You are the one making fine distinctions between the words "assign" and "mark," and you are the one that wants to declare that my grading system either is or is not "grading on a curve". When I attempt to actually explain what it is that I do, you accuse me of "performing drive by assertions, without question or explanation." Maybe you really are curious, but it feels to me like you are not making an honest intellectual effort to understand what I have written, and that you are trying to rely on easily understood pigeonholes.
You, youself, have indicated it to be "on a curve" but you apparently don't like that term. I'm not trying to pigeonhole it by assigning a term but find out if it would fit a general definition. Your grading is subjective, and the grades for some papers depend on the grades on others, so that sounds like a "curve" to me (where a curve indicates that the grades are at least partially variable based on the output of others). That you are trying so hard to explain what you do while tip toeing around that wording is of interest. Exploring it isn't an attempt to pigeonhole, but investigate.
You declared without justification or evidence that most instructors use entirely objective exams consisting of multiple choice exams, and implied that this is a solution to the subjectivity built into all human systems. That seems like an answer to me.
An observation is not an answer. An observation that solves a problem is not necessarily an answer. I went through public school, then a large university. The tests were almost universally multiple choice, often Scantron (tm). Yes, even lower schools have scantron readers. Makes for interesting results, when they get hand-me-downs from larger schools updating and the lower machine is a little off. It could happen where all "e"s were incorrectly marked as wrong because of the alignment of the machine, so the post-test reviews were often quite challenging.
So, stripping away the anecdotes and personal anger, you lead a high school study group
No, I was a teacher with all the duties thereof, aside from setting the syllabus. It wasn't a study group, but I independently created homework, graded it, and lectured from the study material. By your attempt to dismiss it, you are indicating that 99% of all teachers I have do nothing in class other than lead a "study group". You probably just lead a study group. If the answers to all your questions was "yes" would it matter? Or have you already made up your mind and closed it? You are getting more argumentative with ever post now. "personal anger" Where was that again? Calling a teacher "stodgey"? That's an absurtly low barrier for anger. By that standard, you are angry with me. Are you?
How is a single payer tyrannical? At least the ones I've dealt with, you have a choice of doctor, a choice of providers, a choice of hospitals, a choice of public or private service. Are you assuming some impossible worst-case and attacking that?
It's "partisian bullshit" that was proposed by a Democrat, but based on a Republican plan? I don't get it. A good single-payer system would have been more "partisan". And there's nothing "authoritative" about a single payer system. I can vote all I like, even if I never come back.
I find it funny that you feel the need to pigeonhole me.
I'm not trying to pigeongole you. I'm trying to understand. You imply things, then clarify to the opposite of the initial implication, but when I try to drill down to figure out what you are trying to say (or what you did, if you are deliberately trying to give a different impression), is pigeonholing you. Why, because you prefer to perform drive by assertions, without question or explanation?
I am now honestly curious: what experience do you have teaching and assigning grades? You seem to think that you have solved all of these problems. How may I subscribe to your newsletter?
I have no answers. I just have more questions. Why do questions make you so uncomfortable?
I taught high school physics for one year. While I was in high school. The teacher noticed that 1/2 of the class was "above" the other (teaching physics is different whether you use algebra or calculus - reflected by when I went to college, there were seperate classes for each, and half the class had already had calculus, so many of the "complex" algebra physics were trivial if you just figured out one aspect and integrated over time, or such). So I was given the "calculus" half, and sent to another room. one semester later, another teacher complained about the arangement and the class was merged. "My" half had already completed the year's material in that one semester. I'd have kept going, if there hadn't been the complaints about us. By the stodgey economics teacher.
I have no degree in education, but was a trained tutor through college (even tutoring people in classes I've never taken, one need not know to be able to teach, though it helps), and worked a few years as an IT trainer.
I suppose that you would call this curving, but I don't see it as being nearly so black-and-white.
