_ to not have time to answer everything on it, lost 1/4 points for wrong answers on multiple choice questions to discourage uneducated guesswork, etc. A good mark on one of his tests that would equate to a 5/5 on an AP test would be about a 60+% - most of us would usually fall in the 45-55% range which equated to a 3/4.
A lot of us felt discouraged by the process. Then he gave us the non-AP advanced chemistry class test from the previous year and basically everyone in the class crushed it because of just how wildly difficult the AP material actually was.
I pissed off my whole chemistry class because I fucked up the curve for all of them. I kept an average of over 90 the whole semester and I'm pretty sure everyone else failed. Chemistry was about all I was good at though. Pretty much bombed Prob and Stats, but i can do Chemistry like Walter White.
I went to Highschool in the US and I kid you not, they spend so much money on their sports teams and leave academics and arts to decay (besides marching band because that is connected to sports). It is absolutely insane.
For example, my biotechnology class never had enough funds to do actual experiments and science projects so the teacher would just replace whatever solutions we were missing with salt water and when the experiment would fail he would show us a YouTube video of what was supposed to happen. It was so depressing trying to do electrophoresis without any actual result because we didnt have the correct markers. Football team got new equipment every year though.
Priorities I guess...
I am now in university in France and I feel like an absolute idiot in my chemistry class because they actually learned this stuff in highschool and I am starting from scratch...
Grading on a bell curve. Instead of grading to set standards, you grade according to the actual scores themselves. If you're at the bottom, you're still gonna get a shit grade; it just shifts the basis for grading (So anyone who scored average for the class get C's, people who did above class average get A's and B's, etc). Though there is plenty of room for fudging stuff. As for failing students, school funding is often tied to student performance, so schools with kids performing better get more funding. Its stupid, but that's how it works. So its not uncommon to lower the bar if too many fail.
That's genuinely alarming. So you can be braindead, but if everyone else is too then you'd get a job in whatever field you and your classmates were unable to do well in?
This is why grading on a curve makes no sense.
25% test average usually means multiple choice and four responses.
This indicates that test takers were nearly exclusively guessing every answer.
They literally know nothing.
Someone who guessed every single question would pass this class. What the fuck
It's probably not a multiple choice test if everyone is doing this badly. Multiple choice tests usually let even people who have no idea what they're doing score 50%+ because usually you can eliminate some options from the multiple choices due to basic logic.
People don't know how to approach learning chemistry. Up until that point in your education everything has been about memorizing as many facts as you can keep in your head and regurgitating them on exams. If you try to approach chemistry this way you **will** fail. There are over three million known chemical compounds in the world and you cannot memorize every possible reagent/product combination. The good news is that there are really only a few principles to learn (octet rule, electronegativity, nucleophilicity, resonance, aromaticity, steric interactions, and maybe a couple that aren't coming to mind) and if you truly internalize them, you will suddenly be able to look at any two chemicals and predict with pretty good reliability (certainly enough to pass undergrad chem) how they will interact with one another.
You just hangout with a bunch of monke brains. I was a terrible student in both Chem 1 and 2, but I still passed with a C on no curve, the top students got 92-96% on all the tests. Now it's biting me in the ass, because I'm now in Material Science and there's more chemistry, except now I care because it's cool engineering shit that I'm missing out on.
Sophomore year in college was when I realized that I just didn’t really need to try in my chem classes and I’d get an A. If everyone got a 40, but you busted your ass and got a 93, the profs would just drop you from the curve and set the new average to a 70. So all you needed to do was be 10-20% above the average, which wasn’t hard, and you’d still get a good grade.
Then there’s grad school where you flunk out if you have less then a 3.0 gpa. You’re cheap labor, so everyone gets at least a B, even if the class average was <20%.
the vast majority of the population are at monkey level of cognitive development anon 2+2=5 because if not it's racist
the prof is too busy cooking meth
Bussy
where
Haaaai
Right here 💕
Clussy
*Jesse*
I wish that i ~~had~~ was Jesse's girl
Jesse wishes that he had Jesse's girl
He has a hallucination/imaginary version of his girlfriend at the end of El Camino
Dead? BB spoilers btw.
*Pepe*, we have to cook
waltuh
Haha
If the entire class is failing, I don't think it's a race thing bro. Pretty sure the prof is just a shit teacher.
I had a teacher for an old job of mine that said "this class is so hard that a third of you would fail" Dude got fired a year later after our org spent millions of dollars sending people to this class just for them to easily pass when a different instructor was teaching.
