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grades matter for your future

Here’s the real problem. Grad programs and/or employers are cheating—-they aren’t doing their own homework.

“and the grades matter for your future”

There’s the key problem.

A vitality curve is a performance management practice that calls for individuals to be ranked or rated against their coworkers. It is also called stack ranking, forced ranking, and rank and yank. Pioneered by GE's Jack Welch in the 1980s, it has remained controversial. Numerous companies practice it, but mostly covertly to avoid direct criticism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

It's my opinion that Jack Welch was extremely bad for America. He did everything Deming pointed out didn't work long term and focused on profit above all, and got extremely lucky in the financial sector. As soon as the economy soured, his vaunted techniques failed miserably. Worst of all, he trained hundreds of future leaders to follow that model.

I’d agree that a zero-sum weakness-focused approach is maladaptive.

Trying to consider the other hand reminds me of question I had at an all-hands last year: “If the only raises are annual review based, does the inflation rate mean that everyone else takes an effective pay cut?” The response hedged on HR doing market adjustments. Maybe Welch was just being realistic? Maybe encouraging folks to change employment until they are in a position in which they excel is the better option long term?

I don’t know. There’s a saying “it’s cruel to be kind” and maybe I’m too soft to survive.

It's not only that, though - if you reward the top 10% of performers and fire the bottom 10%, say, but don't actually make sure that said performance is due to skill and not a degree of randomness you may not improve at all.

You also create an attitude of fear which is not conducive to a productive and adaptable environment in the long term. You can get away with it for a while, but it's not a good principle.

Get rid of the annual review entirely. Active management is better than passive with guiderails like prodding reviews. I've never been motivated by an annual review nor have I seen it successfully motivate others; have you?

The opposite is true in my experience. People fear it and become less productive as it nears, it takes time that would be better spent on other things and it's not personally rewarding for the manager or the worker. If done poorly, it also lowers team unity and especially doesn't work as a reward because people don't recognize the behavior that led to it. If you reward behavior right after it happens, people associate the behavior with the reward. If you wait six months, they don't. They can intellectually but the team impact is lowered. Not to mention if you're individually evaluating a team based on arbitrary statistics you miss the people who hold everything together. Nobody wants to help their teammate if it will cause their teammate to get a raise instead of them.

Finally, it causes people to game the system instead of improving their work because the work improvement has less impact on their remuneration.

All that to say I don't think the annual review is a good tool.

How do you know if grades matter for your future? In my first uni year, I had no idea I'd get a job before my studies were over.

If there's an actual correspondence (eg you get next year scholarship for your studies only if your GPA remains above X), that's an incentive to cheat, so there is one issue.

And while curves do suck, it also sucks to be compared with someone having photographic memory in most exams where that is a very useful skill (even though the exam is not sttempting to favout photographic memory). Or some lazy bag who is more talented at something so it took you 10x more effort to get the same understanding. Basically, you are stacked against so much, that cheating is just a small part of all of that.

In short, it sucks being compared to people using everything they can to their advantage. But then again, that's what happens past university too, so it's just real life.

Curves typically ignore outliers (because otherwise they would be useless, there’s always that one kid) so unless everyone except you is cheating you’re usually fine.

There are two cases, usually, where curves make sense.

* When the professor doesn’t actually know how hard the exam is because it’s a new test. And since people save tests that’s most classes.

* When the professor is actually trying to find that one kid. This is super common in theoretical maths. The exams are incredibly hard with the expectation that you won’t finish it and graded on a curve or some other measure like “the test is out 100 points but there are 200 possible.” But when someone gets a perfect score you direct them to the phd program.

Curves typically ignore outliers (because otherwise they would be useless, there’s always that one kid) so unless everyone except you is cheating you’re usually fine

There's a big range between "that one kid" and "everyone". In some of my courses it'd be easy to believe 15% were cheating in some way. Another comment in this thread put the share at 50%. How's a curve going to deal with that?

> cognition enhancing drugs, others who had exam copies from prior years to help them prep, and a lot of people who copied each others’ homework

I feel drugs and copying are quite different - the guy on drugs did put in the work and the effort, after all.

For what it's worth, I feel similar to you, including for sports. Basically, life threatening things should be prohibited, but everything else is free-for-all.

