The state of things

Below the median

Unless scores follow a standard (or any other symmetric) distribution

25% of people makes up a quarter of the population!

My mom says I'm above average

It's a satirical account, that's not a real politician.

There are plenty of them out there that are this dumb though.

Looks like a real educational problem.

I cant tell if you are joking or if you are in the bottom quartile.

We just need a few more to see if there’s a trend.

You're probably one of today's lucky 10,000.

Its always about the deviation with them. Perverts.

Wait, this isn't satire?

Edit: I commented too soon. It's satire.

Ashktually half people below the median.

Not in Lake Wobegon!!

Yeah but the average is pretty fucking dumb.

Everyone should be in the top! Everyone should have unlimited resources from disabled addicts to military bioweapons developers - it should be a flat line, a plateau!

I was born extremely smart. I always tested way at the top of the curve... far superior to all my peers.

One could construct tests where this isn't a given. Create an exam with one really easy question and one really hard question. You'll end up with a huge spike in the center and two tiny tails. The top quintile of correct answers (<=1.6 correct answers) will be vanishingly small.

25%!? That's nothing. Half of people are below average. That's twice of what you quoted!

Check the math? What do I look like, a numbertician??

Let me try.

I've got 4 quarters in a row, and each quarter represents 25% of people. I take the right most quarter and place it on the left-most quarter.

40% is not right, there's 50% in lowest quartile, 25% in the second, 25% in the third and 0% in the top.

My state'a standardized test says kids are "at risk" if they aren't in the top 40% of the test. The top 50% could all be traditional "a-b" students. But because they weren't in the top 80% of a-b students they are at risk for failing academically.... It's so asinine and disheartening. The last half of the year is devoted to this idiotic test. Kids could be learning stuff that will enrich themselves... Instead they are learnig how to take a test better.

Sounds bad...

The gravitational pull of the moon.

But you're right, I cannot explain why gravity even exists.

People understand "glass half empty / glass half full", but they can't quite grasp a bell curve

I wonder which quartile they reside in.

facetious

uh, I think it's pronounced Febreeze?

There will always be 25% in the bottom quartile, regardless of how well any students perform.

As Nougat said, this has nothing to do with passing or failing and is just a consequence of measuring performance. If 100 people take a test and the lowest 25 scorers all have a 95 out of 100 points then they are still in the bottom quartile regardless of the fact that every single student passed with flying colors.

Showing a bell curve with no context means nothing.

I’ve been graded on a curve, and I’ve done it myself a couple of times. IMO, it’s usually a sign of a bad class (too much material being crammed in) or a bad teacher (didn’t get the concepts across to the majority of the students).

That said, it’s usually done when it’s needed to prevent a significant portion of the class from failing. I remember a chem exam I took where a 16/100 was a C.

The basic idea is that grades are normally distributed (ie a bell curve) which allows you to find the average grade range and shift the letter grade (eg a C or C+). There’s some professors who take the idea too far and rather than working off of an actual normal distribution try to fit the procedure to a simply skewed distribution or use it to pull down an 85/100 to a C, but in my experience that’s the exception to the rule, especially in math/science courses.

Also, iirc this is a parody account.