That's not really a counterpoint so much as a probable factor. Probably even more to the point, if someone flunks out, it's now often not just a case of partially wasting a couple years--which many do at that age anyway. But also burning a huge amount of money and possibly incurring lots of debt in the process.
I'm having trouble understanding your point. Surely if you got Cs that would be on you. Are you suggesting you should be given As because you pay $50,000 a year? Or that because your parents were making a large investment in your education you made sure to work hard to earn good grades?
> Are you suggesting you should be given As because you pay $50,000 a year
To spell it out: Parents will take their dearest offspring to another similar college where he gets an A instead of a C if grades at a particular college are not inflated. This is a result of competition for business among colleges.
(The only places that are exempt are places so extremely selective that admission/graduation alone is a strong enough signal, i.e. Caltech)
Your parents didn't pay $50,000 a year for you to learn nothing, either. Or maybe they did, which is its own problem.
University degrees just become a tool for class warfare if the price goes up but the difficulty goes down. If everyone is guaranteed to pass as long as their check clears, then your university degree only exists to show you came from a wealthy family. It says nothing about your knowledge or skills.
This could be interpreted as the student being highly motivated to work very hard as a result of knowing how much his/her parents were paying.
I graduated from a hard school 20 years ago that still has a reputation as a place that resisted grade inflation.
My parents had to pay most of my way, we were fortunate enough to have to pay but not fortunate enough it was easy to pay for, 20 years on my parents have not been able to retire at the normal age because they had to pay pretty much all of the tuition for 4 kids. We got academic scholarships but 0 financial aid.
I had almost no money to my name during school, I'd go through a month spending < $100 including my phone bill and stuff like that. (This was in the 1990s when college students did not have cell phones.) I had good internships in the summer and would build up about $8k in savings and then go through that paying for books & expenses during the year. I paid some of my dorm & food costs too out of that, those were big upfront expenses right at the beginning of the year that would result in my bank account being near empty and then I'd watch my finances very closely till the next summer when I went back to work. (I worked part time in school some semesters as well but barely made anything.)
Because I was so aware of the money I worked very very hard and never took it for granted. I knew plenty of fellow students who had serious money problems to get through school.
There was always a weird separation of students in college:
- Students who came from such means that they had everything thing they could possibly want. New cars, buy anything they wanted, credit cards they could run up and their parents would pay, etc.. (I could probably count on one hand the people I knew in this category in school.)
- Students whose parents made enough to have to pay everything but the family budget was then really tight cause college was such a huge expense, so these students lived frugally and never seemed to have any extra money
- Students who were on financial aid and yet seemed to have nice cars and spending money which made no sense. I would have said most people I knew who had cars were in this boat.
- Students who were on financial aid who really seemed to actually need it and had no money.
Different schools seemed to have different makeups of these different groups. My sister went to an Ivy, when I'd go visit almost everyone at her school seemed to be in the case where the parents had so much money that money didn't matter. She had lots of friends whose parents came in and bought a house for their daughter to live in for 4 years for example.
Idk my experience is that in college, a lot of the TF are legitimately clueless. I think that college needs to be more of a support environment for self education rather than this sort of place where you literally repeat what you are told.
Society would be better off if people were guided to autodidacticism.
That's always been the theory underpinning a liberal education, that it teaches its students to think and reason for themselves. Of course, the distance between theory and practice is something else.
agreed. Half of the stuff I was taught was years out of date, and while interesting from a historical perspective, was not useful to me other than during the exam. Waste of time and money really.
>Society would be better off if people were guided to autodidacticism....
I don't know man?
Might be fine if you're majoring in something harmless like music, or art. But for the safety of society at large you just can't implement such a naive system for majors like nuclear engineering or virology. It'd just be irresponsible to the point of being outright dangerous.
It's not naive. No, in my system people could actually pick up nuclear engineering in high school as opposed to college. It's retarded that school in some delays you, because in hs, you need to do some bullshit as opposed to what you want.
Do people learn anything from lectures about safety at school? Everyone takes computer ethics. Everyone knows about Therac-25. Where are we 30 years later? Engineers still implement open-loop control systems. Programmers still write programs with integer overflows. Speed to market beats safety every time (hello, MCAS). So was it really worth thousands of dollars for someone to tell you about that in a class? A few people dying is always a lower priority than a higher share price, it seems. So might as well not waste money on education, right?
> Though grades have always been lower in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects than in the arts and humanities, graduating from a good school with a degree in any major did not use to be a cakewalk. Average GPAs have risen by a full point or more since the late 1960s. Collegeinflation.com shows that at Michigan State, for example, the percentage of As doubled to about 30 percent of all grades from 1963 to 1973 and then rose again by about 50 percent from 1983 to 2013. This is consistent with other research on the widespread change in grading standards nationwide.
To be fair, during that same time we have seen an increase in IQ to match[1]. In part this is attributed to better education, better nutrition and possibly the most important removing lead from toys. It's quite possible, that school is just as hard as it used to be, it's just we are smarter.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't make school more difficult to match OR potentially graduate individuals quicker.
You might want to read the second paragraph of your link. It's extremely relevant. Throughout much of the developed world we've started seeing reduced IQs since sometime around the mid 90s. Wiki has a link to a fair number of contemporary papers and other information as well. [1] To be clear this does not mean a decline in the rate of growth of IQ, but as in people having literally lower IQ.
I expect one reason we have not seen this reversal more well studied in places such as the US is that we don't have any normalized form of IQ tests. The areas where it showed up first, Scandinavian nations in particular, have compulsory military enlistment which, in turn, comes with compulsory IQ examinations. People in many (and it may end up being all) developed nations are literally becoming less intelligent, at least so far as IQ is able to work as a measurement of.
Advocates for "harder classes" also seem to be completely ignorant of the fact that students have far more learning resources than ever before and that the quality of education as it relates to conveyance of course material to students has increased since the 60s. Students have far more access to professors, TAs, and each other than they did in the stone ages.
Exactly - the alternative would be that students were doing worse or exactly the same despite having the huge benefits from new technology, teaching methods, resources etc.
That would be far more concerning.
As a personal example - KhanAcademy launched the year before I went to University and helped me a lot as it meant I could be fully confident of my calculus and linear algebra skills (we studied these topics in Further Maths but not multivariate calculus etc.)
>It is still very hard to get into elite schools, but it's not at all difficult to graduate.
I can't say for all degrees at all elite schools, but in the elite CS program I attended, I worked much harder than I ever did before attending, and much harder than I ever did after graduating.
In the weeks immediately following graduation I used to feel guilt if I would spend over an hour on something fun, like a movie or a video game, because over the course of my degree I had conditioned myself to spend every waking moment working.
"over the course of my degree I had conditioned myself to spend every waking moment working"
I'm pretty sure that's not the best way to actually maximise performance - in the same way that even professional athletes don't spend 100% of their time training. You need recovery periods and, I find, breaks for stuff to actually sink in.
Sure, I don't disagree. I learned a lot about working more efficiently after graduating and forcing myself to work strictly 9-5.
Fact is, when you have weekly assignments in 4 classes that each require many hours to complete, it's easy to find yourself in a cycle of coding until 3 am only to realize you have to do it again the next day to finish a math problem set.
My point is just that "hard to get in, easy to graduate" does not meet my experience at all.
It wasn't my experience either, but my wife certainly had that experience at the UK law school she went to - which was rather more prestigious then the relatively humble uni we both did our first degrees at.
Right after the admission scandal broke, I saw a Cal Tech grad point out that it probably wasn't a coincidence that none of the parents tried to get their kids into Cal Tech, given its deserved reputation for making students work hard.
Which data point confirms your observation that this varies widely by school and there are hard programs out there.
Despite the Chronicle's attempt to lump Caltech in with other elite schools in not explicitly having policies which forbid this from occurring, it is nonetheless impossible as pointed out in a Q&A done by the Chronicle with various institutions.
> Q. Will your university exert more oversight over how students are designated as athletic recruits in the admissions process? If so, how?
> A. Caltech does not reserve admission spots for our athletic department nor do we take into account legacy status or family wealth. The main criteria in our evaluation process focuses on academic and personal performance/potential as well as demonstrated STEM passion and achievement.
> Q. Does "Operation Varsity Blues" show a broader need for reform in selective admissions?
> A. This case is an important reminder how hypervigilant selective admission offices need to be in evaluating candidates and their credentials.
Very interesting, thank you! This discrepancy I cannot explain, and will have to investigate further. It appears the answer changed in the 2005 CDS, see: http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds
(of course, for those following along, this very interesting point is unrelated to the college admissions scandal)
i didn't go to an elite school by any stretch (being a country boy first in the family going to college) but i know what you mean. After graduation, I felt like a hardened and bloodied gladiator standing alone in a stadium with the sun going down. Without a seemingly impossible task to face i didn't know what to do with myself, it was kind of scary.
I went to a state school that had a particularly crappy CS program and it was the same. I don't think busyness is an indication of the "eliteness" of a program. You can just be working hard but not actually learning much because the tasks you're working on are not efficient at teaching.
Some grade inflation comes down to faculty that have become increasingly apathetic. When I was a TA in Canada 11 years ago the professor(s) that ran that class became so frustrated with students who needed a bump of X% (usually in the range of 3-10%) to keep their GPA average for medical school applications. One of the profs confided in me that he just gives them what they ask otherwise the students would waste a tremendous amount of the profs time going through assignments and exams to try to argue for extra marks.
True, witnessed the same in Germany in the CS department of a good university ("let them pass barely, rather than having to deal with them again next year").
In the US, students fill out course evaluations that are known to be driven by the grade that they expect to receive in the class. This creates a perverse incentive to raise grades. I saw this when I was teaching.
By the time I came around (graduated a couple of years ago), professors would start syllabus week with a disclaimer about that kind of groveling for points. In short, they weren't going to hear it at all, the ink is dry unless there is a glaring grading mistake. Probably took a couple of years of constant annoyance to normalize aggressively putting your foot down.
