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Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

My brother graduated from MIT 20 years ago and I recall one summer when I stayed there one of his fraternity brothers quipping “the fastest way to get a girl in Boston is to tell her you go to Harvard, and the fastest way to lose her is to tell her you go to MIT, they don’t want nerds”. Amazing how things have changed but even then it was basically an accepted truth that Harvard massively inflated grades. At the time I was told perfect GPAs were basically unheard of at MIT (back then least).

Grade inflation is real and I think it leads to significant unintended consequences. I do find myself flip flopping however on whether there should be grades at all. If you’ve read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, you’ll recall there is a powerful case made to eliminate grades at the college level. I still lean toward having them currently.

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Another fun anecdote about those times and MIT specifically. My brother was arguably the top student to come out of the Atlanta Public School System in 1996. This was a kid used to being the best in everything he did. He starts at MIT and takes the Calc 2 placement exam (he got a 5 of course on the AP BC test) and scores an 11 out of 100. He said the teaching assistant sat him down and told him “we are not in Kansas any more, forget everything you think you know, you are not prepared to be in this class and we will not accept your AP test results.”

Unfortunately, I recall in 1996 4 or 5 students committed suicide at MIT due to the academic rigor (which is why the first year was pass fail).

I’m not advocating for this system just sharing stories told to me.

Amazing. If you as an educator did that sit-down at the high school level, you'd be fired or be rubber roomed.

While there are softer subject escape hatches at a school like MIT (and I've known some very smart people have taken them while remaining in technology-related areas generally), it's hard to avoid math and hard science/engineering topics in general. And there are a lot of straight A students in high school (and most people at MIT were at least close to that) who were fine with memorized plug and chug high school physics suddenly hit stuff they just can't handle and struggle to just pass the class.

In my experience, MIT is actually pretty good about wanting to help students work their way through once they've been admitted. But there's definitely a firehose aspect to a lot of it a lot of incoming students aren't prepared for--even leaving aside a lot of the distractions and other elements of suddenly being away at college.

Anecdote: I taught at an online bootcamp and I swear our best cohorts were the ones before we started grading. We told them up front: "graduating" from this place doesn't mean anything--you don't get a diploma. They all knew the real test was to succeed in an interview and get a job, and they kept that focus, and worked hard and independently.

Once we started grading, suddenly the game was to get a good grade. And students have all kinds of ways of getting good grades that don't lead to jobs.

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