Why do you obejct to calling grade adjustments "curving"? Is there some negative connotation you take from that word? I personally don't have any connotations or other meanings associated with it, so I'm just curious what you think they are, as you obviously have some. Or is asking a clarifying question "pigeonholing" you again?
And if the answers can't be found in the textbook, or tests I've taken where even having a printout of the answers, one is unlikely to finish the test. What then?
If the people I voted for won, we wouldn't have had the economic troubles that lead to the economy being so shit that many people can't afford insurance, which was part of the justification for ACA. So yes, if the people I voted for won, there'd be no ACA. ACA's main problem is that it didn't go far enough. Single payer with a healthy private sector competing with it is what the best systems have. The US's is one of the worst, both before and after ACA. ACA didn't change it much at all.
And you realize that your argument is essentially stating that cars aren't real if someone talks about the cars from Fast and Furious.
The flipper cars from Fast and Furious 6 were real. They built one and intended to use stunt ramps and such to augment the flipping qualities. But the thing actually worked, and worked so well, they re-wrote the script to get more flipping in, because it was such a cool effect, and without any props or CGI.
Yes, the plot was fiction, but the cars in the movie were 100% real. The fact they were demonstrated in a work of fiction doesn't mean it wouldn't work in real life. It did. Just like the intelligence agencies do collect information from the media. That's real. Just because the most popular example is from a work of fiction doesn't make the practice fiction. It's very real.
That's why most instructors give objective tests. when the correct answer is "c", it's hard to subjectify that.
The other thing is you implied that you do grade on a curve. It's just not a set curve, but the better the others do, the worse, comparatively, the bad ones do. I've been in classes like that. The lower English classes in college were rife with that.
I don't remember the details of the question the grad student didn't answer, but one of the ones that was "easy" (but long) was - calculate the force of the light from the sun on the earth (given some constraints and distances). 4 like that in about 30 minutes.
If you don't understand the rules, how do you know they're being amused?
The way things are done tend to imply things. And the "rules" are abused when a person, well versed in the sport, can't give a rule. Like learning rugby (to watch) as an adult was frustrating. The whistle doesn't blow when someone is tackled, and you can keep fighting for the ball in the pile, but the rules around it are long and complex, and take years of playing and being coached to get them right. That's frustrating, because you can't know the rules. Even if you read the rulebook, that won't help you. You can't enter a ruck from the side, but the definition of ruck isn't clear, so you can enter from the side, so long as the ruck isn't fully formed. And forward passes aren't allowed, but you can throw the ball forward, so long as it "looks" like a backward pass.
There seems to be some disconnect between your assertion of not caring about sports, but yet you care to (1) know their rules ; and (2) to be "frustrated" by abuses of the rules.
Knowing the written rules, and frustrated by the written rules not seeming to have a strong correlation with how it's played. How does someone grow up in the US and not know the basics of a variety of sports? Most were forced to play by a parent or two.
So you make a couple payments before bankruptcy. They'd never be able to prove the intent. "I was a poor college student, and they told me 'cheap credit', but those slick professional salesmen tricked me into it." I paid off my other debt, but the rates on the credit card were higher, so I couldn't pay that off. When the intro rate expired, it went to 20%."
He was obviously a shit professor. The highest grade in the class was from someone who cheated off me. The university policy is people who take a retest must get a unique one. Someone had an excused absence for the test, and scheduled the re-test 2 days later. He went to the tutor sessions where I explained the one I got right (the only person in the class who got it right), amazingly, after he was given his test, he became the second one to get the question right. An error of laziness by the prof.
In fact, after the other guy got his test graded, the prof called me in to his office and accused me of cheating, as I did the problem in the exact same way as the other guy. I cheated by doing the test first, then, not realizing the prof was violating university policy, explained how I did it at a time and location dedicated to explaining problems. I explained how I did the problem, and he didn't press charges on me.
It was a freshman honors class. 100 students in a class, most of whom were probably valedictorians, and the prof could have been teaching them a big-fish little-pond lesson. Didn't work, just pissed off people and made them think it was unfair.
