Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for easier grading(schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com)
schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com
Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for easier grading
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/02/grade-inflation-at-uc-riverside-and.html
207 comments
> 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.
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.
One of the amusing things I encountered in grad school was taking a course where both grad students and undergraduates were allowed. The course was curved for the reasons you mentioned but what was interesting was that the grad students and undergraduates were curved separately. To protect the undergraduates, right? Actually as it turned out the grad students scored worse on average!
Of course the grad students scored worse, they are unlikely to be asked about their grades ever again in their life if they are doing well with research and networking.
Undergrads on the other hand, a bad grade means screened out of interviews.
Undergrads on the other hand, a bad grade means screened out of interviews.
Speaking from my own grad student experience, there is very little incentive to have a good GPA. Research is everything
The courses that the motivated and smart grad students take are typically not available to undergrad students. I took a lot of grad courses in undergrad, and then as a grad students I never studied with any undergrads since I had already taken those courses.
Depends on the university. At mine in CS you could take literally any grad course you wanted so long as the professor didn't mind (and they had no reason to mind), even if you didn't have any of the prerequisites. I learnt a lot that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In practice, in 2024, most companies want to hire programmers (and employees in general) who have done exactly this job before.
Hiring for theoretical knowledge, hiring for abstract-reasoning skills, and then training ... sounds good in marketing collateral, but only the Googles of the world can afford to do it, and even Google may be changing their tune. (Of course, R1 faculty have never looked for an industry job in their lives.)
If you don't believe me, look at some job listings.
Hiring for theoretical knowledge, hiring for abstract-reasoning skills, and then training ... sounds good in marketing collateral, but only the Googles of the world can afford to do it, and even Google may be changing their tune. (Of course, R1 faculty have never looked for an industry job in their lives.)
If you don't believe me, look at some job listings.
That's a pretty strong argument for people to not go to universities. But I'm not sure there's a lot of evidence that going to college is a terrible idea.
And it hasn't been my experience at all. But code camps are always an option.
And it hasn't been my experience at all. But code camps are always an option.
Not necessarily. Even though these job posting seek out experience with specific libraries over general theoretical knowledge, they often still require a four year degree for reasons known only to HR.
> 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)
This is the kind of thing that sounds great within the purely abstract world of an academic bubble, but falls apart at first contact with reality.
It's important to learn the foundations, but that shouldn't be treated as mutually exclusive with learning practical skills.
This is the kind of thing that sounds great within the purely abstract world of an academic bubble, but falls apart at first contact with reality.
It's important to learn the foundations, but that shouldn't be treated as mutually exclusive with learning practical skills.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have never considered which language a candidate knows, or had my set of languages considered, in hiring. That goes double for someone being hired right out of university. I want an interview to test whether you understand how a computer works, how networking/distributed systems/graphics/memory management work (pick the relevant ones). I don't care what the exact implementation language was. I _will_ test a bit more carefully if the applicant says they only know Python, because that can be a sign of fuzzy thinking around pointer/reference/value semantics, but if they can do the work, the language isn't interesting.
The only exceptions I can think of are where you're hiring someone specifically to work on language tooling - e.g., to work on the core C++ library team at Google, you probably need some experience with specifically C++ or C and compilers thereof. Those would be very specialized senior roles, though.
The only exceptions I can think of are where you're hiring someone specifically to work on language tooling - e.g., to work on the core C++ library team at Google, you probably need some experience with specifically C++ or C and compilers thereof. Those would be very specialized senior roles, though.
> I have never considered which language a candidate knows, or had my set of languages considered, in hiring. That goes double for someone being hired right out of university.
For a counterexample, I hired this way for a long time.
Like you said, it works for university students because they don't have experience under their belt yet.
It becomes less effective as you get into more complicated languages/frameworks and you have less time to ramp people up.
In the worst case, we'd invest a lot of time mentoring people in a new language or framework and 6 months later they'd decide they preferred their old language/framework. They'd either leave the company to find a job that fit their preferences, or they'd become disgruntled and spend their days complaining about our language choice or trying to persuade us to rewrite in their preferences.
In other cases, people would try to write everything in the style of their previous language, even if it doesn't match the new language or framework.
It happened enough times that I now prefer candidates who already have proven experience in the language we're using. I won't exclude candidates who don't have experience in it yet, but it's rare that I'll pick a decades-long Python programmer for a Rust position, no matter how much of a Python wizard they are, as long as we have good Rust candidates in the pipeline.
For a counterexample, I hired this way for a long time.
Like you said, it works for university students because they don't have experience under their belt yet.
It becomes less effective as you get into more complicated languages/frameworks and you have less time to ramp people up.
In the worst case, we'd invest a lot of time mentoring people in a new language or framework and 6 months later they'd decide they preferred their old language/framework. They'd either leave the company to find a job that fit their preferences, or they'd become disgruntled and spend their days complaining about our language choice or trying to persuade us to rewrite in their preferences.
In other cases, people would try to write everything in the style of their previous language, even if it doesn't match the new language or framework.
It happened enough times that I now prefer candidates who already have proven experience in the language we're using. I won't exclude candidates who don't have experience in it yet, but it's rare that I'll pick a decades-long Python programmer for a Rust position, no matter how much of a Python wizard they are, as long as we have good Rust candidates in the pipeline.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
At the same time computer science programs would probably do a better service teaching you these things in an actual real language instead of their stupid in house dialect of Java. Most of the gotchas and productivity blocks in programming aren’t from theoretical shortcomings but unfamiliarity with some stupid piece of syntax.
