Because I care about your education

I love studying in Sherbrooke, I really do. It's a small and peaceful city with very nice people and students from all over Quebec. The university offers excellent services and the teachers of our faculty really pour their hearts into teaching us young engineers of tomorrow.

Now I think we're all aware that many professors primarily do research and only teach because they have to. I believe this is completely fair, since they're benefiting from the universities' resources. However, when it gets to the point where teaching is seen as a chore and the students are no longer the primary focus of the teaching, there's a problem.

I really have no idea in how many universities this is happening, but I know of a certain engineering faculty at a certain Montreal-based English University where things have, in my opinion, gotten out of hand.

Is it normal for someone to fail a class? One person in a class of 100? What about 4 or 5 people? What about 25? 30? 40? 60? What about practically the whole class? I'm sure most of you out there started disagreeing around the 25 mark. Surprisingly, this kind of thing happens incredibly often!

...But grades are simply bell-curved and everyone lives on

Should this be normal? Should this be right? I think we can all agree that if a class has a failure rate of 50% (for example), something is wrong. Whether it's the teacher, the exams, or the material, something needs to be changed. Most of the time though, this isn't the case. Failing grades get curved up with a median around 60 and a majority of people pass.

While I understand how the bell curve takes exam difficulty into account and grades students based on the class performance, there is a fundamental problem when this happens in engineering: the student who got an F but got curved to a C doesn't understand the material any better. Keep in mind, these are the people that design your houses, bridges, cars and dams. They design the circuitry inside your mouse as well as the circuitry inside our airplane. They need to know their shit.

I find it repulsive how there can be "filter classes", where professors give nigh-impossible exams on purpose to curve grades so a certain percentage of students pass. I have trouble agreeing with the fact that someone with 40% can get curved to a grade that easily passes while the person who gets 25% doesn't make it to his next semester. They both did terribly and 40% doesn't exactly show much more understanding than 25%. That 15% could be anything from solving an integral to avoiding calculation errors. Not exactly the selection criteria, I'm assuming.

So what ever happened to promoting understanding? University is so much more enjoyable in a non-competitive, non-hostile environment. What's the point of having students compete against each other? It only ends up hurting them. Give students cheat sheets, make exams open-book, teach them to use the resources at their disposal. Memorizing formulas is a thing school teachers make kids do to keep them busy. It's not what our generation will be doing on the job market. So why are things this way?

My hypothesis is that universities make a lot more money filling their first semesters beyond normal capacity and only letting a smaller percentage through. The others either drop out, having already spent 1500$ on tuition; they retake the filter class for 300$ tuition and do their best; or they switch to a different program in the same university since they'll get stuff credited. Regardless, the university ends up making money off of all those students while still admitting the regular number of students into the program (2nd semester onward, of course).

Harvard of the north? Fuck that. I thought this was higher education.

-Frank

PS: And it pisses me off how the kid with McGill on his CV looks better because of its supposed "reputation" when people from other universities actually work for their 4.0+ GPA. Bleh.