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Comment by derevaunseraun | Hacker News Reader

This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class. I remember soloing the class and thinking that the assignments were super hard. They would post grade averages for assignments and I was doing worse than usual.

I remember a TA posting about cheating being an issue. They even released a graph of anonymized student repositories with edges indicating a detected instance of cheating

Turned out that a HUGE cohort of people were cheating (I think maybe over half the class).

The scariest thing about cheating is that whenever a bunch of people do it (and aren't caught), it screws up the class curve so much that people who don't cheat will be forced to put in way more time studying, which will then take time away from other classes. It also screws up metrics that the professors and TAs use to understand how well they're teaching material, which assignments to drop, etc

imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at. If people cheat, it screws up the fairness and can encourage others to start cheating. If everyone (or most) are cheating, you have people who aren't getting anything out of the class, getting credits as prerequisite that they shouldn't be getting, moving on to future classes and continuing the cycle

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Yes - it's similar to the situation in high school where there are kids who want to learn and kids who disrupt the class because they're lazy/not motivated/have issues/want attention.

Automated teaching and testing with social sharing automate that dynamic. There's less attention seeking, but much more passive aggressive subversion.

But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if you want software that works and buildings that don't collapse.

Worse - the skill they've learned best is gaming the system and hiding their incompetence.

It's a double failure - of culture as well as knowledge.

Kudos to the prof in the story for handling it so well. Most profs won't.

The underlying issue is that there's been far too little research into the social consequences of automating all kinds of interactions.

The 70s utopian ideal of "Give everyone a computer to empower them" turned out to be ridiculously naive. What happened instead is that various dysfunctional economic and cultural patterns were automated and enhanced.

Culture as a whole has no defences against this because hardly anyone has realised that it's a problem inherent within the culture-amplifying effects of automation, and not an unfortunate byproduct that just sort of happens sometimes - and who knows why?

> Worse - the skill they've learned best is gaming the system and hiding their incompetence.

So they're ideally qualified for a career in politics.

Or middle management at a large company.

I really appreciate this comment, especially the bit about how automation amplifies culture - that's something I've felt for a long time but you've stated it eloquently.

Schools want to churn out more students, industry wants more fresh grads. Online quizzes/assignments (which are vulnerable to cheating) and Leetcode screener questions (which are just a little better than rote memorization) are how schools and industry react to scaling issues.

I feel like everyone would have better outcomes if we could somehow be satisfied with less growth.

> But that's not the scariest thing. The scary thing is that if it's a STEM field these students go on to get jobs in which they have no competence. This is truly catastrophic if you want software that works and buildings that don't collapse.

And also why we can’t trust a degree to show competence, leaving it to companies to figure out with LONNGG multi-part interviews

Some do summer hires - a sort of 90-day interview - in their Junior year. Much better signal-to-noise.

Businesses are still making out like bandits now that the cost of learning how to do the job has been offloaded onto kids.

You think STEM is bad? Think about, compounded by COVID-induced remote education, medical doctors...

Another thing (that the story goes into in depth) is that cheating creates a whole lot of extra work and stress for professors who would rather just be teaching material and not exerting enormous effort into policing other people's behavior and enforcing rules. (And that's really hard to do if you're afraid of making a mistake somewhere and punishing someone too harshly, or for something they didn't do.)

The students hunting for "the snitch" adds another layer of dysfunction. If someone joins the group chat and leaves because they notice other people cheating, then they could become targets of the other students. That's not the sort of college experience anyone wants to have.

>imo this is why people shouldn't cheat. If nobody cheats, the grades might on average be lower but once the class is curved or assignments are dropped it will be a fair indicator of where everyone is at.

An excellent example of the prisoner's dilemma.

This is an issue that makes me feel conflicted in the case where there are already a lot of people cheating. If there's already a lot of people cheating, it doesn't make practical sense not to cheat, you're really just putting yourself at a big unfair disadvantage, and making an inefficient use of energy that could be used else where. It's unethical to join in the cheating, but a situation like that feels like there's just a lot of arguments to cheat. I think making the best of that situation would be to participate in the cheating but also make the best effort to understand the material as opposed to leveraging cheating to min-max on effort-grade.