I have no idea what you're talking about. You better have done exactly all this stuff exactly before and I will shower you with money, otherwise I'm angry you were even allowed into the building!
Speaking from my experience in stem even then they don’t train you at all for graduate school even if you aced undergrad. GPA no longer matters at that level and as such what few required classes you have are easy A seminar style classes where they make someone in the dept opine on whatever they are working on for a few weeks a semester.
The skills you actually need are manuscript writing. Being able to read a dozen scientific articles a day and gleam what they are saying accurately. Being able to convert that into presentations for other people. Using existing knowledge to develop a research proposal that’s actually topical or relevant to the field today.
People don’t get that experience, at most a training wheels on sort of manuscript project in undergrad where you cite 5 things and only your TA is reading it, not peer review. As such for most people, the first few years of PhD are basically spent spinning your wheels in the mud until you gather enough of these untaught soft skills to actually produce work.
So if you consider the whole undergrad plus these first few years lost in the wilderness in gradschool, its like 7 of your best years gone down the drain because the training system for decades has been “figure it out.” Even as bad as today is, its still a little bit better than a few decades ago when people were spending even longer faffing about in PhD programs on average.
The skills you actually need are manuscript writing. Being able to read a dozen scientific articles a day and gleam what they are saying accurately. Being able to convert that into presentations for other people. Using existing knowledge to develop a research proposal that’s actually topical or relevant to the field today.
People don’t get that experience, at most a training wheels on sort of manuscript project in undergrad where you cite 5 things and only your TA is reading it, not peer review. As such for most people, the first few years of PhD are basically spent spinning your wheels in the mud until you gather enough of these untaught soft skills to actually produce work.
So if you consider the whole undergrad plus these first few years lost in the wilderness in gradschool, its like 7 of your best years gone down the drain because the training system for decades has been “figure it out.” Even as bad as today is, its still a little bit better than a few decades ago when people were spending even longer faffing about in PhD programs on average.
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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.
I found an old thread where you said you said "K8S fixes many many serious issues in Borg that are mostly unfixable at this point (I worked on Borg for many years), it's better in many ways"
I would be very interested in hearing more about that. Would you mind contacting me at [email protected] ? Thanks.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Employers hiring for entry level office work only ask for college degrees because they can. During periods of relatively high unemployment this acts as an easy filtering mechanism to cut the number of job applicants down to a manageable level. If low unemployment rates continue then employers will reduce the college degree bullet point from a "must have" to "nice to have".
Of course, long term many of those entry level white-collar jobs are likely to be eliminated altogether by automation and offshoring.
Of course, long term many of those entry level white-collar jobs are likely to be eliminated altogether by automation and offshoring.
Do you have an example of a developed economy where employers backslid on educational requirements? Because I'll believe it when I see it.
Does the USA count as a developed country?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-degree-job-requirement/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-degree-job-requirement/
Huh, I haven't personally noticed that.
That being said, it is going to take more than one year of labor crunch for this to be reflected in the choices of students to go to school for a job years later. And I've heard of employers who have tightened the screws on older employees without credentials.
That being said, it is going to take more than one year of labor crunch for this to be reflected in the choices of students to go to school for a job years later. And I've heard of employers who have tightened the screws on older employees without credentials.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Hell, sometimes their parents argue about it.
The best defence against this I suspect is to have a clearly communicated, unambiguous grading scheme, but this can be difficult to do in an even handed way.
I had one undergrad prof whose policy was this: All incorrect answers get 0, no exceptions. Correct answers lose points for all steps not shown the way he had demonstrated.
There wasn't a lot to argue about, but none of us felt his approach was entirely fair.
The best defence against this I suspect is to have a clearly communicated, unambiguous grading scheme, but this can be difficult to do in an even handed way.
I had one undergrad prof whose policy was this: All incorrect answers get 0, no exceptions. Correct answers lose points for all steps not shown the way he had demonstrated.
There wasn't a lot to argue about, but none of us felt his approach was entirely fair.
I’ve seen a professor get cornered by a student and his parter who did not even take the class, sounding like a lawyer about three points or so on an exam they totally bombed, and it got very confrontational and uncomfortable. This sort of behavior is getting more common as the people who act like this often realize most people just bend and give them what they are asking.
hyggetrold(2)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Yes, bad and ineffective teachers exist, but in my experience those teachers are the most generous with grades.
That tracks with both my personal experience as an undergrad at a major state university, and my wife's experience with her colleagues teaching at a smaller state college.
That tracks with both my personal experience as an undergrad at a major state university, and my wife's experience with her colleagues teaching at a smaller state college.
Everything you say is true.
As an administrator for an Extension school (at a major university), I inherited a set of Accounting instructors who failed most of their students in intro courses, and took pride in doing so! In their view, they bore no responsibility for their students' success, or lack thereof. The students needed to work harder.
I replaced all of them with instructors (men and women) who had much better professional credentials ... whose students earned mostly A's and B's. There's no evidence that the second set of instructors lowered the standard in any way - their students continued to do well in the program. The new instructors just taught better, and cared more.
