English professor only gives out 1 A in the entire class. Ridiculous policy or what?

An English professor only giving out one A? I call BS. English is a pu$$y class, the only time you'd get one A in a class like that is when the class only has one student.

I never understood these sorts of policies. If Einstein, Newton, Tesla, and Feynman were all in a physics class together and had a prof with this mindset, 3 of them would receive a B. Meanwhile, in a different year, some schmuck not have half as bright would get the A as long as he did better than his peers. Makes no sense.

....and if Newton, Tesla, and Feynman got B's it obviously would have wrecked their careers.

There's a far greater chance that you'll benefit more from learning how to work hard to try to beat out a mere 19 other people to get what you want than from the fractional difference in your GPA that getting one B would make. Once you get into the real world there will be a lot more than 19 other people going for what you want. Learn how to scrap.

BackBayCoder wrote:

I was major engineering. Most classes gave out 2, maybe 3 A'.s It was based on standard deviations and the cutoff mathematically defined to the hundredth.

However, the liberal arts courses and grading were far easier. Each year, when the Summa Cumm Laude's (misspelled for filter) were announced, about 90% of them were psychology majors. I had to take one of said courses and it was a true cake walk. Don't feel like turning in your paper this week, how about next week or the week after that? In the engineering school work was do at a specific hour, on a specific day, or it was a zero. That's how the real world works folks.

So only one A given out? Tough nuts. You'll still score, find a job some day, and live a happy life. Get over it or pick a new area of study.

I disagree. Was pre-med with liberal arts major. Had far better gpa in pre-med courses because I just had to best everyone else. In humanities I had to beat professors' pre-conceived ideas of what an A paper looked like.

gghghghg wrote:

....and if Newton, Tesla, and Feynman got B's it obviously would have wrecked their careers.

There's a far greater chance that you'll benefit more from learning how to work hard to try to beat out a mere 19 other people to get what you want than from the fractional difference in your GPA that getting one B would make. Once you get into the real world there will be a lot more than 19 other people going for what you want. Learn how to scrap.

It's the principle, not the lack of effect it will have on them 20 years down the road. People should be recognized and fairly rewarded for their work, not given lower than deserved marks to "teach them a lesson." If a professor wants to make earning an A more difficult, they should simply make the material more difficult and students will be naturally sorted out as a result. I guess this might be kind of hard to do in a qualitative subject like writing though. Regardless, I think you're missing the point with your mindset.

gghghghg wrote:

....and if Newton, Tesla, and Feynman got B's it obviously would have wrecked their careers.

There's a far greater chance that you'll benefit more from learning how to work hard to try to beat out a mere 19 other people to get what you want than from the fractional difference in your GPA that getting one B would make. Once you get into the real world there will be a lot more than 19 other people going for what you want. Learn how to scrap.

I second this opinion. You need to adjust your attitude. When I was in school I presumed I was going to get an A on every paper. If you don't believe that it's going to happen then you must know that your writing isn't up to snuff. Seriously, ask yourself why you are so afraid. Do you know you are not an A level writer? If so, you should spend some time working on that.

I remember a friend of mine at University of Washington had a Russian Literature class with the same standards. He wrote a paper on Anna Karenina and got the A in his class. I had a history class at UW where they gave two A's out of about 300 people…I got one of them. I think these type of standards are more common than you might think. Or perhaps these professors are just bluffing to make us all work harder. I'm not a professional writer and neither is my former friend. At one time I was a pretty good writer. From this post you can see that my writing has gone to shit. You don't have to be a literary genius to pull off an A on a college paper.

Also, if your writing sucks I recommend doing a lot of reading. It does magic for your writing.

Well, if you want proof, you can ask Kyle. I did feel like I was too close of a friend to him. It made me feel like I wasn't being loyal, probably because my parents told me to never even let yourself be alone with a guy. I did develop feelings for him after my marriage ended, but I never acted on them. I think he and Gayle were better suited for each other.

I hate professors who do this. They obviously can have a better personal assessment than a rubric.

What if one year this guy actually has the worst students ever, none of which deserve to pass? Will he honestly not think he has better discretion than "one kid deserves an A"?

Why are you so unhappy?

If the grading is relative and the class is large enough,

the Gaussian distribution allows for one or several As.

If the grading is absolute, it might be fair to give

C or worse if students are crap.

OP clearly shows entitlement symptoms.

Tell the prof you're a transgendered crossdresser with ethnic confusion, write about straight white male privilege and you may not get an A, but you'll be on your way toward getting a university job teaching English one day.

Doclove wrote:

So you can't beat 19 other people?

This is the problem with the policy. It makes getting an A about beating 19 other people.

Wait until you are done with the semester. Then, regardless of grade, talk to the chair. If you aren't satisfied, then go to dean. Don't bother going higher. The problem is that faculty have the academic freedom (important concept) to grade the way they want. Obviously, deciding to give out one A is ridiculous and reflects his self-importance.

If I were a professor, I'd probably set A-quality so that in a typical year, 10-15% of students would achieve A's. But IMO it's really not a big deal. Let the Russian prof set the cutoff however he wants, quibbling about it seems petty to me.

There are two purposes to grades - letting others know how well you did, and motivating you to work hard. I think the second one is more important, because ultimately it is your skills rather than your grades that will determine your success. And this guy's rule seems to work just fine for motivation.

One time I was in a two-person class, pretty evenly matched with the other student. The professor told us that one of us would get an A and the other would get a C. He let us believe that for a month or two before he told us he was joking. lol.

It depends entirely on the type of school. At really top universities and liberal arts colleges, it's very tough to get As in the humanities. (On the other hand, it's not that hard to avoid Cs if you do your work.) Where I went to college, we had no English majors with GPAs over 3.9. Most of the summa grads were in hard sciences. It's not that science was easy; it's that it's possible to learn the material inside out and get perfect scores in science. When it comes to writing humanities papers, nobody could ever be confident that they'd gotten an A. The good students would get mostly A-minus, with a few B+ for when they "screwed up" and a few As that were mostly reserved for when you said something persuasive that the professor had never thought of before.

I'm sympathetic to your point, but I think don't think your categorical condemnation is justified. Grades are far and away the most powerful tool that teachers have to influence their students.

I think the strongest objection to the policy is that it's a hard curve that nobody outside of the class will know about, so it's theoretically possible for multiple students to do work that is truly exceptional, even by the (apparently) high standards of this professor, and yet not be rewarded. That said, an A- isn't the worst thing in the world, and the one A policy will unquestionably get the attention of the students. Depending on the kind of student, it could be a challenge that the students strive to meet.

When I was first teaching English, I would tell my students what the rough breakdown of grades had been on a particularly assignment. There were rarely more than one or two As, but I didn't rule out the possibility of more. This approach has the advantage of making people feel like they might be able to meet my standards without always being shut out of the top prize by a superstar student. On the other hand, there's a very strong subconscious desire on the part of teachers to allow grades to creep throughout the semester. We want our students to feel like they're improving. We want to feel like they're improving too. A one-A policy keeps the teacher honest.

Ultimately I used grades in a totally different way. I stopped giving grades on assignments entirely, and instead gave detailed comments, keeping copies for each assignment for my files. The final "writing grade" for the semester was made up 2 grades: one for the absolute quality of the final paper, and one for the quality of the student's effort to improve over the course of the semester. For example, a student would lose points for consistently making the same types of errors. Students who responded to commentary did better.

What I found was that not having any grades during the semester made the students very uneasy. They were forced to read the comments carefully instead of just going to the last page to see what the grade was. I also found that my office hours were suddenly jam-packed, because students wanted to make sure that they really understood what was being asked of them.