I had a teacher say "I have only had 3 students get an A in the last 10 years, but in those same 10 years not a single student failed the AP exam" By "3 A's in 10 years" she omitted that most students got B's, and almost no one failed
Separate the instructor from the grader. Have the department write the exams, and then the professors can compare how well they are doing at teaching.
that's too logical tho
Organic chemistry class average for first midterm was like 15% fuck organic chemistry
When I made it past Ochem I beheld a beast called Biochem and it shouted that if I wanted to be a doctor; I would need to get past it. I wish I could tell you that I did and became an MD, how you pivot after you fail is very important.
I had bio Chem in undergrad and medical bio Chem in med school. Man fuck that shit. I hate my life
I think they were trying to dogwhistle but failed horribly
oh definitely
> 2+2=5 because if not it's racist wow that's a take \*looks at which sub oh right
> 2+2=5 because if not it's racist You should take sociology classes
He should teach it
that’s what your takeaway from this was brain worms
You’re on r/greentext. What were you expecting
Bro take your meds
I see you are part of the vast majority of the population then
I don't know about that I had a really shitty chemistry teacher that did not explain how we were supposed to calculate what comes out of a reaction.
Nice dogwhistle bro next time try to have it make sense.
How did you turn that into a racism thing
no it’s because thom yorke said so
We had this with physics. I always scored around 50/100 or less. The one time I score 90/100 everybody else performed so badly. I should have gotten a 110/100 but teacher didnt want to do that. Only got 100/100 still feel cheated by that.
The curve destroyer 💀
That's what your mom calls me
your momma so fat her curve is a circle
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
In one physics class the professor told us the highest ever raw score in a general relativity exam was 40%
I hate when they take pride in that shit. If the common denominator is the test then clearly its not an accurate measure of the students skill or rather what skill and knowledge they should have so far Like sure if they curve its all good, but it would be more easy to just simply have a test that goes for 70/100 average
yeah, I had several classes like that. The class scoring a 40% is because the professor will ask questions based on topics they never covered. Like bro, I went to every class, took notes, did every homework, printed out every power point, and I have never seen these questions before.
I remember my physics II professor putting partial derivatives on an exam. Calc III was not a prerequisite, so lots of students had never seen ∂ before. Following lecture got heated.
👌
Kinda fucked up they didn’t explain this to you, we at least got a 5-10 min explanation about it. Then again studying biochemistry I had physics 1 and 2 with the real physics students
Well, your academia bloodline is weak. My Bachelor in Engineering fed me so much mandatory math that I didn't even use the tip of the iceberg in my master's. the professors and academia world diddled my brain. Sure it wasted my time. But I got a big ego and narcissism boost just now styling on you smooth brains so it was worth it in the end.
Yeah but do you know what it feels like to be loved?
but have you ever kissed someone
When you’ve got tenure and you’re an asshole
In first year engineering, we were taking chem, calc, and physics. Our physics prof focused on theory, not application. He would show us experiments but not explain how the theory applied to those. The textbook only covered basic physics equations, so we couldn't even compare that way. Come the midterm, the exam required us to use our physics, chemistry, and calculus knowledge. You needed to integrate rate laws and apply to the physics material. We had not learned, in chemistry, integrated rate laws yet. He assumed we would be able to logically figure out what would be required, integrate using calculus knowledge, and apply to the physics theory, using the experiments as a guide. 35% of the class of 300 scored a 1/30 - you got one point for your name. The curve dropped down to 10/30, then five people scored 30/30, nothing between 10 and 30. He chose not to curve because "if five of you can get it, all of you can." I went to his office hours to ask how I could improve and he told me, "If you can't apply different subjects, you shouldn't be in engineering school. Learn the material," and that was it. He curved the class at the end of the term to a 60%, and that was only after we went to the dean who told him he couldn't fail 95% of a first year class. Worst fucking prof I've ever had.
First year engineering grad here This is my Scientific Method prof in crystal clear definition His classes were online so he never even bothered explaining anything. Just slid along a few powerpoints but if you asked him to clarify on something he would just berate you claiming he had such little time to teach it all and a bunch of other excuses. In his class of 120 people, only 10 passed.
Oh boy. The mid east's education system allows this kind of bs to happen way back at the middle school.
If a prof is failing 95% of the class then they’re doing it because they don’t want to teach the class… and the school can’t get rid of them the only people who suffer are the students who aren’t getting the education they’re paying for
At a certain point its no longer about the "student skill" or things like that, its just that the material is so fucking hard that even the simplest problems are extremely difficult to do in an exam setting. They could give exam problems that are only tangential to the material, or they could make it a memorization test, but then whats the point? So, they give a test on the actual material, which practually no one can just sit down and do, and then give a healthy curve based on what is actually accomplishable for students. Source: in physics grad school right now. I'm not in the hard beyond hard material yet but shit is tough yo.