I'm sympathetic to some extent. I'm a product of a boot camp (granted I had a technical background before that) and I've worked with CS grads who I'm a bit astounded by their inability to just debug something on a basic level (form a theory, test it, make a logical next decision). On the other hand I wonder if that is a case where they should have been filtered out, or if the issue is they weren't taught / tested on the right things?
>The old academic criteria, imperfect as they were, were in fact doing a reasonable job of selecting individuals able and willing to handle the rigors of traditional college. The blunt fact is that the majority of people who scored below a 1200 on the verbal and math sections of the SAT would have found it difficult or impossible to handle a curriculum like that required to earn a state-school engineering degree or comparable certification. Today, thanks to grade inflation, such students can and do pass through top schools with top honors, especially in the liberal arts.
Do we really want to just go by the "old academic criteria"?
Are the people who just scrape by all just bad?
Would it be better if those people just be pushed out the door?
So let's say we make it "harder", is that harder testing? More work? What then?
I feel like as far as learning about how people learn that it is pretty clear that some people work well in what has become the traditional education systems, and others less so, and I"m not sure that filter really determines who will be productive or if that's all we want from education... to filter folks based on how the education system works now?
Personally I'm inclined to lean towards more / better education, less focus on making everything "harder".
I believe that the key is rigor: if grades are a reflection of whether or not a student has mastered some material, and the grading is rigorous, the only way for a student to attain a high grade is to master that material. That's the point of grades, isn't it?
To some extent I agree, although I feel like grades are often a reflection of papers (busy work that should teach you something) and to some extent what I think of as testing disguised as "trivia".
Good for folks who are good at trivia, not so sure it is the best route.
But yeah I agree grades should reflect how well the student grocks the topic.
It is, but how do you know the material is hard enough?
If I teach history and have a finale exam with one question, “who was the first president of the United States?” then the students will all get A’s, but nobody would consider that a college level history test, and even if you made an A, there is no way to know that you mastered the subject.
That’s a simplification, but in essence the issue at stake here.
doesn't your bootcamp experience support the opposite theory? less but higher quality education can ramp someone up faster than four years of university education.
I think when it comes to the future with disruption, rapid job changes, and etc boot camp like experiences (3 month education on a topic(s)) could be a valuable tool in redirecting and helping or even just expanding the skills of a workforce.
I think there is very much a thing there that could help change the way education works and maybe augment existing education (a boot camp before starting down the CS path might be a good booster / filter out folks who "hey I don't want to do this, I'll do something else").
On the other hand my experience also says that boot camps are heavily profit driven and generally do a poor job of selecting students and push through students who IMO have no business touching code. About half my class was IMO, unemployable. In that way I'm a bit aligned with the article ;)
The number one predictor of workplace productivity is IQ, not training/education. But using IQ in job qualifications is legally perilous. So employers look for proxies like if you got into a prestigious school, and schools use proxies like the SAT which strongly correlates to IQ.
We don't yet know how to increase IQ except for how to avoid some things that decrease it like malnutrition.
High IQ is like a cheat code, that allows you to recognize what is really being evaluated in workers, and to focus on maximizing that. Things that usually matter are: how you present yourself, are you confident in your opinions and not caught being wrong by others, do you ooze enthusiasm, do you regularly seem to be doing a lot of valueable work (does not matter if you actually do it). Productivity is incredibly hard to measure in software development (outside of obvious cases, like a guy just not doing much), so it's not really measured.
High IQ, ideally with a bit of psychopathy, is really a killer combo.
Nassim Taleb is a political activist, not a psychologist. There are surely legitimate criticisms of IQ by relevant scientists, some of those are available in the criticisms section of the Wikipedia page.
I don't think the author is advocating for less education. The thing is that completing a university course awards you with a title which should in theory certify that you have completed some material and you understand it very well.
If that is not the case the world will automatically try to get the next best certification possible. In the world of old just being able to read was seen as a mark of excellence; once that was the norm it became having finished basic schooling. After WW2 having any kind of university degree was synonymous with intelligence, today lots of jobs start requiring a PhD in order to filter out high-level candidates.
This could go on and on forever but the only thing we are achieving is making everybody lose more and more time in school trying to get a piece of paper. This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard. Then the qualifications will go back to being a premium which most companies will not actually need (rather than bartenders needing a bachelor's degree).
There's also an additional disadvantage of having the bar low: you help discredit actual science by having hordes of barely-passable "experts" which say whatever they want to say. In my parent's time when somebody was a doctor or engineer people would listen very carefully; today nobody even believes global warming or vaccines because so many qualified "scientists" keep barfing random opinions out. This is a serious problem because it undermines the public's trust towards serious issues, and while there's no easy solution raising the bar in universities would certainly help.
> This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard.
What might actually help here is to move to a two-tiered method of grading. One is the actual grade, which is solely for the student as a personal evaluation and never made available to anyone outside the school, and the other is a pass/fail for the course.
Then if you have a D for the first half of the semester, you know you need to work harder because there is a significant risk that you don't pass the course. And mediocre students actually fail courses and either have to repeat them until they genuinely master the subject matter or have a "fail" show up on their transcript.
But the school doesn't disadvantage their students by giving out a B as the most common grade when other schools give As, and thereby doesn't deprive their students of honest performance feedback or make it impossible to fail bad students because when the 40th percentile students have an A the "bad" students have a B- when they deserve an F.
I don't think the grades themselves really matter, but the difficulty ceiling does. That is, if a top grade is hard, it gives people something to strive for and challenge themselves to achieve and, the people that do, will be a lot better for it. If, on the other hand, the top grade is relatively easy, then the people who would have been challenged get bored and don't become as great as they would have if they'd been challenged, and the rest get amazing (but meaningless[1] grades without necessarily having much skill in the subject. People learn and improve by being at the edge of their competency.
When I was studying, to me, the grade was just a benchmark to measure my progress against, but otherwise wasn't something that I was particularly concerned about (in second level, I only cared that I good good enough grades to get the Uni placement I wanted, but beyond that, it meant very little and means absolutely nothing to me now. And third level... I've literally never told anyone[2] what grades I got on my degree. It seems that having a relevant degree at all is a ticked checkbox, but that's about it. Once you have some experience, that's all anybody ever cared about, at least, for me).
[1] But I guess even if the spread/variance of grades was high (rather than everyone being clumped at the top because its too easy to get good grades), grades aren't a great indicator for many reasons, so the utility is probably limited either way.
[2] In the context of trying to get a job, at least.
I agree. Grades are, to my mind, a social ranking mechanism. The more important question is, "does everyone coming out of university of whatever with a degree in nuclear engineering, actually have an entry level knowledge of nuclear engineering?"
In my data structures course, the final exam was about 50 pages of difficult, tricky problems. I completed maybe 8 of them and got a B+. The instructor told us that only one student in his career had completed the entire exam.
As an approach I think this makes a lot of sense. First it gives the very best students an opportunity to really show their stuff. For the others, it gives them the opportunity to pick and choose the problems to show that they've at least mastered some of the material (generally, there is often more presented than can realistically be mastered of the course of a semester (between and within each course)).
I'd think that making an exam like that is a hellish amount of work. One might propose that students are definitely not going to remember all of that, so you can basically reuse stuff from previous years anyway, but that's not how the world works, sadly.
I think making an exam like that is silly. Except for research work and startups, you aren't ever going to go into a job and just decided to only tackle certain problems.
I had a history professor who gave a test in this manner: Below there are 3 columns of 14 items of interest, whether they be people or wars or treaties or whatever. You are allowed to cross out 2 columns, and then cross out 3 terms. Write what you know about the remaining terms. Your grade is out of 110 on a 100 point scale.
Now, I loved the test, because I excel at soft trivia tests... but did it really gauge what I understood about history?
Nope. It gauged my knowledge of history trivia for those terms. Understanding history is about understanding how these things connect together.
If I were a history professor, I would base the majority of students' grades on papers about the subjects we cover in class to discover whether they're actually thinking about history or if they're just trying to recite facts and figures.
I think it depends on what is being put in these exams, like if you are being given rote memory trivia or asked to write out a little essay with arguments supported by historical examples for those topics, that would be a tougher exam that asked you to think about history. For a calc final I took, it was 7 pages, 7 problems, 3 hours, and you were only graded on your best 6. Each of those six problems tested very intimate knowledge on specific topics in calc, but if you weren't so strong in one area you could focus on where you can shine, or if something was a walk for you it gave you more time for the tricky problems.
Why should school exams mimic typical scenarios faced in work life.
In typical work scenarios you have more than 2 hours to tackle a problem, anyway.
This is computer science, and a data structures class to boot. Answering any of the questions required not only a deep understanding of the fundamental principles involved, but analytic skills (both in parsing the problem statement into a set of requirements and to identify problematic edge cases).
Any good class will teach more than they could possibly test on in two hours. So the alternative here is to keep students guessing about what will actually be on the exam? That's why, when I was a college instructor, I gave previous exams to my students (also: i thought not doing so would disadvantage less socially connected students; lots of old exams get passed around).
1. We could get rid of whiteboard interviews if CS degree grades communicated the same information.
2. A lot of the moral case for education debt is that it's good long-term value. People graduating from CS education without the education needed to get a good job don't get that value, making the moral case far murkier.
Article is grade A evidence of a failed education. School is not suppose to be "hard" or "easy". Learning, which is completely subjective, does not have an objective difficulty associated with it rather an estimated or average investment in time and other resources.
"At the same time, schools have become more liberal about accepting applicants based on unorthodox qualifications, from athletic ability to nonacademic accomplishments, disadvantageous backgrounds, and demonstrated social "awareness.""
At this point I stopped reading the article. I'm concerned this author(a polisci/economics professor)'s definition of 'hard' is functionally equivalent to 'only for the wealthy whites' again, as the specific time period he cites as the beginning of college becoming too easy (1960s) coincides exactly with desegregation (board vs brown was mid 1950s) AND he specifically cites disadvantaged backgrounds as part of that reason. If I'm mistaken and the author later addresses this, let me know and I'll actually finish the piece.
