[HN Gopher] Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional p...
___________________________________________________________________
Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for
easier grading
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 62 points
Date : 2024-02-14 11:47 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com)
| malfist wrote:
| Why is it always assumed when grade averages go up, it's the
| professor grading easier?
|
| Students have more resources than ever to do a good job, perhaps
| it's students that are improving
| throwaway098479 wrote:
| My thoughts exactly.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Average ACT scores have declined six years in a row and are at
| their lowest level in 30 years. This isn't necessarily the
| strongest argument because of potential changes in the
| composition of the test takers. Particularly as schools go test
| optional. However, I think that is broadly in line with what
| other test scores are showing.
|
| You can pair that with surveys of how much college students are
| studying and it is down significantly from 30-40 years ago. You
| might make the case that they are better prepared now, but the
| other side of that would be that less may be expected of them.
| surge wrote:
| I also believe this is a side effect of "everyone has to go
| to college", you're no longer getting the most academically
| gifted (of which I am not a part either). It's far more
| likely with a larger portion of the populace or diverse
| populace going to college you're going to get several
| students that struggle because in certain majors you can't
| coast through college like you can many high schools.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| And when "everyone" goes to college, you get people that
| aren't really able to do college-level work. A college can
| fail them out, often leaving them with some amount of debt
| from the time they were there. (Worse, it can string them
| along for as much as they can afford, but never let them
| graduate, maximizing their debt as they chase the carrot of
| a degree.) Or it can use grade inflation to get them to
| "pass", but at the price of making the degree meaningless.
|
| The better answer would be not to admit them in the first
| place. But there are people who, after not doing well in
| high school, find motivation or grow up or whatever, and
| _are_ able to do college-level work, and do it well. They
| need a place to go.
|
| So there's not really a great answer. But I think that
| grade inflation might be the worst answer, because it
| destroys the institution, not just the individuals.
| surge wrote:
| I think, the top schools should remain academically
| rigorous, even if that means some kids even those from
| disadvantaged backgrounds don't cut it, I'm of the
| opinion they're probably better off going to a more
| average school anyway, being the first in your family to
| get a degree, for instance is a huge leg up. There's kind
| of an expectation that some schools (MIT, Carnegie
| Mellon, etc) have more academic rigor. As you said it
| makes the degree meaningless, if an A at a community
| college is the same as an A at Stanford, what is even the
| point of all the added tuition and debt?
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| > They need a place to go.
|
| That place, in the US at least, is community college with
| a setup to transfer once they've established themselves
| and acquired basic study habits and so forth, also there
| is much less non-academic distraction coming from greeks,
| athletics and campus lifestyle organizations.
|
| This is actually better for everybody at all levels
| because it's hard to justify paying full tuition rates,
| even at a state school, for lower div classes offered at
| a community college for one fifth the cost or less.
|
| Interestingly, at this level community colleges are in
| some ways even -more- rigorous than "real" universities
| because classes are very cheap so the financial penalty
| of retaking is much lower, and at the institutional level
| there is no ranking pressure to get students to graduate
| in 4 years.
|
| On the other hand the peers that students will be
| mingling with are a much wider spread from highest to
| lowest in terms of ability, than at a school that has at
| least a minimal selection funnel. There will be a small
| group capable of work at the very top (ivy/MIT/cal etc)
| echelon who attend community college to save money or for
| other practical (commute, unpredictable family
| situations, etc) reasons, and of course a much larger
| cohort of people at a barely functional level of ability,
| but these tend to discover that they may not be a fit for
| college after the first year or so.
| 20239uejd wrote:
| On the other hand, GPAs remain about as predictive of later
| criteria as standardized scores. In some studies they're even
| slightly more predictive.
|
| Each have their issues. Even with grade inflation, GPA is
| reflective of a long-term process that unfolds over years.
| ACT is an afternoon when who knows what can be going on.
| scarmig wrote:
| It's pretty simple: use both GPAs and standardized scores.
| To prevent rampant grade inflation, normalize each school's
| GPA (and for ones where the top-end indicates significantly
| less rigorous coursework than other schools', use the
| standardized tests to fill in the gaps). That'll outperform
| both GPA alone and SATs alone.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Generally not a fan of the bolding in the article, but the
| broader point raised by this one is worthwhile.
|
| "Student transcripts, too, might be better understood in the
| context of institutions' and departments' grading standards."
|
| Students don't want As for the sake of As. They want As to
| increase the likelihood that they can get a good job or get into
| grad school. More employers care about GPA than looking at
| transcripts. If schools are able to adopt a consistent way to
| measure student achievement across majors and schools that takes
| into account difficulty, then there would be less demand for
| grade inflation. If everyone gets an A, then that isn't a signal
| of student achievement.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| Wish I could upvote more "to increase the likelihood that they
| can get a good job or get into grad school." I taught as an
| adjunct at a great public university. Undergrads seem to think
| there are two grades - A or failing.
|
| But that attitude starts in high school. As a parent of kids
| there now, rampant grade inflation and an "infinite re-do"
| approach to assignments and tests really sets the tone for kids
| to feel quite bad about themselves for a B+.
|
| I'm bullish on standardized tests becoming more, rather than
| less, important for admissions to competitive (or more
| honestly, limited-number-of-student-slots) universities at the
| undergrad and graduate level.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Imo the standardized tests should be designed by the majors
| and not be standardized at all. Many like the language dept
| have already designed great ones to place people into the
| correct level language class based on what they offer at that
| university. This model expanded to the rest of the school
| would encourage learning without gaming the test or wasting
| time studying just for the test like we see in standardized
| tests and the predatory market surrounding that industry.
| Robelius wrote:
| The school I went to had a common Dynamics exam. It was
| considered the first "real" engineering course you took,
| and was the foundation for a lot of upper div classes.
| Regardless of your teacher or class time; all students took
| the same exam at the same time. Professors would grade
| other professors students.
|
| It was also normal for a double digit % of the students to
| fail the exam and retake the course (me included).
|
| Its not exactly what people think of as a standardized
| test, but it ensured all students in the school had the
| same acceptable level of comprehension on the subject.
| morkalork wrote:
| Also scholarships and bursaries? Often you have to maintain a
| high GPA to continue receiving money.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| The achievement of course objectives is a measure of
| instructional quality. Why add insult to injury when the
| customers don't get what they paid for?
| xyzelement wrote:
| This is an obvious phenomenon. A hundred years ago college was
| for a rare breed of scholar. 50 years ago it was for the more
| ambitious. Today it's for "everyone."