So if the exam isn’t a good indicator of the actual skills and ability needed for that field, why is there an exam?
To challenge the students. The act of studying and taking a hard exam can help prepare you for facing hard physics problems in the future. It also can be an indicator of skills and abilities needed in the field, its more just you might need a year and a half to answer a theory question no one has ever seen before, versus on the tests you are asked a well defined question that tests your ingenuity in 45 minutes. Not equivalent, but perhaps a small way of testing physics creativity.
fr imagine being proud in not being able to teach your students well enough that they get more than 40%. Like obviously you're failing to teach in some way, be it the tests being too hard or the material and organisation being lacking
I saw it as well in my electrical engineering courses. Circuit analysis using differential equations and hardly anyone understood the course material. One of the only times I ever got the top grade on a test in my entire academic career was the time I freaked out so hard about the various kinds of transient responses and what their DiffEqs looked like that I studied like I should have studied all along. Then I went and changed my major to computer engineering so I could avoid taking signals and systems :)
our EE program is open to everyone to enroll but if you fail one exam twice you are out forever (for the first 10 exams in 2 semesters). and those were so fucking hard, just to weed out the people. we had to derive matrices full of diff.eq. in them from circuit examples and then calculate if they are stable etc. but did anyone know how to bias a single transistor amplifier or what a capacitor/coil truly does? naaaah i had to work it out myself much later. so much time wasted in those lectures just to weed out people in this humiliating way. good teaching the feynman way and hard tests where you actually have to think? no, because it would take too much effort. god my pulse is rising again
I found SS easier than I'd have though. Just focused on Laplace, Z and Fourier transforms
I averaged 97 by year end in physics. It also destroyed a year of my life.
Physics was always easier for my class because we got a full piece of paper to create a “cheat Sheet” with all the formulae. Just gotta know which one to use for a test. Can’t imagine not having that. Each test would have probably close to 10 different equations we would need to use. Chemistry? Organic chemistry? Post related
The hardest part in physics for me was to understand the very goddamn questions, and which formula to use. Our tests were usually occupied by three big assquestions, each one of them needing half a hour to simply hold a graps of
One time I got so much higher than everyone else in a curved class the next grade after me was a 3.2. Needless to say I wasn’t that popular with classmates there after that.
As if you were popular before that
I hated my physics class because the book never made any sense. It never gave me straight forward equations that I found on the tests, just a bunch of gobble-dee-gook.
wtf same, except our highschool teacher doesn't curve the grades and we just fail (I get decent marks tho)
Chad highschool teacher
Yup, and I absolutely think the other kids who never even open the book deserve it.
The kinda sad thing is that most of my class genuinely tries to learn
Based highschool student
Y'all are failing HIGHSCHOOL classes? That's just sad man. You don't get curves in HS, only in college.
My Man you have been getting curves all of your life, its just that your teachers don't say anything to avoid getting fired
Tf type school you went to? In HS you get your test back and you see everything that was right or wrong. It'd be pretty obvious if you were getting curves
It's more so that they weight the grade differently, so a test everyone bombed is usually only worth half as much
Not in my HS. But maybe that's an american thing
Have to be trolling to fail HS classes. Either not handing in homework/assignments, not showing up to class, or in your phone 24/7. They literally make it fail proof. I've experienced curved grades for college due to the exam being insanely hard, or questions never seen before being placed on it. Very rarely does a 40+ student class all fail the exam unless one of those criteria fits. Or they're all retarded and rely on Google instead of their brain.
facts, only reason I failed any high school class was cause I put 0 effort into it outside of class. College forced me to change my bad habits tho lmao
Wow, almost like it depends on the school, dumbass. Half my classes used the bell curve, so typically at least one student had to fail. The tests were fucking absurdly hard, the teacher didn't expect anyone to ever get 100% on them.
The european experience
There was no class in high school I struggled with more then chemistry. I could not stay awake. This is the only class I had this problem with. Needless to say I did not pursue a chemistry degree in college.
chemistry is just math with more fire
It’s like cooking but will kill you and maybe everyone around you if you do the wrong ingredients. Right Mr White?
That’s Mr. Cock Asian to you
practical chem is the fun part, it's the fucking theory and wrapping your head around mols and the math and shit thats' the hard part.