I am in general in agreement that grade inflation is a problem, drop out rates should rapidly increase to help stem degree inflation in our populace, as this is associated currently with saddling our future with increasingly difficult hurdles, which will eventually bite us in the form of lagging social security, population shrinkage, and economic instability. However, the arguments being used are immediately suspect to me.
a) you've failed to parse the prose you quote and think that it's complaining outright about universities allowing in applicants from "disadvantaged backgrounds", when in fact it is complaining about allowing in applicants specifically because they are from disadvantaged backgrounds who would not meet previous merit-based admissions criteria, or
b) you genuinely mean to imply that advocating for the ideal of meritocracy is not merely flawed but somehow equivalent to supporting a policy of explicit racial segregation and class-based admissions, or
c) something else entirely
I'm downvoting, primarily because the ambiguity about what you're trying to say makes this comment impossible to substantively engage with.
I'm arguing that it's suspicious to me that someone would say that things only started getting bad around the time where black people were allowed into white-only instutitions and had access to white-only environmnents, and before that time it was completely fair and should be returned to. That that was the point where I paused and decided maybe this person doesn't actually have much of merit to say and queried HN as to if the author has any actual, substantial points.
There were a lot of things going on in the world in the '60s. Whatever you think of TFA, it's simply arguing for more rigor in education. Unless you think racial minorities are less capable of rigorous study, there's no reason to assume the article is racially coded.
I didn't say that racial minorities were less capable of rigorous study, merely that the article did not actually functionally advocate for rigor with that statement, but instead is equating meritocracy with a time period that didn't have meritocracy because people were excluded based on race. Which is concerning.
The article isn't making any such equivalence. It doesn't so much as imply a pre-60s meritocracy. The fact that two things are contemporary doesn't suggest a causal relationship. Perhaps if the article mentioned desegregation, one could reasonably infer that the article was alluding to a causal relationship, but it doesn't even do that. The article (and indeed the specific sentences you referenced) is very explicit about the problem (decline of academic standards) and it offers an explanation (the rise in value of nonacademic standards).
If your subtext depends on ignoring everything about the original claims (fixating solely on a date), you're being libelous.
It also coincides with the generation just following those hit by the GI bill, where college suddenly became a thing every kid had to attend, and became a required part of getting any white-collar job.
If you didn’t have to go to college to get anything done, things like college desegration would have mattered less (mind, its still important, but college simply wouldn’t have been a significant target for it if it happened in say 1910).
That is, overwhelming demand naturally leads to grade inflation (and cost inflation), as the need to ensure graduation regardless of merit increases (because the university became additionally tasked as a trade school). Combined with ofc the private market’s increased reliance on using the university for training versus doing it themselves, internally.
But I’m making the case that grade inflation doesn’t need to stop, the dependency on higher education does. Grade inflation is a symptom, as is every other non-merit based operation of it.
"But I’m making the case that grade inflation doesn’t need to stop, the dependency on higher education does. Grade inflation is a symptom, as is every other non-merit based operation of it."
This is a good point and I agree with you. Thanks for your insight.
The time frame cited was the late 1960s. The article doesn't cite it, but the association between that and grade inflation had nothing to do with desegregation and everything to do with the fact that students who flunked out lost their Vietnam draft deferment. So sympathetic faculty and graduate students handed out good enough grades that they wouldn't flunk out. This reversed temporarily after the war ended, but then a long term trend began not long after.
Ah, I hadn't considered the vietnam angle here (partially because specifying disadvantaged backgrounds read to me a red flag). I'll be reading that site. Thank you.
As former [tenured] faculty, I'm not sure what to say about this. Good luck doing it in a reasonable way. It's not like [some] universities don't try to rein in grade inflation. Instructors do regularly give out Cs and Ds or Fs at many institutions. Our university kind of did audits to just see if there was something glaringly wrong about grade distributions in courses systematically for certain courses.
Anyway, grades shouldn't be arbitrarily difficult either, or curve just to curve. That's misguided as well; there are reasons for grade inflation other than just being nice -- I think old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary which has its own downsides.
I think in my undergrad courses the average grade was usually about a B, which seemed about right to me. Of course I'm biased because it's my own grading, but these were usually upper-level students, who got to that point because they were reasonably competent, and my sense of things was that they had about a B level grasp of the material on average. That is, they understood most of the important points of the material pretty well, but might have become a little lost in the finer points. Why knock their grades down just to make the grade distributions prettier?
My experience was that the trickier part was dealing with new freshman, who didn't always seem as prepared as they should be for college, especially with writing. But it's hard to know if that's actually any different over time; there's been a couple of times I've found decades old samples and I was surprised how little things had actually changed.
> My experience was that the trickier part was dealing with new freshman, who didn't always seem as prepared as they should be for college, especially with writing.
I went to a top 40 undergrad. Not stellar but I would have assumed reasonably high.
I was astounded at the poor quality of people’s writing ability. Most people just don’t understand the concept of stating an assertion and defending it with premises.
I’m all for pedantry here but I’m not sure this one makes a difference. From my understanding a premise is a statement from which you draw a larger conclusion.
You’re saying you draw arguments from premises to support assertions... but as far as I can tell the formation of the sub argument is just making an assertion supported by premises to begin with, the formation of which acts as a premise to support the larger assertion. So I’m not sure I see the difference
If I'd limited my writing practice and technique to what was required and taught in K-12 school I'd have been unable to do that, too. It seems ridiculous but arguing on the Internet taught me how to write lean, clear arguments that could stand up to being kicked around a bit. Not school. School just taught me how to pad papers to hit a word count and conform to silly "essay" formats. What was taught in middle and high school writing wasn't even useful for college, let alone crafting text that anyone who's not being paid to read your work would ever choose to pick up.
It's like attending a shop class that uses made-up tools and materials that don't work very well, don't exist outside shop classes, and aren't even very similar to their counterparts that do. Then the assignments all involve making things that seemingly deliberately avoid teaching skills useful to building items anyone would ever want, for any purpose—the analogy's getting away from me here, but you get the point.
I do think part of the problem is that good writing sense is, in part, developed by reading, and most kids never really pick up the reading bug and so don't have much hope of ever writing half-decently to begin with. But the classes, at least when I was in school, weren't doing anything for those of us who'd met that pre-requisite, either. I'm not sure who or what they're for.
I think this is an insightful comment, and probably matches my experience. But I’m talking about writing skills for the same kinds of typical class assignments, so I’m not sure it applies.
> old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary
Yes! The people complaining about grade inflation want to use grades to compare students across classrooms, yet the level of achievement indicated by a grade is very much specific to a particular class, peer-group, and professor.
Grades should never have been used for cross-classroom comparisons in the first place and if market dynamics have inflated them to the point where it is impossible to continue to abuse them in this manner, I'd call it a good riddance!
That is the problem with metrics. Once there is a metric, a grade or a citation count or an impact factor, people will use it for doing comparisons.
For example in my home country, a relatively big EU member, CS and other technical schools used to give pretty poor grades. Each year, the best CS student among all schools would graduate with a GPA only slightly over 3 (B).
If you applied to a PhD program say at MIT or Cambridge, this would put you in a pretty bad position unless the committee had a lot of insight on local grading policies or you had exceptional achievements to compensate. Not fun.
No metric is free from this problem, but grades have a much more severe case of it than competing metrics (citations, standardized tests, competitions), and we should treat them accordingly. Even if all metrics are bad, we should try to favor the ones that are less bad.
Elite admissions all claim to control for grade inflation/deflation, but since they don't divulge details they almost certainly do a poor job of it. I'm not at all sure it's possible to do good job of it, but some of the obvious easy "fixes" (e.g. using percentiles) would at least alleviate the problem you describe.
Not really? You'd have to normalize across _all_ applicants, otherwise you're putting applicants from countries with a harder curriculum at a disadvantage. 98th percentile from X doesn't mean the same as 98th percentile from Y.
But X and Y universities are being compared on prestige anyway, so the ancient and revered Y's 98th percentile has already beaten X's 100th.
I'd have thought (with no admissions experience) that 98th percentile at an unheard of university is more meaningful than 4.3 points out of 5 from the same.
> For example in my home country, a relatively big EU member, CS and other technical schools used to give pretty poor grades. Each year, the best CS student among all schools would graduate with a GPA only slightly over 3 (B).
My chem department prided itself in the fact that it's core courses and grading system hasn't been touched since around 1995, when they built the current online lab submission website. "You would have gotten the same grade two decades ago," they promised.
Once you were handed the exams, it was obvious why this was the case. They were hard as shit, class averages would hover around 55%, curved to a C even.
We would later be shown the averages of other sections, lecturers, and years, and they would never sway more than 2-3% off the median score despite different sections, professors, decades even. The only constant maintaining this consistency was the content and pace of the lectures and exams, and the grading scale. Despite all the intergenerational turmoil and educational upheaval debated over the past 25 years, here was the chemistry department throwing perfect darts.
Schools need to decide how rigorous they should be, establish a very clear grading system that tests that rigor, and stick with it for decades.
If you develop a rigorous, reliable assessment for a rigorous, reliable course then the very last thing you should want is to brand its scores in a way that invites unfavorable comparisons to degree mill rubber stamp "A"s by people who don't know or can't be bothered, yet this is exactly what you do by calling these grades, fitting them to the ABC scale, putting them on report cards, and weighing them into GPAs. It's madness.
Such an assessment would have much more value as a standardized test, entrance exam, etc. Yes, those are much harder to develop, but that's the nature of the beast. If you want to facilitate inter-institution comparisons you need to develop inter-institution standards.
There's an orthogonal issue here in assessing the assessment. Imagine a terrible test, one with no meaningful relationship between questions and answers. The scores will follow a very reliable, consistent bell curve with very reliable, consistent statistics. So we can't actually take that as an indication of a good test, even if the best possible test would also behave that way.
The number of people that will say, without irony, that they expect upper level classes to follow a normal distirbution in grades boggles my mind. College by definition involves a great deal of gatekeeping and self selection.