Unless admissions massively screwed up and people who can't do algebra are suddenly taking quantum physics, it's almost always the instructor's fault. But being an instructor (in US HCOL areas) is such a poorly paid and ill-respected profession, it often doesn't attract the best and brightest.
As an administrator for an Extension school (at a major university), I inherited a set of Accounting instructors who failed most of their students in intro courses, and took pride in doing so! In their view, they bore no responsibility for their students' success, or lack thereof. The students needed to work harder.
I replaced all of them with instructors (men and women) who had much better professional credentials ... whose students earned mostly A's and B's. There's no evidence that the second set of instructors lowered the standard in any way - their students continued to do well in the program. The new instructors just taught better, and cared more.
Unless admissions massively screwed up and people who can't do algebra are suddenly taking quantum physics, it's almost always the instructor's fault. But being an instructor (in US HCOL areas) is such a poorly paid and ill-respected profession, it often doesn't attract the best and brightest.
There are different university cultures around the world. Because Americans don't do PhDs as often as people in other developed countries, US universities import a lot of faculty from other cultures. And when cultures meet, locals often also adopt ideas from the foreign cultures.
When I was a student, the old "the university is not a school" culture was still strong in my university. The idea was that universities were places of learning, not teaching. Formal teaching was a supporting activity rather than a core part of education. The university made a honest effort to support you to the extent its resources allowed, but the responsibility to learn was 100% yours. If you failed a mandatory exam because the university could not offer the corresponding class that year, it was your fault.
When I was a student, the old "the university is not a school" culture was still strong in my university. The idea was that universities were places of learning, not teaching. Formal teaching was a supporting activity rather than a core part of education. The university made a honest effort to support you to the extent its resources allowed, but the responsibility to learn was 100% yours. If you failed a mandatory exam because the university could not offer the corresponding class that year, it was your fault.
> Unless admissions massively screwed up and people who can't do algebra are suddenly taking quantum physics
While we are bringing up this point, it doesn't have to be quantum mechanics. The invention of algebra based physics classes (which is Mechanics and EM) without calculus is the same thing. Instructors mostly are teaching trust me these are the formulas to use them and this how to use them.
While we are bringing up this point, it doesn't have to be quantum mechanics. The invention of algebra based physics classes (which is Mechanics and EM) without calculus is the same thing. Instructors mostly are teaching trust me these are the formulas to use them and this how to use them.
> There's no evidence that the second set of instructors lowered the standard in any way
That's an extraordinary rise in grades. It seems like part of the conscientious discharge of your job would be to compile the evidence that these instructors did _not_.
That's an extraordinary rise in grades. It seems like part of the conscientious discharge of your job would be to compile the evidence that these instructors did _not_.
> 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.
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.
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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.
> Maybe the course prerequisites were poorly designed
The prerequisite courses are grade inflated so the incoming students lack fundamentals. The only way you can then run the course is to either grade inflate as well and pass students who don't have a clue about the topic or you fail like 3/4 of the class.
If the prerequisite courses weren't grade inflated and the incoming students actually knew what their grades says they should know then it wouldn't be a problem.
The prerequisite courses are grade inflated so the incoming students lack fundamentals. The only way you can then run the course is to either grade inflate as well and pass students who don't have a clue about the topic or you fail like 3/4 of the class.
If the prerequisite courses weren't grade inflated and the incoming students actually knew what their grades says they should know then it wouldn't be a problem.
That's my wife's experience, teaching at a smaller state college. They offer a math course so remedial that it's not allowed to count as hours toward graduation (it does of course count toward full-time status). There's a placement test that determines if it's needed. A serious percentage of the class fails, and these are engineering hopefuls. They had one professor who had a much higher pass rate from this remedial course, but that professor's students invariably did objectively worse by several standard deviations than students who had passed the remedial class at any grade ("Ds get degrees") with any other professor.
Part of the issue with poor grades in this remedial class is a failure by students to take it seriously. They're incredulous that they need to take it; after all, they got all As and Bs in high school, and completed through calculus! One would think that bombing the placement exam and failing the first exam in the remedial class would be a wake-up call, but apparently not.
So, yes, actual grade inflation must be a problem, at least some of the time.
Part of the issue with poor grades in this remedial class is a failure by students to take it seriously. They're incredulous that they need to take it; after all, they got all As and Bs in high school, and completed through calculus! One would think that bombing the placement exam and failing the first exam in the remedial class would be a wake-up call, but apparently not.
So, yes, actual grade inflation must be a problem, at least some of the time.
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.
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.
It would be weirder if it never happened.
Maybe grading is not stack ranking for you, but for other professors it openly and explicitly is. And it's hugely problematic to have inconsistent grade scales between professors. When two Intro to Statistics professors teach the same curriculum but one routinely fails 0-5% of the class and the other routinely fails 40% of the class and grades matter for getting internships or into grad school, that matters and the 40% professor is probably just on an ego trip. I found out the hard way that this is why there was a waitlist to take math classes in the engineering department but no wait list to take them in the math department, because in the math department a D was passing and you could get into a graduate program with >2.5, but in the engineering department a D was failing and you weren't getting into grad school with below a 3.2. Yet engineering department administrators were recommending students take math department classes and not explaining that. You had to figure it out yourself. Usually by going to the honors society's office and asking the students who spent all their time gaming their GPAs.
