[Scotty]

67% is failing over here.  yall grade things funny over there.

67% got me a B in Calc II here.  Grading funny is hardly an Australian-exclusive funny thing.

[Dilmah G]

You guys just suffer from some grade inflation.

[qazwsx]

You call that grade inflation? obviously you haven't seen the UK system then

[Pred the Penguin]

67% would be about a C or D where I used to live.

[Klaustrophobia]

You guys just suffer from some grade inflation.

my (nuclear) reactor hydrodynamics professor would like a word with you.



although come to think of it... i got an A in that class and my average must have been somewhere in the 50-70 range.  40 was a typical exam average.

[BlueFlames]

67% is failing over here.  yall grade things funny over there.

Depends on the professor and the distribution of marks.  A 40% netted me a 'C' in Physics 240.  That was mostly because that professor realized that if he had the balls to fail everyone who couldn't do second-order PDE's in their third semester at university, then the Physics department would not have had a graduating class for 2007.

[Dark Hunter]

67% is failing over here.  yall grade things funny over there.

It's called "curving the grade", and it's pretty common at the university level. I've had several classes where a 72 netted me a respectable B, because pretty much nobody was getting A's or even high B's in the class.

In fact, it's so common that for the last tough class I had (Compiler Writing, which is also known as the "CS Department Hell Course"), the professor made it extremely clear that she was not curving the grade at all. I still passed, thank God (*shivers* I am not retaking that class...  ).

[Mongoose]

The thing that I always wondered  about grade curving was why the professors didn't simply ease up on the material, instead of frying everyone's brains and then bumping up their grades.

[Dilmah G]

Well, thank God for grade-curving at a high school level.

However I found out that due to some stupidity within my curriculum council, my standardized and moderated mark isn't counted on my leaving certificate and that instead, my D grade for Calculus stands.

****.

Time to put down for my aeronautical mathematics course.

[Dark Hunter]

The thing that I always wondered  about grade curving was why the professors didn't simply ease up on the material, instead of frying everyone's brains and then bumping up their grades.

Well, my college prides itself on challenging its students, and therefore generating highly competent graduates. If you can't keep up with the work, you obviously don't deserve to be in the college. (We do have a 60-70% dropout rate in first-year students. Seriously, the intro-level classes sometimes literally halve themselves in size over the semester. It's kinda scary.)

[Colonol Dekker]

WHITNEY ABLE <3

[deathfun]

WHITNEY ABLE <3

?

[Grizzly]

'tis someone hot, apperently. Not my style though.

[Nuke]

im consuming the last of my satanmas booze. any other consumables i received in satanmas have since been depleted.

i finally figured out how to make rage work with my joystick. some damn obscure utility that took me 4 hours to find, and some remapping and it works great. **** microsoft for forcing xinput on pc game devs over direct input. its not even a better api! and it most certainly is not reverse compatible.

[z64555]

Time to put down for my aeronautical mathematics course.

Wth is "Aeronautical mathematics?"

Sounds more like vector fields and approximations out the wazoo.

[Mongoose]

Well, my college prides itself on challenging its students, and therefore generating highly competent graduates. If you can't keep up with the work, you obviously don't deserve to be in the college.

That's all well and good, but unless you're part of the small percentage that winds up going into academia, the majority of the actual material you cover isn't going to be of any practical use in your career.  That was my experience with my physics curriculum, anyway.  I would have much rather had a more practical component to my education than have been subjected to Death By Problem Sets.

[perihelion]

I'm kind of surprised anyone would actively pursue a degree in physics without the ultimate goal of staying in academia.  Outside of universities and national labs, there is very little demand for physics majors.  And in order to be competitive in either of those arenas, you pretty much need to go all the way to the PhD + 1 or 2 post-docs.  I know there are other places for physics majors to find employment, but I'd be hard pressed to find any of them.

My engineering course work, on the other hand, is something I've had to fall back on multiple times during my work experience.  I have my design work with seals, pressure containment, and material selection that I deal with on a routine basis.  And yes, most of it was stuff that is so specific to my particular job that I had to learn the tools of the trade after I started working, but not everything.  I have also regularly run into problems outside my normal routine, so I've had to dig through my old notes and texts to find where I'd messed with that kind of scenario before.

[Nuke]

Time to put down for my aeronautical mathematics course.

Wth is "Aeronautical mathematics?"

Sounds more like vector fields and approximations out the wazoo.

probably all the aerospace crap i had to learn to attempt a flight model in scripting

[CP5670]

I'm kind of surprised anyone would actively pursue a degree in physics without the ultimate goal of staying in academia.  Outside of universities and national labs, there is very little demand for physics majors.  And in order to be competitive in either of those arenas, you pretty much need to go all the way to the PhD + 1 or 2 post-docs.  I know there are other places for physics majors to find employment, but I'd be hard pressed to find any of them.

My engineering course work, on the other hand, is something I've had to fall back on multiple times during my work experience.  I have my design work with seals, pressure containment, and material selection that I deal with on a routine basis.  And yes, most of it was stuff that is so specific to my particular job that I had to learn the tools of the trade after I started working, but not everything.  I have also regularly run into problems outside my normal routine, so I've had to dig through my old notes and texts to find where I'd messed with that kind of scenario before.

Physics majors get hired in many different industries (engineering, software, finance, consulting, etc.), but you're right that the jobs are not specifically physics jobs and they won't actually be doing physics with only a bachelor's degree. The same is true of math majors.

We have a few physics PhDs in my department at work though. They work on things like materials science and optics.

[jg18]

Just finished System Shock 2. Overall, a fantastic time, except for

Spoiler:

some frustrating battles towards the end.

Moving on to Thief.

Oh, and speaking of grades, I passed algorithms, automatically making this a good day.

Grades in graduate school are odd in their own way: for many, if not most, classes, it's not so much a curve as it is putting people into bins, with the bins usually being A, A-, B+, B, maybe B-, but grades below that are rare. In core courses, B+ is the minimum passing grade for Ph.D. students, so the B/B+ divide is the only one that people generally care about. Anything above B+ is either icing on the cake or (more likely) a sign that you worked too hard on that class and should have spent more time on your research.