I'm sorry, but that is just not true. I have any friends who try extremely hard and study for hours, and still are B students. No, they are not mentally challenged. Some people just are not able to grasp concepts and facts as easily, just like some people are not born with the coordination to hit a curveball.
Absolutely not. There's a huge difference. You couldn't be more wrong. Like I said, I have friends who study extremely hard, and they still are B students.
Then they need to study harder if they want an A. I'm not saying they aren't studying hard, but apparently not hard enough for an A. And curves ARE the same thing as PEDs in my eyes. If I earn an A on a test, why should other people who didn't get extra points just because they did worse than I did? It's the exact same thing: getting a grade they didn't earn.
i find the comparison pretty ridiculous, you're acting like the grades you get actually mean something.
There are classes where a curve is a must while you think curves are PEDs which is stupid in my opinion, if the teacher can't get most of the class to pass which has happened in some occasions, that isn't all on the students the curve would be a better comparison to revenue sharing since it puts everyone on an equal plain, and I don't mean within one class but across the department to save a class from one terrible teacher.
I agree. It's hard to separate when the teacher is being ridiculously hard and when students just aren't trying hard enough, though. If there weren't curves, there are many professors who would be having most of their classes failing every semester, absent a serious change to their procedures. Curves are nothing like PEDs.
Hah, Adderall is cheating now? I could throw down 6 red bulls and get a pretty similar effect. Same with a few OTC congestion relievers actually, as they contain pseudoamphetamine, which has similar properties, although duller. I've always had ADD related problems, though. But I've always been so much smarter than everyone around me, that it cancelled out my disadvantage in study habits (unwillingness/ineffectiveness) You still have to know the material. Is caffeine cheating? Is creatine and whey protein cheating? Is someone having too strong of bones because they drink a lot of milk cheating? Some lines need to be drawn, or this will keep getting more absurd.
I think the difference is the legality of something. :wink: That's what makes it an unfair advantage. Adderall is a Schedule II controlled substance.
Legality affects nothing in my eyes. The US is becoming a nanny-state. Call me a rebel, but law doesn't change my opinion of much of anything, only adds risk. It's illegal because dumb people would abuse it.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy that. I don't care how the teacher is, if you don't earn a grade without a curve, you don't deserve it.
Doesn't matter what you think of the law. If something is illegal, using it provides an unfair advantage.
You've been lucky not to have certain teachers, then. In some classes, it is literally impossible to get an A, no matter how brilliant you are or how hard you study. I've been lucky too. I've only had one teacher like that. It depends on what field you're in. My sister ran into a few of those professors because she was a biology major.
If I can weigh in on this as a university professor, let me just say that IMO this is a ridiculous statement. I can EASILY write tests that would be impossible for students to get good grades on, and they would be completely "fair" (in the sense of only covering material related to the class). So could any other teacher - it's no great skill to write misleading questions on arcane technical aspects of the course. Thinking that you're too smart to do poorly on an exam just shows that you haven't had faculty who decided to give you a killer exam. EVERY class has a curve; the only question is whether it is an explicit one or an implicit one. If a class is based on the system that everyone with an average over 92 gets an A (say), the teacher must write tests that result in that being a reasonable level of understanding to warrant an A (and similarly for every other grade). That's a curve (an implicit one), since they are restricted from writing a harder test that would result in too few people getting that grade. Believe me, no teacher could get away with giving very hard tests that result in no one getting an A for very long - they would be called on the carpet by the chairman/dean/etc. (yes, such things are most definitely done). Personally, because of the year-to-year variability in how test questions turn out, I think it's impossible to gauge tests perfectly enough to base grades only on hard cutoffs like this, so I give grades on the basis of a combination of grade cutoffs and the grade distribution (both an implicit and explicit curve). In other words, you've had classes based on curves one way or the other your entire life. The educational system couldn't survive otherwise, since it would be impossible to objectively compare students in different classes and different schools. As to the question of whether ADD drugs like Adderall provide an advantage, the answer is obviously yes, or people wouldn't use them. Since not everyone has access to them (or is willing to break the law to use them), it's an unfair advantage for those that do. It's really not that complicated.
I couldn't lie and say no, because I already was a user. Back in my weightlifting days, when all I wanted was to get bigger and bigger. Now luckily, since that time has passed, my heart has been given a clean bill of health, and all my other organs are normal. Now, when you look at my name on the left, you see I'm at peace with the world. But I was, once, an angry, frustrated person and I channeled that into various obsessions. And for a few years, I was obsessed with building huge muscles. I did whatever I had to do to get there, as my permanently sore shoulders and elbows can attest. But when you want something so bad, it overruns your good sense the same way drug addiction does.
That's not the point of the curve. A curve isn't there to boost the grades of students, and is meaningless outside of the specific class. A curve is there to "correct" grades that have been purposefully and artificially depressed by the professor, for the sake of getting a nice spread of grades among the student and no perfect scores. (Because if five students get perfect scores, you aren't getting good information out of the class. One of those five students could be a vastly more informed student... but the test was too easy, and was unable to indicate any difference between those five students.) So you want a nice spread of grades in the class, but you also don't want the upper echelon students getting 100's (or the poor students getting 0's, for that matter). This usually means that you try to make the tests so the average grade is around a 60-65. The curve itself has no meaning outside of the class. It's not giving an A to someone who didn't deserve it. If another class on the same subject, doesn't curve, the material is usually far easier, and the class grades aren't as representative of the knowledge gained by the students. As opposed to the statistics compiled by grown men playing a kids' game for our entertainment?