>Maybe grading is not stack ranking for you, but for other professors it openly and explicitly is. And it's hugely problematic to have inconsistent grade scales between professors. When two Intro to Statistics professors teach the same curriculum but one routinely fails 0-5% of the class and the other routinely fails 40% of the class and grades matter for getting internships or into grad school, that matters and the 40% professor is probably just on an ego trip.
Intro to Stats: it's vastly vastly more likely that the 0-5% failure professor is not doing their job and is just passing every student regardless of the quality of their work.
Intro to Stats: it's vastly vastly more likely that the 0-5% failure professor is not doing their job and is just passing every student regardless of the quality of their work.
> 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.
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.
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.
All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
I applied to ~15 employers in my last semester of school and 0 of them asked for or about grades (in the US).
I know someone who couldn't get an interview at Google, within the last couple of years, because his grades (at Caltech - the last holdout against grade inflation!) were too low.
IIRC he was above average at Caltech, but GPA was abysmally low compared to applicants from Stanford, Harvard, Pomona, and other egregiously inflating schools.
IIRC he was above average at Caltech, but GPA was abysmally low compared to applicants from Stanford, Harvard, Pomona, and other egregiously inflating schools.
Just curious, why would you include Pomona ( if we're talking about the Claremont colleges generally) but exclude Harvey Mudd, which is definitely in the Caltech position of fiercelyresisting grade inflation, if not even more rigorous than Caltech (and probably anywhere else STEM-oriented) in that regard.
The schools I mentioned are well-known to be grade inflators, and at one point I checked out Pomona's website (which discusses their grading), so it was on my mind.
From a distance, I think highly of Harvey Mudd, but I don't know their grading policies. I doubt they grade harder than Caltech, since HMC's branding is all about "we want to help you succeed" and Caltech is more of "we're going to beat you up [intellectually]."
From a distance, I think highly of Harvey Mudd, but I don't know their grading policies. I doubt they grade harder than Caltech, since HMC's branding is all about "we want to help you succeed" and Caltech is more of "we're going to beat you up [intellectually]."
I went to Caltech and from talking to people who went to HMC within a similar timeframe my understanding is grading was similar. And I did get a Google interview with not an honors GPA.
Interesting, thanks. I have tremendous respect for any undergrad who makes it through that school.
Thanks for the love, I just wish it was reflected in hiring (in general not you specifically lol)
The outlier status of caltech's international renown makes it difficult to compare apples to apples with comparatively provincial HMC. It's a bit like trying to compare Bard or Reed or Cooper Union with NYU. So this makes it difficult to compare based on acceptance rates because Caltech will draw a great many more applicants, and consequently turn down a higher percentage. So the acceptance rate of Caltech at around 3%, and HMC at around 13% gives us an idea of how selective they are, but this is confounded with how famous they are - a term thats hard to quantify and control for.
However the graduation rate tells perhaps a (slightly) more nuanced story about rigor. HMC, despite beimg more expensive to attend than Caltech, had a lower 2023 graduation rate of 91.5% vs Caltech at 93.7%
it's not that different, and probably you can construct error bars that enclose both of these bounds within plausible parameters, but it suggests that there is a somewhat higher premium for failure of those actually accepted at HMC than even the mighty Caltech, and a greater willingness to uphold standards at the expense of angering (relatively) wealthy parents.
However the graduation rate tells perhaps a (slightly) more nuanced story about rigor. HMC, despite beimg more expensive to attend than Caltech, had a lower 2023 graduation rate of 91.5% vs Caltech at 93.7%
it's not that different, and probably you can construct error bars that enclose both of these bounds within plausible parameters, but it suggests that there is a somewhat higher premium for failure of those actually accepted at HMC than even the mighty Caltech, and a greater willingness to uphold standards at the expense of angering (relatively) wealthy parents.
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.
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.
I went through multiple rounds of interviews with Google and received an offer from Amazon without ever providing a transcript (2013).
> All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
Not sure about that. Don't know any faang companies that care about your grade.
Not sure about that. Don't know any faang companies that care about your grade.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That can be true and yet the incentives remain: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...
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+.
The democratization of the gentleman's C[1]
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentleman%27s_C
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentleman%27s_C
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.
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.
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.
If an org is designed in such a way that students are failing at a large scale then it is by nature the org that is the root cause. Why would you have students in a position to fail spectacularly?
The answer is obvious to any student but eludes employed academics - the schooling system from the 1950's does not solve 2020's problems. Educational orgs were founded by motivated people with specific vision that fit their time. Those people are long gone and now they are grand beiracraucies that have tried and failed to systemize knowledge and responsibilities. They are endlessly trying to recapture magic because the orgs evolve into many non cohesive groups.
Grand systems with many abstractions work when an org is for profit and owns enough fundamental intellectual property and market share that their relevance is by market force. If they didn't have that then a startup could replace them tomorrow.
Education on the other hand is propped up by welfare. It is effecticely the law that only accredited institutions can be "education". Yet we know for a fact that a 10 minute YouTube video has significantly better effects on learning than a semester of classes.
The market of education needs to be disrupted in order for students to succeed.
