Make School Hard Again
reason.com
reason.com
I disagree with the belief that schoolwork performs a valuable filter function when it is "rigorous". I agree that rigorous coursework that emphasizes book smarts selects for something, but I don't value that something outside a set of very narrowly defined circumstances.
Having completed both a masters in philosophy and an M.S. in computer science, I'll go as far as to say that I don't think college matters at all any more, in tech, and that's fine. My career path in tech went from Amazon, which didn't care about my "pedigree" to being self-employed, to my current job which just valued the evidence that I could get shit done. I don't like hiring new grads, but when I do what I look for is exclusively accomplishment outside the classroom. Sure, a B student from an MIT csci program will have a degree of algorithmic agility that j-rando web dev who's been hacking away for a decade won't, but I can think of exactly zero times that's mattered.
So I think the "academy" should be an opportunity to climb, to make things happen, to go above and beyond, but I don't think it fulfills its primary purpose by insisting upon harder coursework. In fact, de-emphasizing coursework in favor of making or doing things in the world of research/business/politics/etc. seems preferable to me.
I always find interesting that the most vocal proponents of the "school doesn't matter" argument are often the most educated. Why did you get an undergrad and even go as far as to get a masters? Did you come to the realization after you finished your masters?
Would you advise family members to forgo a college education since it doesn't matter? How confident are you of your convictions?
It's easy to say school doesn't matter after you've achieved all the benefits from the signaling effect
I’ve transitioned to programming in my late 20s. First I tried to learn by doing, without any formal education, and everything was grueling and I barely understood what I was doing. Then I got some formal education, and now I have much clearer mental models of how lots of things work, vastly improving my efficiency and quality.
I’ve practiced a lot on my own too, but my side projects throughout these years would have never taught me certain topics which have actually come up in real life (most recent example I remember is graph traversal).
It’s clear that some people have an outstanding creativity and drive and can explore even remote corners of the discipline on their own. For the rest of us who still love the science, college remains a great solution.
And we can't accept people who have been to college saying college doesn't matter, because their revealed preferences are different and/or they're hypocrites.
> And we can't accept people who have been to college saying college doesn't matter, because their revealed preferences are different and/or they're hypocrites
I would accept the argument of a college educated individual if they actively discouraged their children from attending university. Telling strangers on the internet is easy, but with your own children you have skin in the game. To me that's more telling of their true beliefs
I was pushed into higher education. I'll try to accept or even encourage if my kids prefer vocational education. It's easy for me who live in Norway to say because
- many ordinary jobs now pay extremely well if you put some effort into it.
- moving from carpenter or electrician to engineer etc is way simpler than the other way around && real world experience seems to actually be appreciated if/when you later decide to take higher education.
And yes, I have a bachelor degree and I while it was more interested than I expected I think the vast majority of what I know comes from colleagues as well as reading the Internet.
It would be more accurate to say that those who put themselves in a career trajectory where education generally doesn't matter, unsurprisingly, find out having an education indeed does not matter. It's kind of excusable since such trajectories cover most of the software industry nowadays, but not anywhere near all of it.
Those who want a career where their education is used to its fullest extent are going to have to work at it. Those jobs are harder to find and more demanding.
"Education doesnt matter" is a much different argument than "lots of jobs shouldn't require bachelors degrees"
People who have had a bunch of education are in a position to evaluate how much the education itself rather than the signaling benefitted them, whereas for people who have not, that is an unknown.
However, when you're working on the front lines, you better believe that that stuff becomes incredibly important. Being able to construct good algorithms, explain why they're good or bad, what inputs they require, etc. make all the difference.
Which is why I'm under the impression that if you really want to go to college, you should be trying to get into a PhD, rather than making it into some job prep. For example, if you just want to be a programmer that studies web frameworks, then knowing binary search and tree algorithms won't matter much in the grand scheme of things. Because you're just an end user of the research work at that moment.
I think there should be a common ground where degrees in computer science should be geared toward a research or job path with distinct goals. Say, the job path teaches you how to use frameworks and build things where the research path puts you into algorithms and heavy math.
This indicates that you do agree with the original article. It's just that you've accepted lowering the standards a full level across the board. A PhD today becomes equivalent to the masters degree from a few years ago, masters now equates to old bachelors, bachelors now equates to old HS diploma. But with continued lowering of standards at each level, what inevitably happens is that the next higher level becomes a job qualification as companies look for high quality candidates. So in your system, it will only take a few years before it will require everyone to go to school for a masters to even get a job. This system is broken.
I proposed two different paths with different focus areas.
Bachelors absolutely do not equate to a HS diploma because it depends largely on where you go. My HS school was a standard, public school that only taught the basic subjects. There was no programming course, computation theory course, discrete math course, web development course, compiler course, etc.
So in your system, it will only take a few years before it will require everyone to go to school for a masters to even get a job. This system is broken.
This is assuming your premise holds and it really doesn't. There's companies that still do non-web work to this day and still survive perfectly well.
It used to be that a HS diploma was required to demonstrate that you could work hard. Now they are easy, so we require a bachelors to prove the same thing.
Were these advancements done by degree-seeking students? Probably not. These advancements are coming from psuedo-employees of the university. Instead of receiving payment, they're receiving a piece of letterhead.
> Say, the job path teaches you how to use frameworks and build things where the research path puts you into algorithms and heavy math.
Technical colleges do exist. Many institutions now have 'applied sciences' degrees for the associates level.
PhD students often receive a stipend. So they do get paid to do their work.
And speaking of personal experience, mine is exactly opposite to yours. My university made me. If it were not for my university's rigorous training, I would squander my four years, and I would not be able to do what I enjoy today. I owe a great deal to my university, to say the least.
Yes but schools are de-emphasizing coursework in favor of nothing at all, mostly because in K-12 it makes stats look better (yay! graduation!) and in college butts in seats are $$$.
And make no mistake that school is getting shamefully easy. I wrote back in 2017 with examples from NY and CA but it certainly has not gotten better: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/higher-education-erodes-a7c...
I don't know why more articles like this don't point to the glaring examples of non-rigor. It would support their case more I think.
A website.
No backend.
No js.
Single page, but not a single functionality. Just one page.
What is the point of having a degree like this ?
Anyway, grades shouldn't be arbitrarily difficult either, or curve just to curve. That's misguided as well; there are reasons for grade inflation other than just being nice -- I think old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary which has its own downsides.