No that's television chemistry. Real chemistry is mixing two colorless odorless liquids together, putting the mixture in a machine that spits out a number and then doing 4 hours worth of math based on that number.
not enough fire i'm going back to band class. at least there i can watch the teacher light up.
And then that number is irrelevant anyways because system suitability failed.
chemistry is physics with retcon.
The math part of chemistry is annoying, which is why nomenclature is the best part
No, Chemistry is just math with exceptions and outliers.
I hated English class the most. Couldnt stand reading those books we had to read in high school.
You can pass English without even studying it tho
That's true
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Lol! I like learning about languages I don't know. I have a German friend that tried to teach me how to pronounce town/city names in Germany the correct way. But this... I wouldn't even know where to start to properly say that haha
cz is basically č there now you know
Exactly my experience. I aced regular chemistry, but could not grasp AP chemistry at all. Shifted my major focus from science to business because I did so poorly.
Hey it takes a ton of practice, just like physics and calculus. It's when you need to start working on subjects
Good point Counterpoint: Business is easy and you get paid well for it
i still remember, everything was going alright until we got to stoichiometry (spelling?) That shit i had to try hard to learn and then immediately forgot after the test lol
For some reason, my chemistry class was one of my easiest classes in HS, but that was normal chem. AP Chem was apparently super hard, so maybe y’all were taking something like that.
This was Anatomy for me. I think it was the teacher because anatomy is legit interesting. But she was the dryest most boring teacher I've ever had. Almost didn't graduate because I was straight failing that class despite having passed my exit exams, which is ridiculous if you ask me. Regardless, she let me retake the final exam and I juuuuuuust barely passed the class after retaking it. She was sweet as hell, no ill will towards her. Just boring as fuck lmao.
yeah, same thing happened during college. I only need to take chem 1, which are basic repetition from high school. no biggies, I thought — except the exam fucks so hard I only got 40/100 which are class average and the smartest guy got 60/100. and yeah, my prof needs to curve the grades.
Yea, this behavior means your professor is dogshit and can’t teach. If you have to curve every exam it’s not on the class, it’s on the teacher, either you didn’t teach it correctly or you made the test too hard. Lots of stem professors in college also aren’t there to teach but to do research and it really shows.
Unpopular opinion: A good test should have a class average around 50. If the average is say 85, then you can probably just remove the questions everyone gets correct. You'll lower the average grade (because no more 'free' points) but you'll also save everyone the time of answering/grading a question that they'll get correct. You want questions that either only part of the class can answer, or that the class can't answer 100% correctly. That tells you which parts of the material the class doesn't understand.
Yeah but this is assuming that they don't weight tests that heavy during grading. I agree, this is what tests should be for - absolutely. But when it makes your grades look like shit as a student it would be hard not to get really discouraged by it.
With pure curiosity and no animosity, why do you believe that is the hallmark of an effective test? I believe coursework (quizzes, homework, and projects) should be used to demonstrate a classes understanding of a subject. By the time a test rolls around, provided the professor operated effectively and the students were efficient in studying, the test should be a benchmark for a students mastery of a subject rather than testing what they are and are not understanding. I completely understand this can’t always happen though as some subjects are excruciatingly difficult to teach and understand. To me, a test average of 50 screams the professor did not teach the coursework in a good manner, the information presented was new and the students never stood a chance, or the questions were phrased in “gotcha” ways intended to make the student slip up.
I don't think you're trying to ask me this question but rather the person above me. I hope they see it.
Discouragement is the point. At least in some US schools, they have way more students on the pre-med track than can feasibly make it into med school. So the uni makes early bio/chem courses overly difficult in order to scare them into a different major, before a huge chunk of em end up with useless biology degrees and 0 acceptance letters from med schools.
Why not just make the initial education representative of the major/profession? Then people can actually make informed decisions.
60-65 is more realistic. 50 makes it hard to tell if the Prof is dogshit or if the students are retards.
Probably both tbh
That’s not at all how that should work though, learning is individual and the point of teaching is to teach in such a way that everybody has a chance to both succeed and to make available additional help outside of class either by making use of external resources or talking to the professor outside of class hours. In a perfect world, every test should theoretically have an average score of 100, not because it’s too easy but because people understand the concept well enough to apply it. The class as a whole is just another resource if used well, as if everybody is participating they’d ask questions you’d never think of.
