Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_cramer | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that the article is suggesting that the last 2 years were exceptionally different.

What I'm wondering is what the factors truly are here and what to do with this data.

In my opinion these grades are there to differentiate the skill levels of the people, "short-term-memory" being the major skill here (another topic for another day). But if nearly half of the people are the same elite... this system of skill-measuring is getting useless.

Maybe there should be a better alternative?

View on HN

Exams were cancelled this year and grades were estimated based on students' classroom performance. So your argument doesn't really hold up in this case.

That's even worse. Estimated, highly subjective performance grading that decides over a possible future for a student? Not a fan.

Maybe I'm a bit of a test stan, but I don't think short term memory is the major thing they test.

Unfortunately, introducing new grading schemes is a slow and arduous process, since the current grades are used to determine entry requirements for Colleges and Universities.

But there will be so many new doctors!

Grade deflation is pretty-much impossible in the UK due to pushy parents; I've heard talk on the news of changing the grades from alphabetic to numeric ...

This! As long as parents push students by comparing their grades to other (previous year) grades, we can't reverse course.

We should swap to a numeric system but shouldn't just swap an "A" for a "1"; we should show grades as percentiles. Being in the highest 10%/5% is a more meaningful comparison than saying "A" if the meaning of "A" changes over time.

There will be no extra doctors. Places on medical programs are strictly limited. Students in the UK don't automatically get in once they make the required grades, they still need to be offered a place.

Actually there will:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/05/grade-infl...

That they are in the top 45% of students might concern some ...

You are right, although it is only another 250 on top of an existing 8,750.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com