i've had professors that moved the passing grade based on how many where in the course. 100 people? if you make a single mistake you're out. he also bragged about this from the start.
i passed by waiting until most of the others left or passed.
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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It’s like they didn’t even try to make the story plausible.
Yeah, I studied and taught in STEM. There are true stories about professors who are monsters, but this is pure bullshit.
Professors don't work like that.
Yup, they have their TAs grade exams and grade on a curve so only a fixed percent passes.
With the amount of tests I had where I was the highest grade at ~60% and still got the equivalent of a D, I would have loved some of this curve you guys keep talking about.
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My first introduction to this bullshit was calculus. Teacher bragged about only passing halve his students. Like my man... that ain't the brag you think it's is 1, 2 this is a fucking prereq for the vast vast majority of us!
Yeah, when a prof or teacher says "my course is so hard, only a few people pass" then I immediately translate that to "I am a shit teacher".
So long as you do the work and aren't a lazy ass student, you should have a decent pass.
Only exception I have seen was when the professor was kind of a troll. He was a good teacher. This was in a pretty entry level physics class at a tech school, so we basically got a high school level physics as a pre-req for our degree in whatever 2 year program we were in.
He spent the week leading up to the first big test talking about how hard it was, how people needed to take it seriously, etc.
He handed out the grades after and everyone was visibly upset, nobody had a passing grade. Then he explained, after letting us freak out for a minute, that the score at the top was out of 50, not 100 and I think everyone passed
After that the class pretty fun.
State Universities lovee failing a student in an entry- level course, because the state will subsidize tuition twice for a given class per student.
They don't like doing it a second time because the student has to pay full tuition, and when classes triple in price they're more likely to drop.
This is so fake that we managed to reach the {fake + gay} threshold without having to tap into the gay potential
>anon waits until all the other students leave
>asks the professor what he can "do" to pass
this is a classic porn script, gay/10
"gay potential" sounds like the cutest physics term.
Gay potential is measured in homos
Please tell me it uses SI prefixes.
"They measure 1.63 x 10² megahomos!"
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This probably didn't actually happen, but I did have a physics class in college where we had an exam where the highest score was 35%, so it was graded on an absurd curve
My calc I class in college had a 23% average on the first exam. Later ones made it into the high 30%s. The professor was terrible, but since I had already taken calc in high school and he graded on a curve it was a breeze.
The main problem was that he would test for the stuff we had not covered yet because he "wanted people to work ahead."
Now that's an asshole move.
“wanted people to work ahead”
Ah yes “not fucking doing my job that people are taking loans out for and pay off for years to come”
Fuck that “professor.” A college degree is an overpriced commodity and they are falsely charging students by not teaching them the course
It's fine to give points for "extra work", but the regular work should give you a passing grade at least. The extra work should maybe give you the difference between a 6 or an 8.
Grading on a curve is always absurd to me: it's a cop out for teachers who don't know how to set curriculum/exams properly and demeans the education process.
Should just be
- here's a list of things you learn in this class
- you demonstrate understanding and skill over about 60% of that list
- you get a grade of 60%
While I mostly agree with you, the grading on a curve idea comes from two factors On one hand, the idea that knowing some topics very well can absolve you from knowing other topics at a sufficient level. On the other, people making the exercises for the exams are experts and can easily overlook the hidden difficulties of an exercise. So it happens way too often that a professor would think “this exercise is super easy” and miss that it uses concepts from other courses the students are not super familiar yet.
A lot of professors are overworked with classes and programs too. One of my girlfriends uas a professor for anatomy who teaches two full college courses before going to her massage school to teach anatomy. She says you can tell that the professor isn't really there mentally. Sge never actually prepares for the courses she's supposed to be teaching, but you can tell us just from exhaustion. I wonder how many are like that and just forget what coursework they're currently preparing for others.
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I had a Chem class where the prof opened with "my goal is to fail as many Engineers as possible". The average on the final was 27%. Luckly some important admistrator in the Eng department's kid was in one of those classes and they got the tenured professor fired.
That seems so low that it makes the benefit of the class dubious. Can you really say you're making good use of the students' time when it's clear none of them are understanding the material? Maybe the material needs to be broken up into more digestible chunks.
It's also possible to just write a bad question/exam and recognize you need to do better as a professor.
I had a physics professor who graded himself on whether or not he wrote/taught well by the grade distribution. He was always transparent about it and had benchmarks of how it went previous years. He was also one of the most sought after professors.
I also had s philosophy class where the best grade over the entire semester was a 30 and the professor was like yeah this is just expected. You get an A. This guy obviously derived enjoyment from not being a good teacher and for humiliating his students that they really knew nothing about philosophy. That guy sucked.