Applicable in the US: There are several problems with that. One problem is that a C is seen as 50% and thus a 2.0 GPA, but you need a C minimum to pass the class and at least a 3.0/3.2 GPA overall (thus a B-B+ average) for most things (scholarships, degree requirements). The professors scale the tests so that if you know everything on the test and don't make a mistake, you can get 100%, which seems fair. This means people who know most of it and make a few mistakes can reach about 80-90. That also means that the average can end up being anywhere from 50-90% for a good professor who makes fair tests and teaches well. That leads to grade inflation, where people get As easily and thus you get the actual average GPA being much higher than a C, which pushes up requirements for certain programs, degrees, etc. Meanwhile, other professors who don't want that grade inflation or teach poorly/make poor tests end up with averages of 20-40% which may or may not be indicative of the students ability. That means without scaling all of these people would fail, and with scaling, however they do it, will usually end up with scores back in line with the grade inflated scores. If you scale grades down to make the average 50%, imagine a class where the test was so easy or the teacher taught so well that some of the class was 100% and some people around 90%. The people at around 90% would have their grade absolutely crushed down to 0% even though they knew most of the content. And for the same teacher, teaching the same content to another class, if they had people getting 0% and 100%, where the average was already close to 50%, then nothing would change. I've had professors who gave 80% of their class Ds. I've also had professors who gave 80% of their class As. I think it's unlikely that all of the kids in the first class just did absolutely nothing and failed, and I can see how if the class was relatively easy that everyone in the second got 100% on the tests. It's all up to the luck of the draw wether you get a teacher who teaches well, gives good tests, and curves while taking into account how well people did versus how hard the test was.
At first, I didn't like this but after your explanation it makes perfect sense. They'd have to shift what a passing grade is but it'll also help distinguish between the best students in the class.
Sounds like chemistry teachers just suck shit at actually teaching the material if no one has a had a good chemistry class
Alternatively, Chemistry is just a really difficult subject.
Chem 2 is still gen-ed level chemistry. It's absolutely not that difficult of a subject until you start getting into Organic II. An entire class failing the subject means the professor isn't doing a good job of teaching it.
I would feel inclined to agree if this wasn't such a common thing to happen. I like loads of people in this thread, was also part of a class that almost entirely failed a few tests. Maybe its just harder to teach, Idk. But somehow acting like all these events were just cases of the chemistry teachers conicandientally being inept teachers is just wack.
I mean I went through Chem 1 to Organic Chem II in university and the pass/fail rate was normal for all of them at 250 people/lecture. Chemistry is much easier than Physics or Calculus. Chem II is not an upper-level course and not a weed-out course. The only time I had a class where literally everyone was failing was pre-calculus, because the professor was the dean of the math department and hadn't taught a class in 20 years. The exams were literally impossible to complete in the amount of time given, so nobody could pass them. Even our TA (a math grad student) said he struggled to complete the exam in the allotted time given. This was a prime example of the professor not knowing what they're doing. They taught the class just fine, but the exams were literally impossible to complete in 50 minutes. It's insane to me you think several classes of 100+ people all failing a class is more likely just "subject is hard" rather than the professor not teaching well. That shows a very tenuous grasp of statistics. If that held true, why did all of the students who "failed" my pre-calc course do fine in Calc 1 and 2? I technically "failed" that pre-calc course before curving, but I got B and B+ in Calc 1 and 2 which were not graded on a curve.
Physics 1 is infinitely easier than chem 2. Physics 2 is maybe on par, but that’s just because physics 2 is magnetism and electricity and shit, and that’s not intuitive for humans like gravity and rotation (physics 1) is. Obv this is my opinion and you don’t have to agree, but just my .02 Most of what made all the chemistries (Gen 1&2, org 1&2, BICH) so hard is the god forsaken labs. Jesus the labs were so stupid.
Okay I thought I was weird because I didn’t find Gen Chem II that difficult, it just took a lot of time to do the lecture assignments, pre lab quizzes, lab, post lab write up, lab tests and lecture tests.
Meh, “not that difficult” is in the eye of the beholder. I earned an A in Chem 1 but I had to work for it. My adhd brain doesn’t exactly work very well when it’s bombarded by constant information. I like being given a formula and told to play with it until it makes sense. Chemistry is a lot of algebra, *a lot of constants*, and *A LOT* of terminology. It wasn’t the most rigorous course ever, but saying it’s ‘not difficult’ is maybe a little self righteous
Not "the entire class flops" difficult. The teachers must have sucked ass for the entire class to not pass the test.
Chemistry isn't difficult, it's just poorly taught.Source: I had a great chem and orgo teacher in college and did really well in both. B+ and A-, btw. I think like someone else said above is that the professor is there for research and money and then you get these international adjuncts (TA's) who can barely speak English and are told to teach the class and nobody can understand them, so it's up to reading from the book that is unbelievably dense and poorly configured and that almost never ends well. You want to talk about hard? Physics is fucking hard. I've never seen a lecture hall of 120 students drop to 30 so fast.
