Hacker News Reader

> My university teamed up with an American University, Embray-Riddle, to offer a joint masters. Embray-Riddle required a minimum average grade of 80%; my university came back to them and said no one in the last 10 years qualified for the masters. Eventually they lowered the requirements just so they could have students.

They just shows the US university has no idea how universities based on the UK system work. At Trinity College Dublin the standard was that 70%+ was a first class honours, the highest rank of degree awarded. Getting 80% would be like getting a started first at Oxford. Most years no one gets one in any partial particular faculty.

It's almost as if universities should devise a decent curriculum with the proper goals for the program, then design courses to properly teach those, and then design tests to measure to what degree a student actually meets the curriculum's goal. But hey, who am I kidding?

I went from a grade-inflating US university to a semester in Spain where 50% was passing, passing was the goal, and the grades reflected that.

It was all fine until a computer networking course with a policy of not returning tests or test grades until the midterm, when we discovered that no one was doing better than 29%, and median was probably 20%. The whole section pretty much freaked out, and for a week no learning happened until the professor finally implied that, due to his poor English skills, only near-verbatim reproductions of the book's answer key were awarded any credit.

Ugh that's terrible. The College I went to the professors seemed to have the attitude of this program is hard and our students need all the help we can give them. I think half the students dropped out.

Grade inflation always seems weird to me since they stamped it out in my program 40 years ago by enforcing grading on a curve and not allowing students to drop out and retake classes after the first two days. Grading on a curve was real. I once got a B with a score of 13/50.

I loathe strict curve grading, as it measures relative ability within a cohort with no predictive value of real ability.

A professor can make a test as hard or easy as he wants. So just because you got 100% right means nothing at all in and of itself. And that you got everything right is a really hard tell your test wasn't hard enough. Which also perhaps means the class isn't either.

The problem not stated with grade inflation is it's a good indication that the classes are being targeted towards the lower 1/3 of the class. Which means really you're wasting the upper 2/3rds of the classes time.