The answer is obvious to any student but eludes employed academics - the schooling system from the 1950's does not solve 2020's problems. Educational orgs were founded by motivated people with specific vision that fit their time. Those people are long gone and now they are grand beiracraucies that have tried and failed to systemize knowledge and responsibilities. They are endlessly trying to recapture magic because the orgs evolve into many non cohesive groups.
Grand systems with many abstractions work when an org is for profit and owns enough fundamental intellectual property and market share that their relevance is by market force. If they didn't have that then a startup could replace them tomorrow.
Education on the other hand is propped up by welfare. It is effecticely the law that only accredited institutions can be "education". Yet we know for a fact that a 10 minute YouTube video has significantly better effects on learning than a semester of classes.
The market of education needs to be disrupted in order for students to succeed.
If you think college students these days have the attention span for a 10 minute video assigned to them in class I have some bad news for you as an instructor
They do! I would know :) the problem isn't even the length, the problem is in the performance, the presentation, how cohesive the information is to a new learner.
If an instructor plays a video in class, it doesn't work well. "Why are we here again?".
If the video is assigned, then its ignored because students have to pay on the private loans that pay you. They have to optimize their life because late stage capitalism and government obesity is squeezing the life out of the younger generation. It's human nature but it's often ignored in favor of easy explanations. If you disagree then simply listen to the conversations students have when they think nobody is listening.
The solution, which can be gained by asking any successfully educator (rarely professors), is this - you are a content creator. If you don't know how to play that role, then you can't educate well.
The whole purpose of an instructor is to take difficult concepts and make them easier for the human ape brain to understand. We do this by leveraging visual recognition, memory, and social behaviors.
For example an instructor that presents good information with a poor performance will result in poor communication of that information. This is so common I could walk into a classroom and example it right now.
The problem can only be solved by competition with the existing orgs. There are far better methods, and you can find them if you search.
If an instructor plays a video in class, it doesn't work well. "Why are we here again?".
If the video is assigned, then its ignored because students have to pay on the private loans that pay you. They have to optimize their life because late stage capitalism and government obesity is squeezing the life out of the younger generation. It's human nature but it's often ignored in favor of easy explanations. If you disagree then simply listen to the conversations students have when they think nobody is listening.
The solution, which can be gained by asking any successfully educator (rarely professors), is this - you are a content creator. If you don't know how to play that role, then you can't educate well.
The whole purpose of an instructor is to take difficult concepts and make them easier for the human ape brain to understand. We do this by leveraging visual recognition, memory, and social behaviors.
For example an instructor that presents good information with a poor performance will result in poor communication of that information. This is so common I could walk into a classroom and example it right now.
The problem can only be solved by competition with the existing orgs. There are far better methods, and you can find them if you search.
universities have gone from having the goal of actually educating to giving credentials in return for a lot of money
* Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.*
Citation needed. As somebody who just wasn’t compatible with the school and academic system, eventually dropping out because it took a mental toll on me, doing engineering research in the industry nowadays and considered to be a high performer at work, I’m lucky my employer didn’t care about my grades but looked at my private projects instead.
Citation needed. As somebody who just wasn’t compatible with the school and academic system, eventually dropping out because it took a mental toll on me, doing engineering research in the industry nowadays and considered to be a high performer at work, I’m lucky my employer didn’t care about my grades but looked at my private projects instead.
> Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.
As a potential employer, I would prefer to know where the student landed relative to their peers rather than an absolute score.
Maybe in addition to the absolute score we could know the students percentile score in the class.
It's not impressive to get an A at Harvard, all that says is they aren't in the bottom 21% of the class. Being in the top 10% of the class is impressive.
As a potential employer, I would prefer to know where the student landed relative to their peers rather than an absolute score.
Maybe in addition to the absolute score we could know the students percentile score in the class.
It's not impressive to get an A at Harvard, all that says is they aren't in the bottom 21% of the class. Being in the top 10% of the class is impressive.
Do transcripts in the US not show the class average?
Not at any US college/university that I’m aware of. Mine certainly don’t. It’s an interesting idea though.
Huh. Mine does, from a Canadian university.
I disagree that grading is not stack ranking.
Everything about going to college is to a stamp of approval that you are “better” than others. Better than people from other schools and better than people within your class.
The entire academic system is also “stack ranked”. Promotions depend on getting published in journals, winning awards, and getting grants that others cannot get.
Everything about going to college is to a stamp of approval that you are “better” than others. Better than people from other schools and better than people within your class.
The entire academic system is also “stack ranked”. Promotions depend on getting published in journals, winning awards, and getting grants that others cannot get.
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.
You're in the very small minority. Virtually every professor I had in college employed scale adjustments to grades based on class averages.
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.
And yet GPA is used to rank applicants in pretty much every academic admissions process.
i would hire a student to do a regression on your grading over the past few years and see if that's true
That's fine for a well establish course and curriculum, where its pretty well known where the students are at (or should be) and the material is presented in a consistent manner that has successfully filtered the deserving and undeserving. Which is something that all teachers and schools should strive for, but probably not where many are at.
New topics are added, new teachers, new academic plans defining which courses are required and when. New initiatives, programs, and policies are created all the time that change how people move through the education system. Even someone teaching the same course for 30 years is going to experience their own ups and downs that they may, inadvertently, project onto their students in different ways at different times.
