International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Volume 2, Number 2, July 2008

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Research Article

Excerpt

The Impact of Grading on the Curve: A Simulation Analysis

Grading on the curve is a common practice in higher education. While there are many critics of the practice it still finds wide spread acceptance particularly in science classes. Advocates believe that in large classes student ability is likely to be normally distributed. If test scores are also normally distributed instructors and students tend to believe that the test reasonably measures learning and that the grades are assigned fairly. Beyond an intuitive reaction, is there evidence that normally distributed test scores appropriately distinguish among student performance? Can we be sure that there is a significant correlation between test scores and student knowledge? Testing these assumptions would be difficult using actual subjects. In this paper we use mathematical models and Monte Carlo simulation to test the assumption that normally distributed grades assign the highest grades to the students who were best prepared for an exam.

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Bios

George Kulick
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, New York, USA
kulick@lemoyne.edu

My academic background includes a M.S. in Statistics from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. in Measurement, Statistics and Evaluation from Syracuse University. Since 1988 I’ve been a member of the Business Administration department at Le Moyne College, where I teach statistics courses to both undergraduate and graduate students. I received the MBA Teacher of the Year award in 2002. I am now also the director of Le Moyne’s MBA program. I have been busily involved in curriculum matters at both the college and department levels for the past eight years. I’m particularly pleased to have contributed to the development of the college’s award winning first year academic advising and orientation program, and am currently chairing an effort to create a similarly meaningful sophomore year experience.

Ronald Wright
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, New York, USA
wright@lemoyne.edu

I am a Professor of Management Science at Le Moyne College and currently hold a grant supported Entrepreneur Professorship. My Ph.D. is in Operations Research from the University of Kentucky. My research focuses primarily on developing computer-based decision support systems and has resulted in over fifty publications dealing with applications areas that include fuel purchasing, public finance, personnel management, and evaluations of the financial and educational health of public school districts. Recently I have devoted much of my interest to pedagogical issues and am particularly interested in using computer simulations as educational tools. As a part of this effort I have written papers on using simulations to understand portfolio risk in finance classes and to understand auditing procedures in accounting classes.
Website: http://web.lemoyne.edu/~wright/index.htm

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