On the other hand, all the effort could pay off in an unexpected way down the line because all the cheaters pushed you to achieve more than you would have normally, plus the ethical implications.

Full disclosure, I did have a situation where cheating like that happened, and I did take it. It was for a pretty irrelevant course, and I don't feel bad at all about it. I also haven't made much use of the course material afterwards.

option B, report the cheating

I think this is the right move, but only if you can do it without being known (at least, by the group).

In the best case, you get nothing. Most probably half of the students turn against you. And possibly the teacher himself takes revenge on you for snitching. Some teachers are of the opinion that “snitches get stitches”, often as a way to cope with their own lack of teaching, and sometimes they see it as a good life lesson for the student.

As Electrical engineering TAs in the late 80's, we knew who was copying class homework assignments from their classmates based on transcription errors in the handwritten work that was turned in. Since the class professor couldn't care less about the cheating, we would consistently score the source assignments a few points less than the ones that had copied the assignment. We kept this up for the entire semester.

You graded the original worse than the copies? So the copiers were rewarded?

they did lend their original out to be copied... thus facilitating dishonesty.

It's unjust, though, to punish those who facilitated an offence more than those who committed it.

Sharing your work to others to copy isn’t facilitating, it’s committing. Cheating is cheating.

Sure; dock me a mark or two and tell me why. But why not just give a straight zero to the others that didn't actually do the work?

You must have thought it would discourage hardworking students from allowing other students to copy them. Did it work?

Companies will sue you if you report security vulnerabilities. So yeah definitely a good life lesson.

This world is messed up.

And “no situation can be improved by involving police.”

And the fact that Justice never correctly delivers justice in any country of the world, but adds 2 to 10 years and large expenses in the process.

So report the teacher. The whole snitches get stitches thing needs to stop. We aren’t in a goddamned prison yard. And if someone actually threatens you, call the police. Raise hell about it. Gangster, prison yard culture needs to die. Cheating is never ok. Cheaters should be thrown out of school with zero second chances. People in the US are often going into debt for tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars for college — when people cheat, that diminishes the value of that extraordinary expense. Not to mention honor and integrity ought to matter.

When I was in high school, a bunch of AP students cheated off the valedictorian our senior year...when it was exposed, they hushed everything up rather than allowing a scandal that would ruin the school's and the students' reputations (some of which were bound for Ivy League schools in a few months' time).

Sometimes, the entire community will protect its cheaters.

Option C, help the others students that cheat, let them copy your work, or even help them directly with the work. (Especially for things like home exercises, if not actual exams).

After you graduate, you will have a network of friends that consider you a super-smart, trustworthy, loyal and friendly person.

Chances are, you will learn more than the rest, and end up with a high GPA. And some of the lost opportunity to socialize in bars and clubs, and build networks that way, will be compensated by the relationships with people you helped.

Btw, this same behavior can still work once you're in a job. If you get a reputation as someone who can provide help when people are stuck in some difficult problem, and not shaming them for it to their boss, that tends to reflect positively back to you over time.

The best solution is to report the cheating and have some F’ing integrity. Cheating or tolerating cheating is never ok. Full stop.

> This happened to me in undergrad with an autograded class.

I had a entirely autograded class on my first year at uni, it was awful. Immense amount of tests each week that were so basic yet so picky about the input, you lost points for no good reason and it frustrated me so much.

Ended up making a browser extension that parsed the tests, calculated answer probabilities based on previously completed tests that had similar questions. Unless the teachers were willing to hide the final score, it figured out the correct answer to each and every question.

It ended with a large majority of the class using the extension during the final exam, they couldn't really prove anything and nobody got caught. The next year the amount of tests was reduced and the exam was on paper (I'm sorry undergrads).

I don't feel bad about it, the lecturer abused our time and resources asymmetrically, listening to feedback was years overdue. It doesn't always boil down to "omg cheating bad"

Not at university, but at a company I worked for: the company had legal requirements to train its employees and contractors in various aspects of integrity. They'd made an app that gamified this, and at the end of every month, we should have out score above 70% in that app.