|
| But the average person has not become more scholarly or
| ambitious. Just that the umbrella of "what is acceptable for
| college" has become broader.
|
| As a business it makes sense. You don't want your product to be
| hard to consume so having stringent admissions or academic rigor
| goes against that goal.
|
| So it's obvious that there's infinite pressure to lower the bar
| in admissions and grading so the university can pass more
| customers through, collecting 4 years tuition.
|
| I say this as someone with 3.5 degrees who benefited strongly
| from education. There are benefits, but the average college for
| the average student today is a scam.
| dwallin wrote:
| > A hundred years ago college was for a rare breed of scholar.
|
| A hundred years ago college (and especially elite colleges)
| were largely for white upper-class men so I would be very
| careful throwing around words like "rare breed". Education in
| general was something reserved for the elite, why would you
| bother educating someone who would probably be working a
| factory line?
|
| The general population is far more educated, providing massive
| well-documented and widely-studied societal benefits. What has
| changed is we have moved (slightly) away from viewing education
| as a way of stratifying our society and more towards it as
| something that should be a baseline for our citizens.
| bluGill wrote:
| > A hundred years ago college (and especially elite colleges)
| were largely for white upper-class men
|
| In the US. Other countries had different factors on who they
| discriminated against.
| dwallin wrote:
| I think the point stands. Education at the time was highly
| discriminate regardless of who was considered the in-group
| and who was the out-group by any particular country.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 100 years ago in the US, land grant colleges were already
| enrolling women for decades.
| bluGill wrote:
| Not in large numbers compared to white males. And
| culturally many of them were attended to get a "Mrs
| degree" and not for education (but at least some did go
| for education, and it is unknown how many gave the
| appearance of going for the Mrs degree and did get a
| husband - but the education just as important even if
| they couldn't admit that)
| xyzelement wrote:
| What percentage of even that group went to college a hundred
| years ago? That is my larger point.
|
| // and more towards it as something that should be a baseline
| for our citizens.
|
| At least that's the idea. In reality someone can now graduate
| 300K in debt, with a degree that neither enables them to make
| a living nor be an informed citizen of the republic.
|
| I suppose another way my point can be made is that there's
| now a wider gulf between "has a college degree" and "has a
| valuable education" because of how common and watered down
| college has become.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It is your assertion, not a matter of fact, that "In
| reality someone can now graduate 300K in debt, with a
| degree that neither enables them to make a living nor be an
| informed citizen of the republic."
|
| We have a whole lot more failing restaurants nowadays than
| two hundred years ago, should we conclude people have
| gotten worse at cooking?
|
| If you think college grads are on average less "informed
| citizens of the republic" than those who do not go to
| college, I'm going to tell you that you have very strong
| personal biases at play that do not reflect reality.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Most of todays most prestigious american colleges got their
| start on a government mandate to teach agricultural practices
| to potential farmers, and by and large they all continue to do
| so.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university
| alephnerd wrote:
| The student body is also much stronger academically in 2023
| compared to 2013 looking at HS GPA and ACT scores alone.
|
| Ime, in 2010-2013, it wasn't that difficult to get admitted into
| UC Berkeley or UCLA or an Ivy League if you were in the top 25%
| of your class, but by 2015-2019 it shrank to the top 1-5%.
|
| This had a downstream effect on admissions for other UCs and CSUs
| as well, as everyone ended up joining their backup/safety school.
|
| The student base became much more rigorous at lower tier UCs, but
| grading practices haven't changed in 10 years, especially given
| the fact that most UCs excluding UCB don't grade on a bell curve.
|
| A program like UC Riverside is now much more competitive in 2023
| than it was in 2013.
|
| 2013
| -https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/CDS-2013-14.p...
|
| 2019 - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-
| majors...
| mathattack wrote:
| Could there be grade inflation in HS grades (likely) or ACTs
| (maybe)?
| alephnerd wrote:
| > grade inflation in HS grades (likely)
|
| Unlikely, as grade inflation would imply less need to take AP
| Classes, but proportion of students who have taken AP classes
| and tests has risen from 2013 [0] to 2021 [1].
|
| Also, GPA is based on UC HS A-G classes, which are regulated
| at the state level.
|
| > ACTs (maybe)
|
| Unlikely, it's the same damn test (source: took it in the
| early 2010s, and helped prep family friends in 2021-22).
|
| ------
|
| The main difference is California had a baby boom in the
| 1990s-early 2000s due to tech and immigration from Asia+Latin
| America [2][3].
|
| In the 2009-11 period you wouldn't see portable trailer
| classrooms in top Californian HSes, but by 2011-15 they were
| everywhere, as the 1995-2005 cohort began entering middle and
| high school.
|
| By 2020-21, the glut was largely over, and Californian school
| districts began shutting down elementary schools due to low
| attendance.
|
| California in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2021 had a TFR of 2.5,
| 2.0, 1.95, and 1.5 respectively.
|
| [0] - https://www.dailynews.com/2013/02/20/numbers-taking-
| passing-...
|
| [1] - https://reports.collegeboard.org/ap-program-
| results/class-of...
|
| [2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/national/population-
| growt...
|
| [3] - https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/california-
| sees-sl...
| sickofparadox wrote:
| Why would grade inflation imply less need to take AP
| classes? That doesn't follow at all. AP tests offer a
| chance to get college credits early, and many colleges
| provide preferential status to students with a number of AP
| classes. The incentives for taking them remain whether
| classes are easier or not.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Why would grade inflation imply less need to take AP
| classes
|
| AP Classes act as a GPA and Admissions booster in UC
| admissions.
|
| The traditional scale is 0-4, but if you take AP Classes,
| your GPA can be modified to a 0-5 scale as long as you
| pass the exam and/or maintain at least a B average in the
| class.
|
| Anyone with a GPA >4.0 means they took at least 2-3 APs
| with an A-B average along with an A average in general
| classes.
|
| The fact that the 75th percentile HS GPA at UCR in 2019
| is 4.11 compared to it being in the mid 3s in 2012
| implies that the student body has changed.
|
| In 2010-13 you could get accepted in UCR without having
| ever taken an AP course - that doesn't happen anymore
| since 2019 onwards.
|
| Heck, in the 2019 freshman class 32% of incoming freshman
| had a 4.0 GPA (aka straight As) [0]. Education standards
| in CA at the high school level didn't change between 2012
| and 2019, nor was there remote education.