When it's a subjective grade assignment, assign is probably best. When it's an objective grade, I generally hear ir called "marking" the paper, or grading it.
And you completely dodged the implied question, were you assigning subjective grades, or objective ones? Because that does help influence proper word choice.
I don't get it, can you post it as a 30 minute how-to tutorial?
I wish people would put a transcript in the description. I can read 10x as fast as they can talk, and I get better retention reading than listening. The tutorials are often about control. You control how the user gets the information. They *must* watch. Like the flash-video ads for "one weird trick" to date, lose weight, make money, or whatever with the guy drawing as they are talking. They want to make sure you don't learn it, but try to keep you interested for 30 minutes without teaching you anything.
Even China simplified the traditional characters because they were deemed too hard to learn.
And the studies show that simplified Chinese doesn't speed learning. Taiwan doesn't have a great advantage because they use simplified, compared to China, that still uses traditional (mostly, if not officially, but I think still officially).
Since they don't have a phonetic system, when they borrow foreign words then they match the foreign pronunciation with the set of Chinese characters that have the closest pronunciation. The result is a mix of characters where some have their original symbolic meaning, and others that only stand in for their pronunciation. Think "what your name means in Chinese" party trick.
Horse gram here. A better example is karaoke. spelled "[ka] [la] OK" (with the character for ka and la used, and the Roman characters for OK).
Typing Chinese characters usually means typing out the pronunciation and then selecting the character.
Well, they'd consider it typing the pinyin. You aren't typing the pronunciation, but the transliteration. Pinyin is a code for a character, so they are typing the character, but in a code to match the keyboard. One could make a keyboard with strokes on it. But nobody cared to back when keyboards were being introduced.
How can you set a cutoff when you don't know how hard the test is? Curves are a crutch of bad teachers.
This isn't a hard line in reality -- for example the scores could come back and the instructor goes "damn, that was a lot easier/harder than I thought it was going to be" and maybe adjusts things a bit, or maybe they plan 65% to be the cutoff between two grades but then there's a cluster of scores right at 65% so they bump it a little to one side or the other -- but I think the latter is definitely an ideal to strive for.
The example I gave was poorly worded. The professor, before the test, expected 60% to get a C or better. The average score was 25%. The graduate student tutors couldn't answer some of the questions, and others took longer to work out a single problem of the 4-problem test than the entire time available for the test. My 40% earned me an A. Being in the top 5% of the class should be an A right? Even if the professor writes a "bad" test, right?
Though it was entirely possible that the point wasn't to give accurate grades, but to teach the class a lesson on effort and expectations. Scare them into fearing the tests, or whatever.
Because you are wrong by putting words in my mouth when you claim I am trying to argue against net neutrality or that I've said that net neutrality demands preference for streaming video services (aka Netflix) over other web uses. Quoting the net neutrality laws won't change your deliberate twists of my words, it will only encourage you because you'll think you convinced me that net neutrality doesn't require such preferences when I'VE NEVER SAID IT REQUIRES THEM, AND HAVE, IN FACT, SAID EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. "It would prohibit" such preferences.
You are the only one here with a reading problem. Net Neutrality would allow priority to be given to specific protocols, and throttling to be done as well. You argued with me on that point, indicating that whatever I'm describing can't possibly be "neutral". Whether your opinion is correct or not is unrelated to the facts around Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality (as proposed in Congress and implemented by FCC) allows for such preferences. That you think otherwise just exposes your ignorance. That you argue about it, while being wrong, shows your stupidity. If you weren't an idiot, then you could quote the rules to prove me wrong. You haven't because you can't. And you think that your inability to prove me wrong is proof that I'm wrong.
Curves don't work when everyone scores between 90 and 100 and are distributed down, or 0 to 10 and are all curved up. A curve works when the class is regularly distributed around the intended center. If there's a normal distribution around 60% and the intention was to have the grades normally distribute around 75%, that would be a good candidate for a curve.
And, as you mention, a class of 3 can never be "normally" distributed. Possibly a Poisson distribution, but when you have so few, you'll not get the smotheness of "normal".
