Teaching and Grading

Professors “fairness” in grading seems to be proportional to the quality of their teaching

Every semester ends the same way, ranting about grades. Here is my rant.

Two of the classes I took this past semester illustrates my point on grading fairness perfectly.

The first class, called Operating Systems (OS), was quite hard. However, I was always looking forward to attending it. The material was complex and not easy to grasp, but our professor, who I will call K. for anonymity purposes, made it like a game. He loosely followed a textbook but never used it. Instead, all the material was stored in his head, which enabled him to deliver customized and interactive lectures. Let us look at an example.
A topic we covered was mutual exclusion, which can be loosely defined as safely sharing resources across processes. One way to teach it would be to sequentially define the properties and assumptions it involves in a slideshow and give us homework about it. How boring. Instead, K. started by presenting the material, and followed by giving us mutual exclusion problems that did not work, which we would compete to solve. To encourage us to play the game, class participation was part of our grade. Now, try to picture that. Doesn’t it look exciting? It damn was. And most topics were taught this way.

Let’s briefly look at the second class. It’s called Computer Networks (CN). The material should be interesting and it is not as complex as OS. But it was hell. Our professor, let’s call him F. for anonymity purposes again, taught every single class by monotonously reading slides. Not surprisingly, everyone was sleeping.

The point of this post is not to elaborate on the quality of teaching, so let us now see how it all ended.

In OS, students were graded based on their performance with respect to each other. We won’t discuss the pros and cons of such a grading system, because it’s off topic here. There was also a generous curve. Students could then perform poorly on hard exams and do better on the rest them, which wouldn’t affect their final grade as badly as a grading system in which students would be graded with no regard to each other’s grades. It resulted in most of us getting out of the class with a thorough understanding of the material, which we acquired mostly through games, and with a nice grade that most of us got as long as we played along.

In CN, there wasn’t such a curve, and we were graded with no regard to each other’s performance. The majotiry of us thus ended the semester with the little knowledge we managed to learn on our own to pass the exams, and, as far as I know, lower grades than what we usually get in this kind of classes. I personally don’t understand this grading system. I got a perfect score on our midterm exam, completed all homework assignment, and felt like a did well on my presentation (which I didn’t get any feedback on; how useful for a presentation), and still ended the class with a B+. Then again, the final exam weighted 50% of our final grade, and even though I didn’t get any feedback on it (…), I still felt like I did well on this exam. Anyway, enough ranting, I don’t even mind.

Professor K. already got his well-deserved feedback.

As to you, Professor F., thank you for not only teaching us close to nothing, but also to (minimally) reduce our chances of getting into top graduate school programs. If you happen to read this post, please do not take it personally. Instead, see it as feedback for your teaching methods and grading system, and I hope it will also help you realize the importance of giving feedback to your students.