Curve Breakers: Professor Gives As To Entire Class for Not Taking Exam

Professor Peter Frölich at Johns Hopkins University has always had an idiosyncratic grading curve. he would take the highest grade of his class and designate it as an A and then adjust every lower grade accordingly. Thus, if the highest score is 60 out of 100, 60 points is treated as 100 percent. It is an elegant curve until students discovered a sure fire why of guaranteeing perfect scores for everyone — they simply declined to answer any question making the top score 0. Notably, the professor (shown here) includes gaming as his academic focus.

The conspiracy of curve breakers was hatched in Frölich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer Science Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers. The key was to guarantee that no one gamed them as they gamed the system by at the last minute answering one question correctly. To keep everyone honest, they all stood guards on everyone else outside of the class.

The professor decided to reward the students for successfully rigging his system. However, he has changed his policy to expressly state that if “everybody has 0 points means that everybody gets 0 percent.”

Source: Inside Higher Education