As for the larger trend, I can't help but think it's as much due to better teaching and exponentially more available resources (both for self study ie internet and provided by universities (got to spend that tuition money on something)). From my limited experience (parents went to the same school I did) on a material level classes are objectively harder (more information, deeper coverage, more advanced topics) so sometimes it feels like the "grade inflation panic" is built on a older generation upset that young people might be outpacing them.
Here we don't usually grade on a curve (just move the mapping of points to grades a little), and a general observation seems to be that there usually is an overlap of two normal distributions - the ones that understood the material and the ones that didn't.
> a general observation seems to be that there usually is an overlap of two normal distributions - the ones that understood the material and the ones that didn't.
For any sufficiently large class with challenging material, this has been my experience as well.
You either learn the material and get the questions on the tests correct, complete projects that work, write essays that make sense, etc.. or you do not.
In the case of writing & humanities often the problem is that it is a lot more difficult to tell a correct answer from an incorrect answer. It could be as subtle as the students writing not matching with the professor's political bent.
But for STEM it is way more clear. Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile should fail.
Not sure what the problem is. If the whole class is failing either the school is letting in students who don't belong, whoever taught the prerequisite classes failed to teach the students and passed them on with a curve, or the professor just didn't teach well.
In my mind it's more nuanced than that. An answer can be mostly right but maybe someone missed a negative sign or misread their parentheses and thus failed to complete the question correctly but still understood how the question was to be completed. Should they be penalized as much as a totally blank answer? Probably not. They've demonstrated some learning and they're almost as competent as someone who didn't make the same error. And it's not an error that the course is meant to correct or teach.
That is for sure a thing but that's definitely separate from grade inflation.
The grade inflating teacher might give the person who almost got it right an A, the teacher not inflating might give that student a B.
Even in these super difficult engineering classes at ultra hard schools there are always some people getting the answers right and showing all the work correctly so everyone knows they aren't cheating.
I had some classes that were incredibly difficult where realistically maybe a bunch more of us should have failed.. the teacher scaled things up but we sure as hell did not get undeserved As.
> But for STEM it is way more clear. Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile should fail.
How hard should the problem set be? How long should students have to complete it?
As you increase the difficulty you will push down the score distribution. How do you propose to square the existence of a score distribution against the quite subjective level of "difficulty" of the work that you're setting for grading?
> Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile should fail.
As a former grader and TA for both math and physics, I can tell you this is not the case. I've had students get the right answer the wrong way, stumbling into the correct numeric answer with invalid or incorrect math. I've also had students get 90% of the way through a large problem only to make a simple arithmetic error that lead to the wrong numeric answer.
Which student deserves more partial credit? Or should I pass the student who made math errors but got the right answer, and fail the student who grasped the concepts but made a trivial calculation mistake?
According to my math and physics profs, the student who got the right answer the wrong way would get 100% credit, the student who didn't would get 0% if it's multiple choice (often with those common math errors from years past intentionally given as potential options), and maybe 50% or so if it was a long form answer and the class was merciful. For those long form answers, we would be given explanations on exactly how they would be graded by the lecturer and later the TA in recitation before the exam. For ochem synthesis problems, the prof would give you credit if you reached the correct intermediates at least, even if you couldn't solve the entire reaction, or the TA would take a point off for every mistake, and if the question was weighted for 8 points and you forgot 9 things, you'd get a fair zero.
These aren't shades of gray, they are just protocols you need to establish and stick with before these questions come up during grading. Then you need to stick with these protocols as department policy for decades, so your department is able to maintain the grading scale no matter who the faculty will be 50 years from now. That's the sign of a good department.
I've never understood the use of "curves". Secondary ed doesn't use them as far as my experience goes. Intuitively, it seems like they're harmful because they leave students off-kilter, not knowing whether or not they understand the material. Confidence, or at least not being nervous, is such a key in learning.
Curves make your grade less dependent upon the difficulty of the tests, but more dependent upon the academic ability of your cohort.
The first thing it does is make it easier on a teacher. Making a test where most people won't get 100% and then curving is much easier than making a test where most people fall into the 60-100% range.
I had a midterm on which the second highest grade was in the 40s. The very junior professor certainly would not have been allowed to fail all but 1 student.
Curves sound like a tool for damage control while professors learn how to teach. It seems like it would be better to require professors to have a basic certification in Education so they'd know how to teach better. Teaching well is something you just can't pick up easily on the fly.
Professors not knowing how to teach is common for research universities in the US. Their main job is research, and teaching is just something they do on the side.
Yes, my understanding is the same except that professors are usually required to teach. My best professor in grad school, in terms of teaching ability, had a wife who was a high school teacher. He was head and shoulders above everyone else in the department. He clearly learned methods of teaching from her. He also had active research projects.
I'm a software engineer. I also coach girls basketball at the youth level in my after-work time. I read about teaching methods, how people learn, and I talk with teachers whenever I can. Often they can help me get difficult lessons across to the girls.
It's fine for professors to be great researchers. But, if they have to teach as part of it, they should strive to be good at it.
On every 55% average exam I've had, there would still be 1 or two students with near perfect scores. A bell curve is better to grade vs. one where you let everyone get an 85-90% and chop off the tail to the right of your curve. An ochem prof's job isn't to make you into a walking ochem textbook, it's to challenge you to think about problem solving using what you've learned from studying ochem, it should be hard. It really doesn't matter if you got a 55% anyway if the curve puts you at a B.
Grade inflation won't stop until signalling ceases to be a factor in education (likely never). Generally speaking, students see education as only a means to achieving career success. In any situation where grades are a determining factor, you will see grade inflation. Grades are simply the most visible signal of student intelligence, conscientiousness, and to a lesser extent conformity.
Course difficulty, on the other hand, is much more subtle and complicated to assess. You can look at a given school's grade inflation relative to other schools but that is confounded by differences in the relative merit of the students. Thus, we should predict that school difficulty sends a weaker signal than grades.
You could take the responsibility for grading away from the universities. We do that with school exams in the UK, there are a couple of exam boards that set papers for all schools.
If you did that then you might as well nationalize the universities because otherwise they'd shut down. There's simply no way universities will grant degrees to students who write exams that they did not administer.
Universities live and die by their reputations. The entire purpose of a university degree is so that the school can vouch for their student, putting the weight of their reputation behind the person so that they have an easier time securing employment.
I would also like to take issue with your choice of the word "responsibility" as it pertains to grading. Universities have the right to grade their students, as organizations made up of individuals in a free society. They will not relinquish their right to administer examinations without a fight.
Moreover, if you were to succeed, you would only replace the economic pressure to inflate grades with political pressure. In my experience, public schools are under far more pressure to do this than universities are. A major part of this pressure is manifested in the tendency to standardize exams, leading to hyper-focus on exam prep at the expense of general learning.
>In my experience, public schools are under far more pressure to do this than universities are. A major part of this pressure is manifested in the tendency to standardize exams, leading to hyper-focus on exam prep at the expense of general learning.
Funny anecdote, when I was in (public) high school my school district calculated your "GPA" with additive bonuses for honors classes and AP classes. If you pass an honors course, it adds 0.08 to your cumulative GPA, for an AP course 0.16, with the top students in the school district usually graduating around a 7 point GPA
On top of this, the guidance counselors were really pushy about making sure every good student took every AP class available. Once I had to argue with a guidance counselor not to put me in AP history because I didn't like history. She put it on my schedule anyways and I had to go back and transfer out.
Turns out teachers get bonuses, and the school gets bonus funding, when students pass AP exams. I would assume there's also GPA based funding for the schools, but I don't know of any specifics except that the schools are measured for 'improvement' which certainly hints at structural incentives for GPA inflation.
If you did that then you might as well nationalize the universities because otherwise they'd shut down.
Some would, others would thrive by delivering what their students want (a qualification and the jobs that follow on from that.) A graduate from the University of Waterloo would be considered the equal of one from Stanford given equal results. That isn't the case now.
I imagine most universities would hate it but anything that threatens their cosy financial situation is going to be opposed.
Universities have the right to grade their students, as organizations made up of individuals in a free society.
Would you support universities having the freedom to sell grades? $100,000 for a first class degree, $150,000 for a masters? No study needed.
They can be regulated just as any other organisation can be if society decided that's what they wanted to do.
A graduate from the University of Waterloo would be considered the equal of one from Stanford given equal results. That isn't the case now.
As a student at Waterloo right now, I'd love for this to happen but I don't believe it would be the case. Even if examinations were standardized across all schools, employers would simply shift to some other metric, such as course grades.
Now that I think about it, how would it even be possible? The Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo offers over 300 undergrad (not including grad school!) courses alone! The vast majority of these courses are unique to the school. Are you suggesting we wipe that out and force a standardized curriculum? Or are you suggesting we have standardized examinations in:
* Algebraic Topology
* Analysis of Spatial Data in Health Research
* Calculus of Variations
* Control Theory
* Fluid Mechanics
* Game Theory
* Lebesgue Integration and Fourier Analysis
* Matroid Theory
* Professional Communications in Statistics and Actuarial Science
* Property and Casualty Pricing
* Quantitative Enterprise Risk Management
* Quantum Information Processing
* Real-Time Programming
* Semidefinite Optimization
* Software Requirements Specification and Analysis
I could go on and on and on... I think you get the point. Math profs are constantly creating new courses based on areas of active research. How are you going to standardize examinations for those things? Every university offers different things!
Would you support universities having the freedom to sell grades? $100,000 for a first class degree, $150,000 for a masters? No study needed.
For-profit "colleges" did just that, until they were shut down. What you've described is usually called academic fraud. If Stanford did that, their reputation would be obliterated overnight.
Look at the ongoing story over the admissions bribery scandal. It's a HUGE story and it's only a case of fabricated athletic credentials for admissions, never mind fabricated degrees. I'm not worried about this problem at all.