I think in my undergrad courses the average grade was usually about a B, which seemed about right to me. Of course I'm biased because it's my own grading, but these were usually upper-level students, who got to that point because they were reasonably competent, and my sense of things was that they had about a B level grasp of the material on average. That is, they understood most of the important points of the material pretty well, but might have become a little lost in the finer points. Why knock their grades down just to make the grade distributions prettier?
My experience was that the trickier part was dealing with new freshman, who didn't always seem as prepared as they should be for college, especially with writing. But it's hard to know if that's actually any different over time; there's been a couple of times I've found decades old samples and I was surprised how little things had actually changed.
Yes! The people complaining about grade inflation want to use grades to compare students across classrooms, yet the level of achievement indicated by a grade is very much specific to a particular class, peer-group, and professor.
Grades should never have been used for cross-classroom comparisons in the first place and if market dynamics have inflated them to the point where it is impossible to continue to abuse them in this manner, I'd call it a good riddance!
For example in my home country, a relatively big EU member, CS and other technical schools used to give pretty poor grades. Each year, the best CS student among all schools would graduate with a GPA only slightly over 3 (B).
If you applied to a PhD program say at MIT or Cambridge, this would put you in a pretty bad position unless the committee had a lot of insight on local grading policies or you had exceptional achievements to compensate. Not fun.
That is why there are tools to convert grades from different countries into US letter grades: https://applications.wes.org/country-resources/resources.asp
Elite admissions all claim to control for grade inflation/deflation, but since they don't divulge details they almost certainly do a poor job of it. I'm not at all sure it's possible to do good job of it, but some of the obvious easy "fixes" (e.g. using percentiles) would at least alleviate the problem you describe.
I'd have thought (with no admissions experience) that 98th percentile at an unheard of university is more meaningful than 4.3 points out of 5 from the same.
Once you were handed the exams, it was obvious why this was the case. They were hard as shit, class averages would hover around 55%, curved to a C even.
We would later be shown the averages of other sections, lecturers, and years, and they would never sway more than 2-3% off the median score despite different sections, professors, decades even. The only constant maintaining this consistency was the content and pace of the lectures and exams, and the grading scale. Despite all the intergenerational turmoil and educational upheaval debated over the past 25 years, here was the chemistry department throwing perfect darts.
Schools need to decide how rigorous they should be, establish a very clear grading system that tests that rigor, and stick with it for decades.
Such an assessment would have much more value as a standardized test, entrance exam, etc. Yes, those are much harder to develop, but that's the nature of the beast. If you want to facilitate inter-institution comparisons you need to develop inter-institution standards.
There's an orthogonal issue here in assessing the assessment. Imagine a terrible test, one with no meaningful relationship between questions and answers. The scores will follow a very reliable, consistent bell curve with very reliable, consistent statistics. So we can't actually take that as an indication of a good test, even if the best possible test would also behave that way.
As for the larger trend, I can't help but think it's as much due to better teaching and exponentially more available resources (both for self study ie internet and provided by universities (got to spend that tuition money on something)). From my limited experience (parents went to the same school I did) on a material level classes are objectively harder (more information, deeper coverage, more advanced topics) so sometimes it feels like the "grade inflation panic" is built on a older generation upset that young people might be outpacing them.
For any sufficiently large class with challenging material, this has been my experience as well.
In the case of writing & humanities often the problem is that it is a lot more difficult to tell a correct answer from an incorrect answer. It could be as subtle as the students writing not matching with the professor's political bent.
But for STEM it is way more clear. Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile should fail.
Not sure what the problem is. If the whole class is failing either the school is letting in students who don't belong, whoever taught the prerequisite classes failed to teach the students and passed them on with a curve, or the professor just didn't teach well.
As a former grader and TA for both math and physics, I can tell you this is not the case. I've had students get the right answer the wrong way, stumbling into the correct numeric answer with invalid or incorrect math. I've also had students get 90% of the way through a large problem only to make a simple arithmetic error that lead to the wrong numeric answer.
Which student deserves more partial credit? Or should I pass the student who made math errors but got the right answer, and fail the student who grasped the concepts but made a trivial calculation mistake?
These aren't shades of gray, they are just protocols you need to establish and stick with before these questions come up during grading. Then you need to stick with these protocols as department policy for decades, so your department is able to maintain the grading scale no matter who the faculty will be 50 years from now. That's the sign of a good department.
The grade inflating teacher might give the person who almost got it right an A, the teacher not inflating might give that student a B.
Even in these super difficult engineering classes at ultra hard schools there are always some people getting the answers right and showing all the work correctly so everyone knows they aren't cheating.
I had some classes that were incredibly difficult where realistically maybe a bunch more of us should have failed.. the teacher scaled things up but we sure as hell did not get undeserved As.
How hard should the problem set be? How long should students have to complete it?
As you increase the difficulty you will push down the score distribution. How do you propose to square the existence of a score distribution against the quite subjective level of "difficulty" of the work that you're setting for grading?
What purpose are they perceived to serve?
The first thing it does is make it easier on a teacher. Making a test where most people won't get 100% and then curving is much easier than making a test where most people fall into the 60-100% range.
I had a midterm on which the second highest grade was in the 40s. The very junior professor certainly would not have been allowed to fail all but 1 student.
I'm a software engineer. I also coach girls basketball at the youth level in my after-work time. I read about teaching methods, how people learn, and I talk with teachers whenever I can. Often they can help me get difficult lessons across to the girls.
It's fine for professors to be great researchers. But, if they have to teach as part of it, they should strive to be good at it.
I went to a top 40 undergrad. Not stellar but I would have assumed reasonably high.
I was astounded at the poor quality of people’s writing ability. Most people just don’t understand the concept of stating an assertion and defending it with premises.
It's like attending a shop class that uses made-up tools and materials that don't work very well, don't exist outside shop classes, and aren't even very similar to their counterparts that do. Then the assignments all involve making things that seemingly deliberately avoid teaching skills useful to building items anyone would ever want, for any purpose—the analogy's getting away from me here, but you get the point.
I do think part of the problem is that good writing sense is, in part, developed by reading, and most kids never really pick up the reading bug and so don't have much hope of ever writing half-decently to begin with. But the classes, at least when I was in school, weren't doing anything for those of us who'd met that pre-requisite, either. I'm not sure who or what they're for.
Did you perhaps mean: defending the assertion with arguments built upon explicitly stated premises?
You’re saying you draw arguments from premises to support assertions... but as far as I can tell the formation of the sub argument is just making an assertion supported by premises to begin with, the formation of which acts as a premise to support the larger assertion. So I’m not sure I see the difference
I'm sympathetic to some extent. I'm a product of a boot camp (granted I had a technical background before that) and I've worked with CS grads who I'm a bit astounded by their inability to just debug something on a basic level (form a theory, test it, make a logical next decision). On the other hand I wonder if that is a case where they should have been filtered out, or if the issue is they weren't taught / tested on the right things?