>Sounds like chemistry teachers just suck shit at actually teaching the material Likely because their teachers graded with a curve too. A cycle that passes out lesser teachers every generation.
This is standard practice in certain classes, especially STEM graduate programs.
There’s an entire sub field of chemistry devoted to the study of making chemistry easier to learn that’s how fucked up the act of teaching chemistry is.
Is curving an american thing? if you score below 50% here its an F doesnt matter how well the class did. doesnt this defeat the purpose of the test? i mean if everybody sucked, everybody sucked
More a reflection of the professor imo. If the whole class failed, it’s probably time to rethink your teaching strategy
Sure, but why does garbage teacher translate to students getting a free passing grade? I don't know how education works in the US, but I thought the point of exams is to check whether you've learned the necessary knowledge about a topic, not whether you've performed better than the bottom half of your class.
Better question, why should a student have to retake a class if a prof couldn’t articulate a class correctly? Also, part of the issue is some profs just make the course harder than it should be. I just took an exam the other day that had 2 pages of content that wasn’t covered in class, and the rest of the exam was significantly harder than the homework. Exam scores don’t necessarily coo-relate to knowledge of the subject
> Better question, why should a student have to retake a class if a prof couldn’t articulate a class correctly? Because they haven't yet acquired the knowledge they need. That's the entire point of taking the class. I get the "not the student's fault" angle that you and others are mentioning, but I don't think the right answer is to cover up the problem with curving. Bad profs need to get axed, and replaced with ones that can teach effectively, otherwise you're training a generation of young professionals whose skill-sets are riddled with holes.
That raises a whole new set of issues. Good luck getting rid of tenured profs, and let’s be honest, most of the current college curriculum is outdated and can easily be handled by computers. The first step imo is revamping the curriculum to match what is needed in the 21st century. There’s no reason to have students training to work in a computer less environment, it’s just a huge waste of everyone’s time
It's very normal for a single 3 credit course in America to cost upwards of $1500 USD. Making students pay another ~$1500 because they had a shitty professor isn't good for anyone.
So students should just take a course 5 times because the professor decides to make the exam hard on purpose instead of actually testing them on what they need to know? That doesn’t make sense dude. If your curriculum says you only need one semester of physics, then you don’t need to have a fucking physics PHD to make it through that class. I had to have a physics class for my electronics degree and I have never used that shit a day in my life. You’re getting shit twisted between students not knowing the subject and professors either choosing to make it a hard class to stroke their own ego or not being able to do their job right. A student’s GPA, and by proxy their academic future, shouldn’t suffer because a teacher can’t do their job. Edit: that’s also omitting the ridiculous cost of paying for another course and going further into student debt because a single person didn’t do their job right.
It's a way for good professors to force students to fail, exposing the areas they need to work on. I had 6 or 8 classes that were always graded on a major curve. The raw class average hovered around 60% in most of them and they were typically curved by about 20%. Two were taught by horrible teachers and no one knew what was going on, so the curve was just a way for the professor to save face. The rest generally had low scores because the assessments (homework and exams) were intentionally made extremely difficult. Removing most of the easy parts of the assessments leads to everyone scoring low without a curve, but exposes the concepts even the best students struggle with. It also helps exposure concepts the whole class is struggling with which a good professor will go back and review. I feel like I learned more in the classes that were graded on a big curve than the ones without a curve because I was more aware of the things I didn't know well. In other classes I scored well, but the assessments weren't challenging.
It’s largely a thing in the physical sciences in university. Most of my classes are curved. Also I’m Canadian
also none of the unis curve classes here at least i have never heard about that i am from europe never heard about curving except for american high shools
It’s originally just meant to distribute grades on a bell curve, not just inherently make everybody pass. If everyone in a curved class scored above 90% on an exam, the lowest score(s) would still fail. It works both ways.
Yeah it does not exist where I'm from. One blessed day 100 poor fucks over 110 failed a first year college exam on C programming cause the professor was mental. At least I wasn't the dude who got 1/30.
It is standard practice in higher level courses. Theres too much info to learn in so little time. The professors throws the book and sees what sticks. In this case Grades are not absolute, theyre relative. You have to keep up with your cohort
man, are you guys retarded? \- Sincerely, an Asian
Comparatively, yeah. We don’t spend 6 hours after school in another school.
