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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> One manifestation of this has been grade inflation

Pet peeve: there is no such thing as grade inflation because there is no grade after (or before) A.

What we're witnessing is much worse, it's grade compression where all grades move up with a hard limit.

Inflation wouldn't matter a lot, it would simply make comparisons between periods of time more difficult (we would need to "adjust for inflation").

Compression is much worse because it destroys information, namely, the difference between good and bad works in the same class.

If we had "price compression" in real life, society wouldn't be able to function (everything would cost the same).

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Talking to old timers when I was young (I'm getting to be an old timer), they were all graded on a bell curve in college:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grading_on_a_curve

That sounds great when the tests are hard, but when they're easy, if you got a B and you had the lowest B, it would turn into an F. Of course, the worse students (relatively) would flunk out of school. If you were in a batch of really bright students and you were one of them, that would suck.

When I went to college, I remember professors only applying the curve when everyone did poorly on the exam.

For what it's worth, my wife recently completed her college degree and it was about the same in difficulty as mine 20+ years ago.

Should grades reflect absolute knowledge (e.g. if you have this grade then you are that good) or should they reflect relative ordering? With increasing competition, the relative difference of the top should become smaller. That is one factor.

Grades inflation happens because grades and having finished the school once you started now matter more to students then they used to. The techniques they often use (negotiation) are not exactly commendable, but it still had more to do with price and benefits of it then self-esteem and trophies when they were four years. old.

> Should grades reflect absolute knowledge (e.g. if you have this grade then you are that good) or should they reflect relative ordering?

This is a can of worms all by itself, too. Grades can reflect

1) Absolute knowledge, but this unfairly favours students from rich and well-educated parents; 2) Relative superiority compared to your age group, but this encourages children to not help each other because they are afraid they're competing for a limited number of higher grades; 3) Speed of development, which is largely determined by genetics at any given age; 4) Effort, which is unfair to the bright students who have nothing to put their effort in to; or 5) Potential future ability, which is nigh impossible to measure and not necessarily even an important marker of anything.

There are many more options, and neither is obviously right. I don't think any of these really help with the issue mentioned in the article.

Option 1) is the right thing to do, only it's hard to accept for people who are prejudiced against having rich and well-educated parents.

Option 2) is also fine on small scale, but makes it harder to compare results between different schools, states, countries.

Options 3 - 5 are just dubious (how would you measure "potential future ability"?)

>it's hard to accept for people who are prejudiced against having rich and well-educated parents.

No, it's problematic for people who believe an education system which privileges the rich is a recipe for systemic inequality.

Now personally, I don't think a grading system is the right place to address this inequality, but insisting anyone who does is just "prejudiced against the rich" is facile.

Being rich is not a crime (although some social justice warriors try to make it so). Helping your own children get a good education is not a crime also.

I agree that there should be some form of help for the poor, but gaming the grading system is not the way to go.

Whatever you do the children of rich and well-educated will always be in top 5-10% of their class. We shouldn't promote equality by trying to bring them down, instead we should focus on bringing other students up, making the gap between top 5% and bottom 5% percent narrower.

>gaming the grading system is not the way to go.

And as I said, I don't disagree with that. I just object to your asserting anyone who does is "prejudiced against the rich".

"Whatever you do the children of rich and well-educated will always be in top 5-10% of their class."

Any evidence for that - from what I've observed at the private schools in the UK that my son has attended is that the rich have plenty of kids who have problems or underperform academically - it just doesn't matter very much for them as their parents are rich.

[NB And by "rich" I mean seriously well off - tens or hundreds of millions]

Coming from Eastern Europe, I'm having hard time to grasp the "rich&educated" meme.

Over there, rich and educated is barely a poor correlation. In my experience, a lot of rich people kids were stupid and didn't have much academical success. Yet there were folks coming from poor but educated families who did really well. It's anecdata, but in my class it was ~ equal amount of rich-but-stipid and poor-but-smart kids.

The real privilege is parents' attitude. The attitude that education (not grades, but the real education) is important. This doesn't seem to correlate with wealth much though. A lot of rich folks built their wealth by working hard from zero. Which is frequently not education-heavy field and their mentality is not much different from barely educated handyman. While a lot of well educated people (teachers/educators, all kinds of office workers, engineers and whatnot) are not even middle class.

I'm from the US, and have no idea why rich/poor entered this discussion. My parents were very poor, but reasonably educated. I never picked up on any hint of a correlation between wealth and good grades.

HOWEVER, I saw an enormous correlation between wealth and going to university.

I also belong to the poor-but-educated-parents so I know what you're saying. I would assume the explanation for people with poor parents doing worse is because the parents have less time to be involved. But if you want to know more there are numerous studies. :)

I think that you are right. I just found the topic of "what is it that we expect of grades" to be mildly interesting and I also think the answer should matter when we are talking about grading policy.

FWIW, in the UK, you can get A*s (A 'star').

We've had these for GCSEs (typically sat at around 16 years old) for ages, and they were introduced into A-Level in 2010.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCE_Advanced_Level_(United_Kin...

A "grade 9" was also introduced in 2017, and that is higher than an A* [0], so some people refer to that as A* * (A star star) [1].

[0] https://ofqual.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/05/setting-grade-9-in-new...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2014/sep/14/...

There is a big difference in the grades students are getting in the UK. I don't have an answer as to why but here are some examples for A level Chemistry. The links below give the tables with GCSE and A level exam results from 1993 to 2016.

In 1993 16.8% got an A and 10.3% a U

by 2016 8.4% were A* and 23.5% got an A (31.9% at A/A*) with only 2.7% getting a U.

http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/a-lev.htm

http://www.bstubbs.co.uk/gcse.htm

EDIT: Oh I get it. Should have responded AFTER the morning espresso.

I think GP is saying that it's precisely because grades are limited to a handful of values that you get grade compression instead of grade inflation, and that if prices were limited to some upper value you would get price compression which would be bad.

Yes! ;-)

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