This would eliminate a lot of cheating, and a lot of advantages for those in a good position (better access to new drugs and nutrition, better recovery programs, better training programs — aren't they all unfair at some level?)...

The ultimate goal is to get us to experience the top level combination of talent and effort, both in science/work and otherwise. Getting there is never going to be completely fair (hey, you scored better on it even though you prepared for 3 days and I took 30: tough luck for me, I guess, but the fact you are more talented for that exam is not something I can do anything about).

I've also seen non-cheating people who are excellent at exam taking (great scores) without ever taking anything from the actual material (zero learnings). I've never felt threatened by them either, though maybe I would have if I wanted to pursue an academic career.

I would pay money to have a "open rules" olympics kind of event. Drugs? Cybernetics? Let's do it.

For both academics and the olympics though, this ends up being an arms race that ends up just hurting those who participate. You wouldn't want an all natural, 90th percentile athlete to feel like the only way they can get ahead (or, worse, even just stay where they are) is by taking drugs with dangerous side effects. Similarly, we surely don't want students who are already doing just alright to feel like they need to get an off-script bottle of adderall in order to not fall behind their peers.

A 90th percentile athlete today is likely anything but all natural today.

By the same measure, pain killers, kinesio tapes, surgeries, ice baths: they are routine stuff for common athletes over-exerting themselves.

I've never seen anyone naturally grow a kinesio tape, yet I think 90% of people in pro sports wear them. :)

It always was and remains a question of where we draw the line?

I think that the rule should be the same for the entire population — if we are aware of the adverse effects, prescription required.

There's a big grey area between the life threatening stuff, and the stuff that will slowly mess you up for life. Simple example, but the drugs people take for pain increase your odds of a heart attack if taken habitually. It feels deeply unethical to have "take drugs that will ruin you once your career is over" be the minimum requirement for a career in sports.

Sure, that big grey area also includes paracetamol, alcohol, smoking, even caffeine... — all allowed for both students and athletes even though we know of harm they can produce.

Many sports are life-ruinous by nature (check out those NFL head injury studies), yet we incentivise people to take part in them (by paying a lot for the games).

I always cringe when I hear from pro sportspeople how engaging in sports is promoting a healthy lifestyle: I mean, sure, unless overdone like all pro sports do.

Okay, then I'm going up against people who are willing to risk their health to gain an advantage. Should I be penalized because I'm trying to make sure my equipment's going to last as long as I need it?

I suppose we accept that in sports -- even without doping, if somebody's gonna sacrifice their body to make a play then that's their call -- but in academia, too?

That's what people do all the time.

In academia, pulling all-nighters to meet unreasonable demands, psychological toll of political games, jerk mentors and professors...

In sports, I know of no-one participating even recreationally who does not have a lingering sports injury (me included).

Basically, if you want "your equipment to last", you would not participate in any high level sports at all.

I don't. Steroids are banned from competitive sports for a reason.

> Tough to do when you’re sharing a curve with a bunch of cheaters

Are curves still that common these days? In my time at university, the only classes that got curved were a couple math classes that were curved in the students' favor.

Cheating still a fairness issue even if the curve is "in your favor". The higher the scores of your classmates, the lower your post-curve score will be.

Sometimes a "curve" can be a test that isn't norm-referenced, but instead just curved up on a straight static curve. For example, 10*sqrt(n) on a very difficult final can provide a grade boost to lower grades. It might be easier to just raise grades than to modify the test, if you see students that you feel should have passed, fail.

Yeah, fair.

Curves are extremely common in STEM classes today at Berkeley. I think I've only had a handful of upper division classes that were not curved. A lot of the internal discussion on curving vs not curving is based on the fact that building an exam which generates a good distribution is really hard, especially for classes where the understanding is very stratified due to differing backgrounds in the area.

over a decade ago, the only curved class I took was a calculus class entirely full of kids who went to college at 16, and the guy teaching it seemed to have no issue declaring that this class should contain the same proportion of C's as all his others, regardless of how well we learned calculus :)

I think it highly depends on the school and degree. All my math classes and most of my CS classes at Purdue were curved.

Any professor who has to grade on a curve is a professor who shouldn't be allowed to make tests or assignments.

