Hitler felt the "Bern"

[Xavier_Onassis]

It is really simple.

You establish what you know the students CAN learn with the three hours of study for every hour of class.
You find a book that is easily understood and require them to buy it. If they don't have a book, you don't call on them
One third of the grade is determined by them answering questions from the book. If they can do it without the book rapidly, that is okay. But they can't, mostly.

You establish precisely what you are going to cover and how grades are determined. I used  1/3 class performance, one third exams and the final, one third homework.
I allowed them to return homework corrected within two weeks. There was no reason for them not to be able to get 100% on it, because I gave them the answers in class. Of course, only about 15% of them made over 95% on the homework.
In the syllabus I told them how to calculate grades. I did this for them if they came to my office.

The pass rate varied from 40% to 75%, depending on the time they took the class. The lowest grades were for the 9:00 class. It was hard for them to make it to class so early, it seems.

I did not "curve" grades.

[Plane]

  And you did not feel mean for giving them no more than they had earned?

If you had given a better grade than they had earned this would make them happy, at least at first.

But the effects of grade inflation include that their real capability would be less and thus less valuable . The respect their diploma would bring would suffer and the leverage a diploma has on job procurement would suffer too.

I congratulate you for taking your job seriously and doing it well, no more than this is required to retire the concept of grade inflation.

But do you apply this concept to the value of the national currency?
The more it is handed over unearned the less it has real value.

When the only reason a dollar is worth something is that people are willing to do work to get them, there must be a limit somewhere on how easily they can be had without work.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I actually has a department chairman say to me. "The trouble with you, is you are trying to teach them Spanish!"

I was aghast. I said, what do you think my job is?

He said "to get them READY TO LEARN Spanish."

I don't know why he thought I had a problem.

[sirs]

So.....the lesson learned here is that grades/rules/laws/CONSTITUTION, are all designed with parameters to follow.  They are neither social contracts nor "fluid"...BY DESIGN.  It's what seperates credibility from chaos 

[Plane]

I actually has a department chairman say to me. "The trouble with you, is you are trying to teach them Spanish!"

I was aghast. I said, what do you think my job is?

He said "to get them READY TO LEARN Spanish."

I don't know why he thought I had a problem.

That is very telling.

Did he manage to make clear what he thought was a goal?

Sounds like someone lost in the details.

[Xavier_Onassis]

He was just a jackass. I was told to teach a class in the evenings at a Middle School once a week.  I pointed out that (a) our students never studied except for a class, and therefore they would not get the same out of a once a week course that met 12 times as a thrice weekly course that met 41 times, and (b) that the course did not meet for the minimum of 45 hours, since, although it was scheduled to meet from 7:00 to 10:00 PM, the janitors ran us out of the building at 9:15, thereby cutting the total class time from the 37 hours of the the MWF class to 33 hours, a reduction of 11%.

The dean did nothing about cancelling or upping the number of times the class met, so I gave the same assignments and tests and graded the students exactly the same.  3/4th of them flunked, mostly because they attended 8 or fewer classes, did not take tests missed and did not turn in assignments. The chairman said I should "give them a break" and "curve" the grades. I pointed out that to pass even half of them would be to pass them with a grade of 40%, and told him that I was not going to do this. He had already cheesed me off by giving me a schedule in which my first class was at 8:0 AM and my last was supposed to end at 10:00 PM every Monday.

Eventually, he retired. he said he was planning to take a trip to Paris, so I gave him a beautiful Guide to Paris that had a price of $49.95 on the cover. He did not know, nor did I tell him, that  I got it for $3 in a yard sale.  He was very surprised at his going away party.

Three months later, he died, I heard, of lung cancer. No one knew he was ill.

When I cleaned out my office, I found that he left a beret behind in my office, it had fallen behind a bookshelf. I gave it to Good Will.