While I rarely employ curves on exams in “traditional” math classes, Statistics is a very special beast. And in AP Stat, I’ve explored a variety of flavors, including (but not limited to):
- Gaussian curve (a.k.a., “bell curve”)
- Shift by a constant (i.e., add 5 points to each score)
- Add 5% or 10% of current HW average to each test score1
- The “eBay curve”2
- Square root curve3
- The “20% discount”4 and its close relative, the “25% discount”
- …and my personal favorite: the “you get exactly the score that you earned” curve. In other words: NO CURVE.5
The fact that I’m blogging about curves the day that I graded our 2nd major exam over statistical inference?
Total coincidence, of course.
- The idea being: reward students for practice / effort. Sure, we can debate the merits of this one… [↩]
- Think: different rules for calculating fees based on the price range of the product. Basically a piecewise function of sorts… [↩]
- This one doesn’t make much sense to me if I think about it too long… [↩]
- Students “get back” 20% of the points they missed. I believe a student once referred to this as a “Communist curve”… lol [↩]
- Yeah, this one is definitely NOT a crowd favorite among students. [↩]