|
| Even bottom tier UC admissions have become extremely
| competitive nowadays, and any parent or current student
| can attest to that.
|
| Most HNers seem to have finished HS around the early
| 2010s at the latest based on the kind of commentary I've
| seen on here, so I think they don't have experience with
| how much more impacted admissions in UCs have become
| since 2018-19.
|
| [0] - https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/cds_
| 2019-2020...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The longer there are standardized classes like ap and
| standardized tests, the better the gpa will be in future years.
| This is because programs and extracurriculars continue to
| optimize for these things. Programs and extracurriculars that
| don't exist in college. Is the student from 2023 actually more
| prepared than the one from 2013 for college? Hard to say
| because this isn't exactly what is being optimized or
| controlled for. Nor is it even clear whether being "prepared
| for college" by whatever metric that is at 17 is relevant to
| your academic performance in the next few years or job
| performance going forward.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > there are standardized classes like ap and standardized
| tests, the better the gpa will be in future years
|
| Of course, and this is the point - it had made college
| freshman more college ready.
|
| AP Coursework is equivalent to the content taught in the 101
| course of just about every UC or CC. Doesn't matter if it's
| AP Chem/Chem101, AP Calc ABC/Calc1-2, AP US History/US101,
| etc.
|
| The fact that it has become normalized for high schoolers to
| take first-year level coursework in high school points to
| younger high schoolers cohorts being better prepared for 4
| year programs compared to older cohorts.
|
| > the student from 2023 actually more prepared than the one
| from 2013 for college
|
| There is a direct correlation between High School performance
| and College performance [0][1].
|
| And UCs do take into account high school level variability
| [2]
|
| [0] - https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/northwest/P
| ublic...
|
| [1] - https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/high-
| school-GPA...
|
| [2] - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/how-to-
| apply/ap...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| People are optimizing for the wrong things. They take these
| and get credit for their first year classes that would have
| probably been not so difficult anyhow. Then they get
| destroyed in the next stage, for my major it was organic
| chemistry that handed the 50% marks like candy and there
| was nothing a high school could offer you to prepare for
| that. How could they even, nothing they offer demands you
| spend 20 hours a week outside of class scribbling reactions
| like a mad man in a cold library basement, but thats
| literally what needs to happen to do well. Its a total
| whiplash but even this is still removed from learning how
| to actually work in the field, experience you can't really
| get unless you can get a professor to let you work under
| them. Who goes on to the next stage with ease is now who
| lucked out here during the slog and got some extra
| experience from time they could afford to lose.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > They take these and get credit for their first year
| classes that would have probably been not so difficult
| anyhow
|
| You need to take the AP Exam and score a 5 to get full
| credit for these classes at the college level.
|
| If you did not a score a 5 on the AP Exam, you aren't
| getting out of the intro class at the UC or occasionally
| CSU level.
|
| > the 50% marks like candy
|
| I don't think you're American based on that statement
| alone. It sounds Indian or British - especially because
| in the US a D- is 60%, a C- is 70%, and so on, and we
| don't use the word "marks", and you need a C- average to
| graduate from a UC.
|
| > even this is still removed from learning how to
| actually work in the field, experience you can't really
| get unless you can get a professor to let you work under
| them
|
| Idk about where you are in the Commonwealth, but
| internships have been normalized in the US since the
| 2010s.
|
| Almost everyone in a decent program (aka every UC - even
| Merced) can land an internship or research experience
| after finishing lower div requirements
| jeffbee wrote:
| > If you did not a score a 5 on the AP Exam, you aren't
| getting out of the intro class at the UC or occasionally
| CSU level.
|
| At some UCs, and in some subjects, you can get more
| credit for a 5, but in some subjects you get full credit
| for a 3, even at Berkeley. It depends on whether the test
| is relevant to the main topic of your university studies,
| or tangential to them. A 3, 4, or 5 on either AP Calculus
| exam will get you entirely out of having to study math at
| Berkeley in the College of Letters and Sciences.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > but in some subjects you get full credit for a 3
|
| Fair point!
|
| That said, you get full credit but it won't exempt you
| from major related coursework in most cases. Circa a few
| years ago, I think AP Lit had the best RoI for AP Class
| to Cal Class Credit as they took you out of the intro
| writing classes in LAS.
|
| > A 3, 4, or 5 on either AP Calculus exam will get you
| entirely out of having to study math at Berkeley in the
| College of Letters and Sciences.
|
| Quant Reasoning/Math1a (intro calc) yes, but you'd still
| need to take Math1b/53/54/55 depending on your major in
| L&S.
|
| If you're an English major it probably doesn't make sense
| to do anything beyond 1a, but if you're a STEM major then
| 53/54/55 are de facto requirements and they will require
| 1b.
|
| Every other AP required a 4 minimum at Cal
| jcranmer wrote:
| > it was organic chemistry that handed the 50% marks like
| candy and there was nothing a high school could offer you
| to prepare for that.
|
| My high school was definitely far from typical, but it
| did have an Intro to Organic Chemistry that did provide
| some extra practice for the gruntwork of organic
| chemistry (especially organic nomenclature).
| verelo wrote:
| Grade inflation is legit and absurd. As an employer it makes me
| mad because i cannot use them as an indicator at all, they were
| never great but now they're worthless.
|
| My wife is a mature student doing her PhD, she was negotiating
| grades as part of her TA duties with a professor and his number
| one priority was avoiding student complaints. Legitimate lines i
| listened to them say:
|
| "That student did a terrible job, they should only get 8/10"
|
| "This kid is going to complain, let's give them 9. I don't think
| they deserve to pass but i don't want to answer their emails."
| sevensor wrote:
| > i don't want to answer their emails
|
| This is it right here. All it takes is for there to be no
| countervailing incentive for rigor, and for maintaining high
| standards to be a lot of extra work. For all that we
| occasionally moan about slipping standards in education,
| nobody's calling the school administration on their 20-year-old
| kid's behalf to complain about an undeserved A.
| me_me_me wrote:
| This was not an issue, as all institutions used to had their
| own entry exams. Then they got together and convinced
| government to create standardized test that would allow to
| create standard that they can trust and judge entrants by.
|
| When you do grade inflation the institutions will loose trust
| in the grade quickly and revert back to internal testing.
| 20239uejd wrote:
| Fair enough. I misread your post initially but as a professor I
| can say it's definitely not always like that.