> I think curves are in general unethical due to cheating, and feel they’re a sign that a professor hasn’t done the hard work to really zero in on exactly what knowledge the student is expected to master.

I disagree; there's no objective criteria for what students should be "expected to master" in a particular course. it's inherently relative to what the typical student at that institution is capable of. a class where everyone gets an A is probably a waste of time for everyone involved. it strongly implies that more material could have been covered.

if a whole institution is like this, it gets back to the original problem. when everyone else is graduating with a 4.0, a 3.8 looks a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous school.

ideally, the material itself would be designed to get a good distribution of As, Bs, and Cs with a few Ds and Fs for people who didn't try or understand at all. but it's pretty hard to get this exactly right. better to err on the side of making things a little too hard. then the occasional bright student will really shine, and you have enough signal to compress the range into the expected letters at the end.

there's no objective criteria for what students should be "expected to master" in a particular course

Not exactly, but depending on the course you can get pretty close. In my engineering statics and solids classes, it mapped well with what you'd be expected to do when working as a stress engineer (which is what I worked in after school). In my heat transfer course, it mapped well with the responsibilities of a thermal engineer.

ideally, the material itself would be designed to get a good distribution of As, Bs, and Cs with a few Ds and Fs for people who didn't try or understand at all. but it's pretty hard to get this exactly right. better to err on the side of making things a little too hard. then the occasional bright student will really shine, and you have enough signal to compress the range into the expected letters at the end.

And that's exactly what my professors who didn't curve managed to do. It was clear they worked very hard at prioritizing the important material, teaching it well, and testing it fairly. It was a breath of fresh air.

But when the average score on an exam in one of my other classes was 22% -- and they weren't looking for the next Einstein, it was just another upper division engineering class, presumably the geniuses would have revealed themselves by that point -- it was clear that the professor wasn't even trying. Throw a bunch of crap on the test and let the curve sort it out, so the professor could get back to what they really wanted to spend their time on: research.

Research also happens to be what they are evaluated on for tenure/promotion etc. Teaching evaluations are generally a tiny part of that equation.

> when everyone else is graduating with a 4.0, a 3.8 looks a lot like a 2.0 from a more rigorous school.

I've never heard of this interpretation before, it seems this is a difference in whether the GPA should represent a student's actual grade on assignments, or the student's overall achievement relative to their piers. It seems the curve exists for the latter ideology - you can't expect every FAANG recruiter to say "well they got 2.9 from Georgia Tech, that's better than this 3.4 from Duke", if they did, you'd probably have pretty arbitrary hirings (although, if it became policy, I can see some Googler making an internal tool to 'normalize' school GPAs); although it seems MIT has a "no curves" policy and graduates still manage top-tier GPAs.

I can't speak to what goes on in FAANG recruiting, but I was involved in hiring for a smaller company that recruited heavily from regional schools. we absolutely knew which schools were harder, as most of the younger engineers had graduated recently from that same set of schools. obviously GPA doesn't tell the whole story, and we preferred to decide based on work experience. but for junior hires and especially interns, there's not always a lot of signal to decide on. all things being equal, we would prefer someone with a 3.0 (or even lower, with a good explanation) from the rigorous stem school over someone with a 4.0 from the well-known party school. which is too bad, I'm sure there were some very bright people who went to the "party school", but their grading policy made it very difficult to distinguish them from their peers who barely had a pulse.

I always share the exams I set (and the solutions) with my students. Inhace necer understood the idea that keeping them “secret” is somehow useful.

Yes, writing a new exam each time is a bore but I prefer my students learning my style rather yhan not.

I agree with your opinion on curves (which aren't even a thing where I'm from), but cheating matters even in the absence of curves.

If GPA is a factor to achieve certain jobs, positions, grants, PhD programs, etc. (which it obviously is, to varying extents depending on countries, but AFAIK it always is) then someone who is inflating their GPA via cheating can basically "steal" your job/PhD/etc., curve or not.

> sharing a curve

It's beyond me why is this even allowed.

Are you grading results of your educational effort or are you organizing a beauty pageant?

Not grading on a curve should be part of academic integrity standards.

In my experience it's to help more people pass. If the natural distribution has 70% as the average, no curve is applied. Above-average outliers (the occasional 100% scores) would be removed from the calculation.