A coworker used our testing framework to write an app that would collect the correct answers and fill them in automatically, and only wait for user input if it didn't recognise a question. He gave to code to me when he left. I think I tried it once or twice, but it failed to work for me due to some network issue, so I figured I'd just stick to the spirit on the thing and keep my score up manually.

I was taking an upper level marine biology course - the tests were VERY difficult, but they were take-home, do them at your leisure. I was cool with it. But walked into a coffee shop one day and found 75% of the class sharing answers and cheating anyway.

It seems very funny to me as a programmer, that what university calls "cheating" and threatens consequences, the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" and encourages.

In theory the purpose of the university is to help you develop skills independently, so that you can bring something to the table when you do consult with colleagues in the workplace.

> develop skills independently ... bring something to the table

this assumes that those skills are somehow unique and others cannot learn it.

That's basically the point of university isn't it? It assumes that not everyone can be qualified to do everything and imposes restrictions on who can be hired based on their known qualifications.

Perhaps because these aren't equivalent environments. In school you are expected to learn, not copy answers...

Or IP theft, depending upon the exact scenario. Off to prison you go.

I'd rather say that the equivalent of what the industry calls "consulting with your colleagues" is more a "study session" than an exam (be it take-home).

This is when you learn things, and everyone brings something to the table.

I'd say the equivalent of an exam is a job interview. When the other party wants to see what the individual knows.

There is an enormous difference between the people "consulting with colleagues" and the people openly cheating. When I was doing my engineering degree there were always groups of students who would go over assignments together, see if their answers matched up, and then look through the textbooks and course materials together to see which person was right. That's consulting.

There were also people who would pay someone else to do the assignments, and then upload PDFs of completed assignments to a private chat. World of difference.

Sure, but what the other person is describing as cheating sounds, to me at least, very much like the former case. There was a task, the students were allowed to work on the task in their own time, with their own resources, and chose to put their heads together rather than work on them individually. To me, that seems fairly reasonable.

That said, a lot of this stuff seems kind of culturally specific. At least for the two degrees that I experienced in the UK, there were roughly three types of graded work: exams (overseen, sit in silence, possibly with your own notes but generally not, fixed time limit around 1-2hrs); lab-work (usually done in the building although worked on outside of lab hours as well, fixed deadline of around a week or two, usually graded at least in part based on an oral conversation with the examiner); and coursework (take-home work, fixed deadline ranging from one week to a couple of months, allowed to discuss but direct copying is banned).

In these cases, it rarely makes sense to cheat by directly sharing answers. Obviously in an exam it would be useful, but the conditions of the exam make it largely prohibitively difficult. In coursework, it's usually obvious if people are handing copies of the same work in. And for lab work, the challenge was usually not to just complete the lab and get a "right" result, but rather to understand the task and be able to explain what was going on to the TA grading you. If you can cheat well enough to pass that, you probably understand what's going on - which is exactly the aim of the course anyway.

Whereas it feels like what people are talking about here is students being sent home with problem worksheets, being expected not to talk about them at all, and then getting grades based on those answers. That seems to me to be a system that practically encourages cheating - work together as a group, and you'll obviously be able to achieve more than any one individual, even if you could all pass the course in the first place. In contrast, we also had similar worksheets, but they were never graded, and we were usually encouraged to work together to figure out what was going on. We could then take our answers to tutorials and have a discussion about where we went wrong and why we went wrong usually in a group of any four or five.

So reading this article and some of the comments here, I'm really struggling to get an image of what these teachers are expecting from their students, if they're setting problems that are so obviously gameable.

Try consulting with your colleagues during your next interview and see if it’s encouraged.

Except if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired. You are not allowed to "consult" with anyone, so why should you be allowed to consult with anyone about your homework.

> Except if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired

What the hell are you talking about? I routinely consult with others and others routinely consult with me. That's afaik standard practice in most professions: engineering, medicine, architecture, psychology, marketing, and yes software development.

You share confidential information with colleagues outside your job? I guess how much or what consulting you can do depends a lot on your job. I know quite a few companies which don't allow talking about specific problems you are facing because that would reveal information they consider confidential. Now if we are talking general questions, sure but you are very much allowed to do the same as a student. All this to show that sharing information/solutions has quite a gradient even in professional life.

