During my masters, I had a course where the average grade on every test was below 30%. Grades like this were still low, but a decent amount of the class regularly got single digit scores.
It was a survey course, but the tests were full of hyper specific things that were never even mentioned in the class. Both of the professors running the course knew this and said it was intentional, because they wanted the tests to show them who was really into the material such that they were deep diving the subject outside of class topics (I'm pretty sure they also referred high scorers to top tech employers - they never said this, but it's one of those fields where it would make sense).
They always curved grades up so a 30% was usually an A, but it made it feel like I never had any idea if I was actually learning the material, and it was probably one of the most deeply demotivating experiences I had in my entire time in school. Just very bizarre to say I aced a class despite getting what would have been a failing grade on every test.
Same, every test was a logic and reasoning test where everything was a concept not covered by the course. The idea was that fully understanding fundamental principles would allow you to reason yourself pretty close to the correct answer. I think it mostly just served to give us all extreme test anxiety.
Organic chemistry, biochemistry, any sort of chemistry at my university were just absolute chaotic battlefields of filter courses. Were their people that got Aâs? Sure. But most people were closing in on 50% and some exams had questions where the vast majority of people got it wrong than even partially correct. Courses like these arenât as much to teach as to survive and batter you down to see if youâre capable of handling the workloads in those fields, hence, filter courses.
My school in particular also had insane drama and politics between the professors so there was also no coordination at all between classes or material. We just did our best.
Quantum is not a filter course. One must get through all your stated filter courses before getting to quantum. A filter for grad school, maybe?
I agree organic chem is a solid filter course. Biochem can be difficult, but basically utilizing the jargon knowledge gained in organic. And biochem, in my opinion, is very very much a course to teach.
Yeah, sorry, I couldâve been clearer. I was very much referring to the courses I mentioned as filter courses quantum wouldnât count as that. Biochemistry is definitely very worthy as a course to teach and important to several life science disciplines, but my school treated it very much as a filter course. A lot of the professors, while kind, treated the undergrad life science courses as things to get through rather than learn from. On more than one occasion, I went to professors for help and they said donât worry about it and Iâd learn more about the subjects once I got to grad school. My school was definitely more focused on grad work than undergrad is my ultimate point.
Fair, and no apology needed. Curious what Uni you went to, as the work in the lab of my biochem professor was very relevant to the things we were learning in biochem. I was fortunate enough to be allowed access to the lab, the weekly meetings, and assist in basic stuff the lab was doing while still in undergrad.
I get the professors attitude sorta, but at the same time sounds kinda weak for all the students trying to learn, like yourself.
I was soooo sure I was going to fail organic chemistry. But I had one particular rule. GO TO CLASS. Even if I hated it and even if I thought I was going to fail. That strategy saved me more than once but by far the biggest was in organic chemistry.
O chem my teacher ended up giving everyone who attended class the week before the final a full letter grade bump. Since it was only about 1/4 of the class regularly attending at that point. Bumped me from a C+ to a B+.
I had it during COVID, so it gave us a little leeway but a lot of it was online learning, only so much you can do there. Curving saved most of us though.
For realsies, I am far from the best to answer that question. As for an attempt, it is similar in many ways to quantum physics, conceptually. The mathematical approach differs when solving equations pertinent to each field.
For chemistry, at least in so much as I could tell, the goal is to understand electrons. Specifically how they interact with other electrons. How their energy behaves. How they attract and repel things. What happens to them when they interact with light. These sort of things.
Chemical bonds are largely interactions between electrons, other electrons and protons of the atoms. Quantum formulas attempt to gain knowledge, and hopefully predictability, of these interactions.
Some days I was not convinced the professor fully knew what he was talking about. My mind was like an infant baby trying to navigate a busy international airport most of the time, it felt.
Electromagnetism is a beast of a thing. Light continues to be very complicated mathematically.
hey we passed it though! its infuriating how i now "get it" more after seeing some youtube videos on it. granted, this is because its more well known, and people have found more useful ways of conveying the concepts. when i took it, right out the gate the professor said no teacher is actually qualified to teach it. dont remember if that was before or after he said "take all the lessons and rules you know about classical physics and throw that shit out the window"
I work in academia, and the issue can be that people who want to do research are forced to give classes. Itâs regular here that you have up to 70% teaching duties, depending on the research group. They donât actually have the motivation to be a good teacher. They came with a passion for the field, and they donât understand the novice-expert gap, or what motivates students to learn and retain information.