I'm not saying you should hand out undeserved grades. I agree with your perspective that grades have to mean something and high grades need to be earned. My personal take is that as a society we just need to get comfortable with C's, because that's where the average should be. (Sure, who wants to hire a Writer who's only average at writing? But by letting them know they are only average in writing you can now give them opportunities to _measurably_ improve, or highlight that they are above average in math and might be more successful there.)
But if 3/4 of the class failed then _something went wrong_, and I would hope that our educators are able to reflect on that a little more then, "because they deserved to."
The only thing those students got out of that class was an F. And the one thing the school administration has got right is that giving out F's is a failure of the institution. The problem is that right now their incentives are to reduce the number of F's rather than improve the teaching and learning. If those students had learned something or got your wake up-call, they would have done better.
I'm not blaming you. There's a whole institution behind you, and several more over a student's education, with all sorts of problems and not enough of them having anything to do with actually educating people.
But solutions have to start somewhere, so I would still look to you to talk to your fellow faculty and leadership; tell them that 3/4 of your class couldn't even hit average marks compared to every other time you've taught the course, and that we have got to do better to prepare incoming students for the material they are about to learn.
Education isn't about regurgitating the same things over and over and keeping up the same bell curve until you retire. It's about teaching and learning and creating new opportunities for people to grow. That won't always work for everyone. You'll have to give out a an F here and there. But just like high grades should mean something, low grades should too. A student putting in low effort but grokking the material should be getting a C. An F is an indicator that something is wrong and the student isn't where they need to be.
New topics are added, new teachers, new academic plans defining which courses are required and when. New initiatives, programs, and policies are created all the time that change how people move through the education system. Even someone teaching the same course for 30 years is going to experience their own ups and downs that they may, inadvertently, project onto their students in different ways at different times.
I'm not saying you should hand out undeserved grades. I agree with your perspective that grades have to mean something and high grades need to be earned. My personal take is that as a society we just need to get comfortable with C's, because that's where the average should be. (Sure, who wants to hire a Writer who's only average at writing? But by letting them know they are only average in writing you can now give them opportunities to _measurably_ improve, or highlight that they are above average in math and might be more successful there.)
But if 3/4 of the class failed then _something went wrong_, and I would hope that our educators are able to reflect on that a little more then, "because they deserved to."
The only thing those students got out of that class was an F. And the one thing the school administration has got right is that giving out F's is a failure of the institution. The problem is that right now their incentives are to reduce the number of F's rather than improve the teaching and learning. If those students had learned something or got your wake up-call, they would have done better.
I'm not blaming you. There's a whole institution behind you, and several more over a student's education, with all sorts of problems and not enough of them having anything to do with actually educating people.
But solutions have to start somewhere, so I would still look to you to talk to your fellow faculty and leadership; tell them that 3/4 of your class couldn't even hit average marks compared to every other time you've taught the course, and that we have got to do better to prepare incoming students for the material they are about to learn.
Education isn't about regurgitating the same things over and over and keeping up the same bell curve until you retire. It's about teaching and learning and creating new opportunities for people to grow. That won't always work for everyone. You'll have to give out a an F here and there. But just like high grades should mean something, low grades should too. A student putting in low effort but grokking the material should be getting a C. An F is an indicator that something is wrong and the student isn't where they need to be.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
To be clear, I am saying standardized tests (SAT and ACT) are useful for admission decision purposes today where the average high school graduate who applies to a college has a 3.5-4.0 GPA on a 4.0 scale. I am also being rather specific in saying that limited-seat institutions or heavily over-subscribed schools where the number of applicants greatly exceed the number of enrollment spots need some way of filtering applicants.
A thing that I feel is VERY true is that most "highly selective" colleges and universities probably get a relatively small percentage of "instant admit" applicants and a much larger number of "probably will be successful here" applicants. A higher standardized test score (ignoring some nuance here) is a useful tool for entering the admissions lottery in that second group. It isn't all there is - I see high school grads with good standardized test scores, the default high GPA, and not much or any interesting things otherwise struggle to gain admission at over-subscribed schools.
Switching to actual college coursework, when I have taught undergrad students, I use demanding individual projects (evaluated by oral presentation, demo, and questioning) as a significant part of the course. It mostly doesn't scale as an approach but my (biased) feeling is that for the "middle 50%" of students, it is a valuable and worthwhile effort.
All of this gets really murky and nuanced depending on what your real goals are. Those goals are often quite different depending on perspective.
A thing that I feel is VERY true is that most "highly selective" colleges and universities probably get a relatively small percentage of "instant admit" applicants and a much larger number of "probably will be successful here" applicants. A higher standardized test score (ignoring some nuance here) is a useful tool for entering the admissions lottery in that second group. It isn't all there is - I see high school grads with good standardized test scores, the default high GPA, and not much or any interesting things otherwise struggle to gain admission at over-subscribed schools.
Switching to actual college coursework, when I have taught undergrad students, I use demanding individual projects (evaluated by oral presentation, demo, and questioning) as a significant part of the course. It mostly doesn't scale as an approach but my (biased) feeling is that for the "middle 50%" of students, it is a valuable and worthwhile effort.
All of this gets really murky and nuanced depending on what your real goals are. Those goals are often quite different depending on perspective.
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.
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.
> It was also normal for a double digit % of the students to fail the exam and retake the course (me included).
