Comment by light_hue_1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by light_hue_1 | Hacker News Reader

You can tell this was written by a student who doesn't really understand grades or what the problem is.

> You may have gotten a C in Math 55 but your potential employer could see the average grade was a B+.

This never happens. No one cares if you were a C student at Harvard or an A student. All they care about is the degree. With one exception: grad school. Bad grades can shut off doors for more education.

From he point of view of people who give grades:

1. High grades are free, low grades are expensive.

I can mint as many As as I want. No one will ever complain.

Give a student a B or a C? I have had students flip. Their parents can call. They can appeal. Some people just cause endless problems.

2. I don't need people posting hate about me online

When you give students good grades they say great things about you on ratemyprofessor and on surveys. When you give bad grades.. they say bad things. No thanks.

This has even resulted in lecturers losing their jobs.

3. Cheating distorts grades anyway

Can you imagine the disaster when you catch most of a class cheating? In my experience a significant fraction of students cheat. Guess how many hours of your life you will waste if you pursue every clear cheater?

With that in mind, if you grade on a curve and set a low average grade, you're just punishing the honest stuents.

4. Who cares!?

So what if everyone gets an A? What's the point? Given that no employer cares and that your wealth is largely a function of your parent's wealth, why are we wasting so much time on this. Any reasonable effort should merit an A and then we leave people alone. Students who want to excel will go on to do research, side projects, etc. regardless.

This is spot on.

The people who do care are the exchange students, transfer students, and students applying to graduate school, assuming grades transfer (which they often don’t). Schools with unusual grading policies often include a letter alongside transcripts to explain away why a student’s grades may not match what you expect. For example, Wellesley College includes a letter explaining that grades are NOT inflated at Wellesley, so a B in a class at Wellesley corresponds to an A at a more typical school. Evergreen College includes no grades at all and provides a thick packet explaining everything.

Maybe Harvard should include a letter in its transcripts explaining that students at Harvard are graded in an extremely lax fashion, and any credits transferred from Harvard should be transferred as if the course were taken pass/fail. (Half joking.)

You missed one more social aspect: give too many students an F in a course (for example, for cheating), and the instructors in the following year will let you know what they think.

> You missed one more social aspect: give too many students an F in a course (for example, for cheating), and the instructors in the following year will let you know what they think.

Give too many Fs and the administration is going to be breathing down your neck. They've got graduation rate targets to hit, not gonna happen if you fail too many people.

to quote a professor I had in uni: "if they want me to stop failing students, they should stop assigning me classes and let me do my research"

To your professor: If you want to do research then what are you doing at a school?! Take a tip from E.O. Lawrence and get a large funder to fund a research institute for you.

> So what if everyone gets an A? What's the point?

What's the point of university then? If "any reasonable effort should merit an A" it seems like there is zero point in university existing. A degree has no signal at that point.

And even if it's true that a degree has no signal anymore, you can't operate like that in the real world because a lot of people still operate under the assumption that degrees and GPA do carry signal. You'd most likely end up losing out on a lot of opportunities.

Hopefully the point of university is to learn

Agreed. But also, there's no point in giving grades if they don't mean anything. If you expect everyone who puts in nominal effort to get an A, then the class should be pass/fail.

I wonder if an explicit policy that grades are for internal purposes only would help. That is, grades are useful feedback on how well you're learning, but they aren't comparable between classes and aren't intended to judge or rate students. So the uni would refuse to calculate GPAs or report grades to outside parties.

Maybe they could even give more flexibility on how grades are calculated and reported. Like they could be whatever combination of pass/fail, letters, percents, notes etc that the prof wants, because by policy you're not calculating with them.

Yeah, and I also like your idea of every class being pass/fail. I'm sure I've heard of some colleges doing it but I haven't looked into whether it's considered to be an improvement. Also I wonder what the results would be in terms of norm-setting if this was done at Harvard or something next?

You may think so but this would be going against the facts. In reality, there are two major goals each US university has: 1. attracting funds (in the form of tuition, grants, etc) 2. improving educational statistics for the state The second goal is related to the first and, in the case of a public school, dominates. The more diplomas the university awards, the more funding it usually gets (since it improves 'retention').

Universities certainly have great facilities for learning and if a student wants to learn, s*he certainly can but this is irrelevant from the point of view of the administration.

Lest you think this is another conspiracy theory, I have heard these two exact statements in every faculty meeting we had at the university level. How can I care about grade inflation (as a faculty) if I am penalized for the excessive number of withdrawals from my classes. Think about it: the students have realized that they were not ready for the class early, and decided to save themselves the headache and take a lower level class. This is counted against the faculty. Now what incentive do I have to give objective grades?

Damn, that's a bummer of a state of affairs

There’s a reason why despite MIT putting their courses online for free, people still attend the university.

Learning is not the only reason to go to university, and it’s probably not even the primary one anymore.

Would pass/fail be a better fit?

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