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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

You either learn the material and get the questions on the tests correct, complete projects that work, write essays that make sense, etc.. or you do not.

In the case of writing & humanities often the problem is that it is a lot more difficult to tell a correct answer from an incorrect answer. It could be as subtle as the students writing not matching with the professor's political bent.

But for STEM it is way more clear. Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile should fail.

Not sure what the problem is. If the whole class is failing either the school is letting in students who don't belong, whoever taught the prerequisite classes failed to teach the students and passed them on with a curve, or the professor just didn't teach well.

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> Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile should fail.

As a former grader and TA for both math and physics, I can tell you this is not the case. I've had students get the right answer the wrong way, stumbling into the correct numeric answer with invalid or incorrect math. I've also had students get 90% of the way through a large problem only to make a simple arithmetic error that lead to the wrong numeric answer.

Which student deserves more partial credit? Or should I pass the student who made math errors but got the right answer, and fail the student who grasped the concepts but made a trivial calculation mistake?

According to my math and physics profs, the student who got the right answer the wrong way would get 100% credit, the student who didn't would get 0% if it's multiple choice (often with those common math errors from years past intentionally given as potential options), and maybe 50% or so if it was a long form answer and the class was merciful. For those long form answers, we would be given explanations on exactly how they would be graded by the lecturer and later the TA in recitation before the exam. For ochem synthesis problems, the prof would give you credit if you reached the correct intermediates at least, even if you couldn't solve the entire reaction, or the TA would take a point off for every mistake, and if the question was weighted for 8 points and you forgot 9 things, you'd get a fair zero.

These aren't shades of gray, they are just protocols you need to establish and stick with before these questions come up during grading. Then you need to stick with these protocols as department policy for decades, so your department is able to maintain the grading scale no matter who the faculty will be 50 years from now. That's the sign of a good department.

In my mind it's more nuanced than that. An answer can be mostly right but maybe someone missed a negative sign or misread their parentheses and thus failed to complete the question correctly but still understood how the question was to be completed. Should they be penalized as much as a totally blank answer? Probably not. They've demonstrated some learning and they're almost as competent as someone who didn't make the same error. And it's not an error that the course is meant to correct or teach.

That is for sure a thing but that's definitely separate from grade inflation.

The grade inflating teacher might give the person who almost got it right an A, the teacher not inflating might give that student a B.

Even in these super difficult engineering classes at ultra hard schools there are always some people getting the answers right and showing all the work correctly so everyone knows they aren't cheating.

I had some classes that were incredibly difficult where realistically maybe a bunch more of us should have failed.. the teacher scaled things up but we sure as hell did not get undeserved As.

> But for STEM it is way more clear. Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile should fail.

How hard should the problem set be? How long should students have to complete it?

As you increase the difficulty you will push down the score distribution. How do you propose to square the existence of a score distribution against the quite subjective level of "difficulty" of the work that you're setting for grading?

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