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I'm jealous of curves and more tests than a final.

In Germany there are no curves. Some professors even say at the beginning of the semester that usually about 50% (or whatever value applies) of people fail this class - they use those classes to weed out the lazy students. For most classes you have one final and that is your grade.
 
I never calculated my major GPA. Do I count just CS classes? Or all classes required for my major (including math/physics/etc)? Do I exclude the CS classes that I took for honors credit that didn't count towards my major?

I think my major GPA is lower than my non-major GPA ha. CS is hard man.

My school listed both our major GPA and our Overall GPA on our "Arrow Sheets". So obviously I put the higher GPA first, then the lower one on my resume ;) But yes, I think that's what you do, all the required classes for your major. (So for mine it was all the studio art classes, photography, sculpture, art history, and computer art classes that fit into the major. Leave out the liberal classes and any overflow classes you took that were in the degree program but exceeded the maximum number of credits.)

And yeah it is, and I'm sure you took way more difficult classes than I did :P But in the back of my mind I'm always like "If I could get through CS classes, I can fer-sure handle this." My brother goes to the same school I did and he decided last semester he wanted to do the CS minor, too. (His major is Theatre Production and he does all of the bckstage stuff for theater events and concerts - the sound, lighting, etc. So it would definitely help him.) I'm anxiously waiting for him to hit the upper level classes so someone in my family can understand why I complained so much lol.

Thanks! That is definately her. Her grade in this one class does not reflect what kind of student she is. She has spent hours on this class - And in her eyes she is a failure if she doesn't pass :( I tell her look at all your other grades. She is the hardest on herself. She is great at math and statistics and most everything else she takes, chemistry - not so much. She said her brain is just not wired for it lol. It is very hard to watch her be so hard on herself, but it is part of learning and growing as an adult and person I told her. We sat down and planned out different things to do in worst case scenerio - and she seemed better having a plan to go forward whatever happens. I have told her if you do your best that is all you can do - things happen, we will figure it out :) and keep going.

She sounds a bit like me. Perfectionist? It's easy to focus on and over analyze the one thing that went wrong and ignore all of the great things you've accomplished. I wish her the best of luck! :)
 
I'm jealous of curves and more tests than a final.

In Germany there are no curves. Some professors even say at the beginning of the semester that usually about 50% (or whatever value applies) of people fail this class - they use those classes to weed out the lazy students. For most classes you have one final and that is your grade.

I'm jealous of the amount of money you DON'T have to pay to go to school. I'd take your grading system over our costs any day.
 
My school listed both our major GPA and our Overall GPA on our "Arrow Sheets". So obviously I put the higher GPA first, then the lower one on my resume ;) But yes, I think that's what you do, all the required classes for your major. (So for mine it was all the studio art classes, photography, sculpture, art history, and computer art classes that fit into the major. Leave out the liberal classes and any overflow classes you took that were in the degree program but exceeded the maximum number of credits.)

And yeah it is, and I'm sure you took way more difficult classes than I did :p But in the back of my mind I'm always like "If I could get through CS classes, I can fer-sure handle this." My brother goes to the same school I did and he decided last semester he wanted to do the CS minor, too. (His major is Theatre Production and he does all of the bckstage stuff for theater events and concerts - the sound, lighting, etc. So it would definitely help him.) I'm anxiously waiting for him to hit the upper level classes so someone in my family can understand why I complained so much lol.



She sounds a bit like me. Perfectionist? It's easy to focus on and over analyze the one thing that went wrong and ignore all of the great things you've accomplished. I wish her the best of luck! :)
Oh yes she is! :) Cheer, School - life in general, pretty much sums it up! Thank-you!
 
It's generally unavoidable in a lot of engineering-type majors where a 60 on an exam is a good grade. That's been my experience anyway.

Well it's not completely unavoidable, because both my schools did it, and people do graduate from them. Including engineering.

I mean, I was in nursing school. The classes weren't exactly easy. It's not like I was in English 111 wanting a curve. A 60 in classes like pharmacology, organic chem, and microbiology is also normal (or high, actually). We had quite a few tests where the entire class failed. No curve. Just, "Well, you're not going to go work in a hospital without learning this material. So work harder."