|
| One issue is that evaluation of teaching is often heavily based
| on student ratings, so there's a huge incentive to avoid
| conflict and resentful feelings. There is in fact good reason
| for weighing ratings, because they are predictive of objective
| learning outcomes, but my sense is the pendulum of emphasis on
| them has swung a bit too far. I'm old enough to have had a
| glimpse of an different era and zeitgeist, and have seen what
| happens when you have instructors who teach poorly, are out of
| touch, and then blame it on lazy students, but I now I think
| sometimes basing so much on student feelings is a bit too much.
|
| I also have colleagues at well-known private institutions who
| have told me very, very clearly and directly that they not
| infrequently have pressure from administration to give students
| better grades. They have multiple stories of the college
| getting calls from a parent who is a significant donor,
| complaining about their child's grade, and asking the professor
| if there's "any way the student can make up some of the grade"
| or something like that. It's never a direct order, and there's
| never a request to just change the grade outright, but you can
| tell that there's an implicit message that if they were to
| ignore them repeatedly, they would make things difficult.
|
| Really like a lot of things in higher education, grade
| inflation involves a lot of things other than the process of
| assigning a grade per se, and the interaction between the
| student and the instructor. There's a lot of cultural and
| sociofinancial variables involved, many of which are difficult
| to quantify and might not really be in people's conscious
| awareness all the time.
|
| Then again, where I've been at there were deliberate but
| reasonable efforts to rein in grade inflation, and I've never
| really felt like I was being overly generous for its own sake
| or to avoid trouble later. In my experience, if you are very
| very clear about expectations and your grading criteria, and
| they are reasonable, students don't complain.
|
| Another issue I rarely see brought up in this is that I think
| increasingly students are counseled by college advising to drop
| courses if they are struggling. In fact, as I think about it,
| they track this very very very closely, and have a systematic
| screening process to flag students who might not do well, with
| check-ins all the way up through midterm. Some of this is due
| to new conditions of federal higher educational loans, but some
| of it is just due to changed advising practices to be more
| proactive. If you have a bunch of students who might have
| otherwise failed dropping the course in the second week, where
| there's no record of a grade in their record, it will look like
| grade inflation when it's really a type of selection bias.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| At some colleges if you retake a course and get a higher
| grade, that's the grade and the old one stops weighing down
| the gpa calculation. This was not an uncommon route to pass a
| chemistry series.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That sounds fair. Grades should assess the student's
| mastery of the material. If they flunked the first time and
| earned a B+ on the retry, why hold their initial failure
| over them? They already paid with the opportunity cost of
| retaking the course instead of having that slot freed for
| something else.
| noqc wrote:
| As an educator, I do not consider it my obligation to provide
| employers with effective evaluations. I am an educator, not an
| interviewer. You want effective evaluations, pay for them.
| stagger87 wrote:
| What do you consider the grades you give your students if not
| an "evaluation" of their performance in your class?
| Alternatively, if you _do_ consider them an evaluation, are
| you saying your grades are not effective at evaluating them?
| bo1024 wrote:
| Ok, but your reputation among employers may go down and that
| will hurt all of your future students.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| It is incomprehensible to me that you would even consider using
| grades as a hiring indicator.
| stagger87 wrote:
| I'm curious if you do hiring, and if yes, for how long? There
| was a time in my career where grades were a data point that
| could be used. But I agree, nowadays not so much for the
| engineering roles I deal with.
| streptomycin wrote:
| Some of this is because young professors try to grade things
| fairly (such as failing students who never make any effort to
| learn the material) and get beaten down by the administration
| because failing students are a lot of extra work for the
| admins. Then it flows downhill to professors telling the same
| to TAs.
|
| I remember as a TA I caught a student cheating (very blatant,
| included a paper trail with obvious lying) and the professor
| was like "eh, give him an 8/10 instead of a 10/10". That was
| the attitude 15 years ago, I can't imagine what it's like now
| if trends have continued..
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Counterpoint: grades put too much emphasis on performance, and
| not the joy of learning. Being a hardass and stack-ranking people
| doesn't actually encourage education or innovation, but
| encourages people who are good at rote tasks that may not
| resemble real life.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > stack-ranking people doesn't actually encourage education or
| innovation, but encourages people who are good at rote tasks
| that may not resemble real life.
|
| adjacent: My kids and I ace tests w/o studying. It's an ability
| we never had to work for. Afterward, the material was
| forgotten.
|
| Our good and bad grades both poorly reflect what we know.
| azemetre wrote:
| What kinds of tests are you acing? Also for learning wouldn't
| it be better to actually challenge yourself and exercise the
| brain muscles when learning something new?
|
| I've met too many first year college students who breezed
| through high school but never learned how to study. When the
| first calculus exam comes around they all tend to fail then
| get very anxious/depressed. Sometimes they'll drop out
| entirely.
|
| I'm sure this story isn't uncommon for others either.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Some people enjoy trivia, tests, etc. It's not just about
| the knowledge, its about thinking about what the test-
| writer will ask, and how they will assess knowledge. And
| the fun of performing under pressure.
|
| I have always enjoyed tests. My son does too...
|
| Honestly it helps in other pursuits in life where you're
| evaluated under pressure (like interviewing). So its not a
| terrible thing.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > it helps in other pursuits in life where you're
| evaluated under pressure (like interviewing).
|
| It depends. It doesn't do much to overcome social
| challenges.
|
| ex: Son #1 studied for nothing but freezes hard in job
| interviews. Conversely, I've talked my way into a number
| positions for which I wasn't a good candidate.
|
| We've learned that interview-skills are more highly
| prized than being qualified. Usually far more.
| tekla wrote:
| Yep, very common. Pretty much everyone (including me) in my
| class who claimed didn't have to study in HS got their ass
| reamed during the 1st year.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > What kinds of tests are you acing?
|
| k-12, college. College was more mixed for me; learning
| happened in my C D and F subjects. I'd remember material
| trivially _or_ w / brutal difficulty. Always one or the
| other. I retained the latter.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This is very much my experience but all the stuff I
| "didn't retain" is actually there, hidden deep, waiting
| for the right reference or trigger. It's deeply upsetting
| as my memory is both incredible and impressive, yet
| utterly useless to me if it doesn't "want" what I want.
|
| The hardest for me in college was simply having zero
| strategies to deal with my diagnosed ADHD. "Oh I'm so
| lazy and procrastinator but I get everything done well"
| doesn't work so well for your 400 level CS project.
|
| It sure is humbling going from "everyone believes you are
| literally a genius and teachers gossip about your
| standardized test scores that you max out the scale on"
| to "well I might at least be average intelligence".