None of the metrics work in all cases. "I'm 10th in my class" meant I was good. But "I'm in the bottom half of my class" is bad. And "I was 10th out of 19" just confused the heck out of them. Public school (top in the US for a number of years), with only 19 people in my graduating class. The numbers obviously don't matter that much. The lowest person in the class took 3+ AP classes as a senior. Even grades don't mean that much in such an odd environment. Thankfully my SAT was high enough to guarantee entry into a state school (always a priority because of the cost), despite my location in the worst measured class rank. But then, even the lowest SAT score in the class was above national average. Only two perfect scores of the 19, though.
I know other people from other schools with grades like 5.5 on a 4.0 scale. Honors classes were 5-point scale, and AP were on a 6-point scale, and weighting was given to later years to erase earlir mistakes so scores of the all honors/AP group were absurd. Most times they got listed as 4.0, so about half the school was listed with a 4.0, and the points above 4.0 were mainly used for ranking within the class.
Unless there is a once-in-a millenium statistical abberation, that's exactly how it works. And if that abberation manifests, then you change the system to something more fair. Why is that so hard to understand?
Assigning them? Most tests these days are quantitative, not qualitative, and the grades are "earned" with correct answers, not assigned. There's not much wiggle room in the grade assignments when the tests are purely quantitative.
Filler are classes unrelated to the core. For an art major, art history isn't filler. Math would be. For a math major, math wouldn't be a filler, art history would be. It seems pretty straight-foreward. Who would decide? The accreditation board. It doesn't seem like a hard problem.
The physicist's math grade is different from the chemist's math grade is different from the engineer's math grade even if they deliver the same exam. How on earth should an employer figure out how who is best at math when you can't even keep a consistant scale in one university?
What job has a chemist, engineer and physicist competing against each other? Only the ones that don't care what the grades were. Would you like fries with that?
Slashdot Mirror
You are the one making fine distinctions between the words "assign" and "mark," and you are the one that wants to declare that my grading system either is or is not "grading on a curve". When I attempt to actually explain what it is that I do, you accuse me of "performing drive by assertions, without question or explanation." Maybe you really are curious, but it feels to me like you are not making an honest intellectual effort to understand what I have written, and that you are trying to rely on easily understood pigeonholes.
You, youself, have indicated it to be "on a curve" but you apparently don't like that term. I'm not trying to pigeonhole it by assigning a term but find out if it would fit a general definition. Your grading is subjective, and the grades for some papers depend on the grades on others, so that sounds like a "curve" to me (where a curve indicates that the grades are at least partially variable based on the output of others). That you are trying so hard to explain what you do while tip toeing around that wording is of interest. Exploring it isn't an attempt to pigeonhole, but investigate.
You declared without justification or evidence that most instructors use entirely objective exams consisting of multiple choice exams, and implied that this is a solution to the subjectivity built into all human systems. That seems like an answer to me.
An observation is not an answer. An observation that solves a problem is not necessarily an answer. I went through public school, then a large university. The tests were almost universally multiple choice, often Scantron (tm). Yes, even lower schools have scantron readers. Makes for interesting results, when they get hand-me-downs from larger schools updating and the lower machine is a little off. It could happen where all "e"s were incorrectly marked as wrong because of the alignment of the machine, so the post-test reviews were often quite challenging.
So, stripping away the anecdotes and personal anger, you lead a high school study group
No, I was a teacher with all the duties thereof, aside from setting the syllabus. It wasn't a study group, but I independently created homework, graded it, and lectured from the study material. By your attempt to dismiss it, you are indicating that 99% of all teachers I have do nothing in class other than lead a "study group". You probably just lead a study group. If the answers to all your questions was "yes" would it matter? Or have you already made up your mind and closed it? You are getting more argumentative with ever post now. "personal anger" Where was that again? Calling a teacher "stodgey"? That's an absurtly low barrier for anger. By that standard, you are angry with me. Are you?