My microbiology class, only 2 of us got higher than a C. No one got an A. Out of 39 people, only 11 passed (I'm including D as passing, even though they had to retake it), and only 7 moved on in the program (the 7 of us that got higher than a D). She still has a job, and no one says anything except, "Yeah. That class is tough. You kind of have to devote your life to it."

Obviously it was a small school, so there weren't 500 kids taking the class. But they would have let us all fail if we had failed.

I guess I just don't understand it because I've never had a grade curved in my life. I'm just a believer in: If you don't know this stuff, then you can't have an A. An A implies that you know this material and are ready for more, and that is not the case if you got a 57 on this test. (regardless of whether it's the teacher's fault or the student's, the point is, you don't know the material.)

Like I said, I genuinely didn't even know there were still schools that curved grades.
 
Well it's not completely unavoidable, because both my schools did it, and people do graduate from them. Including engineering.

I mean, I was in nursing school. The classes weren't exactly easy. It's not like I was in English 111 wanting a curve. A 60 in classes like pharmacology, organic chem, and microbiology is also normal (or high, actually). We had quite a few tests where the entire class failed. No curve. Just, "Well, you're not going to go work in a hospital without learning this material. So work harder."

My microbiology class, only 2 of us got higher than a C. No one got an A. Out of 39 people, only 11 passed (I'm including D as passing, even though they had to retake it), and only 7 moved on in the program (the 7 of us that got higher than a D). She still has a job, and no one says anything except, "Yeah. That class is tough. You kind of have to devote your life to it."

Obviously it was a small school, so there weren't 500 kids taking the class. But they would have let us all fail if we had failed.

I guess I just don't understand it because I've never had a grade curved in my life. I'm just a believer in: If you don't know this stuff, then you can't have an A. An A implies that you know this material and are ready for more, and that is not the case if you got a 57 on this test. (regardless of whether it's the teacher's fault or the student's, the point is, you don't know the material.)

Like I said, I genuinely didn't even know there were still schools that curved grades.

I didn't mean to imply that only "easy" majors don't grade on a curve. My sister was a nursing major and I don't think that they had a curve. But most people I know in engineering at various schools had one. I don't think my math classes did, but my CS ones definitely did. The idea that curves would be banned is weird to me.

There are certain majors where giving a written test is actually a terrible way of testing how well you know the material (just like most programming job interviews are generally terrible ways of telling how well someone can program). But they don't have a choice but to give them.
 
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I didn't mean to imply that only "easy" majors don't grade on a curve. My sister was a nursing major and I don't think that they had a curve. But most people I know in engineering at various schools had one. I don't think my math classes did, but my CS ones definitely did. The idea that curves would be banned is weird to me.

I'm definitely jealous of these schools that have it! I would have loved to have my grades curved.

My GPA (and my soul) took a pretty big hit from what I call "the big 4" - organic chemistry, microbiology, pharmacology, and A&P II. A&P is the only one I managed an A in. And I had to take a leave of absence from my job to manage the B's that I did get. I wish each of them was 6 credits, so you could just take two at a time and have that be your entire course load. I know you'd never graduate at that rate, but I'm 41 and still haven't graduated anyway [emoji2]
 
I'm definitely jealous of these schools that have it! I would have loved to have my grades curved.

My GPA (and my soul) took a pretty big hit from what I call "the big 4" - organic chemistry, microbiology, pharmacology, and A&P II. A&P is the only one I managed an A in. And I had to take a leave of absence from my job to manage the B's that I did get. I wish each of them was 6 credits, so you could just take two at a time and have that be your entire course load. I know you'd never graduate at that rate, but I'm 41 and still haven't graduated anyway [emoji2]

For what it's worth, I have some friends who took Organic Chemistry and I don't think they were graded on a curve, probably the same for the other classes you mentioned. I don't know if it's a teacher by teacher, or college by college rule (within the university), but it wasn't a University rule to grade that way - like I said, giving tests in CS is a terrible way of assessing knowledge. I just know it was more prevalent in some majors than others. I can't remember if my math classes were graded that way.

I'm taking grad classes now and you have 5 years to complete it. I have to take 1 class a semester without a break basically to finish in time (10 classes + thesis). It's not a big deal I suppose, but two in a semester on top of working 10 hours a day would probably be too much for me (plus the amount my employer reimburses only pays for just over 2 classes a year). You don't realize how much work it is when you're not 18 with no other responsibilities lol.