| Internally I wish I could "unlock" that kind of just
| knowing things again, but the reality is that this is
| probably my actual potential and it was just easy for me
| to reach. The one counterpoint is that the 400 level
| algorithms class that started with the professor spending
| an hour explaining that most of the class fails every
| year and we need to take this seriously was super easy
| and fun and was nearly an A for me despite having no time
| management and project management skills.
| me_me_me wrote:
| educational system was never about joy of learning or
| enlightenment of young minds.
|
| It was always a nursery + learn basic skills like reading and
| math + creating habits like showing up on time (creating
| effective factory workers while their parents work in a
| factory).
|
| Later we added an extra level that prepares for higher
| education, and here all you are doing is jockeying for a spot
| in university. Cramming details for a big test so you can be
| graded vs you peers when applying for university. That's the
| whole point really. Was majority of knowledge gained in
| secondary school is lost by the end of your 1st year of
| university.
|
| The whole idea of school being a place that inspires young
| people is romanticized propaganda.
|
| At best a teacher might pick a student or two that shows
| promise and guide them a bit. But they can do it for all kids
| in every class. They cannot make physics interesting for all
| kids and make them get all 100% at final test.
| bo1024 wrote:
| This comment is not historically accurate with respect to
| universities. Universities originated as places of research
| and scholarship (there are also theological roots). Joy of
| learning and enlightenment are deep in their roots (so deep
| we may not be able to find them any more).
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| My mother was an accounting teacher. She said grades should be
| feedback to the student how well they are doing. And feedback
| to how well the teacher is doing.
|
| A student with a low grade really needs to consider upping
| their game or dialing back on their class load. People forget
| that the results of grades don't necessarily reflect the
| quality of the student. A student taking 6 classes is going to
| have a rougher time than one that's taking 1 class. A working
| single working mother is going to have less time to devote than
| a 20 year old living with her parents and only going to school.
|
| If your students are doing well enough on the tests that it's
| hard to not give them all A's you need to increase the level of
| material your teaching. Because really your wasting their time
| otherwise. If they're all failing you need to reevaluate the
| level of material and how you're teaching the class.
| lightedman wrote:
| I would suspect (as a local to the University in this article)
| the inflation is higher than one sees.
|
| For a short period of time, I did some part-time pizza delivery
| in the UCR area. These college students are... not very bright.
| We're talking leave car doors open (in the middle of one of the
| worst neighborhoods around) and go back inside while chatting on
| the phone with their best buddy sort of naive. Some don't even
| know their own address and have been in the same student
| apartment for several years.
|
| The ones in the Ag./Hort. Sci classes seem to be mostly on-the-
| ball, but it helps UCR is almost entirely research fields, for
| that one. Ditto the geology department (having a literal mountain
| to yourself in your Uni's back yard for studies helps.)
| bsder wrote:
| What about the numbers for the engineering departments?
|
| I'd be curious if inflation holds there, as well, since
| engineering departments have to answer to an accreditation body
| (ABET).
| bradley13 wrote:
| Prof here. Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a
| grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. I
| would happily give out nothing but A's (those would be 6's here),
| if all students deserved them. On the other hand, I have taught
| classes where 3/4 of the students failed, because they deserved
| to.
|
| Giving out unjustifiably high grades devalues them. Why should a
| top student apply themselves, if everyone is going to get an 'A'?
| A student putting in low effort needs to get a wake-up call by
| failing exams or assignments.
|
| Grades tell the school how a student is doing, and may serve as a
| basis for admission to particular courses or projects. Grades
| tell the student how they are doing, and where they need to
| invest more effort. Grades inform potential employers where a
| student's strengths and weaknesses are.
|
| Ok, stepping back: one possible reason for undeserved high grades
| can be found in the school administration. Students who fail too
| many courses must leave the school, and that costs the school
| money. Administrators tend to think of this year's finances, and
| don't care a whole lot about long-term reputation. Professors and
| instructors have to push back, have to insist on maintaining a
| level of quality. No one wants to teach for a diploma mill.
| ecf wrote:
| > Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths
| and weaknesses are.
|
| I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned
| about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had.
|
| Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center
| cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn't have the
| luxury of studying as much as others did.
| tekla wrote:
| Funny, most of my class considered it a red flag if a
| employer didn't check for grades. Mostly because it meant
| everyone who had < 3.0 GPA or so would mob them.
|
| All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| > All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
|
| Not sure about that. Don't know any faang companies that
| care about your grade.
| brewdad wrote:
| They don't care about the difference between a 3.5 and a
| 4.0 but they absolutely have a minimum grade standard for
| new college grads.
|
| Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to know
| whether you have a degree and your work experience.
| Grades certainly matter when first starting out however.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Google was happy to attempt to recruit me from a no-name
| school with a 3.2 GPA
|
| Pretty much anything above a 3.0 for a STEM degree is
| just a measure of how much you cared, or how much free
| time you had anyway.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| > Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to
| know whether you have a degree and your work experience.
| Grades certainly matter when first starting out however.
|
| Not really, even half a year of internship in a average
| software shop/your own software project/working
| experience in any software position is enough to win over
| a great student with 0 experience to score you a chance
| of interview. And the interview experience is the same
| for everyone.
|
| The school experience frankly doesn't account for
| anything except whether the candidate has the fortitute.
| You learn on the job anyway. It's like how they use
| leetcode where they just want to see how hard you want
| the job.
|
| Source: I am in faang.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| I applied to ~15 employers in my last semester of school
| and 0 of them asked for or about grades (in the US).
| tekla wrote:
| Any employer of new grads that didn't ask for grades were
| all pretty obviously lower tie. It was also much harder
| to get an interview because of sheer numbers of students
| standing on line.
|
| The high tier companies told everyone before they stood
| on line that unless you have a minimum of 3.0, you were
| better off going somewhere else.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Often professors grade gently to avoid being mobbed at the end
| of the year as I was told by a few myself. Students have been
| getting worse by the year at that.
|
| The worst part of the modern college experience I think is the
| fact in many majors, you no longer learn relevant job skills
| and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad
| research outside of the courseload. This obviously sets up a
| world where more advantaged students who can afford free time
| to such things continue to hold the best outcomes, despite
| recent DEI pushes from admin to avoid these things. I've heard
| a professor actually state with pride how the lab classes in
| their department have not changed in over 40 years, so that
| grades from 40 years ago could be compared to todays grades,
| somehow believing that is more useful to employers than getting
| qualified candidates. Then on the other hand students have to
| take so many concurrent credit hours in different classes that
| they will admit to triaging their study time and giving up on
| certain classes, where they might have succeeded if allowed
| more time for focus perhaps in one of those month-mester
| formats, where you can get a semester's course done in a month
| or so.