How is a single payer tyrannical? At least the ones I've dealt with, you have a choice of doctor, a choice of providers, a choice of hospitals, a choice of public or private service. Are you assuming some impossible worst-case and attacking that?
It's "partisian bullshit" that was proposed by a Democrat, but based on a Republican plan? I don't get it. A good single-payer system would have been more "partisan". And there's nothing "authoritative" about a single payer system. I can vote all I like, even if I never come back.
I find it funny that you feel the need to pigeonhole me.
I'm not trying to pigeongole you. I'm trying to understand. You imply things, then clarify to the opposite of the initial implication, but when I try to drill down to figure out what you are trying to say (or what you did, if you are deliberately trying to give a different impression), is pigeonholing you. Why, because you prefer to perform drive by assertions, without question or explanation?
I am now honestly curious: what experience do you have teaching and assigning grades? You seem to think that you have solved all of these problems. How may I subscribe to your newsletter?
I have no answers. I just have more questions. Why do questions make you so uncomfortable?
I taught high school physics for one year. While I was in high school. The teacher noticed that 1/2 of the class was "above" the other (teaching physics is different whether you use algebra or calculus - reflected by when I went to college, there were seperate classes for each, and half the class had already had calculus, so many of the "complex" algebra physics were trivial if you just figured out one aspect and integrated over time, or such). So I was given the "calculus" half, and sent to another room. one semester later, another teacher complained about the arangement and the class was merged. "My" half had already completed the year's material in that one semester. I'd have kept going, if there hadn't been the complaints about us. By the stodgey economics teacher.
I have no degree in education, but was a trained tutor through college (even tutoring people in classes I've never taken, one need not know to be able to teach, though it helps), and worked a few years as an IT trainer.
I suppose that you would call this curving, but I don't see it as being nearly so black-and-white.
Why do you obejct to calling grade adjustments "curving"? Is there some negative connotation you take from that word? I personally don't have any connotations or other meanings associated with it, so I'm just curious what you think they are, as you obviously have some. Or is asking a clarifying question "pigeonholing" you again?
And if the answers can't be found in the textbook, or tests I've taken where even having a printout of the answers, one is unlikely to finish the test. What then?
If the people I voted for won, we wouldn't have had the economic troubles that lead to the economy being so shit that many people can't afford insurance, which was part of the justification for ACA. So yes, if the people I voted for won, there'd be no ACA. ACA's main problem is that it didn't go far enough. Single payer with a healthy private sector competing with it is what the best systems have. The US's is one of the worst, both before and after ACA. ACA didn't change it much at all.
Tom Clancy didn't think so.
And you realize that your argument is essentially stating that cars aren't real if someone talks about the cars from Fast and Furious.
The flipper cars from Fast and Furious 6 were real. They built one and intended to use stunt ramps and such to augment the flipping qualities. But the thing actually worked, and worked so well, they re-wrote the script to get more flipping in, because it was such a cool effect, and without any props or CGI.
Yes, the plot was fiction, but the cars in the movie were 100% real. The fact they were demonstrated in a work of fiction doesn't mean it wouldn't work in real life. It did. Just like the intelligence agencies do collect information from the media. That's real. Just because the most popular example is from a work of fiction doesn't make the practice fiction. It's very real.
That's why most instructors give objective tests. when the correct answer is "c", it's hard to subjectify that.
The other thing is you implied that you do grade on a curve. It's just not a set curve, but the better the others do, the worse, comparatively, the bad ones do. I've been in classes like that. The lower English classes in college were rife with that.
I don't remember the details of the question the grad student didn't answer, but one of the ones that was "easy" (but long) was - calculate the force of the light from the sun on the earth (given some constraints and distances). 4 like that in about 30 minutes.
If you don't understand the rules, how do you know they're being amused?