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Had a similar thing happen in an intro geology course. Highest grade on the final was 41%, my grade. I got an A in the class. I do not understand why anyone would make an intro to geology course that difficult. Very few are going into the field. Most just needed an extra science course, like myself.
I was a physics major, and the whole department was famous for this. I think it's just lazy. They don't make the test for what they actually taught, they just throw shit against the wall and see what sticks.
That's pretty common for math heavy classes, the tests are ridiculous and they grade on a curve.
I knew someone who had to pass a class where the failure rate was 85%. The worst part is this was only one of a few of these classes. She was studying physics, and even though I really don't want anything to do with her now for unrelated reasons, I still feel bad for her.
It would never happen as described in this post, but things like this are way more common than people think.
I still remember teaching >3 people a subject, because they asked me to, and then we all did the exam and I was the one who failed it. Now I'm, not error-proof but that's kind of ridiculous. I have experienced a truckload of these things but that one illustrates very well how random and/or unfit for purpose most exams are. It's like a coin flip +/- 5% depending on the depths of your studies beforehand.
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I love the correction system we have at my university. All the exams are pseudonymized with a sticker you receive during the exam and scanned after completion. About 10 to 30 people are involved in correcting the exams for one course. We don't know who the exams belong to as we only see the scanned version on our tablet or computer. Each task is corrected by a different set of people. We can select to see only a single task or subtask to streamline the process of correction, too. Furthermore, all the tasks are checked twice independently. Once done, the system can assign the exams back to the students. I love how it's fair and "anonymous" by design.
Wait... are there universities that don't have an anonymous exam system?
I was a university student around ten years ago and we usually wrote our names and student identification numbers right on the exam. For the most part our professors didn't really know us very well anyway (due to the number of students), so I never questioned why it should not be so.
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suuuuurree
organic chem(for life science majors, the one for scientists is more harder) was brutal in my CC, surprisingly, and i found out they made stem courses extremely ivy league level on purpose, because a UC said so or they wont accept transfer students with an "easy grade" i think its bs to keep students perpetually in the school to continue paying for admission.
I keep reading about people grading on a curve and I still can't grasp what that means. Do those teachers have like a set number of A B C, or whatever, they can give out? And if they've run out of A then you get a B? And if the B run out you get a C and so on? That seems a completely intellectually bankrupt practice! If you don't want more than X people passing, then just grade people with percentages and let only the first X highest through and that's it, but don't lie with fake grades! How insane...
basically that, yes.
though in my experience, they'd make the tests so hard that everyone would get failing or nearly failing grades, then curve up so that more people pass and some get As
only issue for them is if the average is 36% but 3 students got high 90s.. makes the curving math a lot more awkward
Wait until you hear that universities are just literal paywalls to seperate social classes so poor people can’t get good jobs that once were apprenticeships.
I mean, not the whole world is the US. Plus, at this point you'll get a better paying job if you go into trades.
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In Delft, corrections of the curve are only ever used upwards, in case the passing rate is very low. If everyone completes the test without mistakes everyone gets a 10.
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You forgot to fuck the professor.
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Dean time!
I hope you were smart enough to record that interaction, anon.
My major in college for my BS included all but 2 credit hours of a physics minor, so my final semester, I took Thermal Physics to complete that minor. I've never met a physics course I didn't ace, so I figured "easy A".
I'm quite certain I was the highest scorer in the course and was a solid B+ before the final. I took the final and felt really good about how well I did. I thought sure that professor would curve (or otherwise adjust the grades) and I'd be the one that threw off the curve.
I got my grades back. I got a C. My only C ever, in fact. An A (what I expected) would have gotten me summa cum laude.
The same semester, I took a statistics class. Paid exactly zero attention in class. The class took place in a computer lab for no good reason other than I'm guessing the other classrooms were booked. I played a fast-paced Quake-like FPS every class all class. Got an A in that course.
But that fuckin' thermal physics class.
Years later, a coworker of mine who was an alum of my alma mater told me that they'd taken the professor who taught that thermal physics class off of teaching permanently due to his completely unreasonable grading practices.
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I remember that my statistics professor was so smug about grading on a curve because it was using statistics. It was also a class that he gloated about as a class where you "needed an a" if you wanted to get into grad school. In other words, the asshole was making sure only a certain number of people even had a chance to get into the graduate programs. It was rumored that he even ran tests on students in the different labs, telling the grad students teaching the labs to teach in certain ways and seeing if there were any differences. Wouldn't put it past him.
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