| nradov wrote:
| Colleges aren't intended to be trade schools teaching job
| skills. This does, however, put some students in a difficult
| position. If someone wants to become a professional software
| developer and isn't particularly interested in becoming a
| well-rounded individual with a broad, liberal education then
| there aren't many good options. Coding boot camps exist but
| are generally limited and low quality.
|
| You might not realize this yet, but occasionally overloading
| students with coursework is actually a positive. I attended
| an academically rigorous college and as an average student
| there was just no way I could finish everything on time in a
| high quality way. This taught me effective time management,
| ruthless prioritization, and the pointlessness of
| perfectionism. Those lessons were more valuable than the
| content of any particular course.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| While this style of educational methods might work for you,
| they don't work for everyone and in fact they are very
| harmful to a subset of the population. Colleges seemingly
| are more willing to install fencing in parking garages than
| to look inwardly at why they have had to install this
| fencing in the first place.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Colleges aren't intended to be trade schools teaching job
| skills
|
| If that's the case then we shouldn't be funding them as
| such. Virtually all the support for public funding of post-
| secondary education is helping people get good jobs and get
| upward mobility. This is obvious from listening to how
| politicians speak about educational funding.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| We didn't get here from the supply side but from the
| demand side. Entry level office work does not hire with
| only high school anymore, and the students have followed.
| There are plenty of people who would not go to college if
| they thought they could get white collar work doing so;
| in 2024 everyone dreads the high cost of college
| education.
|
| I don't really think anything in college is particularly
| helpful for entry level white collar work, it's just what
| the employers are asking for.
| bradley13 wrote:
| > Often professors grade gently to avoid >being mobbed at the
| end of the year
|
| Mobbed how? I have had students protest their grades -
| there's a process for that. If the grade is somehow a
| mistake, or unfair, it gets corrected. If not, and if the
| grading is demonstrably fair, what are they going to do?
|
| FWIW, although I am a hard grader, the student ratings
| indicate that they appreciate it.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Ever taught first year calculus to a batch of pre med
| students? They're under pressure to score high, and feel
| like their entire future rides on every quiz, so tend to
| argue every point deducted. It's an incredible time suck,
| and really just demoralizing.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I had many profs take great joy in "failing" the pre-meds
| (a.k.a. letting the PhD and industry track students get
| better grades) for exactly this reason.
| teeray wrote:
| > you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to
| learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the
| courseload
|
| Colleges scoff at the idea of becoming "job training
| schools," but that is exactly what they need to be. The
| students are, overwhelming, there to "get a good job after
| college." Only a fraction of them will continue on to spend
| their entire career in academia.
| ghaff wrote:
| The logic isn't that most students will go on to academic
| careers. It's that if students have a solid basis on the
| theory and other foundational basics of a field they can
| pick up a lot of the (often ephemeral)
| tooling/techniques/etc. on their own.
|
| If you want to argue that elite schools in particular often
| over-rotate on the theory and don't do enough to get
| students hand-on I won't really disagree with you. But
| there is a distinction from trade schools.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| Yes. At my CS program, there was a saying that when
| someone asks you what programming languages or frameworks
| you know, you say "any", because you are being taught
| foundations that will let you pick up any language or
| framework that gets invented (barring some massive
| revolution in quantum computing or P=NP or whatever)
|
| Almost no CS major will get a job that will require them
| to write their own programming language and compiler from
| scratch. But having done that, I am way better off than
| if I spent that semester taking a bootcamp on the latest
| implementation details of the newest language or
| framework at the time, which is now obsolete.
| brewdad wrote:
| Sure, but how successful have you been getting a job
| requiring knowledge of Rust if you learned C++ in
| university? What about a more established language like
| Java if you happen to have little experience with it.
|
| The fact is modern companies don't want you to have the
| ability to acquire a new skill, they want you to have
| that skill on day one. This is even more true outside the
| programming realm. It's short sighted and
| counterproductive long term but when the next quarter's
| earnings are what matters, long term is but a an abstract
| concept.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's hard to answer in the general case. I think it's
| fair to say I've _never_ been hired because of expertise
| in a narrow technology area.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I learned java 7 in college, got a job writing java 7
| transitioning to java 8, then spent 8 years writing
| python 3, which when I actually got the job I thought I
| hated python (I think it has some dumb choices and
| culture around it), and through some slow but definitive
| moves in that same company I "learned" java 8 to start
| working on a different project.
|
| I was expected to learn and become proficient in things
| like CSS and Javascript and HTML as well despite never
| taking a class on any of them.
|
| My degree taught me how computing _works_ , from the
| theory to the logic gates to the math needed to interact
| with basics in the field.
|
| You know, companies used to spend money "training" their
| employees to do the things they needed to do. When
| computers first came around companies had to turn a
| mountain of secretaries into the very first programmers
| and computer administrators, and those mostly women
| bootstrapped the entire information economy. But that
| investment into human resources could better be spent on
| the CEOs private plane so they've spent the past 40 years
| bitching that "waaah waaah higher education doesn't make
| me cheap little worker bees waaah" as if you are entitled
| to free labor just because you "run" a business
| lokar wrote:
| What languages I already know has never been an issue,
| past my first couple years out of school. Similarly, in
| interviewing experienced candidates I don't care which
| languages they happen to already know, I only want people
| who can learn whatever languages we decide to use.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| I hire people on a regular basis. I very much want people
| who have the ability to learn a new skill, and I work for
| a megacorp ( no faang ).
|
| Straight out of college, the hard truth is that you know
| virtually nothing, even if it sounds harsh ( and no
| you're not a senior engineer after 3 years ). If I find
| someone who's really good at c++ out of college, has
| started learning rust, wants to learn, and has good
| foundations, I'll happily hire them.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It is highly unlikely that any general college curricula
| could teach a generic enough curricula that would apply
| to enough businesses to work more like a trade school;
| the tech ecosystem is complex and even within one
| language there are multiple flavors of open source
| frameworks, to say nothing of companies with proprietary
| stuff.