>The old academic criteria, imperfect as they were, were in fact doing a reasonable job of selecting individuals able and willing to handle the rigors of traditional college. The blunt fact is that the majority of people who scored below a 1200 on the verbal and math sections of the SAT would have found it difficult or impossible to handle a curriculum like that required to earn a state-school engineering degree or comparable certification. Today, thanks to grade inflation, such students can and do pass through top schools with top honors, especially in the liberal arts.
Do we really want to just go by the "old academic criteria"?
Are the people who just scrape by all just bad?
Would it be better if those people just be pushed out the door?
So let's say we make it "harder", is that harder testing? More work? What then?
I feel like as far as learning about how people learn that it is pretty clear that some people work well in what has become the traditional education systems, and others less so, and I"m not sure that filter really determines who will be productive or if that's all we want from education... to filter folks based on how the education system works now?
Personally I'm inclined to lean towards more / better education, less focus on making everything "harder".
If I teach history and have a finale exam with one question, “who was the first president of the United States?” then the students will all get A’s, but nobody would consider that a college level history test, and even if you made an A, there is no way to know that you mastered the subject.
That’s a simplification, but in essence the issue at stake here.
Good for folks who are good at trivia, not so sure it is the best route.
But yeah I agree grades should reflect how well the student grocks the topic.
I think there is very much a thing there that could help change the way education works and maybe augment existing education (a boot camp before starting down the CS path might be a good booster / filter out folks who "hey I don't want to do this, I'll do something else").
On the other hand my experience also says that boot camps are heavily profit driven and generally do a poor job of selecting students and push through students who IMO have no business touching code. About half my class was IMO, unemployable. In that way I'm a bit aligned with the article ;)
If that is not the case the world will automatically try to get the next best certification possible. In the world of old just being able to read was seen as a mark of excellence; once that was the norm it became having finished basic schooling. After WW2 having any kind of university degree was synonymous with intelligence, today lots of jobs start requiring a PhD in order to filter out high-level candidates.
This could go on and on forever but the only thing we are achieving is making everybody lose more and more time in school trying to get a piece of paper. This is extremely wasteful and can be simply corrected by making schools actually hard. Then the qualifications will go back to being a premium which most companies will not actually need (rather than bartenders needing a bachelor's degree).
There's also an additional disadvantage of having the bar low: you help discredit actual science by having hordes of barely-passable "experts" which say whatever they want to say. In my parent's time when somebody was a doctor or engineer people would listen very carefully; today nobody even believes global warming or vaccines because so many qualified "scientists" keep barfing random opinions out. This is a serious problem because it undermines the public's trust towards serious issues, and while there's no easy solution raising the bar in universities would certainly help.
What might actually help here is to move to a two-tiered method of grading. One is the actual grade, which is solely for the student as a personal evaluation and never made available to anyone outside the school, and the other is a pass/fail for the course.
Then if you have a D for the first half of the semester, you know you need to work harder because there is a significant risk that you don't pass the course. And mediocre students actually fail courses and either have to repeat them until they genuinely master the subject matter or have a "fail" show up on their transcript.
But the school doesn't disadvantage their students by giving out a B as the most common grade when other schools give As, and thereby doesn't deprive their students of honest performance feedback or make it impossible to fail bad students because when the 40th percentile students have an A the "bad" students have a B- when they deserve an F.
I stupidly thought the goal of education was for everyone to learn, but I guess the process of education is to stratify the populace.
I hated, and still hate the gamesmanship that takes place with teachers/professors. The trick questions on tests, etc. I never had the patience for any of the nonsense. For things that were nuanced I understood the reason to test on details, but to just play games, always pissed me off. I was an OK student because I wouldn't play their games.
During college I was a Comp Sci major and the Business Majors needed to take two computer science classes. Being the entrepreneur that I was, I started tutoring as many of the girls as their parents would pay my $25 and hour tutoring fee with a money back if you don't get a B or higher guarantee. In the first two years everyone of my students got A's. I made sure every student understood the material, their programming projects were always unique and I made the student do all the work. At the end of the class everyone of my students knew the material cold.
I was so successful that they Comp Sci department and the Business department tried to ban me from tutoring, not to mention that 3 students switched majors to Comp Sci and a couple others added Comp Sci as a minor. Their argument was that I was ruining the grade distribution in the classes I tutored, I guess the Comp Sci courses were weed out classes for the Business Majors. I had letters from every parent and every student, the University President laughed in the faces of the department heads and he dismissed me from the meeting, and from what I heard he spent 40 minutes yelling at them for being stupid and degrading the reputation of the University. Of course I somehow never got an A on any programming projects again, but it wasn't payback, even as a senior when in one class I wrote everyone else's programs for them, just to prove a point, everyone else got an A, I got a C+.
Education is not about learning, it'a a business, just like health care isn't about making people healthy, it's about profit and loss.
Stratification is built in to the etymology of the word "graduate". Compare a "graduated beaker", which is a beaker with measurements printed on it so that you can tell how much fluid it contains.
Part of the problem is that schools have conflicting goals. The education goal you mention is the goal everyone talks about, but few of the students genuinely care about it. What they're mainly there for is career advancement: to be graduated above others so they can get better employment. This becomes clear if you imagine what an institution truly devoted to nothing but education might be like. Such an institution might be like a movie theater which plays exclusively documentaries. It doesn't take much imagination to realize how well that would do: it would go bankrupt because almost no-one would want to pay money for it.
Politicians identify school with education, and use that to create talking points about how everyone should be educated. But in the context of the other goal, of graduating and distinguishing people, it makes zero sense to have everyone graduate. That would be like a graduated beaker with only two measurements, "empty" and "full".
I can't say for all degrees at all elite schools, but in the elite CS program I attended, I worked much harder than I ever did before attending, and much harder than I ever did after graduating.
In the weeks immediately following graduation I used to feel guilt if I would spend over an hour on something fun, like a movie or a video game, because over the course of my degree I had conditioned myself to spend every waking moment working.
I'm pretty sure that's not the best way to actually maximise performance - in the same way that even professional athletes don't spend 100% of their time training. You need recovery periods and, I find, breaks for stuff to actually sink in.
Fact is, when you have weekly assignments in 4 classes that each require many hours to complete, it's easy to find yourself in a cycle of coding until 3 am only to realize you have to do it again the next day to finish a math problem set.
My point is just that "hard to get in, easy to graduate" does not meet my experience at all.
