In most classes in most institutions, getting a grade of 50 means, in the eyes of the institution, and often the teacher, you’ve failed, or at the very least have a lot more work to do before you’re ready to move on to learning the higher level concepts. Then, there’s that one physics class I took, where everyone’s goal was to get a 50 or better. Why? Because most of us were typically scoring 30s and 40s on our tests. And our homework scores, while quite a bit better, were not exactly what most people would call great either, hovering in the 70s and 80s.
So we all must have failed that class. Except, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, we didn’t. Now, naturally, there was a curve, and, no stranger to college grading, especially in the math and physics departments, we knew there would be a curve. One might also expect we were a lousy class, not putting in the work to do well. You would be mistaken. Instead, this class was about us applying everything we’d learned in math and physics up to the point in ways we’d never thought about before. Our tests, and even our homework, was never about regurgitating what we’d already learned and putting it back on paper. It was about applying what we learned to situations we’d never seen before. In short, this class tested true mastery of the material and our ability to think and apply our knowledge, something we’d never had to do before. And we were woefully unprepared for this.
Our professor seemed surprised by how little we understood how to apply what we learned. Frankly, we were all surprised, as we had previously thought we were doing well. But, struggling through the year, getting half the questions right was a big deal. It meant we were making progress and getting somewhere. And we learned a lot in that class, about how to think, and how apply our knowledge to more general situations and make it work for us more often than in the specific cases we were taught. And the ability to do so is incredibly valuable.
Also, a 50 turned out to be a B at the end of the year. I was pumped, because, even though my score was low, I knew I’d earned that B more than I had any other grade at college up to that point. I would bet our entire class put more effort into our work than we ever had before for this one class. We certainly spent far more time talking with each other and struggling through our work. But in the end, it was worth it, even if it felt like we were constantly getting beat down sometimes, because we learned the skills we would need to make our knowledge useful to us.
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