Again: what the hell are you talking about? We were talking about professional consulting, not about sharing confidential information. These are two very different activities, and you can definitely do one without the other.

The statement saying "if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired" is false.

We are replying to a post which said cheating in education is what is consultation in professional life. Nowhere did we talk about general "consultation" we comparing copying others solutions (cheating) to "consultation", I would argue that the equivalent of copying someone's specific solution in many (most) cases would be a violation of ethical/company/workplace rules and is not just "consultation".

Asking someone for help with homework (much more equivalent to general consultation) is not generally considered cheating in education either.

Absolutely, the equivalent of cheating is 'not just "consultation"', but in your original message you said "if you consult..." without qualification. And no, you don't get fired for "consulting" alone. Right below you already changed your statement to "they are rules in professional life about how you consult with others". Let's maybe leave it at that? This doesn't seem like a productive discussion and is entering flamewar territory.

I assumed it was clear from the parent I was replying to (like others did), that I meant my statement in the context of how they said it's equivalent to what's called cheating not a general statement about all consultation, but you're right I should have made that more clear.

You are also correct that this is not a productive discussion, because we are discussing a misunderstanding (due to me not being clear enough).

I did find your language and reaction a bit disproportionate though.

I don't think so, grandparent was definitely talking about general consultation, and on your second post you clearly say you mean that all but the most generic kind of consultation is a fireable offence. But happy that we got to a common ground.

Also funny thing you bring up medicine, they have quite strict rules about what you can share.

Yes, so you just follow these rules when consulting with a colleague, what's the problem?

We are all replying to a post that said what is considered cheating in education is simply consultation in professional life. I responded that they are rules in professional life about how you consult with others. In other words there are rules about consultation in both education (there is usually no issue about studying together, but there are issues about just copying somebody else's homework) and professional life (e.g. a doctor can't just share a specific medical file with anyone asking for a solution, or an engineer can't ask someone at a different company to program some program for him).

> I responded that they are rules in professional life about how you consult with others.

No you didn't, you said "if you consult with colleagues/friends outside of your company you would get fired", which is clearly false. I'm the one who said rules should be followed. But I'm happy that the mistake was corrected and we're now on the same page.

Come on. In one case, you aim to prove that you have mastered an established body of knowledge. In the other case, you are trying to solve an open problem with any legitimate means available. Those are entirely different things, and conflating them is obtuse.

I hope you told the professor what you discovered. Allowing cheating is complicity in the cheating without the benefits. But I remember the intense social pressure - glad I’m not a kid any more.

> If people cheat, it screws up the fairness

I think it's strange to think cheaters are anything other than selfish. To make an altruistic appeal seems misguided.

I can imagine some people cheating not out of selfishness but just to get by. In the case of a curved class (which has its own set of ethical dilemmas), if nobody cheats then people will be OK on average. But because some people decide to cheat, it screws up the dynamic.

This isn't going to convince anyone in particular who wants to cheat, that wasn't really my intention

what's the ethical dilemma of a grade curve? your grade reflects how well you learned.

Your grade reflects how well you learned with respect to your peers.

Getting 80% in an exam in a weak cohort of students might earn you an A, while doing so in a strong one might get you a B instead. Is this fair toward a student getting a B this year with the same score that earned somebody an A the year earlier just because they happened to enroll with different peers?

Also why should the grade distribution of an exam be determined beforehand?

> why should the grade distribution of an exam be determined beforehand?

because we know beforehand that population density over repeated trials of some measure will fall in a normal distribution, especially when constructing such a test is more straightforward than 90% gets A, 80% gets B, etc

So, you are suggesting that if we have a class of 100 people, and we want to measure their height, we should just order them by length, and then the tallest one we call 2.1 meters, the one in the middle 1.8, and the smallest one 1.5, no matter how tall they actually are? Wouldn't it be better if we measure their actual size?

Students will cheat. the solve is to get rid of curving classes in this manner

The Polish university I went to never even heard of grading on a curve, and yet cheating was rampant. I think it's just human nature - as long as cheating is not heavily penalised, many people will choose to do it.