Same situation for an algorithms course I took. Way more than mildly infuriating to study extensively, have almost no clue what youâre doing on the test, and have to sweat out the time until it comes out the professor just wrote a shit test and had to curve that 28% up to a B+ or whatever.
My professor for both dynamics and hydraulics targeted class averages on exams to be 25%. Why would he actually teach us the material? Not like dynamics is intrinsic to civil engineering or anything. I didn't learn a lick of hydraulics and still walked away with a B (if I remember correctly) because of that curve. We called him Dennis the Menace for a reason. He was a grad professor forced to teach those classes because the regular professor went on paternity leave or research leave or something. Good thing I don't work in Civil Engineering lmao
The only time I have ever seen a class average test grade go below 30% was once when a professor fumbled writing the test and accidentally made a bunch of literally unresolveable questions.
Like, for every unknown you need an known to have a resolvable equation, 2 knowns, 2 unknowns, thus 2 equations.... there is no way to solve 2 knowns 4 unkowns.
I had a computer systems course that averaged around 50% for both of its tests. I believe I got around a 60 on both. Neither were curved. The tests weren't a majority of the grade for the course, but combined they were still ~30% of the overall grade.
I have many more gripes about the course, but that was definitely the largest one.
What's sad is that I was very interested in the content for that course in the beginning, but the amount of effort it required to get even a half decent grade in the course on top of juggling 4 other classes killed my motivation for the subject.
The average grade in my college statistics course was so low that the curve pushed my mid-60s average on tests up over 100, and I ended the course with an A.
One of the professors at my college when I was studying Electrical and Computer Engineering was notorius for spending a lot of time discussing and teaching one important aspect of the chapter only to test us on something he just glassed over. This despite taking tons of notes on everything, turning n my homework on time. I thought I was the only one until other classmates brought it up. Apparently the majority of the class was doing poorly on his tests, like scoring a 30%, even the top students were doing really bad.
Physics 2 for my Uni. Yeah they beat you down saying how much the class sucked and itâs clearly our fault for not studying but weâll do this so we donât fail the whole school since itâs mandatory class.
I get that, but skimming through OPs post history, they were doing entry level Calculus a year ago. I find it very hard to believe that they are in a statistics class so advanced that this kind of grade isn't more likely to have been a product of negligence.
My elective astronomy class in my 2nd year of undergrad was this way. The teacher was so fun to listen to but he would test us on like, the entirety of humanityâs knowledge of the universe and if you got a 30% you probably needed to drop your major and switch to physics immediately.
statics*. Engineering physics course. I had a very similar experience. Consistantly got failing grades on midterm exams that got curved to C's. I took the general final which was written by the entire department and not by my professor and got an A. Worst class ever.
This is math, for me. I have dyscalculia, but nobody knew that existed back then. I'd spend literally 8+ hours after school studying for one test and it would NOT stick no matter how much I tried, new methods, people helping me etc. I'd be crying at the kitchen table because my brain was acting like Teflon, but I couldn't leave until I aced the practice equations. Morning would come before I'd get even two or three.
i would say like.. not really, i think yes in some cases you can give them the most advice you can to help them succeed o this is how i study this is how i use questions, it doesn't really mean they would do as well as you or put in as much effort as you, when i did stats i did well i got an B; 87, about an average score for my class. but i had an excellent professor, there is some classes no matter how hard you try you will ALWAYS get a 50 and lower, and you start wondering y its usually because of how you are taught.
in this case i can't reasonably say it is that; unless given the box n line graph the shows the stats for this class, but i would say there is a chance to fix this, but OP has to think about it; do you think you can REASONABLY recover from this WITHIN your known ability to, are you actually willing to sit for hours studying especially if you have like a 2/100, or do you need to retake the class with a different professor in order not to ruin gpa? which i don't think retaking a class if a bad thing if it really saves your gpa.
especially if you have that extremely low grade of a 2/100.
i dont really think anyone is stupid when it comes to academics i'm not on my high horse because in highschool i did really bad but in college i am graduating cum laude.