Which data point confirms your observation that this varies widely by school and there are hard programs out there.
See: https://www.chronicle.com/article/We-Asked-20-Elite-College/...
> Q. Will your university exert more oversight over how students are designated as athletic recruits in the admissions process? If so, how?
> A. Caltech does not reserve admission spots for our athletic department nor do we take into account legacy status or family wealth. The main criteria in our evaluation process focuses on academic and personal performance/potential as well as demonstrated STEM passion and achievement.
> Q. Does "Operation Varsity Blues" show a broader need for reform in selective admissions?
> A. This case is an important reminder how hypervigilant selective admission offices need to be in evaluating candidates and their credentials.
Caltech's CDS says otherwise - http://finance.caltech.edu/documents/537-cds2019.pdf section C7
(of course, for those following along, this very interesting point is unrelated to the college admissions scandal)
University of Michigan has a top 20 education program (to pick an example). Their vision is...
> The vision of the U-M School of Education is to be a premier School of Education devoted to developing civically engaged children, youth, and adults for a diverse and inclusive society.
http://www.soe.umich.edu/about/
I recently read an interesting piece on Australia's top journalism program that wasn't all that hard but seemed to have an underlying purpose of social change... https://quillette.com/2019/05/22/when-the-authorities-tell-y...
People tend to chase after their goals. If the goals have changed from what they used to be, shouldn't we expect the output to be changed as well?
To be fair, during that same time we have seen an increase in IQ to match[1]. In part this is attributed to better education, better nutrition and possibly the most important removing lead from toys. It's quite possible, that school is just as hard as it used to be, it's just we are smarter.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't make school more difficult to match OR potentially graduate individuals quicker.
I expect one reason we have not seen this reversal more well studied in places such as the US is that we don't have any normalized form of IQ tests. The areas where it showed up first, Scandinavian nations in particular, have compulsory military enlistment which, in turn, comes with compulsory IQ examinations. People in many (and it may end up being all) developed nations are literally becoming less intelligent, at least so far as IQ is able to work as a measurement of.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
That would be far more concerning.
As a personal example - KhanAcademy launched the year before I went to University and helped me a lot as it meant I could be fully confident of my calculus and linear algebra skills (we studied these topics in Further Maths but not multivariate calculus etc.)
Course difficulty, on the other hand, is much more subtle and complicated to assess. You can look at a given school's grade inflation relative to other schools but that is confounded by differences in the relative merit of the students. Thus, we should predict that school difficulty sends a weaker signal than grades.
Universities live and die by their reputations. The entire purpose of a university degree is so that the school can vouch for their student, putting the weight of their reputation behind the person so that they have an easier time securing employment.
I would also like to take issue with your choice of the word "responsibility" as it pertains to grading. Universities have the right to grade their students, as organizations made up of individuals in a free society. They will not relinquish their right to administer examinations without a fight.
Moreover, if you were to succeed, you would only replace the economic pressure to inflate grades with political pressure. In my experience, public schools are under far more pressure to do this than universities are. A major part of this pressure is manifested in the tendency to standardize exams, leading to hyper-focus on exam prep at the expense of general learning.
Funny anecdote, when I was in (public) high school my school district calculated your "GPA" with additive bonuses for honors classes and AP classes. If you pass an honors course, it adds 0.08 to your cumulative GPA, for an AP course 0.16, with the top students in the school district usually graduating around a 7 point GPA
On top of this, the guidance counselors were really pushy about making sure every good student took every AP class available. Once I had to argue with a guidance counselor not to put me in AP history because I didn't like history. She put it on my schedule anyways and I had to go back and transfer out.
Turns out teachers get bonuses, and the school gets bonus funding, when students pass AP exams. I would assume there's also GPA based funding for the schools, but I don't know of any specifics except that the schools are measured for 'improvement' which certainly hints at structural incentives for GPA inflation.
Some would, others would thrive by delivering what their students want (a qualification and the jobs that follow on from that.) A graduate from the University of Waterloo would be considered the equal of one from Stanford given equal results. That isn't the case now.
I imagine most universities would hate it but anything that threatens their cosy financial situation is going to be opposed.
Universities have the right to grade their students, as organizations made up of individuals in a free society.
Would you support universities having the freedom to sell grades? $100,000 for a first class degree, $150,000 for a masters? No study needed.
They can be regulated just as any other organisation can be if society decided that's what they wanted to do.
As a student at Waterloo right now, I'd love for this to happen but I don't believe it would be the case. Even if examinations were standardized across all schools, employers would simply shift to some other metric, such as course grades.
Now that I think about it, how would it even be possible? The Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo offers over 300 undergrad (not including grad school!) courses alone! The vast majority of these courses are unique to the school. Are you suggesting we wipe that out and force a standardized curriculum? Or are you suggesting we have standardized examinations in:
* Algebraic Topology
* Analysis of Spatial Data in Health Research
* Calculus of Variations
* Control Theory
* Fluid Mechanics
* Game Theory
* Lebesgue Integration and Fourier Analysis
* Matroid Theory
* Professional Communications in Statistics and Actuarial Science
* Property and Casualty Pricing
* Quantitative Enterprise Risk Management
* Quantum Information Processing
* Real-Time Programming
* Semidefinite Optimization
* Software Requirements Specification and Analysis
I could go on and on and on... I think you get the point. Math profs are constantly creating new courses based on areas of active research. How are you going to standardize examinations for those things? Every university offers different things!
Would you support universities having the freedom to sell grades? $100,000 for a first class degree, $150,000 for a masters? No study needed.
For-profit "colleges" did just that, until they were shut down. What you've described is usually called academic fraud. If Stanford did that, their reputation would be obliterated overnight.
Look at the ongoing story over the admissions bribery scandal. It's a HUGE story and it's only a case of fabricated athletic credentials for admissions, never mind fabricated degrees. I'm not worried about this problem at all.
A much more accurate system, IMHO, would be to switch over to a ranking/percentile order within the school, and use standardized tests for rough cross-school comparisons. Sure, it's not perfect, but it seems better than what we have now.
Also, it provides a great argument for instructors when students inevitably come-a-grade-grubbing. "I can't bump your score, because that would inexorably bump DOWN someone else's score, and that wouldn't be fair to the other students."
Law schools often do this, and I heard many stories of things like (in the days of physical books...) moving the perfect references, a week before the deadline, to an unrelated shelf in order to trip up your classmates.
By contrast the science students tended to collaborate on everything outside of an exam room, and learned a lot from each other this way. Even if their grades were less perfectly reflective of individual understanding.