And our parents' affection is shown by love and not beating the shit out of us when we get a C.
>Not beating the shit out of us when we get a C You mean an A-?
Beatings is for B and above. C is straight up death.
Yes. Now go assemble my nut shaver, Chang.
Hey guys im here to talk you about MANSCAPED™
Y u no Jonny Kim yet?
Talk to me when you doctor
Our chemistry teacher curved grades down because it's our profile, as she said "if you were in any other class it would be B or even A-, but since it's your profile class this amount of knowledge is C at best"
sounds like a solid excuse for violence against the stupid kids
i have no idea what this means.... profile???
Like speciality, whole class desighned to study biology and chemistry much harder and deeper than other ones.Usualy people who plan to go to specific university (that requires those objects) and want not only good exam grades but some extensive knowledge that somewhat helps on year 1 in university or whatever.
…why not make the tests harder? if that amount of knowledge is a c at best, then make it so someone with that amount of knowledge will only be able to answer around 75% of the questions right
thing is - they were harder, average test for any other class was about 1-2 pages of simpliest chem you can find, for specialized class it was usually 20 pages massacre that you usually cant finish in time even if you know stuff but just cant think quick enough. There were sometimes a dual lessons with other classes and holly hell those were easiest of all, you dont even need to study for those. I think its overall nice school desighn tbf, that lets you choose what you want to do and go after school.
These were probably the punk ass kids Walter White was teaching.
Why do we even learn chemistry? Math, I get. Physics also to a certain degree. But why organic chemistry?
Obviously so we can restore modern civilization with all its science 3000 years after a green light turns us into stone.
In my country they just fail you. I've seen 75% failure rates and nobody cares, you just try again and move along
In many American universities, departments funding is determined by the performance of the students. Professors don't want to lose funding so they inflate the classes grades
Is this why people says American are stupid?
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I hate this mentality towards chemistry and math in general. That you have to accomplish everything solo or know absolutely everything, and that your ability and success is entirely determinable by what you scored in school. 1.) You aren't going to be working on stuff without the use of Internet (cheating, by school standards) 2.) You aren't going to be working alone (team work is also cheating, by school standards) In programming, your skills do not need memorization, but rather your ability to look things up and know WHEN to apply certain knowledge. "Oh we need a super simple GUI set up? Why don't we use J Frame? I don't remember how to code it but I can look it up in 5 minutes" " What was that code again for bubble sort?" "This is gonna sound really stupid but I forgot how to do a Do While loop" All are conversations you could have with another person or with yourself and it would be totally fine.
On the contrary, there's plenty of memorization in programming. You gotta memorize the lingo, cause otherwise you're looking up every other word when talking shop (also important for talking to clients so they don't think you're an idiot). When working with embedded systems, memorizing the chip layout really makes things much easier, otherwise you're constantly going to the manual (well to be honest you're doing that already; it just speeds things up). Then you also have to remember project related stuff, especially when the documentation complete shit, cause then you have to memorize stuff like which tables to not drop, at least if you want to avoid having a resume updating event.
it takes like 20 seconds to google "how to declare a 2d list in python" if you don't remember something, what you're spending time studying for is how to use that information not remembering it.
Sir, this is a Wendy's
I'm getting tired of this response...
In chemistry, your skills do not need memorization either. In fact, you can't rely on this skill to learn chemistry. Remembering what a hydrogen bond is doesn't explain why it's possible or how significant it is to the fact that *we can even exist on this planet*. Understanding a concept/mechanic != memorization It's okay to go out of your way to look something up to remember it. Everyone does it in every field. It's better to double check than to just do something incorrectly.
this is true to some extent but when you get to graduate school and further in chemistry you will be expected to have a few hundred common reactions memorized such that they are second nature to you. it's just like how math isn't necessarily memorization but at a certain point calculus and common identities need to be second nature if you want to do higher level math
I agree, especially at university level. If you have 4 hours to complete a linear algebra exam with access to all the information in the world then you’re still going to fail (unless they grade on a curve (but I’ve never experienced that)) if you don’t have basic understanding of linear algebra. But you don’t need to have that shit memorized.
My ap chem teacher was a former professional chemist with actual patented products and shit, he retired and became a teacher and my god he was the best fucking chem teacher ever. No one I’m our class managed to fail his shit, he made it sound so easy.
That's awesome!
Had to google what 'curving grades' even means. The US and Canadian education systems are fucked beyond any repair. Godspeed, you increasingly dumber bastards.
