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| quote: | Originally posted by mezzir
I got a fairly shitty GPA, probably in the 2.7 rangeish right now, in my second to last semester towards a degree in economics.
As for grades, grades don't measure intelligence, fuck that. I focus on learning the material. If I don't well on an assignment, but I remember and can apply it better a year later than an A student, well then who's better off? Then again, I've always been a fan of curving stuff so that the class average is a C, every time. A's should be earned, and frankly its fucking stupid to give people who just do all the work an A, right?  |
No, curved grading is ridiculous in small classes. The whole idea of curved grading is that the students determine the standards they must aspire to, rather than having the standards set for them. This is both positive and negative, because:
a) It's a fairly accurate way of gauging a person's real skills in comparison to others, and therefore in the real world.
b) If everyone included in the curve is stupid, or performs poorly, even the poorly skilled people will get marked well.
For this to succeed, the sample needs to be large, i.e 1000 people. It works in these cases. I get marked on bell curves at the moment and it's complete and utter bullshit in a class of 25 people. You should be marked on your own merits and whether your work is of good standard, not whether someone's is better than yours.
Also, to a certain degree I agree with you that grades don't measure intelligence, but I think it's a real cop out for you to pass off your poor grades for that reason. An intelligent person should be able to figure out how to get the good grades, even if the actual testing for them seems ridiculous.
It's the same with the license test; it's a ridiculous exercise which doesn't actually measure your driving ability, but if you're a good driver you should able to work out what they're after and pass anyway.
| quote: | Originally posted by Zild
Strengths and weaknesses aren't what I was talking about. I was talking about the intrinsic difficulty of a specific program compared to others. Like comparing a physics degree to a degree in women's studies. I'm sure kids who failed out of the physics program are still more intelligent than A students in women's studies. |
I think that's very condescending of you. Though I like hard science, I've always been better at social sciences. I did physics, chemistry and maths in my final year of school and passed all of them at around 70%, but my forte has always been English, History, etc. I'm sick of hearing hard scientists say they are smarter than people doing humanities. The one thing you all forget is that in maths or physics, there is always a "right" or a "wrong" answer; once you've worked it out, you either get it or you don't. In social sciences and whatnot, this same attribute does not apply, and that makes things hard too.
To say that a physics student is "more intelligent" than someone studying women's studies is erroneous, because you're obviously judging intelligence by your own biased standards. A physics student might be able to work out the mass of a planet, but placed on the street they'd probably struggle to read a bus timetable because it doesn't conform to the hard rules they've bent their lives to, or they might struggle to write grammatically correct sentences or spell properly.
On the other hand, someone doing women's studies might struggle to work out how much change they should receive after buying dinner, but plonk them in the middle of a foreign country and they'd be able to find their way home with superior interaction and problem solving skills. It's all relative.
A perfect example with which I have personal experience is architects. Architects are smart, right? They build stuff and use complex geometry and engineering. Find me an architect who can spell and I'll find you a women's studies student who is smarter than a physicist.
Lastly, I think a lot of people fail to make the distinction between being truly intelligent and simply having a good memory for facts and rote learning. In line with what mezzir said, many of the rote learners achieve good marks but are not genuinely clever.
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