There were also some upsides to the competition in terms of motivation and focus, though admittedly with extremely ambitious law students it was a little over the top for the first year. But based on my experience teaching undergraduates, the middle ~60-70% of the class would benefit from an environment with more immediate competitive pressure.
Standardized _aptitude_ tests were always bad because they’re supposed to test basic skills but do so with lots of curveball tricks or specific formats... so teachers taught the specifics of the test
I once took a discrete math class for CS majors. I aced it. Loved it. Classmates would ask me to explain concepts to them before exams if they were having trouble. There was only one other student in the class who had gotten an A on every exam leading up to the final. He had a problem that he didn't know about, though. He didn't turn in the homework.
Now, homework for this class was not a measure of skill. It was just a way for the professor to have an extra way to determine that you were participating. I warned him the class before the final that he was gonna fail if he didn't get the teacher to give him an extension on the homework, because I knew he wasn't turning it in (there was a requirement in the syllabus that you needed to turn in 70% of the homework to have a chance at passing). Hell, he was proud of the fact that he was smart enough to understand the course material without doing it. He didn't ask for the extension, and a year later, he was sitting in the same class for which he had already mastered the material.
in many classes, homework has devolved into another technique to inflate grades. in most of my college courses the homework was either very easy or graded for "completion". almost always a complete waste of my time, but it was usually worth too many points to skip entirely.
I had a couple professors who would "assign" difficult problem sets that weren't graded at all. it was usually a bad call to skip them, because the exams were actually hard. that's the only respectful approach, imo.
And that seems totally backwards. If i took my car to a mechanic, I expect them to fix my car 100%; so why do we expect professors to produce students with 75% achievement?
Professors are supposed to be in the business of teaching, not assessing.
Depends on how you look at it. I went to a school that bell curved around a C for most core classes and most of the curving wasn't "deflating scores" but rather making the class hard enough that there was a wide distribution of scores which made identifying the people who understood the most material clear. Having everyone get A's may make you feel good, but then you are most likely holding people back as there is no way for them to work harder and stand out if it is so easy that everyone is getting A's. Also, that competitive environment tends to make everyone work harder so they learn more.
While I'm not saying there shouldn't be schools where it is easy to get A's and B's, I am 100% glad I went to one that pushed me as hard as they did as I learned a ton and I have gotten very good job offers since graduating.
But if somebody enrolls Stats 101, it should be the goal of the professor to get every student to _learn_ Stats 101, not to produce a majority of students with mediocre understanding
Any tough class I've had always had a few students get a near perfect score. They were given the exact same lectures, content, and resources as people who failed the class (myself included sometimes), but all they did was engage with it more thoroughly outside of class. The professors job isn't to hold your hand and pull you through college, like a high school teacher might, it's to just lay out what's expected of you to pass the class. Whether or not you go home and put in the work you personally need to comprehend it as well as some of your peers is entirely up to your own circumstances. It's not even the school's job to educate you. The school's job is to provide you with the resources you need to pass your classes. Whether or not you receive an education is entirely up to you.
It seems absurd that high school teachers go through more education training than college professors (most of which never actually take any education training at all).
1. "Don't ask, don't tell" for degree status of job applicants.
2. National exam-based standards for competency-based certificates.
3. Remove federal guarantees for student loans.
4. Expanded forgiveness programs for outstanding student loans.
Yes there may be professors or programs that are artificially awarding higher grades than deserved. But the more likely case is that the admitted pool of students is just a higher caliber with stronger educational background than 50 years ago. If you agree that grades are a metric of academic mastery, then it makes sense average grades are improving, and are not necessarily an indication that somehow school has gotten easier than back in the "good 'ol days".
While elite institutions use such arguments to justify their grade inflation, grade inflation is actually seen across all kinds of educational institutions. The system overall is less selective than it used to be. And grade inflation is proceeding far too quickly in recent years to be explained by a changing student body.
See http://www.gradeinflation.com/ for data backing up what I claim.
As an approach I think this makes a lot of sense. First it gives the very best students an opportunity to really show their stuff. For the others, it gives them the opportunity to pick and choose the problems to show that they've at least mastered some of the material (generally, there is often more presented than can realistically be mastered of the course of a semester (between and within each course)).
(nested parens are (the best))
I had a history professor who gave a test in this manner: Below there are 3 columns of 14 items of interest, whether they be people or wars or treaties or whatever. You are allowed to cross out 2 columns, and then cross out 3 terms. Write what you know about the remaining terms. Your grade is out of 110 on a 100 point scale.
Now, I loved the test, because I excel at soft trivia tests... but did it really gauge what I understood about history?
Nope. It gauged my knowledge of history trivia for those terms. Understanding history is about understanding how these things connect together.
If I were a history professor, I would base the majority of students' grades on papers about the subjects we cover in class to discover whether they're actually thinking about history or if they're just trying to recite facts and figures.
In typical work scenarios you have more than 2 hours to tackle a problem, anyway.
This is computer science, and a data structures class to boot. Answering any of the questions required not only a deep understanding of the fundamental principles involved, but analytic skills (both in parsing the problem statement into a set of requirements and to identify problematic edge cases).
Any good class will teach more than they could possibly test on in two hours. So the alternative here is to keep students guessing about what will actually be on the exam? That's why, when I was a college instructor, I gave previous exams to my students (also: i thought not doing so would disadvantage less socially connected students; lots of old exams get passed around).
When I was studying, to me, the grade was just a benchmark to measure my progress against, but otherwise wasn't something that I was particularly concerned about (in second level, I only cared that I good good enough grades to get the Uni placement I wanted, but beyond that, it meant very little and means absolutely nothing to me now. And third level... I've literally never told anyone[2] what grades I got on my degree. It seems that having a relevant degree at all is a ticked checkbox, but that's about it. Once you have some experience, that's all anybody ever cared about, at least, for me).
[1] But I guess even if the spread/variance of grades was high (rather than everyone being clumped at the top because its too easy to get good grades), grades aren't a great indicator for many reasons, so the utility is probably limited either way.
[2] In the context of trying to get a job, at least.
2. A lot of the moral case for education debt is that it's good long-term value. People graduating from CS education without the education needed to get a good job don't get that value, making the moral case far murkier.
But it is true that there are real incentive issues. GPA as a metric especially in High School is problematic in that it encourages students going with what they are already good at instead of where they may have room to grow and explore. I could see a case for keeping GPA "internal only" but that puts more emphasis on standardized tests which are already a teach to test black hole.