That isn't very specific, 10% failing a technical course is very low, 99% extremely high.
That isn't very specific, 10% failing a technical course is very low, 99% extremely high.
Also scholarships and bursaries? Often you have to maintain a high GPA to continue receiving money.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
> 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/Public...
[1] - https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/high-school-GPA...
[2] - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/how-to-apply/ap...
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/Public...
[1] - https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/high-school-GPA...
[2] - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/how-to-apply/ap...
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.
> 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
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
> 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.
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.
> 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
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
> 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).
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).
The most I’ve seen thats typically offered at the highschool level is taking community college classes that your eventual actual college would transfer over. That being said community colleges are significantly easier than normal colleges. Our math and chem department would specifically advise people to get certain classes done at the local cc and transfer the credit if they were at risk to not pass these classes at the main college. Cheaper per credit hour too.
> The student body is also much stronger academically in 2023 compared to 2013 looking at HS GPA and ACT scores alone.
ACT scores have been falling since at least 2017 but possibly earlier [0]. GPAs in the US have gone up because of grade inflation (in large part due to NCLB and schools being rewarded for passing more students). In many schools 50% is now the lowest score you can receive (even for work not submitted).
> 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%.
Nowhere but an elite prep school would the top 25% of the class be admitted to an Ivy. Even 5% would be a very good school, not typical.
[0] https://prepmaven.com/blog/test-prep/average-act-scores/
ACT scores have been falling since at least 2017 but possibly earlier [0]. GPAs in the US have gone up because of grade inflation (in large part due to NCLB and schools being rewarded for passing more students). In many schools 50% is now the lowest score you can receive (even for work not submitted).
> 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%.
Nowhere but an elite prep school would the top 25% of the class be admitted to an Ivy. Even 5% would be a very good school, not typical.
[0] https://prepmaven.com/blog/test-prep/average-act-scores/
Could there be grade inflation in HS grades (likely) or ACTs (maybe)?
> 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...
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...
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.
> 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...
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...
> 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.
Or it implies that grades are inflated, including the grades for AP classes. Not sure why you think that such grade inflation is impossible.
Or it implies that grades are inflated, including the grades for AP classes. Not sure why you think that such grade inflation is impossible.
Grade inflation makes people more likely to take AP tests. Grade inflation makes grades a less reliable indicator of ability, which means students need extrinsic measures (standardized tests) to demonstrate this.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> The hardest for me in college was simply having zero strategies to deal with my diagnosed ADHD.
Ah yeah. Mine wasn't diagnosed (yet) but I wound up on Ritalin during my last year. Doing college with a job, 2 young kids and a disabled wife had it's own demands.
Ah yeah. Mine wasn't diagnosed (yet) but I wound up on Ritalin during my last year. Doing college with a job, 2 young kids and a disabled wife had it's own demands.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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?
I keep coming back to this. What about the student? “Pay for it”, how out of touch is this person? Have you seen what students are paying…I’m so frustrated by the complete lack of accountability our education system is taking for these perspectives.
Wow...thats just...yep.
I think grades are very much an indication of performance, more generally a valuable part of the student experience and growing as an adult, if you can't be bothered grading...step aside, plenty of other people want your job and are willing to work for it.
I think grades are very much an indication of performance, more generally a valuable part of the student experience and growing as an adult, if you can't be bothered grading...step aside, plenty of other people want your job and are willing to work for it.
Ok, but your reputation among employers may go down and that will hurt all of your future students.
No, it won’t.
Outside of a handful of “elite” schools, I literally could not tell you anything about the quality of most schools.
I care far more that you can actually deliver value.
Outside of a handful of “elite” schools, I literally could not tell you anything about the quality of most schools.
I care far more that you can actually deliver value.
Interesting, so you might be saying that you think the individual quality at a given school varies a lot more than the difference in average quality from school to school?
Yeah, this is exactly it. Sure, don't take responsibility for evaluations...but ultimately that just hurts the school and the students.
> 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.
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.
It is incomprehensible to me that you would even consider using grades as a hiring indicator.
Yeah, its been a while since they felt useful, but there was a time when they were valuable for junior employees.
Internships have almost completely replaced this imo, but i think that mostly speaks volumes to overall disappointing performance of education in recent decades.
Internships have almost completely replaced this imo, but i think that mostly speaks volumes to overall disappointing performance of education in recent decades.
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.
I've been the SME for interviews since 2011-ish.
30 femtoseconds into thinking about how to approach the task I realized that it was and always had been impossible to compare grades across institutions, across courses taught by different faculty within the same institution, and even across different revisions of a course taught by the same faculty within the same institution. Did the TA in the fall 2020 Aerospace Flight Mechanics class post good review guides or did they hang the class out to dry just to watch the carnage?
As far as I'm concerned, every course in every degree program should be pass/fail.
You either met the standard or you did not. It has been my experience that 10x'ers don't exist, rockstars fizzle out, and the best coworker is one who is easy to work with, meets the standard, is eager to learn, and is willing to help out no matter how big or small the ask.
My director of engineering, my direct and only supervisor, and a 40-year aerospace veteran who sits at the top of a 300-man org chart will sweep up the lab and take out the trash if we're all busy. (muttering "FOD FOD FOD" the entire time but still) That kind of mentality is more important than a 4.0 (or is the school a 5 or 6 point institution?) transcript.