We can only stop grade inflation if we do something that the denizens of reason dot com would not like: make public college free. The logic in the rise of grade inflation is very simple: students (or their parents) pay a fortune for a degree and they want something for it, no matter their performance. Only the most flagrant burnouts get failed out of college today because if we restored grading to a normal distribution people would stop sending their kids to college at the same rate, and colleges would lose tuition revenue.
The difficulty with combating grade inflation is that no one school can do it alone. One school doing it just disadvantages their students when these grades are compared.
A much more accurate system, IMHO, would be to switch over to a ranking/percentile order within the school, and use standardized tests for rough cross-school comparisons. Sure, it's not perfect, but it seems better than what we have now.
Also, it provides a great argument for instructors when students inevitably come-a-grade-grubbing. "I can't bump your score, because that would inexorably bump DOWN someone else's score, and that wouldn't be fair to the other students."
I thought the AP tests were very good. I took 13 of them. The tests themselves were just good tests of knowledge and skills so teaching to the test meant teaching relevant content.
Standardized _aptitude_ tests were always bad because they’re supposed to test basic skills but do so with lots of curveball tricks or specific formats... so teachers taught the specifics of the test
That was (and I believe still is) the case in New York as well. My teachers would complain about it directly to us students, and the transition from the standardized test scheme to college was kinda bumpy as a result (since the closest thing to a standardized test you could prepare for there were maybe the exams from previous years for that professor).
One downside of class ranking is that it incentivises destructive behaviour.
Law schools often do this, and I heard many stories of things like (in the days of physical books...) moving the perfect references, a week before the deadline, to an unrelated shelf in order to trip up your classmates.
By contrast the science students tended to collaborate on everything outside of an exam room, and learned a lot from each other this way. Even if their grades were less perfectly reflective of individual understanding.
My experience in law school was that, while this sort of destructive behavior thing did occasionally happen, it's way overblown. In all the courses I took, the missing book thing (1) happened _once_, during the first year, (2) was corrected within hours, (3) because of #2, was never shown to be out of malice rather than ignorance (4) had substantial negative social consequences for the person suspected (i.e., rumors, lack of trust) ANYWAY, and (5) never happened again throughout my entire law school experience. Nor did the competition prevent the formation of study groups.
There were also some upsides to the competition in terms of motivation and focus, though admittedly with extremely ambitious law students it was a little over the top for the first year. But based on my experience teaching undergraduates, the middle ~60-70% of the class would benefit from an environment with more immediate competitive pressure.
I think that depends on your law school, to be honest it probably gets easier the more prestigious your school is. I have a friend right now who goes to a decent, but not top 10 law school. There is an insane level of competition going on in mid tier law schools, because the jobs which comfortably pay tuition are only offered to the top 15% of the class and there is a glut of people looking for jobs and holding a J.D. right now. Any short of that class standing, and good luck paying back 150k on your 45k salary with bleak prospects, hopefully you don't have undergrad debt either. Last semester, six laptops were stolen from the law library, accessible only to law students and staff. People feed lies about basic coursework questions. The culture in the mid tier is super toxic.
This "It is still very hard to get into elite schools, but it's not at all difficult to graduate." needs more nuance.
My daughter could tell you it isn't easy, at all, to graduate from CMU SCS. It will kick your ass no matter how smart you are. That said, of the entrances to any program that's highly selective on a relevant basis, wouldn't you expect almost all of them to graduate with a good GPA?
There a lot more diversity of ability at programs with 30% acceptance than 3%. Grading on a curve might work there, and be a factor in motivating students to work harder.
But is that the best approach? Would ending legacy and donor admission concessions do more for academic rigor?
The scope and workload required to earn a grade weren't standardized, but even people who gave lip service to this fact didn't resist the temptation to use them for purposes of ranking and comparison as if they were. The very people bemoaning grade inflation are the people who used grades most irresponsibly, and their main objection is that they want to continue being irresponsible even though the system has started to route around them.
Tough.
It looks like the system now uses standardized tests and extracurricular competitions for cross-classroom comparisons and uses grades primarily to assess obedience. To my way of thinking, that's the right direction, in that it actually measures people against each other rather than measuring the arbitrary grading scales of the professors involved.
Do grades matter? The point is demonstrating that you understand the content. MBA programs have pass/fail grading that oftentimes is not allowed to be released. If you fail a class, you should be able to take it again and if you pass, you then "know" the content and the first fail doesn't matter. The culture that makes failing unacceptable is certainly part of the reason inflation exists. The discussion seems very far away from "do you actually understand the course content".
To me, non pass/fail grades are pointless unless you're moving onto a higher degree, and professors are often silly about their requirements for passing a class.
I once took a discrete math class for CS majors. I aced it. Loved it. Classmates would ask me to explain concepts to them before exams if they were having trouble. There was only one other student in the class who had gotten an A on every exam leading up to the final. He had a problem that he didn't know about, though. He didn't turn in the homework.
Now, homework for this class was not a measure of skill. It was just a way for the professor to have an extra way to determine that you were participating. I warned him the class before the final that he was gonna fail if he didn't get the teacher to give him an extension on the homework, because I knew he wasn't turning it in (there was a requirement in the syllabus that you needed to turn in 70% of the homework to have a chance at passing). Hell, he was proud of the fact that he was smart enough to understand the course material without doing it. He didn't ask for the extension, and a year later, he was sitting in the same class for which he had already mastered the material.
I think your homework anecdote actually supports the argument of TFA.
in many classes, homework has devolved into another technique to inflate grades. in most of my college courses the homework was either very easy or graded for "completion". almost always a complete waste of my time, but it was usually worth too many points to skip entirely.
I had a couple professors who would "assign" difficult problem sets that weren't graded at all. it was usually a bad call to skip them, because the exams were actually hard. that's the only respectful approach, imo.
It wasn't used in this case to inflate grades, because your homework wasn't actually a part of your grade except that doing the work determined whether you passed or failed. If you turned it in, you might pass, but your grade was dependent on your test scores. If you didn't, you failed regardless of what you did on the test.
To make a somewhat cynical argument, it is unreasonable to expect universities to be unbiased sources of information while their students are each paying them $200k for the degree.
To have any hope of degrees actually meaning anything, grades and diplomas need to be awarded by a standardized, neutral third party.
The essay is very light on evidence. Pathological cases (such as buying grades) aside, maybe grades have generally increased because teaching has gotten better? I certainly wouldn’t posit this as an absolute truth but research into teaching methods has gotten better. 50 years ago teaching wasn’t the least bit scientific. Modern research into teaching methods is a proper science, even if it’s hindered by many false starts and slow adoption. Modern technology also offers vast potential for better teaching and learning.
I’m not sure how useful grades are when everybody gets an A. But if the reason is a phenomenal teacher (and better teachers reproducibly produce better performing students [e.g. 1]) then maybe grades are simply an unhelpful metric. “Stopping grade inflation” isn’t just not a solution, but actively counter-productive. “Grading on a curve” when every student has mastered the curriculum (which, in higher education, is entirely achievable) is bogus.
Now we have two claims that are light on evidence (evidence that good teachers get better results is not evidence that this is the actual reason for increasing grades.)
Teaching research is unfortunately fairly balkanised and my brief stint in the science of teaching was in German, so I could, for the most part, only offer references to German text books. However, it’s established that active learning increases student performance significantly [1], and systematic active learning was only introduced into curricula fairly recently (and not yet pervasively). Where this was done this has by necessity caused an at least partial “grade inflation” but I’ll admit that its adoption is far from satisfactory so (as my comment already noted!) it might not be sufficient to explain grade inflation.
I can understand the author's sentiments, but at the same time, fear of grade inflation has let to administrators pressuring professors to have a "C" average <-- i think this pressure is a far worse problem than grade inflation. Rather than aiming to get every student to the highest level, professors are pressured into using reverse-curving and other tactics (trick questions, ambiguous study guides) to artificially "deflate" students scores.
And that seems totally backwards. If i took my car to a mechanic, I expect them to fix my car 100%; so why do we expect professors to produce students with 75% achievement?
Professors are supposed to be in the business of teaching, not assessing.
Not a good analogy. Mechanics diagnose and fix problems. Professors impart knowledge onto others; whether students fully absorb everything is another issue (ignoring the professor's competence).
Then I guess the debate should be what a professor's job should be: (a) reciting imperfect knowledge & theory to students without regard for whether it's accurate or digestible, or (b) maximizing students knowledge of the material (without reducing the amount of material students need to learn).
> pressuring professors to have a "C" average <-- i think this pressure is a far worse problem than grade inflation. Rather than aiming to get every student to the highest level, professors are pressured into using reverse-curving and other tactics (trick questions, ambiguous study guides) to artificially "deflate" students scores.
Depends on how you look at it. I went to a school that bell curved around a C for most core classes and most of the curving wasn't "deflating scores" but rather making the class hard enough that there was a wide distribution of scores which made identifying the people who understood the most material clear. Having everyone get A's may make you feel good, but then you are most likely holding people back as there is no way for them to work harder and stand out if it is so easy that everyone is getting A's. Also, that competitive environment tends to make everyone work harder so they learn more.
While I'm not saying there shouldn't be schools where it is easy to get A's and B's, I am 100% glad I went to one that pushed me as hard as they did as I learned a ton and I have gotten very good job offers since graduating.
It's very easy to provide opportunities for the best students to excel (eg, higher level courses, research opportunities).
But if somebody enrolls Stats 101, it should be the goal of the professor to get every student to _learn_ Stats 101, not to produce a majority of students with mediocre understanding
They are in the business of lecturing and assessing, not teaching you how to learn. In college, you are expected to teach yourself. It's why they have libraries, it's why you might only have classes for 10 hours a week.
Any tough class I've had always had a few students get a near perfect score. They were given the exact same lectures, content, and resources as people who failed the class (myself included sometimes), but all they did was engage with it more thoroughly outside of class. The professors job isn't to hold your hand and pull you through college, like a high school teacher might, it's to just lay out what's expected of you to pass the class. Whether or not you go home and put in the work you personally need to comprehend it as well as some of your peers is entirely up to your own circumstances. It's not even the school's job to educate you. The school's job is to provide you with the resources you need to pass your classes. Whether or not you receive an education is entirely up to you.
