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Originally Posted by Gilda
Smart people who don't work hard don't deserve to succeed solely because they are intelligent.
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This is where either I don't understand you, we're not in agreement, or we're discussing opposite ends of a concept. Or maybe a little of each.
I have been in higher-level classes where everyone was very bright, and pretty much the entire class mastered the course objectives. However, when test time rolled around, it contained what we used to call "Guess what I'm thinking" questions. These questions even tripped up PhDs on occasion.
It seems you're saying that we shouldn't be "dumbing classes down." Agreed, but as related above, I experienced more "smartening classes up," which seemed to be an attempt by faculty to achieve more prestige. Maybe that's not as common now.
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Originally Posted by Gilda
I completely agree that that competetive curving is a bad system for grading. Take Sissy, for example. Put her in a typical high school physics class with typical high school students, and she's going to be one of the elite students in the class. Put her in the same class, but make the other students Newton, Copernicus, Eienstein, Hawking, and Kepler, and she'd be the worst student in class, even with the same performance. Evaluation should be criterion based, not competetive.
Gilda
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Just so I'm clear--you've mentioned that As in your classes are not terribly common. Have you never experienced a situation in which you had quite a few more of them than normal, just because smart students happened to be clustered in that class?
Or did Hawking get a "C?"
Edit: P.S. Thanks for an interesting post.