30 femtoseconds into thinking about how to approach the task I realized that it was and always had been impossible to compare grades across institutions, across courses taught by different faculty within the same institution, and even across different revisions of a course taught by the same faculty within the same institution. Did the TA in the fall 2020 Aerospace Flight Mechanics class post good review guides or did they hang the class out to dry just to watch the carnage?
As far as I'm concerned, every course in every degree program should be pass/fail.
You either met the standard or you did not. It has been my experience that 10x'ers don't exist, rockstars fizzle out, and the best coworker is one who is easy to work with, meets the standard, is eager to learn, and is willing to help out no matter how big or small the ask.
My director of engineering, my direct and only supervisor, and a 40-year aerospace veteran who sits at the top of a 300-man org chart will sweep up the lab and take out the trash if we're all busy. (muttering "FOD FOD FOD" the entire time but still) That kind of mentality is more important than a 4.0 (or is the school a 5 or 6 point institution?) transcript.
> My director of engineering, my direct and only supervisor, and a 40-year aerospace veteran who sits at the top of a 300-man org chart will sweep up the lab and take out the trash if we're all busy. (muttering "FOD FOD FOD" the entire time but still) That kind of mentality is more important than a 4.0 (or is the school a 5 or 6 point institution?) transcript.
And now we know why the bolts keep coming out of Boeing plans :P
Joking aside, I agree, this (very untestable) skill / attitude is the key thing I look for too. But it really depends on the role, I'm mostly concerned with getting a reference I trust.
And now we know why the bolts keep coming out of Boeing plans :P
Joking aside, I agree, this (very untestable) skill / attitude is the key thing I look for too. But it really depends on the role, I'm mostly concerned with getting a reference I trust.
In my opinion, they are an indicator similar to personal projects. Now if you can do a really good job of vetting their work and it's extensive, the personal project could be much better.
They still had to grind out the work. Actually, some of the BS in academics is not that different from the BS in the corporate world. They're going to have some BS metric, and depending where you work, they just thumb their scales for developers they want to keep (or lose).
In my experience, there are many "developers developers", and outside of software, engineering geniuses with poor grades. That said, these developers often seemed to have other issues, and frankly might be wrong for like 80% of gigs.
If someone is genuinely talented, but thinks there's zero value in demonstrating that with more abstract, academic pursuits that tells you something about them. Perhaps more of a problem for stuffy corporate jobs.
They still had to grind out the work. Actually, some of the BS in academics is not that different from the BS in the corporate world. They're going to have some BS metric, and depending where you work, they just thumb their scales for developers they want to keep (or lose).
In my experience, there are many "developers developers", and outside of software, engineering geniuses with poor grades. That said, these developers often seemed to have other issues, and frankly might be wrong for like 80% of gigs.
If someone is genuinely talented, but thinks there's zero value in demonstrating that with more abstract, academic pursuits that tells you something about them. Perhaps more of a problem for stuffy corporate jobs.
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..
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..
Yeah this is similar today. No one calls a student for cheating, at least in what I’ve been observing. Students that complain get additional marks, students that get accused of anything revolt, teachers are basically scared of the “customer”, and for good reason, unfortunately.
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.
When you do grade inflation the institutions will loose trust in the grade quickly and revert back to internal testing.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it makes a difference for grad school, but even then there are likely far better indicators of potential success.
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.
> 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/
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/
[deleted]
I work at a large public university. There’s tremendous pressure on professors to make sure students pass. This is especially true on courses that tend to filter students, such as Chem, Physics and some math courses. They will remove tenured faculty from teaching courses where they are failing too many students. These courses will be handed to lecturers who will be more sympathetic to passing more students. Also, they’ve also changed a course like Organic Chemistry from upper division to lower division. They have also started allowing high school level math courses to count for college credits.
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).
I'd be curious if inflation holds there, as well, since engineering departments have to answer to an accreditation body (ABET).
The author observed that there is little change over time in the percentage of students getting Ds and Fs. If it were the case that the source of the pressure was maintaining graduation rates, wouldn't we expect the inflation to be focused there, and not at more students getting an A instead of a B?
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.
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.
I would love it if grades kept improving because students kept getting smarter.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university
> 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.
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.
> 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.
In the US. Other countries had different factors on who they discriminated against.
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.
100 years ago in the US, land grant colleges were already enrolling women for decades.
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)
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.
// 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.
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.
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.
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?
What does "DFW" stand for?
D grade (unsatisfactory), F grade (fail), Withdraw (course dropped)
See https://uwm.edu/academicaffairs/student-success/data-of-the-...
See https://uwm.edu/academicaffairs/student-success/data-of-the-...
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Its just a required piece of paper with $100k debt at this point.
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
Students have more resources than ever to do a good job, perhaps it's students that are improving
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
<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.
I have also seen local community colleges near me actually have Profs from the R1 Flagship school "moonlighting" teaching courses in the evening. They often are freer in how work with students and also try out new material for textbooks they are authoring.
I have also seen local community colleges near me actually have Profs from the R1 Flagship school "moonlighting" teaching courses in the evening. They often are freer in how work with students and also try out new material for textbooks they are authoring.
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?
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.
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.
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.
My thoughts exactly.
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.