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Comment by andreilys | Hacker News Reader

“ I was similarly bothered by this, and by the fact that nobody was worried that these students would fail out given that they cheated their way in.”

You would be surprised at how difficult it is to fail out of programs.

From what I’ve seen profs have an unwritten rule to not fail students from school admin, otherwise they might complain and so it’s easier to give a D than fail them completely.

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That depends on the school. My 4-year would put you on academic suspension if your GPA was too low, which ended with you kicked out (well forced to take a 1 year break and have to ask to return... Not a lot of people did, especially since credits expired after 7 years). Although, I did get a D in a class I should have failed by the curve because I didn't write up all the lab reports, but I did well on all the tests and went to office hours to ask how to not fail, and a better grade than I deserved in a final quarter class where I wrote an apology note on the final exam, because I skipped studying that lieu of other course work, since that one wasn't needed to graduate.

On the other hand, my mom teaches pre-baccalaruate math at a CSU and gets all kinds of grief from administration for failing kids who don't earn a passing grade.

Yep exactly, curving grades is such a weird concept. But it makes sense if you think about colleges as a product, and students as customers. You don't want unhappy customers!

It wasn't really possible to flunk out of Caltech. What would happen is students would get discouraged and just leave. If you wanted to return, they'd let you back.

A friend of mine "flunked out" this way, and 10 years later came back and finished with all As. I asked him if he got any smarter in that decade. He laughed, and said no, he was just willing to do the work the second time around.

> pre-baccalaruate math at a CSU and gets all kinds of grief from administration for failing kids who don't earn a passing grade.

Hey I took pre-bacc math! At a Cal JCC but still... even my community college math classes were way harder than my "prestigious" undergrad institution which like Caltech is basically impossible to fail out from. Especially if you play a sport! Hockey and football teams got 1 page cheat sheets on exams which was outrageous.

Yeah, admissions isn't really about who can succeed at the school (since basically anyone who gets in will be fine).

While you do get some education, I'd argue the majority of the value is the signalling the institutions provide by being selective.

It's about forcing scarcity for social status.

> admissions isn't really about who can succeed at the school

At Caltech this definitely was not true. None of my fellow students were legacy that I knew of, and none were rich that I was aware of.

> (since basically anyone who gets in will be fine)

Also not true of Caltech. Caltech sometimes did make mistakes in admitting students who couldn't hack the program, and those poor students suffered until they gave up. It didn't matter how hard they worked, it just didn't work for them.

On the other hand, some students (like Hal Finney) effortlessly, and I mean effortlessly, aced everything.

Not me, I had to work fairly assiduously or I got F's.

Yeah Caltech is specialized enough that I could see it being an exception.

To expand on my previous point it’s not that all majors are unfailable - I knew plenty of kids that failed out of STEM and switched to some more generic liberal arts major anyone can pass.

At Caltech that’s probably not an option.

I would be nice if liberal arts programs also required calculus and physics. An educated person should know something about science besides these "I believe in science" memes on the internet.

Of course, I have no chance of becoming World Dictator, so those who don't like math are safe :-)

I’m an adjunct at a top 30 b school (not US but top 30 global), and I tried to fail a student and the administration made it pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen. I don’t even think he had undergraduate freshman level of business acumen, let alone MBA level.

Hey now, it's "Cs earn degrees," not "Ds earn degrees!"

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