During my studies, there was one professor who openly said that, if he caught you cheating, he will fail you in his class (which, in Polish universities, means going through a lot of bureucracy to not have to repeat the entire year) - as opposed to other professors, who will usually just allow you another attempt at later time. Also, during the written exams, he wasn't staring longlingly at the sky throught the window (like some other professor did - I assume they wanted to help us cheat, so that we can pass their class and be out of their lives), but was watching us like a hawk 100% of the time. In result, AFAIK there was no cheating in his class at all - it just didn't pay off.

Personally, this hypocrisy and game of cat and mouse was one of the main lessons I learned in high school and later in university ("it's ok to cheat as long as you don't get caught", "nobody cares about their work anyway" etc.). It's a shame that the education system is corrupting the morals of young people in such a way, but on the other hand, the grown up world they're about to join is pretty corrupt anyway, so maybe it's actually teaching valuable survival skills.

I don't think the comment you replied to meant to say that getting rid of grading on a curve would stop cheaters, merely that it would stop some of the bad effects cheating can have on those not cheating.

This happened to me in an ML class. Somehow people went from not knowing what eigenvalues were to solving all the problems in Bishop's book correctly and exactly the way the TA wanted them. A bunch of them would go to his office hours and have him do a problem, then they would share his answers.

I didn't complain until after the term was over and was just chatting casually with him while waiting for lunch at a food truck on campus. He was completely oblivious and didn't believe it.

On the other hand you studied way harder than you normal would have, which if your goal is to learn the material, is in fact a good thing.

But yes I understand screwing up the curve has other negative effects. I think in some ways this is a tying of learning to employment and life success. People cheat because they don’t want to learn but they do want a good job. I don’t know how you separate these two things, or whether you should, but if you made the benefit of cheating simply not understanding the material it would end. In the mean time your best strategy is probably to snitch.

> it screws up the class curve

This is your problem right here. There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve. That just makes the class a lottery and incentivises sabotaging for others to get an upper hand yourself.

Curve grading is such a messed up thing. It leads to professors assuming you should get all A's in all of your classes basically, cuz of this nonsense from US unis.

I did an exchange year, and sent my grades over to a professor. Guy was like "What's up with all the non As" and I had to talk about how we do things differently here (giving points for right answers, and then adding them all up).

Of course there's always an overall curving happening on a high level because teachers choose how hard to make assignments or not, and ultimately grades are not really fundamentally important, but when people just have those to judge you on and choose to, it really fucks things up.

I don't get it, don't curves limit the number of people who get an A each semester? But potentially everyone in a class that isn't curved could get an A (or F)

it depends on the curve. "curve" is kind of vague here, sometimes a prof will curve by adding so many percent to everyone's grade to get enough people over a certain threshold

but also the prof will know if the class is full of overachievers and curve in a way commensurate to the class

Well for example, in my school, basically nobody would get 90% on an exam. Very good people would get 80% but the average is more around 60%. So you stuff that into the grade conversion for foreign universities and ... well lots of people get C!

I think that curves discourage cooperation and encourage zero-sum thinking. Curves are only really necessary when the professor is out of touch with the class and/or prerequisites.

I don't think that people would typically go to the lengths of trying to sabotage someone else, in practice it could just look like a bunch of people working separately and not cooperating at all

In an ideal world, there wouldn't be any curves and the coursework would be tailored sufficiently for every cohort of students for every semester

I think of helping each other as part of the reason we put students in the same room to begin with. So when a student asks another for help with understanding a concept and the other refuses that request, that's working against the purposes of group education, i.e. sabotage.

But I admit I might be a bit radical here compared to most people. (Who I am sure will argue that utilising teacher time to the maximum is the only reason to gather students in one room.)

I agree with you, but also most of the time when people ask each other for help it isn't to help understand a concept. It's usually for source code.