The way things are done tend to imply things. And the "rules" are abused when a person, well versed in the sport, can't give a rule. Like learning rugby (to watch) as an adult was frustrating. The whistle doesn't blow when someone is tackled, and you can keep fighting for the ball in the pile, but the rules around it are long and complex, and take years of playing and being coached to get them right. That's frustrating, because you can't know the rules. Even if you read the rulebook, that won't help you. You can't enter a ruck from the side, but the definition of ruck isn't clear, so you can enter from the side, so long as the ruck isn't fully formed. And forward passes aren't allowed, but you can throw the ball forward, so long as it "looks" like a backward pass.
There seems to be some disconnect between your assertion of not caring about sports, but yet you care to (1) know their rules ; and (2) to be "frustrated" by abuses of the rules.
Knowing the written rules, and frustrated by the written rules not seeming to have a strong correlation with how it's played. How does someone grow up in the US and not know the basics of a variety of sports? Most were forced to play by a parent or two.
So you make a couple payments before bankruptcy. They'd never be able to prove the intent. "I was a poor college student, and they told me 'cheap credit', but those slick professional salesmen tricked me into it." I paid off my other debt, but the rates on the credit card were higher, so I couldn't pay that off. When the intro rate expired, it went to 20%."
He was obviously a shit professor. The highest grade in the class was from someone who cheated off me. The university policy is people who take a retest must get a unique one. Someone had an excused absence for the test, and scheduled the re-test 2 days later. He went to the tutor sessions where I explained the one I got right (the only person in the class who got it right), amazingly, after he was given his test, he became the second one to get the question right. An error of laziness by the prof.
In fact, after the other guy got his test graded, the prof called me in to his office and accused me of cheating, as I did the problem in the exact same way as the other guy. I cheated by doing the test first, then, not realizing the prof was violating university policy, explained how I did it at a time and location dedicated to explaining problems. I explained how I did the problem, and he didn't press charges on me.
It was a freshman honors class. 100 students in a class, most of whom were probably valedictorians, and the prof could have been teaching them a big-fish little-pond lesson. Didn't work, just pissed off people and made them think it was unfair.
When it's a subjective grade assignment, assign is probably best. When it's an objective grade, I generally hear ir called "marking" the paper, or grading it.
And you completely dodged the implied question, were you assigning subjective grades, or objective ones? Because that does help influence proper word choice.
A math major working in crypto needs art history why?
I don't get it, can you post it as a 30 minute how-to tutorial?
I wish people would put a transcript in the description. I can read 10x as fast as they can talk, and I get better retention reading than listening. The tutorials are often about control. You control how the user gets the information. They *must* watch. Like the flash-video ads for "one weird trick" to date, lose weight, make money, or whatever with the guy drawing as they are talking. They want to make sure you don't learn it, but try to keep you interested for 30 minutes without teaching you anything.
Even China simplified the traditional characters because they were deemed too hard to learn.
And the studies show that simplified Chinese doesn't speed learning. Taiwan doesn't have a great advantage because they use simplified, compared to China, that still uses traditional (mostly, if not officially, but I think still officially).
Since they don't have a phonetic system, when they borrow foreign words then they match the foreign pronunciation with the set of Chinese characters that have the closest pronunciation. The result is a mix of characters where some have their original symbolic meaning, and others that only stand in for their pronunciation. Think "what your name means in Chinese" party trick.
Horse gram here. A better example is karaoke. spelled "[ka] [la] OK" (with the character for ka and la used, and the Roman characters for OK).
Typing Chinese characters usually means typing out the pronunciation and then selecting the character.
Well, they'd consider it typing the pinyin. You aren't typing the pronunciation, but the transliteration. Pinyin is a code for a character, so they are typing the character, but in a code to match the keyboard. One could make a keyboard with strokes on it. But nobody cared to back when keyboards were being introduced.
This isn't a hard line in reality -- for example the scores could come back and the instructor goes "damn, that was a lot easier/harder than I thought it was going to be" and maybe adjusts things a bit, or maybe they plan 65% to be the cutoff between two grades but then there's a cluster of scores right at 65% so they bump it a little to one side or the other -- but I think the latter is definitely an ideal to strive for.