Doing everything you can to teach students material isn't the same as "hand holding". While much of the responsibility of learning should fall on the student, it's still the professor's job (imo) to present the material in a way that maximizes students' understanding.
It seems absurd that high school teachers go through more education training than college professors (most of which never actually take any education training at all).
Grades are fundamentally stupid. Grade inflation is as close as we can come, realistically, to getting rid of them, so I’m in favor in most situations.
I think the opposite. The dual purpose of schools to both teach and grade should be separated into two separate types of institutions. Grades and pressure are detrimental to learning and only exist because schools double as certification authorities. If you think about it more closely, though, these are very different functions and there is no a priori reason why they should be done by a single institution.
How about we make schools about learning at your own tempo, because you want the knowledge? Schools should strive to be excellent at teaching, enabling you to learn easily, not forcibly push it onto you, making you die from stress.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadTo spell it out: Parents will take their dearest offspring to another similar college where he gets an A instead of a C if grades at a particular college are not inflated. This is a result of competition for business among colleges.
(The only places that are exempt are places so extremely selective that admission/graduation alone is a strong enough signal, i.e. Caltech)
University degrees just become a tool for class warfare if the price goes up but the difficulty goes down. If everyone is guaranteed to pass as long as their check clears, then your university degree only exists to show you came from a wealthy family. It says nothing about your knowledge or skills.
I graduated from a hard school 20 years ago that still has a reputation as a place that resisted grade inflation.
My parents had to pay most of my way, we were fortunate enough to have to pay but not fortunate enough it was easy to pay for, 20 years on my parents have not been able to retire at the normal age because they had to pay pretty much all of the tuition for 4 kids. We got academic scholarships but 0 financial aid.
I had almost no money to my name during school, I'd go through a month spending < $100 including my phone bill and stuff like that. (This was in the 1990s when college students did not have cell phones.) I had good internships in the summer and would build up about $8k in savings and then go through that paying for books & expenses during the year. I paid some of my dorm & food costs too out of that, those were big upfront expenses right at the beginning of the year that would result in my bank account being near empty and then I'd watch my finances very closely till the next summer when I went back to work. (I worked part time in school some semesters as well but barely made anything.)
Because I was so aware of the money I worked very very hard and never took it for granted. I knew plenty of fellow students who had serious money problems to get through school.
There was always a weird separation of students in college:
- Students who came from such means that they had everything thing they could possibly want. New cars, buy anything they wanted, credit cards they could run up and their parents would pay, etc.. (I could probably count on one hand the people I knew in this category in school.)
- Students whose parents made enough to have to pay everything but the family budget was then really tight cause college was such a huge expense, so these students lived frugally and never seemed to have any extra money
- Students who were on financial aid and yet seemed to have nice cars and spending money which made no sense. I would have said most people I knew who had cars were in this boat.
- Students who were on financial aid who really seemed to actually need it and had no money.
Different schools seemed to have different makeups of these different groups. My sister went to an Ivy, when I'd go visit almost everyone at her school seemed to be in the case where the parents had so much money that money didn't matter. She had lots of friends whose parents came in and bought a house for their daughter to live in for 4 years for example.
Society would be better off if people were guided to autodidacticism.
I don't know man?
Might be fine if you're majoring in something harmless like music, or art. But for the safety of society at large you just can't implement such a naive system for majors like nuclear engineering or virology. It'd just be irresponsible to the point of being outright dangerous.
It's not naive. No, in my system people could actually pick up nuclear engineering in high school as opposed to college. It's retarded that school in some delays you, because in hs, you need to do some bullshit as opposed to what you want.
I also didn't say anything against assessments.
Just yesterday I saw the news that even Oxford is dumbing down its policies. Way to go!
To be fair, during that same time we have seen an increase in IQ to match[1]. In part this is attributed to better education, better nutrition and possibly the most important removing lead from toys. It's quite possible, that school is just as hard as it used to be, it's just we are smarter.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't make school more difficult to match OR potentially graduate individuals quicker.
[1] https://www.123test.com/flynn-effect/
I expect one reason we have not seen this reversal more well studied in places such as the US is that we don't have any normalized form of IQ tests. The areas where it showed up first, Scandinavian nations in particular, have compulsory military enlistment which, in turn, comes with compulsory IQ examinations. People in many (and it may end up being all) developed nations are literally becoming less intelligent, at least so far as IQ is able to work as a measurement of.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
That would be far more concerning.
As a personal example - KhanAcademy launched the year before I went to University and helped me a lot as it meant I could be fully confident of my calculus and linear algebra skills (we studied these topics in Further Maths but not multivariate calculus etc.)
I can't say for all degrees at all elite schools, but in the elite CS program I attended, I worked much harder than I ever did before attending, and much harder than I ever did after graduating.
In the weeks immediately following graduation I used to feel guilt if I would spend over an hour on something fun, like a movie or a video game, because over the course of my degree I had conditioned myself to spend every waking moment working.
I'm pretty sure that's not the best way to actually maximise performance - in the same way that even professional athletes don't spend 100% of their time training. You need recovery periods and, I find, breaks for stuff to actually sink in.
Fact is, when you have weekly assignments in 4 classes that each require many hours to complete, it's easy to find yourself in a cycle of coding until 3 am only to realize you have to do it again the next day to finish a math problem set.
My point is just that "hard to get in, easy to graduate" does not meet my experience at all.
Which data point confirms your observation that this varies widely by school and there are hard programs out there.
See: https://www.chronicle.com/article/We-Asked-20-Elite-College/...
> Q. Will your university exert more oversight over how students are designated as athletic recruits in the admissions process? If so, how?
> A. Caltech does not reserve admission spots for our athletic department nor do we take into account legacy status or family wealth. The main criteria in our evaluation process focuses on academic and personal performance/potential as well as demonstrated STEM passion and achievement.
> Q. Does "Operation Varsity Blues" show a broader need for reform in selective admissions?
> A. This case is an important reminder how hypervigilant selective admission offices need to be in evaluating candidates and their credentials.
Caltech's CDS says otherwise - http://finance.caltech.edu/documents/537-cds2019.pdf section C7
(of course, for those following along, this very interesting point is unrelated to the college admissions scandal)
I'm sympathetic to some extent. I'm a product of a boot camp (granted I had a technical background before that) and I've worked with CS grads who I'm a bit astounded by their inability to just debug something on a basic level (form a theory, test it, make a logical next decision). On the other hand I wonder if that is a case where they should have been filtered out, or if the issue is they weren't taught / tested on the right things?
>The old academic criteria, imperfect as they were, were in fact doing a reasonable job of selecting individuals able and willing to handle the rigors of traditional college. The blunt fact is that the majority of people who scored below a 1200 on the verbal and math sections of the SAT would have found it difficult or impossible to handle a curriculum like that required to earn a state-school engineering degree or comparable certification. Today, thanks to grade inflation, such students can and do pass through top schools with top honors, especially in the liberal arts.
Do we really want to just go by the "old academic criteria"?
Are the people who just scrape by all just bad?
Would it be better if those people just be pushed out the door?
So let's say we make it "harder", is that harder testing? More work? What then?
I feel like as far as learning about how people learn that it is pretty clear that some people work well in what has become the traditional education systems, and others less so, and I"m not sure that filter really determines who will be productive or if that's all we want from education... to filter folks based on how the education system works now?
Personally I'm inclined to lean towards more / better education, less focus on making everything "harder".
Good for folks who are good at trivia, not so sure it is the best route.
But yeah I agree grades should reflect how well the student grocks the topic.
If I teach history and have a finale exam with one question, “who was the first president of the United States?” then the students will all get A’s, but nobody would consider that a college level history test, and even if you made an A, there is no way to know that you mastered the subject.
That’s a simplification, but in essence the issue at stake here.
I think there is very much a thing there that could help change the way education works and maybe augment existing education (a boot camp before starting down the CS path might be a good booster / filter out folks who "hey I don't want to do this, I'll do something else").
On the other hand my experience also says that boot camps are heavily profit driven and generally do a poor job of selecting students and push through students who IMO have no business touching code. About half my class was IMO, unemployable. In that way I'm a bit aligned with the article ;)
We don't yet know how to increase IQ except for how to avoid some things that decrease it like malnutrition.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-your-iq-strongly-influen...
High IQ, ideally with a bit of psychopathy, is really a killer combo.
You are speaking like this is a fact, when there are solid arguments that the whole IQ->Job performance theory is pure nonsense
See https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
If that is not the case the world will automatically try to get the next best certification possible. In the world of old just being able to read was seen as a mark of excellence; once that was the norm it became having finished basic schooling. After WW2 having any kind of university degree was synonymous with intelligence, today lots of jobs start requiring a PhD in order to filter out high-level candidates.
This could go on and on forever but the only thing we are achieving is making everybody lose more and more time in school trying to get a piece of paper. This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard. Then the qualifications will go back to being a premium which most companies will not actually need (rather than bartenders needing a bachelor's degree).
There's also an additional disadvantage of having the bar low: you help discredit actual science by having hordes of barely-passable "experts" which say whatever they want to say. In my parent's time when somebody was a doctor or engineer people would listen very carefully; today nobody even believes global warming or vaccines because so many qualified "scientists" keep barfing random opinions out. This is a serious problem because it undermines the public's trust towards serious issues, and while there's no easy solution raising the bar in universities would certainly help.
What might actually help here is to move to a two-tiered method of grading. One is the actual grade, which is solely for the student as a personal evaluation and never made available to anyone outside the school, and the other is a pass/fail for the course.
Then if you have a D for the first half of the semester, you know you need to work harder because there is a significant risk that you don't pass the course. And mediocre students actually fail courses and either have to repeat them until they genuinely master the subject matter or have a "fail" show up on their transcript.
But the school doesn't disadvantage their students by giving out a B as the most common grade when other schools give As, and thereby doesn't deprive their students of honest performance feedback or make it impossible to fail bad students because when the 40th percentile students have an A the "bad" students have a B- when they deserve an F.