In the class I mentioned above, the prof and TAs weren't pissed off about people using each other to understand concepts or even high level design. They were pissed because people were copying source code verbatim, comments and custom debug messages and all

On a related note, if someone ever asked me for help with a concept or high level design I would be more than happy to oblige. But (most of the time) people aren't asking for that, they want source code that they didn't contribute to

this could be fixed by making assignments collaborative, but then the professor has no means of verifying where everyone is in terms of understanding

I've always loved curved classes because they allow very good professors to give real mindfuck exam questions that cause you to walk away from the test with a new perspective on the material.

Those exams were often the most edifying couple hours of the whole semester. You also got a clear sense of the difference between you and a real master of the material which is a helpful lesson in humility.

I went back to grad school recently and it seems like that mode of testing has gone out of style in the last ten years. The exams I took were geared more towards establishing a minimum bar of competence, more for my future employers' benefit than my own.

they allow very good professors to give real mindfuck exam questions that cause you to walk away from the test with a new perspective on the material

I think the problem with this is, although cool, very few professors are capable of doing this well and very few students benefit from it. IOW, it doesn't scale.

To my mind, oral finals or 'discussions" would repair the cheating issues quite well. But again, it's hard to scale and professors would need to be trained in how to do them.

You don't need after-the-fact curving for that, though.

When I set (free-form written, math/CS) exams, I always made a point of designing the exam in a way where I didn't really expect anybody to get more than 90% of the points. I also made sure that students knew this.

I always set grade brackets before grading (e.g., 80% of points gets you an A, below 35% is a failing grade, and so on). I always ended up with a pretty reasonable grade distribution.

I took a class that gave mindfuck questions and did not need curved grading.

It was simple. The weekly assignments contained 6 questions. One of those was the mindfuck question and wasn’t graded (if you solved it you got extra credit, but hadn’t been solved so far).

You don’t even need to hide the crazy questions. Offering them as extra credit is a simple solution that works well.

Of course there’s a rational argument to using the distribution of scores to set the grades: If everyone in the class gets half the questions wrong on the final exam, you shouldn’t just fail the whole class! The test was probably just harder than expected

But in that same example, if many of the students get close to 100% on the final by cheating, then the remainder of the class will suffer

I disgree. How hard it is to pass a class should be an absolute. It shouldn't be easier for one cohort over another just due to the first being, on average, less prepared than the second.

If an exam turns out to be too hard the teacher can investigate, consult their peers, talk to their students and decide if it's worth to scale all grades by a factor to correct.

> How hard it is to pass a class should be an absolute.

It should be, but profs and TAs change from semester to semester. The coursework changes also. Also the profs, TAs, and coursework of prerequisites change too

> It shouldn't be easier for one cohort over another just due to the first being, on average, less prepared than the second.

A good professor will have the sense of discretion necessary to know when a class is half-assing on average

No, the proper response to that is still not a curve, it's to identify which block of questions wasn't appropriate and removing those from scoring or turning them into "bonus points" and similar measures.

That way you don't incur any of the (pretty severe) drawbacks of a curve but don't punish students for questions that were badly phrased or weren't properly taught.

Simply removing the offending questions after the fact doesn't solve everything. Students may have fruitlessly wasted a ton of time on those questions, causing their grade in other parts of the test to suffer.

Are how do you suppose an instructor can identify which questions were too hard when a big chunk of the class got them right by cheating?

Curve grading does have a place. But that is standardized tests or placing entire cohorts to buckets. So we are talking of hundreds if not thousands of students. For individual schools or classes inside thereof it is wrong method. Either the students know enough of the course material to pass or they do not.

So true. Curve grading works well when the cohort is large and heterogenous. (Like, say, Finnish matriculation exams. >20k people in a single cohort, and each individual exam within the whole thing with at least 5k people in them.)

As far as I'm concerned, curve grading single courses is just as bad as stack ranking at work. And in here, with high concentration of engineers who loathe stack ranking, a disproportionate fraction are somehow in favour of per-course curve grading.

Blind spot? Stockholm syndrome? Go figure.

Fun thing with Matriculation examination. The small subjects are not on curve. Like for example Latin... Or higher level Russian where there is enough native speakers to have an effect on it.

Whole stack ranking is just weird. Either the people are good enough to do the work or not. If not eventually fire them. On other hand at top the rewarding extra is an problem, but I don't know if you can do that without someone gaming it.