How about we make schools about learning at your own tempo, because you want the knowledge? Schools should strive to be excellent at teaching, enabling you to learn easily, not forcibly push it onto you, making you die from stress.
that said, grades are useful for self assessment imo
So I wouldn't say this is just a college problem.
There is nothing wrong with comparatively ranking individuals for selection, but what does a 0.25 GPA difference really mean? It doesn't tell you anything that helps you understand the candidate.
Instead of GPAs why not use cumulative scoring of major subjects to show total capability. For example, in math you learn to count, do basic arithmetic, algebra, etc. For each topic you earn a point on completing the concept which goes toward your total score. By the end of highschool you might have a score of 1000 points, by the end of a somewhat math heavy major you might have 2000, nd by the end of a math intensive PhD you might have 3000-4000 points. Then, when you're looking for talent you can focus on scores for the skillsets you need.
To have any hope of degrees actually meaning anything, grades and diplomas need to be awarded by a standardized, neutral third party.
it's impossible to fairly grade students even in one class, so I don't see any way a multi school entity could fairly grade
Tough.
It looks like the system now uses standardized tests and extracurricular competitions for cross-classroom comparisons and uses grades primarily to assess obedience. To my way of thinking, that's the right direction, in that it actually measures people against each other rather than measuring the arbitrary grading scales of the professors involved.
My daughter could tell you it isn't easy, at all, to graduate from CMU SCS. It will kick your ass no matter how smart you are. That said, of the entrances to any program that's highly selective on a relevant basis, wouldn't you expect almost all of them to graduate with a good GPA?
There a lot more diversity of ability at programs with 30% acceptance than 3%. Grading on a curve might work there, and be a factor in motivating students to work harder.
But is that the best approach? Would ending legacy and donor admission concessions do more for academic rigor?
Some junior professor, who's up for tenure based on research output, and teaching prizes based on being liked... in his shoes, would you decide to spontaneously give mostly B & Cs next year, and spend weeks fighting unhappy students?
Thinking about how we'd like the idea system to work is just daydreaming. You've got to think about the incentives facing all the people involved. And at the moment, these seem to point towards inflation.
The parent of a friend had a widely varied career working in economics for multinationals and the US State Dept. He decided at one point to take accept a position teaching economics at a nearby state school (this was in the '90s).
He found part way through the term of a intro-mid level course that a significant number of the students were unable to do the basic math required for the problems, let alone work through the actual problems.
Of course he was giving them failing grades.
He was soon reprimanded by the administration and told to raise the grades to passing despite the inability to do even the basic work.
He resigned at the end of that term.
Several takeaways from that story, none of them good.
That is not actually passive voice: note that "cease" is not inflected into the past participle, and it is modified with a modal "should" instead of an auxiliary (almost invariably "be"). In grammatical construction, this sentence is identical to "You should go," which I think you should recognize as not being passive either.
Is there a term for this? "This nonsense should cease" does differ from "you should go" in that it demands an action on an inanimate thing, while avoiding saying who acts.
Grade inflation does mean an "A" doesn't mean what it used to.
But is that bad? (Or good?)
Letter grades are an arbitrary measure and are most generally used to compare recent graduates. For that gradual inflation is not a problem. (And, if you were comparing between generations for some reason you could apply an appropriate adjustment, though it's pretty unclear why you'd be doing that for anything serious.)
There also seems to be a strong implication that we used to have a stronger "fail 'em out if they can't handle it" approach to education and that we should return to that. I don't know if we actually used to (didn't seem that way to me in my day -- the mid-to-late '80s) but even so, I doubt this is an effective educational strategy for a large proportion of students, which leads to an inefficient educational system. (That is, it ends up providing an effective educating fewer students at a larger cost than other approaches.)
So, low-quality arguments. Not surprising though... they let anyone write opinion pieces these days! <-- this is a joke
There certainly is a real value in putting the smartest (well, most able actually, but I know what you mean) people on the hardest problems. So better to use a system designed for the specific purpose rather than try to repurpose something made for a different purpose.
At this point I stopped reading the article. I'm concerned this author(a polisci/economics professor)'s definition of 'hard' is functionally equivalent to 'only for the wealthy whites' again, as the specific time period he cites as the beginning of college becoming too easy (1960s) coincides exactly with desegregation (board vs brown was mid 1950s) AND he specifically cites disadvantaged backgrounds as part of that reason. If I'm mistaken and the author later addresses this, let me know and I'll actually finish the piece.
I am in general in agreement that grade inflation is a problem, drop out rates should rapidly increase to help stem degree inflation in our populace, as this is associated currently with saddling our future with increasingly difficult hurdles, which will eventually bite us in the form of lagging social security, population shrinkage, and economic instability. However, the arguments being used are immediately suspect to me.
a) you've failed to parse the prose you quote and think that it's complaining outright about universities allowing in applicants from "disadvantaged backgrounds", when in fact it is complaining about allowing in applicants specifically because they are from disadvantaged backgrounds who would not meet previous merit-based admissions criteria, or
b) you genuinely mean to imply that advocating for the ideal of meritocracy is not merely flawed but somehow equivalent to supporting a policy of explicit racial segregation and class-based admissions, or
c) something else entirely
I'm downvoting, primarily because the ambiguity about what you're trying to say makes this comment impossible to substantively engage with.
If your subtext depends on ignoring everything about the original claims (fixating solely on a date), you're being libelous.
If you didn’t have to go to college to get anything done, things like college desegration would have mattered less (mind, its still important, but college simply wouldn’t have been a significant target for it if it happened in say 1910).
That is, overwhelming demand naturally leads to grade inflation (and cost inflation), as the need to ensure graduation regardless of merit increases (because the university became additionally tasked as a trade school). Combined with ofc the private market’s increased reliance on using the university for training versus doing it themselves, internally.
But I’m making the case that grade inflation doesn’t need to stop, the dependency on higher education does. Grade inflation is a symptom, as is every other non-merit based operation of it.
This is a good point and I agree with you. Thanks for your insight.
See http://www.gradeinflation.com/ for more detail on that trend.
In the UK we had an unemployment problem when Margaret Thatcher was around, one solution to that was to lower the entry barriers for further education. University became remarkably easy to get into, however, the economics of this were such that teaching was different.
In the sciences it was much more profitable for a university to run access courses with 10x the amount of 'customers'. However, you would not have students getting one to one tuition time and having experiments taking up ten foot of a workbench. It was more a matter of multiple choice questions with none of the staff personally mentoring the students.
Some of the older courses were impossible to get a first in. The course I did had historically only ever given out one first, just getting a pass was a heroic achievement.