When I was studying, to me, the grade was just a benchmark to measure my progress against, but otherwise wasn't something that I was particularly concerned about (in second level, I only cared that I good good enough grades to get the Uni placement I wanted, but beyond that, it meant very little and means absolutely nothing to me now. And third level... I've literally never told anyone[2] what grades I got on my degree. It seems that having a relevant degree at all is a ticked checkbox, but that's about it. Once you have some experience, that's all anybody ever cared about, at least, for me).
[1] But I guess even if the spread/variance of grades was high (rather than everyone being clumped at the top because its too easy to get good grades), grades aren't a great indicator for many reasons, so the utility is probably limited either way.
[2] In the context of trying to get a job, at least.
As an approach I think this makes a lot of sense. First it gives the very best students an opportunity to really show their stuff. For the others, it gives them the opportunity to pick and choose the problems to show that they've at least mastered some of the material (generally, there is often more presented than can realistically be mastered of the course of a semester (between and within each course)).
(nested parens are (the best))
I had a history professor who gave a test in this manner: Below there are 3 columns of 14 items of interest, whether they be people or wars or treaties or whatever. You are allowed to cross out 2 columns, and then cross out 3 terms. Write what you know about the remaining terms. Your grade is out of 110 on a 100 point scale.
Now, I loved the test, because I excel at soft trivia tests... but did it really gauge what I understood about history?
Nope. It gauged my knowledge of history trivia for those terms. Understanding history is about understanding how these things connect together.
If I were a history professor, I would base the majority of students' grades on papers about the subjects we cover in class to discover whether they're actually thinking about history or if they're just trying to recite facts and figures.
In typical work scenarios you have more than 2 hours to tackle a problem, anyway.
This is computer science, and a data structures class to boot. Answering any of the questions required not only a deep understanding of the fundamental principles involved, but analytic skills (both in parsing the problem statement into a set of requirements and to identify problematic edge cases).
Any good class will teach more than they could possibly test on in two hours. So the alternative here is to keep students guessing about what will actually be on the exam? That's why, when I was a college instructor, I gave previous exams to my students (also: i thought not doing so would disadvantage less socially connected students; lots of old exams get passed around).
2. A lot of the moral case for education debt is that it's good long-term value. People graduating from CS education without the education needed to get a good job don't get that value, making the moral case far murkier.
At this point I stopped reading the article. I'm concerned this author(a polisci/economics professor)'s definition of 'hard' is functionally equivalent to 'only for the wealthy whites' again, as the specific time period he cites as the beginning of college becoming too easy (1960s) coincides exactly with desegregation (board vs brown was mid 1950s) AND he specifically cites disadvantaged backgrounds as part of that reason. If I'm mistaken and the author later addresses this, let me know and I'll actually finish the piece.
I am in general in agreement that grade inflation is a problem, drop out rates should rapidly increase to help stem degree inflation in our populace, as this is associated currently with saddling our future with increasingly difficult hurdles, which will eventually bite us in the form of lagging social security, population shrinkage, and economic instability. However, the arguments being used are immediately suspect to me.
a) you've failed to parse the prose you quote and think that it's complaining outright about universities allowing in applicants from "disadvantaged backgrounds", when in fact it is complaining about allowing in applicants specifically because they are from disadvantaged backgrounds who would not meet previous merit-based admissions criteria, or
b) you genuinely mean to imply that advocating for the ideal of meritocracy is not merely flawed but somehow equivalent to supporting a policy of explicit racial segregation and class-based admissions, or
c) something else entirely
I'm downvoting, primarily because the ambiguity about what you're trying to say makes this comment impossible to substantively engage with.
If your subtext depends on ignoring everything about the original claims (fixating solely on a date), you're being libelous.
If you didn’t have to go to college to get anything done, things like college desegration would have mattered less (mind, its still important, but college simply wouldn’t have been a significant target for it if it happened in say 1910).
That is, overwhelming demand naturally leads to grade inflation (and cost inflation), as the need to ensure graduation regardless of merit increases (because the university became additionally tasked as a trade school). Combined with ofc the private market’s increased reliance on using the university for training versus doing it themselves, internally.
But I’m making the case that grade inflation doesn’t need to stop, the dependency on higher education does. Grade inflation is a symptom, as is every other non-merit based operation of it.
This is a good point and I agree with you. Thanks for your insight.
See http://www.gradeinflation.com/ for more detail on that trend.
Anyway, grades shouldn't be arbitrarily difficult either, or curve just to curve. That's misguided as well; there are reasons for grade inflation other than just being nice -- I think old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary which has its own downsides.
I think in my undergrad courses the average grade was usually about a B, which seemed about right to me. Of course I'm biased because it's my own grading, but these were usually upper-level students, who got to that point because they were reasonably competent, and my sense of things was that they had about a B level grasp of the material on average. That is, they understood most of the important points of the material pretty well, but might have become a little lost in the finer points. Why knock their grades down just to make the grade distributions prettier?
My experience was that the trickier part was dealing with new freshman, who didn't always seem as prepared as they should be for college, especially with writing. But it's hard to know if that's actually any different over time; there's been a couple of times I've found decades old samples and I was surprised how little things had actually changed.
I went to a top 40 undergrad. Not stellar but I would have assumed reasonably high.
I was astounded at the poor quality of people’s writing ability. Most people just don’t understand the concept of stating an assertion and defending it with premises.
Did you perhaps mean: defending the assertion with arguments built upon explicitly stated premises?
You’re saying you draw arguments from premises to support assertions... but as far as I can tell the formation of the sub argument is just making an assertion supported by premises to begin with, the formation of which acts as a premise to support the larger assertion. So I’m not sure I see the difference
It's like attending a shop class that uses made-up tools and materials that don't work very well, don't exist outside shop classes, and aren't even very similar to their counterparts that do. Then the assignments all involve making things that seemingly deliberately avoid teaching skills useful to building items anyone would ever want, for any purpose—the analogy's getting away from me here, but you get the point.
I do think part of the problem is that good writing sense is, in part, developed by reading, and most kids never really pick up the reading bug and so don't have much hope of ever writing half-decently to begin with. But the classes, at least when I was in school, weren't doing anything for those of us who'd met that pre-requisite, either. I'm not sure who or what they're for.
Yes! The people complaining about grade inflation want to use grades to compare students across classrooms, yet the level of achievement indicated by a grade is very much specific to a particular class, peer-group, and professor.
Grades should never have been used for cross-classroom comparisons in the first place and if market dynamics have inflated them to the point where it is impossible to continue to abuse them in this manner, I'd call it a good riddance!
For example in my home country, a relatively big EU member, CS and other technical schools used to give pretty poor grades. Each year, the best CS student among all schools would graduate with a GPA only slightly over 3 (B).
If you applied to a PhD program say at MIT or Cambridge, this would put you in a pretty bad position unless the committee had a lot of insight on local grading policies or you had exceptional achievements to compensate. Not fun.
Elite admissions all claim to control for grade inflation/deflation, but since they don't divulge details they almost certainly do a poor job of it. I'm not at all sure it's possible to do good job of it, but some of the obvious easy "fixes" (e.g. using percentiles) would at least alleviate the problem you describe.
I'd have thought (with no admissions experience) that 98th percentile at an unheard of university is more meaningful than 4.3 points out of 5 from the same.
That is why there are tools to convert grades from different countries into US letter grades: https://applications.wes.org/country-resources/resources.asp
Once you were handed the exams, it was obvious why this was the case. They were hard as shit, class averages would hover around 55%, curved to a C even.
We would later be shown the averages of other sections, lecturers, and years, and they would never sway more than 2-3% off the median score despite different sections, professors, decades even. The only constant maintaining this consistency was the content and pace of the lectures and exams, and the grading scale. Despite all the intergenerational turmoil and educational upheaval debated over the past 25 years, here was the chemistry department throwing perfect darts.
Schools need to decide how rigorous they should be, establish a very clear grading system that tests that rigor, and stick with it for decades.
Such an assessment would have much more value as a standardized test, entrance exam, etc. Yes, those are much harder to develop, but that's the nature of the beast. If you want to facilitate inter-institution comparisons you need to develop inter-institution standards.
There's an orthogonal issue here in assessing the assessment. Imagine a terrible test, one with no meaningful relationship between questions and answers. The scores will follow a very reliable, consistent bell curve with very reliable, consistent statistics. So we can't actually take that as an indication of a good test, even if the best possible test would also behave that way.
As for the larger trend, I can't help but think it's as much due to better teaching and exponentially more available resources (both for self study ie internet and provided by universities (got to spend that tuition money on something)). From my limited experience (parents went to the same school I did) on a material level classes are objectively harder (more information, deeper coverage, more advanced topics) so sometimes it feels like the "grade inflation panic" is built on a older generation upset that young people might be outpacing them.
For any sufficiently large class with challenging material, this has been my experience as well.
In the case of writing & humanities often the problem is that it is a lot more difficult to tell a correct answer from an incorrect answer. It could be as subtle as the students writing not matching with the professor's political bent.
But for STEM it is way more clear. Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile should fail.
Not sure what the problem is. If the whole class is failing either the school is letting in students who don't belong, whoever taught the prerequisite classes failed to teach the students and passed them on with a curve, or the professor just didn't teach well.
The grade inflating teacher might give the person who almost got it right an A, the teacher not inflating might give that student a B.
Even in these super difficult engineering classes at ultra hard schools there are always some people getting the answers right and showing all the work correctly so everyone knows they aren't cheating.
I had some classes that were incredibly difficult where realistically maybe a bunch more of us should have failed.. the teacher scaled things up but we sure as hell did not get undeserved As.
How hard should the problem set be? How long should students have to complete it?
As you increase the difficulty you will push down the score distribution. How do you propose to square the existence of a score distribution against the quite subjective level of "difficulty" of the work that you're setting for grading?