That's a good point, thank you. I wasn't aware of it, or at least didn't actively remember the fact. But it makes sense and circles on the same thing. Curve grading only makes sense when the cohort being evaluated is large and varied enough.

> Whole stack ranking is just weird. Either the people are good enough to do the work or not.

Even at the risk of veering quite far from the thread topic, I am not sure that's the only angle to look at things. In my experience, pretty much anyone who is genuinely curious and has the discipline to work at understanding how/why a ${THING} functions, is going to be good at their job. Some people just don't find what their thing is, and surprisingly many are in jobs where they are not even allowed to figure it out.

    As far as I'm concerned, curve grading single 
    courses is just as bad as stack ranking at work.

In my years of schooling, I never saw curve grading resemble "stack ranking" whatsoever.

In stack ranking you have to designate some team members as superior and some as bad. You could have a team of ineffective idiots and be forced to label some of them as high achievers, or a team of superstars and be forced to label some of them as bad. I agree that this is manifestly ridiculous.

I've never seen curve grading like that.

If you want to compare grades across semesters you have to either keep the difficulty of the tests constant or adjust the grades to compensate for how difficult the tests were relative to previous semesters.

BTW, I don't know if it's a named fallacy, but saying "there's no rational argument for X" is not a good argument against X. You can't prove a negative so you cannot know if there is not a rational argument for X.

    There is no rational argument for grading people on a class curve

It's an imperfect solution for a legitimate problem.

The counterargument is that it would be rare for a prof/teacher to absolutely nail the correct difficulty for an exam.

If they feel that their students' average exam grade fails to accurately reflect how well the class is learning the material, then some kind of adjustment makes sense... imagine a scenario where you have a classroom full of motivated and engaged students who are showing good understanding of the material, and yet the average exam score is 60%. This strongly suggests professor/teacher has erred and an adjustment is in order so that the scores better reflect actual mastery of the material.

There are of course also a lot of situations where grading on a curve is blatantly unfair and/or simply makes no sense.

This is why I'm generally against grades with more than three levels.

I would like to see a system where almost all (something like 99 %?) of students just plain "pass". Then we have the lower statistical anomalies (lowest 0.5 %) and upper statistical anomalies (highest 0.5 %) which fail and get an "excellence" type grade.

If the average score is too low or too high, that doesn't mean more students fail or perform excellently, that just means the teacher needs to recalibrate.

(Of course, these percentiles ought to be measured over as inclusive a reference class as practical. Ideally across schools and years simultaneously.)

That sounds promising!

A lot of my classes the average grade on a test could be as low as 30% with a P100 of 50%. The material was extraordinarily difficult. I’m glad it was because it stretched me in equally extraordinary ways to do my best. But I don’t see how they would have assigned grades without a curve. In most cases I agree with you, but in those classes I wouldn’t have changed to tests to dumb them down but I also wouldn’t have accepted score based grades. The curve felt fairly rational in the situation and I think the distribution of performance reflected a grade curve well enough. The GPA though for the department was depressed relative to others but it was also widely regarded and recognized internationally as extremely difficult.

> imo this is why people shouldn't cheat.

Well, people shouldn't cheat for a whole lot of reasons. But the main take away from this is, in my opinion, that people should not be "graded on a curve".

You somewhat seem to miss the wood for all the trees. The problem is the curve - grading on a curve is inherently unfair and irrelevant. Why should it affect your grade if others in the class cheat/struggle/..?

Any teacher (and school system) worth their salt has by now dropped grading on a curve.

Maybe not a literal curve, but tons of instructors will compensate if an exam ends up being too hard (or too easy). Except the main way they tell whether the test difficulty was off is by looking at the grade distribution which obviously ends up skewed if some people cheat

I never thought about it that way, but that's such a good point.

You should read up on Nash equilibriums. In general, the equilibrium only holds with information sharing. In the real world, winning due to a lack of information sharing is called things like "good business." Academia, and cheating in general, is rotted to the core because of ranked grading and curves. They fundamentally incentivize cheating, because of the game theoretical gain therein.

Cheaters by definition are not interested in fair, so this argument will not convince any of them.

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