🚀 go-pugleaf

Tanya Quinn (tdquinn@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca) wrote:

> Marks are just numbers.  In most cases, they are all relative.  Most 
> courses tend to give "bell-curve" distribution type marks, so the marks 
> are relative to other students in the class, and not necessarily to other 
> classes at the same institution or a different program at a different 
> institution. 

Not at Carleton, at least not in my department.

> Standards can be different as well.  Programs at universities that let in
> a higher quality of students tend to have higher expectations of them as 
> well.  I am not making ANY comments about the quality of education at 
> Carleton, as I have no idea what the programs are like, but saying that 
> students marks improve, may say that the pace or material might be 
> actually EASIER than these students have previously been used to.  

Okay people, let's do a little math here.  Up until this year,
Carleton has had an open door policy, ie. we take students who only
have a 60% + average out of high school.  To stay in an honours
program at Carleton you need a 6 GPA, which is about a 70%.  So
obvious the two thirds of students that actually make it past first
year, in many cases have raised their average.

While I'm not saying that this is the case at Carleton, in most
education institutions in England (mostly private schools) if their
entrance standards are fairly low, they usually mark harder than
schools with higher entrance standards.

> Having gone to two different universities, Queen's and Waterloo, I DO 
> notice a big difference in courses among the two universities.  I went 
> from getting an award for 1st year calculus at Queen's, to barely passing 
> 2nd year calculus at Waterloo.
> So marks are definitely not a reflection of the quality and depth of 
> knowledge that one has obtained IMO, but a way of ranking students 
> relative to each other, based mostly on irrelevant criteria such as 
> amount of time spent following professor's instructions, or ability to 
> spit things up again, or ability to recall a small subset of knowledge 
> under pressure.  Just because one student does numerically worse than 
> another, doesn't mean they have any less understanding of the material, 
> or any less ability to apply this knowledge in the so called "real world"  
> An as far as Carleton providing a better "rate of return" this is simply 
> as measured by numbers and not quality of knowledge.

And this is why the MacLeans survey is not a good indicator of how
universities rank against each other and one of the reasons why
Carleton and Memorial University of Newfoundland (amoung others)
decided not to participate in teh survey.

Sincerely,
Michael K. Barbour                         Political Science Honours IV
Poli-Sci New University Govt (NUG) Rep.    Carleton University, Ottawa
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    e-mail -> mbarbour@chat.carleton.ca or an650@freenet.carleton.ca
    URL    -> http://chat.carleton.ca/~mbarbour
           "My purpose was a narrow and selfish one;
                        namely, the good of Newfoundland." 
- the Honourable Joseph R. Smallwood, first Premier of Newfoundland
        and last living father of Confederation
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