Due to the elitist nature of how it worked back then a given institution had a certain amount of reputation that went with it so an employer would know that getting a third from a highly reputable university was of merit, not to be compared with a higher grade issued by a mere 'polytechnic'.
I did not think the elitism was bad back then. The reason being that if the state had invested so much money in you then there was an expectation to pay it back. But that all changes when the onus of payment falls on the students and the bank of mum and dad.
Perhaps that is the nub of the problem. When you have students paying for their education you need to have a certain amount of grade inflation to make the investment worthwhile to them.
I would be interested to know if countries that do have state funded free tertiary education can keep a grip of grade inflation. I know that some professional degrees, e.g. in medicine, are not internationally comparable. So, if Western countries don't recognise East European or other degrees in the same way, there should be no need to grade inflate.
Oh, please. They make it sound like going to a top school is simply about ego enhancement. It's more like about enhancing your net worth in the long run.
Grade inflation is probably about two forces colliding:
1. Schools being used primarily for credentialing rather than for educating per se.
2. Increased awareness of "diversity" issues, for lack of a better term.
What you see is that members of some in group -- in this case upper class cis het white males -- generally get scored better than members of various out groups, such as women, people of color and LGBTQ. There are various factor as to why that is, but part of the problem is straight up prejudice. There is plenty of evidence that if an in group member does x, it gets credit and when an out group member does the exact same thing, it doesn't get the same credit.
So there is a legitimate argument to be made that if your grades at a college most strongly correlate to a particular demographic rather than performance - especially if that demographic is the known and long standing in group that controls everything -- then those grades aren't really measuring performance per se to begin with. Thus they are merely a credentialing mechanism being used to exclude out group members and perpetuate historical injustices.
The problem is that passing out As like candy doesn't actually fix prejudice and social exclusion. It merely serves to erode the value of the signal that grades are supposed to provide.
I don't know what the solution is. But I suspect that's a large part of the mechanism driving such trends.
I'm far from a "pedigree snob". I started at a community college and am the biggest proponent of that path for most people. It's a huge benefit to be employable, and a career such as being an electrician grants that in spades. Too many go to college hoping to sit at a desk afterwards, do very little, and be paid 6 figures just because you have some degree. It doesn't happen anymore without networking / family connections.
It's critical to be skill-based, if you can pull that off without an education, great. But there's no downside to having an employable skillset and formal education. I see a lot of people that are against formal education try to make it a split decision. Not all employable folks have a formal education, and not all with a formal education are employable. I'm employable because of my skillset, work ethic and education. Some folks look down on me because I didn't go to a top university (I did go to a community college first, and had no outside funding/help). Wouldn't change a thing and would recommend my path to anyone. Community college is a must, and overall, choose your major wisely based on skills that people pay for.
A good employee with skills can easily get through 2-4 years of school, so there's no real excuse to not have it under the belt. I've seen plenty of folks that are already successful go back and finish up their bachelors. It also never expires unlike all the certs that companies try to sell.
It does grant some degree of credibility. It has to, as starting and completing anything does. All that said, I'm opposed to pedigree snobs and anti formal education folks alike.
Note that missing success in learning can be caused both by the students and the teachers (or school). Grades are a way to measure that success and do not necessarily reflect on one or another.
Seems like people are actually smarter and the pseudointellectuals at Reason are just trying to find something to rail at.
It is not particularly a problem that the arbitrary meaning of A or C is wandering around. Many of use have played Japanese video games that give a grade-based rank for your performance on some level. At times I've been a bit surprised to get an A the first time I tried the level... only for me to discover that there's also S, SS, SSS, and SSS+ actually above it. This scale may feel weird for cultural reasons, but it still distinguishes various skills just fine. There are some administrative problems in converting between the various "A" grades, but that's already a problem anyhow and presumably at least mostly solve to the satisfaction of the relevant entities.
The problem is that the ability to distinguish at the top end is being erased as the top end of the tests get pulled down over time. This makes the tests less useful for their own stated purpose. If one imagines for the sake of argument a academic test whose minimum is -2 standard deviations and the top end is -1 stddev, it's not a terribly useful test. As academia goes, it's strictly a subset of the utility of a test that measures from -3 stddev to +3.
(I qualify "academic" because there's plenty of practical, non-academic uses for such a test, but in academia that's not very useful.)
There's nothing particular immoral about moving the "A" setpoint around. The problem is that with insensitive tests, we lose the ability to distinguish between someone who just barely topped out the test, and someone who is 2 stddev above it, and in academia, that's a pretty serious loss, for all kinds of reasons.
Now, the question of what you do with the grade I think is best considered separately. You start with a clear view of the true situation, and then figure out how you want to deal with it. You don't help yourself on any level by starting from a foundation of lies.
For similar reasons, I often remind my fellow developers, never lie to the database. If you want to, for example, give someone a discount on service, you don't do that by going in to the consumption database and telling it that they used only 10 GB instead of 20. You do it by making sure your billing database has a field for "special discount" and putting it there. You don't want to lie to your databases, because that number isn't just used for billing, it's used for all sorts of other things, things you don't even have a complete list of, all of them assuming the database is telling the truth, and you don't know what will break. Don't lie in the grades; tell the truth, and figure out how to deal with the truth.
You may also note as a result of this that I'm actually in a bit of disagreement with the professor. Making school harder isn't necessarily a solution to any problem; the thing that needs to be done is to re-open that top-end again. That's similar in some ways, but will be different in others.
John V.C. Nye's jeremiad against grade inflation is very good and well written. However, it screams 'get off my lawn'. He is, no doubt, a very accomplished person[0]. But I believe that he blind to the concerns and needs of the current generation of students. Cheifly, the issue of tuition at Caltech has radically changed the calculus of grades and of failing students.
The tuition with room and board at Caltech in 1982, the year after he graduated from there, was $9481 for the school year [1]. In 2019 dollars that is $26,654.02 [2]. This year the tuition with room and board is $67,887 [3], roughly 2.5x over Dr. Nye's 'financial risk' at the time he went to Caltech.
Say you failed out after two years at Caltech fully on student loans and then need to pay back those loans. Current rates and fees come to about 6%. So, those two years ($135,774) at 6% comes out to ~$680 per month, just to keep the principal at the same amount and not to add to it. At a wage of $15/hr for the non-degreeed job you can then take, you have about $1750/mo left over, after the debt is taken out.
Look, I'm not going to try to say that you can or cannot make it on ~$1750/mo in Pasadena. But I think we all know that such a monthly income is not going to be anywhere close to easy to live on. It will take some tight budgeting. You can make up a lot of scenarios about how this 20 year old person can 'make it work', but it'll take moving very far away from Pasadena (as it likely would have in 1981, as well). To actually pay that down will take a LOT of work.