OP just need to study better and try to put in EXTRA effort into it.
i need people who are struggling like this to put your heart and soul in it if you know you are going to struggle because that's really the only way to get good grades, and if you struggle like me this is weeks (2 weeks at most a few hours everyday) of studying not 3 days. you need to change tactics often you need to ask your professor these questions about the exam.
some people need allot more studying and effort than the usual ones but as long as you try your best and get a high score who really cares about how much you been studying if you have a B or an A?
If they are anything like the tests I took when I was still pursuing engineering it's a string of math based questions, with each answer being dependent on the answer to the previous question. So if you get Question 1 Part A wrong, you'll get every subsequent question wrong as well. I had an exam once where I got 0/100, and technically got one of the later questions right but through a happy accident so it was still technically wrong.
Generally speaking on engineering tests, arriving at the wrong answer while still following the (mostly) correct process will get you at least some points
That's insane and so was the professor who set it up that way. I'm sorry they set your class up for failure.
In all my exams that were structured like this, the work was what was graded. If you messed up a calculation and got the wrong answer, you lost less points than if you did the wrong calculation or logic. If you got part B wrong but did everything right on C, we were still given full credit for C. In fact, every single one also had a clause of "If you couldn't answer the previous part, use 'wrong but workable answer' and keep going.
Math test so likely fill in the blank of some kind.
The answers could have been formatted in a unique way that the student didn't match, leading the system to mark it as wrong even though they are technically right.
If there are short answer questions, those tend to not give points when pushed automatically to the gradebook. They produce points after an instructor manually looks over the question. *Since the system can't grade written responses itself.
In my statics class, most of tests were setup more like physics problems where you had to show your work/steps in determining the stresses/forces and answer. There were just a few multiple choice/short answers at the beginning to cover the concepts/definitions. Only answering those would still me get 10 to 20/100.
Showing at least some correct work on the rest, even if the answer was wrong (e.g. error in math, using the right variable/math but with the wrong equation, etc.) would net a few more. No way they did the homework or studied if they only got 2.
This just bring back to the point of, we do not have enough information.
We don't know the type of questions in that test.
I do know enough professors that I am confident to say, quite a few do not do well with online work. Teachers can be horrible at technology. An example is they may not know how to set up partial credit correctly on automated questions.
For non-automated questions, the instructor would have to grade it manually then update the points.
This screen shot doesn't tell us if the instructor did so or not. There is a common setting to automatically push grades upon exam completion, even though the grade is lower than expected since it counts written responses as a 0 until the instructor changes it.
I don't think most people have trouble with the math. IME, it's people who can't make a mental model for concepts like force without motion that struggle with statics. Usually those people have gotten into a statics class because they've memorized their way through solutions to math and/or physics problems without having an understanding of what's really going on.
I went to 4 of my static classes, first day, midterm 1, midterm 2, and final. Though to be fair the professor posted incredible notes, the exams questions where pulled directly from them and it was open book/ unlimited time. But still it wasn't bad at all and just a slight continuation of concepts from physics 1.
It's just proving equilibrium if I remember right, so forces and torque and I feel like that is largely covered in other physics classes prior to this yeah?
And if it was multiple choice they would have almost had to purposefully select wrong answers. The iron is statistically guessing randomly would be better than this score
Highly depends on how that multiple choice was set up and where OP is located.
For example I can't fathom that in the US you actually get multiple choice with only 4 answer choices lol. Guessing blindly should not make you pass. It's not the purpose of a test. The last time I saw a MC test like that was elementary school.
If I saw one during university in Germany you had 10-12 options to choose from and they all were almost the same answer with very little difference, so you could not guess them, you had to do the calculations by hand and get them perfectly correct. It would not have made a difference if it was a MC test or just a free text field where you write down your answer by hand.
He said it was for a Statics course. Thereâs no way it was multiple choice. It was likely an exam with 4-6 questions that each required several pages worth of written equations and mathematical derivations.
Btw, doing an overnighter is not studying or preparing for a test. Imagine wasting an entire semester in a class not reviewing material or paying attention. Then thinking you can make it all up in the final 12 hours before the test.
2 weeks of 1 hour a day will prepare you infinitely more than an all-nighter the day of the test. Whereas 1 hour a day for the 3-4 months of the class is how you actually get an A.
Others already said it but overnighters actually make you perform worse because you will be tired. It's not real preparation, the real way is studying a short-moderate amount of time every day for weeks prior.
Im nit even joking when I say this but 20 yesrs ago I chose to do the probability section of my maths paper as one of my exams. Studied and thought it was an absolute no trainer, easy peasy.
