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Comment by Y7ZCQtNo39 | Hacker News Reader

In some aspects yes, in others no.

I accidentally cut myself a little too deep while doing dishes a couple years ago (opaque, soapy water and sharp surfaces don't mix well). I couldn't get the bleeding to stop (without constant pressure held for about an hour), so I went to urgent care. I knew that I needed stitches or that "glue" they use to seal wounds. I didn't care which solution the Doctor picked, but I knew I needed something.

Students have some sense of what a generally good instructional experience looks like. It's better to collect this feedback, and have people that are experts in instruction examine the reviews, synthesize with their own knowledge of what makes instruction great, and use that information to improve.

But saying we should totally close out students since "they don't know what they need" removes a fruitful data source in determining where professors can improve.

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Sadly, the only thing many students feel they need from a university education is a degree. This is not surprising, given our society's constant refrain of telling everyone, "You need a college degree to get a good job".

Many students are there not because they want to learn but because they want to get that piece of paper that is the ticket to a successful career. A teacher forcing them to learn, to spend time and effort studying and working, is not seen as a positive if your goal is simply to get a degree. The ideal teacher for them is someone who just give you an A no matter what. That would be the quickest and easiest way to guarantee achieving that goal.

This is the true issue here - the disconnect between what many students want from a university education and what that education is actually supposed to be.

Studies show that the pay differential for "all but completed degree" and "completed degree" are stark. Researchers have said that this indicates that a large fraction of the "value" of college is just signalling (intelligence, aptitude, diligence), not education.

If that's the case, many of the students in your post are right -- just giving them the degree could save them (and the school) a lot of time and money. Maybe your art history class is a cost-effective way to get a world class education in late Italian Romantic oil paintings, but as a way of proving you're smart enough to work in a law firm (or even "broaden your horizons and become a better citizen through rounded education") I can't imagine it's terribly efficient.

Well, there's a collective action problem there.

It's in every student's individual interests for their school's standards for admission and grading to be low, so they can obtain the credential easily.

But it's in the student body's _collective_ interests for the school's standards to be high, so the credential retains and improves its signalling value.

There's a reason a C- student at Harvard doesn't transfer to a deprived community college where they'd be at the top of every class :)

The thing is that most university grading systems have a very high rate of false negatives. For example, in the UK it is rarely possible to retake a course. And this means that messing up a single exam can cause grade problems, even if the material is well understood.

In my experience, exams are often full of ambiguous questions, questions testing knowledge that is not part of the course syllabus, etc.

If the grading was fair, I would agree with you, but it rarely is. And IMO this is what students really hate: they put in a hell of a lot of work. They actually get to grips with the material, and for stupid reasons out of their control they end up with no credit for it.

If the doctor chose one of the sealing methods over the other which you preferred, you gave a lower score of because of it, it still is not an indication of the quality of the treatment you received. You wouldn't have been qualified to determine the best method.

When you review feedback collected (in any situation analogous to what you mention), you take that into account.

What if the feedback also said the doctor wasn't personable? Maybe the doc could be a bit warmer with his patients... and a patient would be absolutely qualified in determining whether or not that bedside manner is present.

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