| lokar wrote:
| I found the (looked down on) "skills" parts of my CS degree
| to be somewhat helpful the first couple years as I got
| started. The overwhelming value has been in theory,
| critical thinking and math/engineering formalism throughout
| my career.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a
| student, I don't care how the other students did._
|
| You're in the very small minority. Virtually every professor I
| had in college employed scale adjustments to grades based on
| class averages.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I think its very common to grade on a curb, mostly because
| most professors don't have a natural high water mark defined
| (like what does "A" work mean independent of your peers?).
| And if they did have an idea, they probably have taught the
| class many times to get that idea. Especially for smaller
| upper division classes that are not taught at scale, this is
| probably not very feasible.
| itronitron wrote:
| And yet GPA is used to rank applicants in pretty much every
| academic admissions process.
| jseliger wrote:
| That can be true and yet the incentives remain:
| https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...
| mise_en_place wrote:
| A sneakier thing that some of my professors did was to inflate
| the lower percentile of grades. So not everyone would get an A,
| but nobody would get lower than a B-/C+.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| The democratization of the gentleman's C[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentleman%27s_C
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| In my experience, administration cares a lot about pass/fail
| ratios. Much less so about the distribution of passing
| grades. I've seen situations where administration forced a
| curve in a difficult class because they weren't willing to
| face the music when over 50% of a class failed. Mostly
| because the students and their (helicopter) parents would
| raise a shitstorm of busywork and a lot of bad press.
|
| Of course, sometimes 50% of a class fails because the
| teaching is shoddy, or the grading is unfair, or the
| prerequisites weren't properly set or enforced. It isn't
| always a failure on the part of the students. Failing grades
| are inherently a failure of the system to prepare and guide a
| student through material. A common _symptom_ of that systemic
| failure? Lazy, unmotivated students.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| Schooling as an institution is decaying, and there are
| alternate institutions popping up in the decentralized
| Network State. Will future employers prefer students who
| went to woke Harvard, or an autodidact who was
| homeschooled, utilized an AI tutor (Synthesis), and then
| went on to the Thiel Fellowship. Time will tell I suppose.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| > Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a
| student, I don't care how the other students did.
|
| This was not my experience in a large public US research
| university for undergrad and masters in math and CS. So many of
| my STEM classes had exams that were not calibrated at all to
| any "bar" of minimum expectations. Often the median grade for
| exams (out of 100) was 30-60. So the prof fit it to a normal
| distribution and then put arbitrary cutoffs for what counted as
| an A, B, C, D, and F.
|
| Social science and humanities was often very different grading.
| I had a humanities prof tell me exactly what you said when I
| asked about the curve: there is no curve, I do not compare you
| to other students, I compare you to my own standards.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| One of my favorite finals had two parts. One was a normal
| test on the material. That was not graded on a curve.
|
| The other was a more open ended set of problems. That was
| graded on a curve, and was a lot of fun.
|
| But yeah, every other CS class I took was on a curve.
| jprival wrote:
| I recall certain intro CS courses being calibrated to be
| difficult enough to fit with the department's (generally
| tough) grading guidelines without actually applying a
| strict curve to exam results after the fact, so as to
| encourage students to see it as a collaborative endeavor
| rather than a competitive one. That seems kind of ideal if
| you can make it work. But yes, it's hardly unusual for
| grades to work _a lot_ like stack ranking.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| In my most extreme case of this, I had a C.S. midterm where I
| nearly doubled the second highest score (90 vs 47). The
| cutoff for an A was around 40.
|
| The only one of my humanities classes that had a curve was
| the "Introduction to logic" (which was offered by the
| philosophy department). It was a rather gentle curve, but the
| tests were also open-book.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail, that
| sounds like a dysfunctional system. Maybe the course
| prerequisites were poorly designed. How do you determine with
| such certainty that it was the student's fault? Do you ever
| look at those stats and consider whether you're actually doing
| a good job at teaching?
|
| I've definitely encountered some professors are just terrible
| educators that take pride in failing as many students as
| possible... Not that I'd claim this is the case for you, but I
| always wonder when people bring up these massive rates of
| failure.
| burnished wrote:
| It would be weirder if it never happened.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail,
| that sounds like a dysfunctional system. Maybe the course
| prerequisites were poorly designed. How do you determine with
| such certainty that it was the student's fault? Do you ever
| look at those stats and consider whether you're actually
| doing a good job at teaching?
|
| I think "only a poor teacher blames their students" is a
| pretty tempting companion to "only a poor craftsman blames
| their tools," but, at least from my motivated thinking as a
| teacher, I don't find it completely true.
|
| The structuring of universities as businesses means that
| there's a strong, if seldom explicitly acknowledged, tendency
| to view a degree as something that is purchased, rather than
| earned. This means that there is a lot of pressure from
| administration to make sure that a large proportion of an
| increasingly large population of students--students whom the
| faculty had no voice in choosing--eventually get their way to
| a degree. The students who are interested in their education
| still work sincerely towards that goal, but the ones who view
| a degree as a credential they are purchasing can fall,
| intentionally or unintentionally, into the trap of relying on
| this institutional pressure to shepherd them through as long
| as they play the system correctly. And then, as a teacher,
| your choice is to connive at this "go along to get along"
| mentality, or to be stuck in a situation where there is no
| reasonable way to get students who came to you unprepared--
| for societal and educational reasons--to a point where one
| can honestly say that they have mastered this course's
| material and are ready for the next.
| dmckeon wrote:
| One approach to requiring prerequisites is to give a test on
| the prerequisite content on the first or second day of class,
| with the test scored quickly, and the results worth 20% of
| the final course grade. Students who do well on the test know
| the prerequisites, and those who bomb the test have time to
| drop the course and enroll in one of the prerequisite courses
| - or to stubbornly struggle with the higher-level material
| and earn a B grade. It takes some cooperation among the
| faculty to pull off, but can be effective.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| One interesting point is that public universities are
| sometimes used as dumping grounds for people who could not
| get into private universities, and politicians also often
| want to expand classes for political reasons. Sometimes this
| can result in wholly unprepared people going to courses they
| will not pass, which does a disservice to the students, the
| professors and the university.
|
| I attended my public school just as CS was becoming a hot
| subject. My entering class had 300 CS students; by the time I
| graduated there were 900 incoming students into CS and many
| more clamoring to get in, and the program was struggling with
| such a fast expansion; but telling voters that we are
| expanding CS education sells well. On top of that the
| university had also been decreasing the amount of remedial
| core classes for students struggling as well.
| klyrs wrote:
| > If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail,
| that sounds like a dysfunctional system
|
| University _must not be_ easy for slackers. Slackers must
| fail in class, or they will not learn the real-world lesson
| that underlies it all.