Got a fucking 0. Turns out I REALLY misunderstood the entire concept of probability maths. Still mortified to this day
I took a calculus test on derivatives and studied pretty hard on it. I don't know if the issue was me messing up my study guide and memorizing and practicing the wrong rules, or if I just completely whiffed when it came time for the test. But since basic derivation is basically just applying those rules, having the rule wrong in my head meant that it was impossible to get a correct answer.
I got <10% of the questions right, despite studying and generally understanding the concepts I was supposed to apply. My results were all consistent with each other and the rules I was applying, but not actual derivatives of the underlying function because the rules I applied were wrong.
Yeah, "despite studying and reviewing homework." I want to know what you are calling studying and reviewing. If you went through problems start to finish and feel like you understood them, not sure how this could happen. If your homework was copied from someone else before and you "read through" thinking you could just remember some of it for the test like a reading assignment then you did not learn any of the material and the score may track...
One of my math courses in College had an average class score of 27%. Getting a C on the final, despite your previous grade guaranteed a C or higher in the class because of it.
I was always a straight A student, but I was getting like 20% on the statics section of my intro to engineering course. Part of the reason I studied humanities.
Statics is really hard, especially for the test format OP laid out - only 4 questions with, presumably, very complex force diagrams.
I remember I got like 1 point for a sailboat problem, I thought I did pretty good with gravity, buoyancy, friction through the water, wind against the sail, sail against the mast, force vector against the rudder etc. -- the only fuckin vector I got credit for was the force vector for the WIND.
It depends on the professor.... I had to take statics twice in school. Exams tended to have around 4 questions on them, and each one would be like a page or a page and a half of written work to answer the questions. If you make 1 mistake at the very beginning, no luck getting anything else correct. My first professor graded based off the final answer and I got a 30 on the first exam so decided to drop the class. When i took it again, my professor graded based on the written work, and i was getting 90's even though the final answer was off sometimes. Also, if your calculator is set in the wrong mode you could be completely screwed.
Iâve had professors who grade like a hardass and will give 0 points even for a correct answer if you didnât show your work in the exactly correct way.
They will also actively dock points for specific things, meaning itâs possible to get negative points for a single question if you both get it wrong and did something they donât like.
Itâs shit but itâs how it is, lots of professors are bad at actual teaching while also being pedantic assholes with how they grade.
Statics is absolutely a class where all these factors converge
idk man, i once got a 3.1/10 on a final paper, with the feedback being "it's not bad, it's just not good enough". This was one of the first papers we had to write in our course lmao
There are way too many professors who don't want to teach to your major, but want to teach to their major. So they'd include stuff that was never in a lecture, never in a book, never in a handout.
Why? Because fuck you for being interested in something other than pure chemistry, apparently.
Idk man, my statics class had a 60% failure rate, and that's among people who already had a full year of engineering courses at a good school, already been through calc and diff equations. These were serious students who wanted to go into engineering fields, at an expensive engineering college; no one at that level just flunks a core class for funsies. It's just a hard topic, depending on the instructor and the ordering.
If you have ever taken statics (currently taking it rn) I can see this being true. Itâs an upper level engineering course, it delves deeper into physics and involves calculus 3 concepts. I wish all I had to do to study was read a textbook but even if you practice problems sometimes concepts donât stick and maybe youâll know how to do a problem exactly like the ones youâve practiced but it can be hard to apply concepts to new problems youâve never seen before. Thatâs the issue I have at least
I work in high schools. These kids never study, rarely complete any work, have zero expectations, and graduate regardless. Teachers arenât kidding when they say these kids cannot read/write/do basic maths- they canât even complete grade school level worksheets. Anything that requires thinking is completed using ChatGPT.
Now that theyâre in college, they realize they donât know shit. Because of their high school experience, they expect to pass without putting any effort or energy into it. I guarantee OPâs version of studying is not even remotely close to actual study needed to pass.
chatgpt studied and they probably looked at it and "it made sense". Thats whats happened to an alarming number of my classmates in my engineering degree. If they're doing this bad now they need to lock the fuck in bc statics is the easy class
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u/ProfessionalRandom21 1d ago
There is no way anyone actually studied, done their homework properly get 2/100. Zero. If this is real, just gave up and go farm banana.
OP probably skimmed through the text book once before the exam.