The example I gave was poorly worded. The professor, before the test, expected 60% to get a C or better. The average score was 25%. The graduate student tutors couldn't answer some of the questions, and others took longer to work out a single problem of the 4-problem test than the entire time available for the test. My 40% earned me an A. Being in the top 5% of the class should be an A right? Even if the professor writes a "bad" test, right?
Though it was entirely possible that the point wasn't to give accurate grades, but to teach the class a lesson on effort and expectations. Scare them into fearing the tests, or whatever.
Because you are wrong by putting words in my mouth when you claim I am trying to argue against net neutrality or that I've said that net neutrality demands preference for streaming video services (aka Netflix) over other web uses. Quoting the net neutrality laws won't change your deliberate twists of my words, it will only encourage you because you'll think you convinced me that net neutrality doesn't require such preferences when I'VE NEVER SAID IT REQUIRES THEM, AND HAVE, IN FACT, SAID EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. "It would prohibit" such preferences.
You are the only one here with a reading problem. Net Neutrality would allow priority to be given to specific protocols, and throttling to be done as well. You argued with me on that point, indicating that whatever I'm describing can't possibly be "neutral". Whether your opinion is correct or not is unrelated to the facts around Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality (as proposed in Congress and implemented by FCC) allows for such preferences. That you think otherwise just exposes your ignorance. That you argue about it, while being wrong, shows your stupidity. If you weren't an idiot, then you could quote the rules to prove me wrong. You haven't because you can't. And you think that your inability to prove me wrong is proof that I'm wrong.
Curves don't work when everyone scores between 90 and 100 and are distributed down, or 0 to 10 and are all curved up. A curve works when the class is regularly distributed around the intended center. If there's a normal distribution around 60% and the intention was to have the grades normally distribute around 75%, that would be a good candidate for a curve.
And, as you mention, a class of 3 can never be "normally" distributed. Possibly a Poisson distribution, but when you have so few, you'll not get the smotheness of "normal".
None of the metrics work in all cases. "I'm 10th in my class" meant I was good. But "I'm in the bottom half of my class" is bad. And "I was 10th out of 19" just confused the heck out of them. Public school (top in the US for a number of years), with only 19 people in my graduating class. The numbers obviously don't matter that much. The lowest person in the class took 3+ AP classes as a senior. Even grades don't mean that much in such an odd environment. Thankfully my SAT was high enough to guarantee entry into a state school (always a priority because of the cost), despite my location in the worst measured class rank. But then, even the lowest SAT score in the class was above national average. Only two perfect scores of the 19, though.
I know other people from other schools with grades like 5.5 on a 4.0 scale. Honors classes were 5-point scale, and AP were on a 6-point scale, and weighting was given to later years to erase earlir mistakes so scores of the all honors/AP group were absurd. Most times they got listed as 4.0, so about half the school was listed with a 4.0, and the points above 4.0 were mainly used for ranking within the class.
Unless there is a once-in-a millenium statistical abberation, that's exactly how it works. And if that abberation manifests, then you change the system to something more fair. Why is that so hard to understand?
Personally, when I am assigning grades,
Assigning them? Most tests these days are quantitative, not qualitative, and the grades are "earned" with correct answers, not assigned. There's not much wiggle room in the grade assignments when the tests are purely quantitative.
Filler are classes unrelated to the core. For an art major, art history isn't filler. Math would be. For a math major, math wouldn't be a filler, art history would be. It seems pretty straight-foreward. Who would decide? The accreditation board. It doesn't seem like a hard problem.
The physicist's math grade is different from the chemist's math grade is different from the engineer's math grade even if they deliver the same exam. How on earth should an employer figure out how who is best at math when you can't even keep a consistant scale in one university?
What job has a chemist, engineer and physicist competing against each other? Only the ones that don't care what the grades were. Would you like fries with that?
And how do you feel about a class I was in where my 40% was an A (the average was in the 20s)? Grade inflation, and everyone should have failed?