A bit off-topic, but I remember a college class in which I was completely lost. I wasn't even clear on the topic of the class. Nothing ever made sense. I got D's on most of the tests. I was enormously frustrated. Then, at the end, I got my final grade: B+.
My sense of relief was comical and fleeting. It was replaced by anger. How was it possible that most of the students in the class did worse than I? What an absolute waste to subject us all to such nonsense.
I remember speaking to an engineering statistics (IIRC) professor once, who said that no one had ever gotten an 'A' in his class. (Presumably, the final grades were curved like yours.) He said it proudly. I considered asking him if he was teaching basket-weaving or underwater archaeology to his statistics students.
I heard a story from an academic coordinator once, of an instructor who had been hired for a required CS computer architecture class because he was a friend of the department chairman. He was an electrical engineer, which made some sense, but then students started showing up in the coordinator's office crying and trying to drop the class well after the last drop date. It seemed he thought CS undergraduates were supposed to be the same as electrical engineering grad students, and wanted to fail the entire class. (He did not, nor did he get hired for further classes. After many years, though, his friend was the department chairman again and hired him as a tenured professor and the department's external relations coordinator. This is part of the reason I did not go into academia.)
Many instructors are just stinking bad. Many aren't, and manage to tie together both interesting lectures and more active assignments. But the bad ones do leave marks.
Are you just talking about grading on a curve? This happened to me in a graduate math class and I agree with you that it felt unnecessarily demoralizing. But it also seemed like a natural outcome of grading a hard class on a curve.
I had some upper division math classes that were offered for both undergrad and grad credits. I enjoyed the classes, but one thing I noticed was that the teacher seemed to be under some pressure to ensure the grad students passed. They didn't seem to care about the classes and performed horribly, I would do OK, and at the end of term all the undergrads like me would exit with an almost-guaranteed A.
Really helped to shape my perception that grades are meaningless and ultimately political.
It's not just that the grading was on a curve, it's that they learned nothing at all but still got a better grade than most of the class (implying that no one learned anything). Almost better to just have the whole class fail, then at least the department will notice that the professor is useless.
That wouldn't really be fair to the students who care about their GPAs, though.
> Almost better to just have the whole class fail, then at least the department will notice that the professor is useless.
You know it's the professor themselves that adjusts the grades? Of course the professor wouldn't fail the class if, as you suggest, it would make the professor look "useless".
I get the sense that history teachers talk about how history is the most important, physics teachers talk about how physics is the most important, gender politics the same, arts the same etc...
There's incentive to keep yourself employed however useless, bloated or out of time what you're teaching is.
I'm not sure how the school plan is evaluated in different places, but i feel like for example religion in a country like Sweden where most people don't believe in it[1] should be brought down to make space for something Swedes think is important.
My sense of relief was comical and fleeting. It was replaced by anger. How was it possible that most of the students in the class did worse than I? What an absolute waste to subject us all to such nonsense.