Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

> While schools and colleges are sounding the alarm about declining knowledge results, joy grades are rising, as grades have become a competitive tool on the market.

This in my opinion is the main problem. Take this "marketing tool" away from the private schools, and the rest of the problems are fixable (e.g. with diversified pupil compensation). But when you let a private business both grade themselves and sell entry to (free!) university, you will quickly have massive problems...

Up until the 70-ties or so there was a separate government agency responsible for final exams and grades. If we want to keep private schools (and I think we should at least try), then we need to reinstate that separation of education and evaluation, urgently. Problem is we now have a large swath of middle class parents who feel that they've been very smart and ensured a great future for their children by choosing the right school for them (and at least subconsciously they understand that the main reason is the inflated grades). They don't want that privilege taken away. There is no limit to the hypocrisy many people can accept if they feel it benefits their kids.

Source: I'm Swedish, but I don't have kids so not super knowledgeable. Just my impression after following the debate and talking to friends with kids.

I sort of agree with what you are saying (I'm also Swedish) but I think the incentives are different, and due to the American dominance of Hacker News readers it's worth to clear up:

Swedish middle class parents do not choose "good schools" because they want a "great education" for their kids as a competitive advantage... in the sense of a well-off American parent want their kids to go to Harvard or MIT or similar.

Swedish middle class parents choose "not-bad schools" (not the same as "good schools") because they want to shelter their kids from trouble and from problems, for example from the social issues from failed integration of immigrants.

So it's more about avoiding trouble and "white flight", than the education itself.

The same is true in Australia: parents choose "not-bad" schools to minimize the chance of their kids being knifed or beaten up by other kids. But it's not due to immigration, instead just to "white trash" for lack of a better word raising violent, substance-abusing children.

As an Australian you must know that when the middle class are sneering at the working or non-working class the term is bogan.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bogan

Yeah, but while "bogan" connotates unsophistication, bad fashion sense and the like, bogans are usually portrayed as somewhat likeable and not actively criminal.

The same is true in the UK. One of the highest rates of bullying in Europe (the other big one is Finland). Somehow, one of the highest rates of sexual violence against girls in schools too (this is globally, so including developing countries).

Obviously, this problem is multi-faceted, the best solution is everyone just going to a nice school. But part of the problem in the UK was that comprehensive education is very ideological, and the belief was: comp schools are so bad because all the good students go to grammar schools. This did not turn out to be accurate.

But London (which is currently in the midst of a knife-crime epidemic) was one of the worst places, and got significantly better due to more investment, and more exclusions/discipline. For example, some schools will get teachers to walk at-risk students directly to their homes from schools. And ofc, the exclusions have caused outcry (funnily enough, there is a split on this between unions, who hate it, and teachers, who quite like it). Incidentally, Glasgow also used to have a serious knife crime problem, and they got over this with enhanced stop-and-search...unf, this is politically impossible in London. There are solutions to all these problems though.

I grew up in the UK, and knew lots of smart kids now working deadend jobs who got chewed up and spit out by schools (almost always the issue was bullying, and schools not removing people who were behaving, in a non-school context, criminally). It is a seriously bad situation imo.

We do the same here in the states. Some folks pay for private schools so their kids don't have to be exposed to perceived riff raff, while others choose to live in more expensive neighborhoods where the only benefit is often that there is less riff raff in the public schools.

Would that explain why my bachelor students were so unbelievable inept at emotionally dealing with and resolving conflicts when I taught at university there?

Haha I don't know where you're from but Swedish people are often stereotypically bad at both dealing with emotions and resolving conflicts. "Van der" = Gonna guess you are Dutch? Well Swedish people are, as you know well yourself, the opposite of the Dutch in how to handle things.

Source: My partner is Dutch.

Haha, could you elaborate on that? That sounds like a fun read.

disclaimer: I'm Dutch.

Dutch and Finnish are known for being frank and to the point which is why they are quite well regarded in Sweden. Swedish is more conflict averse, always trying to protect each other and often failing because what happens is that people read in between the lines instead, which is much worse.

disclaimer: I’m Swedish.

You guessed right! Yeah, I know the stereotypes but the thing is that I already had studied a master in Sweden for two years myself, and thought I had gotten used to communicate "like a Swede", but I still was surprised how much more fragile the bachelor students were than anticipated

How could you learn that from teaching a course? Did you create conflict among student and note how everything became chaos? Or do you just mean that a few complained about grades?

If the course is interactive and not just a lecture where students listen silently then you can easily observe what is going on. In college we have something called "seminars" where the teacher or teacher assistant work on problems and projects with small groups of students, that is highly interactive.

Neither. It was a design bachelor with group projects. You get to see a lot of interpersonal dynamics, and you also have a lot of direct interactions with your students.

I assumed you taught some technical class since this was HN, but if you didn't then I understand since those programs aren't well regarded in Sweden. If it isn't business, medical, law or STEM then it is almost surely ill regarded. I'm not talking badly about those fields in general, just that Sweden doesn't have any good programs for the so the students you get there are really poor.

It was an Interaction Design bachelor, and I taught programming. Maybe you should stop assuming so much.

Also, my goodness, blaming the students for systemic issues in society much?

I can agree to some extent, but wait until the middle class kids don’t perform well enough to make it into the middle class... Problem is: in a fair system that will happen, and many of those parents will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.

Funny you should mention the schools grading themselves. I'm a student at an AcadeMedia school, and they gave us a form to rate our education experience, along with this instruction on how to rate. For non-English speakers, they are basically asking us to rate outside of a linear 1-10 scale an instead follow theirs (which is biased towards higher ratings) presumably to look good on internal reviews. If this is somehow shown to their investors, I think the media should take this up.

https://imgur.com/a/XlyDudM

Do you know what is meant by "joy grades"? Does it refer to grade inflation (ie nearly everyone getting very good grades)?

If you are a glass-half-full person (I am), it's fair to call it grade inflation. In the sense of an unfortunate (or natural) the-standards-keep-chaning-over-time and suddenly people have better grades than 10 years ago, but the same knowledge.

If you are glass-half-empty person, you can interpret is as a sort of implied "if you pick my school (which means I get money) I will make sure your kid get good grades".

The two main ways to get into university in Sweden is through your grades or through a national test (Högskoleprovet ~ The university test). From your grades you calculate a score and then people are accepted into programmes at uni based on that score.

The grading has seen a lot of debate over the last 10 years or so from when it changed (IG/G/VG/MVG --> A-F scale). The way things were graded in the old system had national guidelines, but I think teachers were supposed to take a holistic view on the students performance. Essentially, teachers gave an overall grade. With the new system there were two things that were rather unintuitive. MVG was the highest grade in the previous system, but this does not translate well to an A. Under the previous systems a few programmes required MVG in every subject to compete with other students. So as far as I know the new system required a grade "above" MVG. So that is one thing that makes it different. But also, the new grading system should grade you high if you scored high in ALL criteria for that subject. You were only supposed to be able get one grade higher than your lowest criteria. Of course, a lot of teachers thought "Well IG should translate to F, G should be E-D, MVG should be A. And then I'll just grade like in the previous system.". I think this line of thinking has created a lot of joy grades and unfortunately locked a lot of hard working kids out of their fair spot at uni while letting less hard-working people in.

I know some people who barely got into uni from their grades but turned out to be some of the best performers among their peers because they got fair grades while others got joy grades.

Anecdotal but my relative is a teacher. The principal of their school just told them straight up that they need to improve the grades no matter what so they can compete with other schools.

It’s kind of a open secret that if you go to a bad school it will be easier to get a good grade to get into university but harder to pass university.

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