60 Percent of Grades at Harvard Were A's. Enough Is Enough.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/opinion/harvard-easy-a-grades.html

#Education #Academia #Grading

Harvard College will limit the number of students who can receive A grades

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/may/20/harvard-college-cap-a-grade-students

#Education #Universities #Grading

My mid-semester anti-AI ranting and raving seems to have worked! I’ve now marked two classes worth of final papers and only had one that smelled like robot feces. 🙂

Still planning to rework my process / policies around writing assignments over the summer.

#teaching #grading

#request for #help with a #math thing: A function (hopefully excel-friendly) I can use to curve scores according to workload on projects.

I grade student projects by a workload/task document: I break the project down into a couple dozen tasks, and either assign them to individuals on the teams or allow them to choose collectively. Either way, a common thing happens: one or two team members often do very little early on, and conscientious group members pick up their slack. Since I will always try to give credit for work done, this means the workload is unbalanced--that is, imagine there are 100 tasks and a 5-person team. We often end up in this situation for tasks assigned:

Jenny - 35 tasks
Johnny - 30 tasks
Jayda - 20 tasks
Magda - 10 tasks
Melvin - 5 tasks

It's not ideal, of course, but it happens. I'd like to curve (literally) grades so they are proportional to the workload. That is, Jenny should have to work less hard for an A, and Melvin should have to work very hard for an A.

I'd like a function that will turn Jenny's linear 0-100 score into a nonlinear 0-100 score where, e.g., an 80 is turned into a 92, a 90 is turned into a 98, etc. 0 is still 0 and 100 is still 100.

I'd like it to turn Melvin's linear 0-100 score into a nonlinear 0-100 score with curvature going the other way: e.g., a 90 becomes a 60, a 95 becomes an 80, a 99 becomes a 95, etc. 0 is still 0 and 100 is still 100.

I don't actually need this to scale from 0 to 100; I can adjust limits if something ends up going from 23 to 2,428 or something.

Ideas? I've played so far with stacking some inverse, logarithmic, and exponent functions, but I can't get things tweaked to do the above (I have an overly-complex function that will scale Melvin's score but not Jenny's).

Pointers/suggestions are welcome, even if they are not full solutions.

Suggestions that I should not want to do this will be taken for what they are worth; I want to do this, and it makes sense to me as a way to try to shift an unfair situation toward fairness.

I feel silly admitting defeat, but I tell myself it's just that I don't have time to figure this out (after a couple of hours not figuring it out). That is possibly just self-serving cognition.

#professor #highered #grading

How to judge "damaged" Pokémon cards in Japan: ignore the label, trust your eyes.

Ask to inspect cards under the shop's lighting. Check corners, edges, surface, and centering yourself.

Sunrise in Osaka and Tokyo recommends you look at their damaged cards and judge condition yourself. I found steal deals at nearly every shop by inspecting inventory others walked past.

#PokemonTCG #DamagedCards #Grading

Japanese "damaged" Pokémon cards are graded differently than you think.

A card with minor edge whitening that any Western seller would call Near Mint gets a "damaged" label in Japan. This creates massive arbitrage for international collectors who understand Western grading scales.

The best value for money in Japan's shops lives in the "damaged" section.

#PokemonTCG #DamagedCards #Grading