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Why does the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences give out so few A's???

TalkSFU13
edited April 2013 in General
According to the 2011/12 grades report, only 17.9% A's are given out in lower division art courses. Compare it with others:

% Of Lower Division A's:
Applied Sicence - 23.5%
Business - 13.8%
Communications - 30.3%
Education - 31.9%
Environment - 21.2%
Health Science - 30.1%
Sciecnce - 20.5%
University total - 20.7%

Only three lower division non-art subjects recieve less A's: business, earth science, and mathematics.

Criminology, Psychology, Philsophy, Linguistics, English, Foundations of Acadaemic Literacy, Economics and Asia-Canada studies all recieve under 16%...

Comments

  • smythsfu
    edited April 2013
    I know from being in CRIM its difficult to get an A. Its just the messed up grading scale.. 
  • MXC
    Maybe cuz this is SFU! D:
  • ryan
    Well there are all sorts of possible reasons. One obvious one is the fact that many lower division FASS courses are curved. This caps the maximum number of kids who can get A's. For proof of this take a look at the difference between grades awarded each year. econ for example only has a variation of about 2-3% between grades awarded each year.

    Other possible reasons are thing like the subjective nature of many FASS courses, or perhaps the lower entry requirements leading to "less qualified" students.

    Whatever you do, don't try to turn this into proof that any FASS program is harder than any other non-FASS program. Grade distributions do not necessarily equate to difficulty.
  • smythsfu
    edited April 2013
    CRIM isn't curved so its probably the 85% cutoff for an A- that is why criminology is only 16%
  • TalkSFU13
    I never said arts/social sciences is harder? I'm not even the faculty of arts... I'm a KIN major. I just wanted to know why arts has the lowest handout of A's, minus business 

  • SFUgirl00
    It obviously has nothing to do with lower entry requirements like Ryan said. If it did, then communications/fine arts wouldn't give out the most A's (30%) because communication, arts & technology is the faculty with the lowest admission average/requirement. 

    It just has to do with the grading scale and curving of art courses plus the fact that some art courses are actually hard, like economics as you mentioned, for example 


  • ryan
    85% cut off for an A- is used by many faculties. In some courses it is even higher. When I took EDUC 465 an A+ was 97%, with the other A ranges decreasing by like 3% each from there.

    And communications actually only gives out an average of about 17% A's. The average above is inflated by programs like IAT (38% A's last year, has been as high as 49.2% ).

    Im not trying to say FASS kids are dumb, I'm merely trying to hypothesize potential ideas. I have no idea why marks are lower.
  • BeAnBeAnBeAnBeAn
    Because Arts is the easiest thing you can get into so a lot of the mediocre students from high school get in and don't get A's.
  • smythsfu
    ^Sfugirl00 just talked about that. Why doesnt the communications, arts and technology faculty give out the least amount of A's then since thats the easiest faculty to get in 
  • BeAnBeAnBeAnBeAn
    Yeah scale is also hard af. 
  • Glo
    In all honesty, I think it's because students coming out of high schools don't know how to write. In my 100 level courses, the profs had to go over what a thesis statement was, repeatedly.

    If you're going into sciences, you generally come out of high school prepared for the type of work expected from a university course. But high school English, unless you were in an honours/AP/IB type program, does very little to prepare you for the research and writing expectations at the university level. And this applies to all students, especially those non-FASS students taking their B-Socs and B-Hums. This is why FAL is on that list, because it's taken by students with weaker writing skills who probably won't be pursuing writing intensive disciplines anyways

    From your list, Philosophy, Linguistics, and English are humanities courses which all stress good writing skills (god forbid you try to take some of the Humanities department courses without a firm grounding in writing). Psych and Econ both learn towards more science or business than other FASS disciplines (psych's grading system is also painful). As for Asia-Canada Studies, I imagine that's like poli sci and hinges on heavy research and writing.
  • Glo
    There's are the profs and TAs who have just straight up accepted that lower division student don't know how to write, and then there are the ones who are hellbent on forcing you to write a lot better. Some of the humanities and philosophy profs are the largest culprits for that one. It sucks, but it's also meant that my writing has improved leaps and bounds since starting uni
  • Glo
    Well the OP was about lower division arts courses. I was referring back to that.

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