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Comment by qntty | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm cynical, but I lost my trust in educational institutions when I realized how disconnected grades are from learning. Learning about people cheating didn't do anything to change my opinion. If anything, it made me hopeful to know that people seem to naturally resist participating in poorly designed institutions even if they don't share my bigger picture view of them.

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This isn't just any educational institution. It's the training ground for army officers, and one with a very high reputation. This isn't just someone with an easy degree getting all A's based on dubiously challenging coursework. These are officers who are supposed to be entrusted with command and people's lives.

Ok, but do you go to school for the grades or to learn? Grades are like performance reviews. They might matter to your teacher/manager/school/employer, but they sure as hell don’t matter to me because I’m the judge of my own success.

I share your view. My strategy in university was to memorize as much as I could going into the exam and then garbage collect 1 day later and be left with nothing.

This was an arrogant waste of time, but my priorities at that time were to simultaneously max(grades) and min(effort), with the end goal being a job, and my strategy optimally satisfied those goals. In hindsight I wish that things had been designed differently to prevent gaming the system in such a way, to save me from myself, but alas they were not (and still aren't).

You say grades are disconnected from learning without provided any evidence (or even an anecdote for an example).

I'm not saying you're wrong but some supporting evidence would be good as this wasn't my experience in undergrad and isn't my experience now.

I went to a target school. Most reputable TAs and Professors I've met agree grades are mostly a scam. Historical issues with grade inflation or large curve disparities across semesters because departments force fixed grading distributions, devoid of any context. It makes it harder to design fair exams and homeworks. The only thing grades are good for are improvement indicators - not if you did well with understanding the material of the class you took. Some professors choose students to assist in classes based on how they improved from prerequisites, rather than if they got an A/B/C.

The obvious example of cheating resulting in higher grades independent of effort or learning is kind of besides the point.

Picking different professors will also result in better grades independent of effort or knowledge. One of my math teachers literally gave everyone that showed up to an upper level class an A, and said he wanted to cover more material rather than have a final.

The most clear cut example of grades independent of learning is someone that knows the subject and is unable to test out of the class. In such cases they can get top scores without learning anything.

If you’re arguing that they reflect having learned the material at some time. I knew people with significant time pressure like a full time job that knew the material very well, but simply aimed for a lower grade on assignments as a means of managing their time. Grading on a curve means you need to find something that separates A’s from B’s when everyone learns the material and that’s often just effort.

I think most people understand grades aren't purely a measure of how well you know a subject, but also related to how much your parents donated to the university, or how important you are to the football team.

What should devastate people's trust in educational institutions is the relationship between Harvard and Epstein. We get to watch this university, whom I'm told is full of the world's smartest people, claim it was ignorant of what was really going on.

Harvard gave a sex trafficker a security card and his own office while he paid them millions. Harvard faculty was even joining him at his parties, I find it hard to believe what he was doing was really a secret.

Regarding grading: I am a professor at a large American state university where football is king. I have never been pressured to change a grade for the kinds of reasons you mention.

I'm not saying that grading is perfect -- measuring what has been learned is hard, and there can be pressure not to be too harsh overall. But this sort of corruption is, in my observation, not widespread.

Have you ever failed a football player?

I have not, to my knowledge, ever had a football player in one of my classes.

Suppose you had an important football player in a class, and because of a grade you gave he missed a big game, do you believe there would be negative repercussions?

If so, there's at least a little bit of pressure towards passing those students. I wouldn't even call it "corruption", just normal human bias that everyone is guilty of.

I don't speak from experience, but I believe the answer to be "probably not" -- at least not on the academic side of things. There would be repercussions for the player of course, and maybe also for the special tutors that athletes get to keep them academically on track. But I doubt the athletics office would even try to contact me or my department chair. Dealing with academic bureaucracies is a giant pain in the ass, and I certainly wouldn't try to make it easier for them.

I think there are typically a handful of classes that are known to be "athlete friendly" and I can imagine pressure existing there. Indeed, here is one example I have read about:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/131523/teaching...

Then what's the point of telling us that you've never been pressured to change a football players grade? Obviously nobody is going to pressure you to change a grade for a student not in your class.

He's being honest instead of withholding the truth to fit some agenda. Shouldn't be too surprising.

Because I've learned some about the way academia works -- where pressure comes from, and how it operates.

If the administration tried to hatch some conspiracy to inflate the grades of athletes or legacy students or whoever, ... then a quarter of the faculty would rebel, and the other three-quarters wouldn't even notice. Senior administrators send out lots of emails concerning this or that, and when they say to jump, nobody is scrambling to ask how high.

So how do you explain all of the programs caught doing the things you say wouldn't happen?

(1) To the best of my observation -- and I read Inside Higher Ed regularly -- this certainly happens but it's not common.

(2) AFAICT, when it does happen, it happens through known channels. e.g. there might be a few classes or majors which have a reputation as going easy on athletes, and instructors there might be asked to stay in line.

I'm not saying it never happens, but it's certainly uncommon enough that "grades are meaningless" isn't really true.

It seems that you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Corruption will always exist somewhere any any system at scale.

The question is how pervasive it is and how it is handled. For the most part the corruption is overstated because it is newsworthy.

As an aside, you should look into the specific facts on Harvard and Epstein [1].

https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2020/report-regarding...

Yes, a report written by the vice president found they did nothing seriously wrong. Doesn't change my mind much because I already knew their stance on the whole thing.

Everybody loved Epstein right up until he got caught, and nobody had a clue what he was doing. This is the position of everybody involved with Epstein, not just Harvard. Call me dumb but I'm not buying it.

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