Grades part 1 (What's Your Failure Rate?)

Hello everyone,

What's your failure rate?

This is a question calculated to strike fear in the heart of every teacher. Well, not always fear--sometimes it strikes anger, sometimes despair, sometimes embarrassment.

The question has reference to the percentage of students in your classes that are getting fails. Presumably, if you have a lot of students failing, there is something wrong with you, so you feel fear or some other strong emotion if someone questions your rate.

Conventional wisdom suggests that, in a normal class, students will naturally fall into a curve, with the majority receiving C's. Suppose you have a class of 40. Conventional wisdom would suggest that you would normally have 4 A's, 8 B's, 16 C's, 8 D's, and 4 Fails. Sometimes called a "bell curve" because the statistics are thick in the middle and taper toward the ends, this piece of convention seems logical on its face, but is fraught with contradiction and controversy. Like most "norms," it rarely happens in a microcosm like a class, though it may reflect wide trends, and it has recently been used for racial profiling.

Even so, if your grades are heavy on the top or the bottom, you ought to examine yourself, and the need to examine your classroom can be painful.

My standard for grades has evolved over my career. Most recently, my standards were the hardest they had ever been, but I was most confident in the grades I gave. I never gave a final grade until I had had multiple communications with the student about the grade and I had made it very clear (in public) what that student needed to pass the class. I looked carefully at all my subjective scores (like essay grades), and I was willing to adjust them upward if necessary. I carefully checked students that were borderline, and called them in individually to tell them what their grades were, and what they would be without the required work.

I absolutely refused to adjust the grades in my class to accommodate any sort of artificial grading norm like a bell curve or the prevalent fear that the administration would punish me for giving too many fails (they never did). It's true that, when the time came for final grades, I would often agonize over them; and it's true that, if I made an error, I tried to make it be an error in the student's favor; but it's also true that my standards were high, and I wasn't afraid to give a fail when a student earned it.

Jeff Combe