|
| As an undergrad, I was a keen student. I listened, learned,
| and put hours into my homework to really make sure I learned
| it. I took three courses where around 75% of the class failed
| or dropped out. I learned an incredible amount of material in
| those classes, and I aced each of them. I observed my
| classmates treating the classes like any other, phoning in
| the homework and getting slaughtered in exams. Each
| instructor had a prepared speech for day 1 setting
| expectations for the difficulty of the course.
|
| You get out what you put in. Yes, bad and ineffective
| teachers exist, but in my experience those teachers are the
| most generous with grades. The tough ones willing to fail
| anybody who doesn't know the material have the highest
| standards for themselves as well as the students.
|
| If you really want to know how effective a teacher is, you
| can't just look at the grades in their class. You also need
| to track their students to the classes which depend on that
| material.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| As someone who comfortably was at the top of every class
| without a ton of effort I found grading to be stupid.
| Incentives demanded you have As. Teachers who were rigid
| graders with thresholds at 95% for As were very frustrating.
|
| The difference between an A and an A- is not one of mastery but
| of minor errors and lapses in focus.
|
| Teachers don't have the ability to meaningfully measure top
| performance. Imo grading should have a lower ceiling for an A
| but no curve.
|
| So much anxiety would be lost if everyone just chilled out and
| said, look, if you generally understand all the material, you
| get the top mark.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| universities have gone from having the goal of actually
| educating to giving credentials in return for a lot of money
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| This comes from a few recent changes in college admissions. Less
| students are enrolling in college, and this trend will likely
| continue for the next 10 years. Part of this is due to there
| being less people 15-18 years old compared to previous years, so
| colleges need to be more competitive to retain the same number of
| students. The other part is rising costs of colleges, to the
| point where many who would normally consider it are pausing and
| asking if it is worth it.
|
| In a normally competitive college market, students are pressured
| to do well academically. If they do not, they receive low grades,
| then get put on academic probation, then get dismissed from the
| college and are replaced by a more academically capable student.
|
| For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), there will always be
| more students. But for state level universities and community
| colleges, there is not always another student to take their place
| due to factors above.
|
| So, grade inflation seems like a natural solution to the
| immediate number of enrolled students problem, however the long-
| term tradeoff is that it devalues the institution's image by not
| holding new graduates to the same standard that graduates 5-10
| years ago were held to.
|
| You see this all the time in FinTech - some firms only hire from
| Stanford, Yale, etc because those colleges are great at creating
| students with a certain baseline standard of education. The
| amount of time it takes to ramp up students from those
| universities compared to others is significantly less.
|
| So in general, grade inflation is a short-term fix that might
| have long term consequences.
| mhuffman wrote:
| >For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), I went to one of
| these type schools. At the time, grade inflation was already a
| hot topic. It seemed then that there were two schools of
| thought:
|
| 1) Grades where artificially inflated for some students that
| couldn't keep up for social or political reasons and to help
| with their economic future. The idea being that in a "real"
| job, it isn't about always being exactly right and you can
| always research any info you need in quasi-real-time, not to
| mention most of your actual job requirements will be taught to
| you on the job. So a can-do attitude and good communication
| skills are adequate and a bad grade should not stop your
| progress.
|
| 2) Students were just smarter and better prepared each
| successive year. If a student makes an A, you give them the A!
| And if the school is very selective a lot of students will make
| A's. They are not there by accident after all! As an example,
| the average GPA in my school was a 4.1! (And I mean my
| university, not my high-school where AP "tweaks" GPAs)
|
| I was even in a class where one of our projects was to research
| and write about this. At the time, there was no one right
| answer, it seemed.
| carabiner wrote:
| There isn't grade inflation in STEM programs. These discussions
| neglect this fact because the vast majority of college students
| are still humanities majors. If you look at Math or Mechanical
| Engineering departments, there is zero issue of grade
| inflation. OP article is about philosophy program where I can
| definitely see the fuzzy nature of the subject leading to soft
| grading. If anything most engineering schools are known for
| grade deflation. At my school, they started adding the course
| average grade to transcripts, but only for courses at the
| college of liberal arts.
| vonzepp wrote:
| During COVID in UK alot of grades were given by teacher
| assessment not by an exam. There was grade inflation. For one
| reason I didn't see was, people mess up exams, run out of time,
| spend too much time on an answer, misread a question, panic,
| don't turn over a page, feel ill on the day. Predictied grades
| don't predict non knowledge based exam performance. I wonder have
| there been studies covering how many grades are lost due to such
| failings.
| currymj wrote:
| I don't think it is just pressure from above. I think a lot of
| professors would sincerely prefer to not give out any grades (as
| is done at some universities), or at least to give them an
| extremely low importance, and grade inflation is a way to
| approach this within the current system.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Why not pass/fail everything? I've never looked at a transcript
| when hiring someone. It's not a strong differentiator in
| industry.
|
| Maybe it makes a difference for grad school, but even then there
| are likely far better indicators of potential success.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| You haven't. But lots and lots of firms do. It might be better
| if they didn't, but that isn't the world these grads are
| entering today.
| neilv wrote:
| I would love it if grades kept improving because students kept
| getting smarter.
| vmilner wrote:
| Returning to a Uk university after 30 years recently to do a
| taught masters (STEM subject) I noticed that modules were either
| marked on a curve or (more dubiously) had a "revision lecture"
| where essentially the lecturer described what questions would be
| on the exam paper to a close approximation.
| lumost wrote:
| Ultimately, this is because employers and grad schools care about
| the GPA, and schools want to ensure that most of their student
| body is above the arbitrary thresholds set by those institutions.
| Otherwise, students and alumni would devalue the university.
|
| If Harvard or anyone else wants to maintain a student body with a
| GPA of 3.5 at the 25th percentile, they will need to either cut
| students or inflate grades to reach that point. Cutting students
| was a popular tactic when university was a summers wage - not so
| much when students are indebting themselves for 10 years to get a
| degree. Hence we have grade inflation.
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| > I decided to look at UC Riverside's grade distributions since
| 2013, since faculty now have access to a tool to view this
| information.
|
| For context, the author is Eric Schwitzgebel:
|
| "an American professor of philosophy at the University of
| California, Riverside. His main interests include connections
| between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the
| nature of belief"
|
| Sources:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schwitzgebel
|
| https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/
| aidenn0 wrote:
| What does "DFW" stand for?
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