Failing out of Caltech has never been a good option, despite the consternations of old men who like to tell the young men what is what. However, these days, the risks of failure at Caltech come with a much heavier financial burden than they did nearly 40 years ago.
[0]https://economics.gmu.edu/people/jnye
[1]https://caltechcampuspubs.library.caltech.edu/110/1/1981-198...
(1) I'm more sympathetic to schools that don't graduate everyone - which is part of what the article is arguing for, explicitly - back in the old days when you could pay for college with a couple of summers worth of full time work. Today, it's a crushing debt that will stay with students for decades. The school pretty much owes it to the students to ensure they graduate. That's not an argument for making the school easier, but that the school should be going to whatever ends needed to ensure that the students do get an excellent education. The question isn't "how do I give out a curve?" it's "how do I make sure every single person in this room gets an A-level knowledge of the material?"
(2) I majored in a hard science in undergrad (bio major, chem and lit double-minor). Our hardest class was OChem, where the professor would brag that only 4 people per semester would get A's. In OChem 1 I was #6 in the class and got a B; in OChem 2 I was #2 in the class and got an A. I don't see that it did anyone any favors: the actual class knowledge distribution was reasonably bimodal around "people who were clawing over every single point to try and be one of the A's" and "people trying not to get an F". Instead of a grade that reflected their mastery of the knowledge, most of us got lumped into the middle of an artificial bell. But it was orgo: its reputation for killer difficulty gave the professor free reign to grade how he wanted.
(3) Do we care about inter-major inflation? Are we worried about the relative difficulty of getting an A in Lit vs. getting an A in biochemistry? Which of the reasoning in favor of "difficult grades" exempts inter-major comparisons? Why don't we care that an A in literature is a joke to get compared to a B in physics? How would we make an A in business as hard to get as an A in chemistry? Who would actually benefit?
(4) Much of the criticism of inflation comes from credentialism. Universities were never anything but credential-producers; the only thing that's changed is that enough of the public now attends that that's visible to "the masses."
(5) What's the value of a university education? If the answer is " the intrinsic satisfaction of learning", grades are irrelevant. If the answer is "social signaling", then grade inflation is already working as intended. If the answer is "job training," then grades of any arbitrary difficulty will still generally be a poor proxy for how one will function in an actual job environment. What's the defense for the value of grading?
(6) I appreciate that we implicitly deny the idea that students might be getting better. Average scores on med student board exams have been climbing YoY for a while, as new and better study aids keep getting released. The average med student now knows, objectively, more and better than his predecessors did. is it shocking that something similar may occur in other fields? If it is, damn, that's a more amazing failure of the educational industry than any amount of inflation.
University degrees just become a tool for class warfare if the price goes up but the difficulty goes down. If everyone is guaranteed to pass as long as their check clears, then your university degree only exists to show you came from a wealthy family. It says nothing about your knowledge or skills.
To spell it out: Parents will take their dearest offspring to another similar college where he gets an A instead of a C if grades at a particular college are not inflated. This is a result of competition for business among colleges.
(The only places that are exempt are places so extremely selective that admission/graduation alone is a strong enough signal, i.e. Caltech)
I graduated from a hard school 20 years ago that still has a reputation as a place that resisted grade inflation.
My parents had to pay most of my way, we were fortunate enough to have to pay but not fortunate enough it was easy to pay for, 20 years on my parents have not been able to retire at the normal age because they had to pay pretty much all of the tuition for 4 kids. We got academic scholarships but 0 financial aid.
I had almost no money to my name during school, I'd go through a month spending < $100 including my phone bill and stuff like that. (This was in the 1990s when college students did not have cell phones.) I had good internships in the summer and would build up about $8k in savings and then go through that paying for books & expenses during the year. I paid some of my dorm & food costs too out of that, those were big upfront expenses right at the beginning of the year that would result in my bank account being near empty and then I'd watch my finances very closely till the next summer when I went back to work. (I worked part time in school some semesters as well but barely made anything.)
Because I was so aware of the money I worked very very hard and never took it for granted. I knew plenty of fellow students who had serious money problems to get through school.
There was always a weird separation of students in college:
- Students who came from such means that they had everything thing they could possibly want. New cars, buy anything they wanted, credit cards they could run up and their parents would pay, etc.. (I could probably count on one hand the people I knew in this category in school.)
- Students whose parents made enough to have to pay everything but the family budget was then really tight cause college was such a huge expense, so these students lived frugally and never seemed to have any extra money
- Students who were on financial aid and yet seemed to have nice cars and spending money which made no sense. I would have said most people I knew who had cars were in this boat.
- Students who were on financial aid who really seemed to actually need it and had no money.
Different schools seemed to have different makeups of these different groups. My sister went to an Ivy, when I'd go visit almost everyone at her school seemed to be in the case where the parents had so much money that money didn't matter. She had lots of friends whose parents came in and bought a house for their daughter to live in for 4 years for example.
Society would be better off if people were guided to autodidacticism.
I don't know man?
Might be fine if you're majoring in something harmless like music, or art. But for the safety of society at large you just can't implement such a naive system for majors like nuclear engineering or virology. It'd just be irresponsible to the point of being outright dangerous.
It's not naive. No, in my system people could actually pick up nuclear engineering in high school as opposed to college. It's retarded that school in some delays you, because in hs, you need to do some bullshit as opposed to what you want.
I also didn't say anything against assessments.
As one example, my school was extremely rigorous and a difficult grader, most students in STEM or business programs. In the late 80s/early 90s a big push was made to even out a biased m/f ratio. They did this by greatly expanding the arts/humanities programs. They now have 55/45 overall m/f with over 60% female in the arts college.
Unfortunately, humanities are well known for grading biased towards A/B and now this university has one of the largest amounts of grade inflation of any private school since 2000.
Above may be anecdotal, but I believe much of the grade inflation is due to similar changes in focus away from rigorous subjects with right/wrong type answers (ie STEM) to those where interpretations are open and grades are more for participation and completion of assignments. That women seem to be more attracted to those subjects has allowed instutions to expand enrollment, balance overall populations and make a lot more money.
I’m not sure how useful grades are when everybody gets an A. But if the reason is a phenomenal teacher (and better teachers reproducibly produce better performing students [e.g. 1]) then maybe grades are simply an unhelpful metric. “Stopping grade inflation” isn’t just not a solution, but actively counter-productive. “Grading on a curve” when every student has mastered the curriculum (which, in higher education, is entirely achievable) is bogus.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jae.2539