ETA: Just calculated my major GPA in reference to an earlier post and it's about .08 lower than my cumulative GPA.
 
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Well it's not completely unavoidable, because both my schools did it, and people do graduate from them. Including engineering.

I mean, I was in nursing school. The classes weren't exactly easy. It's not like I was in English 111 wanting a curve. A 60 in classes like pharmacology, organic chem, and microbiology is also normal (or high, actually). We had quite a few tests where the entire class failed. No curve. Just, "Well, you're not going to go work in a hospital without learning this material. So work harder."

My microbiology class, only 2 of us got higher than a C. No one got an A. Out of 39 people, only 11 passed (I'm including D as passing, even though they had to retake it), and only 7 moved on in the program (the 7 of us that got higher than a D). She still has a job, and no one says anything except, "Yeah. That class is tough. You kind of have to devote your life to it."

Obviously it was a small school, so there weren't 500 kids taking the class. But they would have let us all fail if we had failed.

I guess I just don't understand it because I've never had a grade curved in my life. I'm just a believer in: If you don't know this stuff, then you can't have an A. An A implies that you know this material and are ready for more, and that is not the case if you got a 57 on this test. (regardless of whether it's the teacher's fault or the student's, the point is, you don't know the material.)

Like I said, I genuinely didn't even know there were still schools that curved grades.
I went to nursing school also - and am an RN - I wont say how long ago lol - the class sizes were small - only 40 in my program. If you did not pass the class, you re-took it. No one was passed if they did not pass. I understand what you are saying, but in classes like chem they use online materials and programs and professors don't always "teach" the material. Some classes have 400 plus students - my daughter's biology lab was actually online -Then you are tested on material that may have not even been covered in class. Some classes use TA's. Some of the tests are department wide tests - and who knows if it was all covered. There is so much material to learn in a short amount of time. I am not making excuses - I am saying how it is in some of the harder classes and why they use a curve or the class would fail all the time. I went old school, professors taught - we had textbooks we opened and actually learned from at times. Not all her classes do.
 
my daughter's biology lab was actually online .

Oh. My. God.

I'm so old... I can't even imagine this. That sounds impossible to me!

* And congrats on being an RN! I know from experience how difficult that is, so I'm always super impressed with people who finish nursing school. I couldn't pay for school, so I had to drop out, but even when I went back I switched majors. Nursing school is no joke.
 
I'm so pissed right now! We're having a huge storm here in the north bay and every single public school has closed, but my college won't. We share a campus with a high school (community college probs) and they're closed due to flooding, but the college still refuses.

People here don't know how to drive in weather like this, and my campus has a ton of 200+ year old oak trees. One of the larger trees fell over in a much smaller storm this year, so I'm really worried that one is going to fall on someone or a car or building.
 
Oh. My. God.

I'm so old... I can't even imagine this. That sounds impossible to me!

* And congrats on being an RN! I know from experience how difficult that is, so I'm always super impressed with people who finish nursing school. I couldn't pay for school, so I had to drop out, but even when I went back I switched majors. Nursing school is no joke.

Oh. My. God.

I'm so old... I can't even imagine this. That sounds impossible to me!

* And congrats on being an RN! I know from experience how difficult that is, so I'm always super impressed with people who finish nursing school. I couldn't pay for school, so I had to drop out, but even when I went back I switched majors. Nursing school is no joke.

I know - she had bio with lab this semester so I am thinking going into an actual lab - but no - I didn't even know that was an option..

Thanks :) I applied to a program here that only accepted 40 students at a time, I was on a waiting list for a little while, then got in. I was very fortunate I did not have to pay at all. The school and program was based at a local hospital and we were to work for 2 years for them when we graduated. They ended up having too many nurses then - they made this deal when there was a big nursing shortage, so they had alot of nurses and then said we did not have to work at the hospital if we did not want to - so I chose not to. I got married and pregnant while in nursing school so did not want shift work at the time. I worked for an Internal Medicine Doctor as my first job - he taught me alot about the Kidneys, and Dialysis. From there I went to home health and did that for a long time - I was young and naive - going into some pretty bad neighborhoods - which I would not do today lol. I have also been a nurse at a Foster Care group home and currently work (have been the last 12 years) at an Elem School which I love :). I wanted the schedule to be able to spend time with my kids and their activites.
 
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