Social Media Is Destroying Our Youth
I was horrified to find a Cornell University student with this [censored] on their Facebook profile:
Yup, the third time’s the charm, even when you’re a graduate student in Operations Research with another graduate degree in Physics. Social media is ruining our generation.
Fair Grading in the University Setting
When taking a course graded by a large staff, you might wonder how fair the grading is. After all, no two people grade the same way, and the criteria can be interpreted differently. Some graders are tough for syntax problems in programs, while others are more interested in style. It’s impossible to know whether they’re objective or not without data.
Fortunately, a friend who works for a University happened to have the data lying around for an introductory CS course. There were 15 graders, and 437 data points, for an average of 29 assignments and tests per grader. The course, he said, enrolls about 150 students every semester, and is the gateway into acceptance into the CS major. Without further ado, allow me to present a graph of the average grade given per grader:
The average mean grade given was 78.9; the standard deviation of grades given by each grader was 5.4, indicating that the majority of grades fell on average into a 73 – 84 point spread. The data is probably complicated by the performance of students and would require complicated multi-factor analysis, of which I know nothing, to sort it out.
N Mean SE Mean StDev 15 78.87 1.40 5.43 Minimum Q1 Median Q3 Maximum 68.50 74.50 80.80 82.90 87.10
It’s mildly reassuring that the data seems to be left-skew, indicating that graders tend away from the normal distribution in favor of slightly more lenient grading. However, the spread between the averages of the worst and best graders is a whopping 18.6 points. Should a student have to bet his grade in a critical course on which grader happens to get him? No. As long as the assignment of graders is essentially random–the case in this course–which grader does which student shouldn’t affect their grades significantly if the graders follow a normal distribution–almost the case here.
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You might have heard of the Warcraft III custom map DOTA, otherwise known as Defense of the Ancients. A particular flavour, Dota Allstars, is incredibly popular on Blizzard’s WC3 bNet servers, but getting the latest maps can be a problem because the popular distribution sites are always down. So, if you want to download the latest DOTA, this is the place to find it!