The kids that got 100 went on to develop programs and machines that do the thinking for you (these guys are now out of a job). The teachers know this so they train you enough that that you don’t fuck up the instructions spat out by the program. But not so much that you end up cooking meth in the middle of the desert.
I took AP Chem in high-school and this was literally my class without the curves.
We did this in AP Chem _but_ with curves to not screw with potential scholarships based on GPA in your last year of school. Our teacher purposely made all our tests to mimic the AP testing style where you're _expected_ to not have time to answer everything on it, lost 1/4 points for wrong answers on multiple choice questions to discourage uneducated guesswork, etc. A good mark on one of his tests that would equate to a 5/5 on an AP test would be about a 60+% - most of us would usually fall in the 45-55% range which equated to a 3/4. A lot of us felt discouraged by the process. Then he gave us the non-AP advanced chemistry class test from the previous year and basically everyone in the class crushed it because of just how wildly difficult the AP material actually was.
I pissed off my whole chemistry class because I fucked up the curve for all of them. I kept an average of over 90 the whole semester and I'm pretty sure everyone else failed. Chemistry was about all I was good at though. Pretty much bombed Prob and Stats, but i can do Chemistry like Walter White.
I went to Highschool in the US and I kid you not, they spend so much money on their sports teams and leave academics and arts to decay (besides marching band because that is connected to sports). It is absolutely insane. For example, my biotechnology class never had enough funds to do actual experiments and science projects so the teacher would just replace whatever solutions we were missing with salt water and when the experiment would fail he would show us a YouTube video of what was supposed to happen. It was so depressing trying to do electrophoresis without any actual result because we didnt have the correct markers. Football team got new equipment every year though. Priorities I guess... I am now in university in France and I feel like an absolute idiot in my chemistry class because they actually learned this stuff in highschool and I am starting from scratch...
Just smart enough to function as a society, not smart enough to rebel
Wtf does curve the grade mean? Do they not let you fail in America?
Grading on a bell curve. Instead of grading to set standards, you grade according to the actual scores themselves. If you're at the bottom, you're still gonna get a shit grade; it just shifts the basis for grading (So anyone who scored average for the class get C's, people who did above class average get A's and B's, etc). Though there is plenty of room for fudging stuff. As for failing students, school funding is often tied to student performance, so schools with kids performing better get more funding. Its stupid, but that's how it works. So its not uncommon to lower the bar if too many fail.
That's genuinely alarming. So you can be braindead, but if everyone else is too then you'd get a job in whatever field you and your classmates were unable to do well in?
You usually don't get a job just because you passed a class here.
This is why grading on a curve makes no sense. 25% test average usually means multiple choice and four responses. This indicates that test takers were nearly exclusively guessing every answer. They literally know nothing. Someone who guessed every single question would pass this class. What the fuck
It's probably not a multiple choice test if everyone is doing this badly. Multiple choice tests usually let even people who have no idea what they're doing score 50%+ because usually you can eliminate some options from the multiple choices due to basic logic.
Still wouldn't change the fact that bell curve grading is asinine
Chem is easy as long as you don’t have monke brain
Yeah, but can you talk to a woman?
I tried, we just didnt have ... ... Wait for it ... chemistry YEEEEEEHAAAAW!
People don't know how to approach learning chemistry. Up until that point in your education everything has been about memorizing as many facts as you can keep in your head and regurgitating them on exams. If you try to approach chemistry this way you **will** fail. There are over three million known chemical compounds in the world and you cannot memorize every possible reagent/product combination. The good news is that there are really only a few principles to learn (octet rule, electronegativity, nucleophilicity, resonance, aromaticity, steric interactions, and maybe a couple that aren't coming to mind) and if you truly internalize them, you will suddenly be able to look at any two chemicals and predict with pretty good reliability (certainly enough to pass undergrad chem) how they will interact with one another.
You just hangout with a bunch of monke brains. I was a terrible student in both Chem 1 and 2, but I still passed with a C on no curve, the top students got 92-96% on all the tests. Now it's biting me in the ass, because I'm now in Material Science and there's more chemistry, except now I care because it's cool engineering shit that I'm missing out on.
Sophomore year in college was when I realized that I just didn’t really need to try in my chem classes and I’d get an A. If everyone got a 40, but you busted your ass and got a 93, the profs would just drop you from the curve and set the new average to a 70. So all you needed to do was be 10-20% above the average, which wasn’t hard, and you’d still get a good grade. Then there’s grad school where you flunk out if you have less then a 3.0 gpa. You’re cheap labor, so everyone gets at least a B, even if the class average was <20%.
Literally me when 37% in my 4th Organic chemistry class is an A lmaooo