As a former grader and TA for both math and physics, I can tell you this is not the case. I've had students get the right answer the wrong way, stumbling into the correct numeric answer with invalid or incorrect math. I've also had students get 90% of the way through a large problem only to make a simple arithmetic error that lead to the wrong numeric answer.
Which student deserves more partial credit? Or should I pass the student who made math errors but got the right answer, and fail the student who grasped the concepts but made a trivial calculation mistake?
These aren't shades of gray, they are just protocols you need to establish and stick with before these questions come up during grading. Then you need to stick with these protocols as department policy for decades, so your department is able to maintain the grading scale no matter who the faculty will be 50 years from now. That's the sign of a good department.
What purpose are they perceived to serve?
The first thing it does is make it easier on a teacher. Making a test where most people won't get 100% and then curving is much easier than making a test where most people fall into the 60-100% range.
I had a midterm on which the second highest grade was in the 40s. The very junior professor certainly would not have been allowed to fail all but 1 student.
I'm a software engineer. I also coach girls basketball at the youth level in my after-work time. I read about teaching methods, how people learn, and I talk with teachers whenever I can. Often they can help me get difficult lessons across to the girls.
It's fine for professors to be great researchers. But, if they have to teach as part of it, they should strive to be good at it.
Course difficulty, on the other hand, is much more subtle and complicated to assess. You can look at a given school's grade inflation relative to other schools but that is confounded by differences in the relative merit of the students. Thus, we should predict that school difficulty sends a weaker signal than grades.
Universities live and die by their reputations. The entire purpose of a university degree is so that the school can vouch for their student, putting the weight of their reputation behind the person so that they have an easier time securing employment.
I would also like to take issue with your choice of the word "responsibility" as it pertains to grading. Universities have the right to grade their students, as organizations made up of individuals in a free society. They will not relinquish their right to administer examinations without a fight.
Moreover, if you were to succeed, you would only replace the economic pressure to inflate grades with political pressure. In my experience, public schools are under far more pressure to do this than universities are. A major part of this pressure is manifested in the tendency to standardize exams, leading to hyper-focus on exam prep at the expense of general learning.
Funny anecdote, when I was in (public) high school my school district calculated your "GPA" with additive bonuses for honors classes and AP classes. If you pass an honors course, it adds 0.08 to your cumulative GPA, for an AP course 0.16, with the top students in the school district usually graduating around a 7 point GPA
On top of this, the guidance counselors were really pushy about making sure every good student took every AP class available. Once I had to argue with a guidance counselor not to put me in AP history because I didn't like history. She put it on my schedule anyways and I had to go back and transfer out.
Turns out teachers get bonuses, and the school gets bonus funding, when students pass AP exams. I would assume there's also GPA based funding for the schools, but I don't know of any specifics except that the schools are measured for 'improvement' which certainly hints at structural incentives for GPA inflation.
Some would, others would thrive by delivering what their students want (a qualification and the jobs that follow on from that.) A graduate from the University of Waterloo would be considered the equal of one from Stanford given equal results. That isn't the case now.
I imagine most universities would hate it but anything that threatens their cosy financial situation is going to be opposed.
Universities have the right to grade their students, as organizations made up of individuals in a free society.
Would you support universities having the freedom to sell grades? $100,000 for a first class degree, $150,000 for a masters? No study needed.
They can be regulated just as any other organisation can be if society decided that's what they wanted to do.
As a student at Waterloo right now, I'd love for this to happen but I don't believe it would be the case. Even if examinations were standardized across all schools, employers would simply shift to some other metric, such as course grades.
Now that I think about it, how would it even be possible? The Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo offers over 300 undergrad (not including grad school!) courses alone! The vast majority of these courses are unique to the school. Are you suggesting we wipe that out and force a standardized curriculum? Or are you suggesting we have standardized examinations in:
* Algebraic Topology
* Analysis of Spatial Data in Health Research
* Calculus of Variations
* Control Theory
* Fluid Mechanics
* Game Theory
* Lebesgue Integration and Fourier Analysis
* Matroid Theory
* Professional Communications in Statistics and Actuarial Science
* Property and Casualty Pricing
* Quantitative Enterprise Risk Management
* Quantum Information Processing
* Real-Time Programming
* Semidefinite Optimization
* Software Requirements Specification and Analysis
I could go on and on and on... I think you get the point. Math profs are constantly creating new courses based on areas of active research. How are you going to standardize examinations for those things? Every university offers different things!
Would you support universities having the freedom to sell grades? $100,000 for a first class degree, $150,000 for a masters? No study needed.
For-profit "colleges" did just that, until they were shut down. What you've described is usually called academic fraud. If Stanford did that, their reputation would be obliterated overnight.
Look at the ongoing story over the admissions bribery scandal. It's a HUGE story and it's only a case of fabricated athletic credentials for admissions, never mind fabricated degrees. I'm not worried about this problem at all.
A much more accurate system, IMHO, would be to switch over to a ranking/percentile order within the school, and use standardized tests for rough cross-school comparisons. Sure, it's not perfect, but it seems better than what we have now.
Also, it provides a great argument for instructors when students inevitably come-a-grade-grubbing. "I can't bump your score, because that would inexorably bump DOWN someone else's score, and that wouldn't be fair to the other students."
Standardized _aptitude_ tests were always bad because they’re supposed to test basic skills but do so with lots of curveball tricks or specific formats... so teachers taught the specifics of the test
Law schools often do this, and I heard many stories of things like (in the days of physical books...) moving the perfect references, a week before the deadline, to an unrelated shelf in order to trip up your classmates.
By contrast the science students tended to collaborate on everything outside of an exam room, and learned a lot from each other this way. Even if their grades were less perfectly reflective of individual understanding.
There were also some upsides to the competition in terms of motivation and focus, though admittedly with extremely ambitious law students it was a little over the top for the first year. But based on my experience teaching undergraduates, the middle ~60-70% of the class would benefit from an environment with more immediate competitive pressure.
My daughter could tell you it isn't easy, at all, to graduate from CMU SCS. It will kick your ass no matter how smart you are. That said, of the entrances to any program that's highly selective on a relevant basis, wouldn't you expect almost all of them to graduate with a good GPA?
There a lot more diversity of ability at programs with 30% acceptance than 3%. Grading on a curve might work there, and be a factor in motivating students to work harder.
But is that the best approach? Would ending legacy and donor admission concessions do more for academic rigor?
Tough.
It looks like the system now uses standardized tests and extracurricular competitions for cross-classroom comparisons and uses grades primarily to assess obedience. To my way of thinking, that's the right direction, in that it actually measures people against each other rather than measuring the arbitrary grading scales of the professors involved.
I once took a discrete math class for CS majors. I aced it. Loved it. Classmates would ask me to explain concepts to them before exams if they were having trouble. There was only one other student in the class who had gotten an A on every exam leading up to the final. He had a problem that he didn't know about, though. He didn't turn in the homework.
Now, homework for this class was not a measure of skill. It was just a way for the professor to have an extra way to determine that you were participating. I warned him the class before the final that he was gonna fail if he didn't get the teacher to give him an extension on the homework, because I knew he wasn't turning it in (there was a requirement in the syllabus that you needed to turn in 70% of the homework to have a chance at passing). Hell, he was proud of the fact that he was smart enough to understand the course material without doing it. He didn't ask for the extension, and a year later, he was sitting in the same class for which he had already mastered the material.
in many classes, homework has devolved into another technique to inflate grades. in most of my college courses the homework was either very easy or graded for "completion". almost always a complete waste of my time, but it was usually worth too many points to skip entirely.
I had a couple professors who would "assign" difficult problem sets that weren't graded at all. it was usually a bad call to skip them, because the exams were actually hard. that's the only respectful approach, imo.
To have any hope of degrees actually meaning anything, grades and diplomas need to be awarded by a standardized, neutral third party.
it's impossible to fairly grade students even in one class, so I don't see any way a multi school entity could fairly grade
I’m not sure how useful grades are when everybody gets an A. But if the reason is a phenomenal teacher (and better teachers reproducibly produce better performing students [e.g. 1]) then maybe grades are simply an unhelpful metric. “Stopping grade inflation” isn’t just not a solution, but actively counter-productive. “Grading on a curve” when every student has mastered the curriculum (which, in higher education, is entirely achievable) is bogus.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jae.2539
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.full
And that seems totally backwards. If i took my car to a mechanic, I expect them to fix my car 100%; so why do we expect professors to produce students with 75% achievement?
Professors are supposed to be in the business of teaching, not assessing.
Depends on how you look at it. I went to a school that bell curved around a C for most core classes and most of the curving wasn't "deflating scores" but rather making the class hard enough that there was a wide distribution of scores which made identifying the people who understood the most material clear. Having everyone get A's may make you feel good, but then you are most likely holding people back as there is no way for them to work harder and stand out if it is so easy that everyone is getting A's. Also, that competitive environment tends to make everyone work harder so they learn more.
While I'm not saying there shouldn't be schools where it is easy to get A's and B's, I am 100% glad I went to one that pushed me as hard as they did as I learned a ton and I have gotten very good job offers since graduating.
But if somebody enrolls Stats 101, it should be the goal of the professor to get every student to _learn_ Stats 101, not to produce a majority of students with mediocre understanding
Any tough class I've had always had a few students get a near perfect score. They were given the exact same lectures, content, and resources as people who failed the class (myself included sometimes), but all they did was engage with it more thoroughly outside of class. The professors job isn't to hold your hand and pull you through college, like a high school teacher might, it's to just lay out what's expected of you to pass the class. Whether or not you go home and put in the work you personally need to comprehend it as well as some of your peers is entirely up to your own circumstances. It's not even the school's job to educate you. The school's job is to provide you with the resources you need to pass your classes. Whether or not you receive an education is entirely up to you.
It seems absurd that high school teachers go through more education training than college professors (most of which never actually take any education training at all).
How about we make schools about learning at your own tempo, because you want the knowledge? Schools should strive to be excellent at teaching, enabling you to learn easily, not forcibly push it onto you, making you die from stress.
that said, grades are useful for self assessment imo