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I'm near finishing my undergrad at Harvard extension school. Many of the courses (especially in CS) are taught alongside traditional Harvard students. Same assignments / tests / lectures, they just have to be physically in the lecture hall. The work is rigorous, and the grading is usually harder than the state school I attended long ago. (I have taken a few non-math / non-CS courses that were easy A's). Maybe grades have inflated, but overall the students are really good. Grading really harshly just to "separate the top" or whatever doesn't make sense. They all mastered the material in "Introduction to Computer Science" in the semester.

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> They all mastered the material in "Introduction to Computer Science" in the semester.

There is no way all of them did. Eric Mazur tested this for people taking physics at Harvard, he found that even though every student got an A they didn't actually learn the material. He tested before and after on standard physics understanding, they didn't improve even though they got A in the class.

You can watch this video where he talks about it:

https://youtu.be/tn1DLFnbGOo?t=959

Teaching so that students actually learn the material is extremely hard.

Alright, I do agree with that. Many people are incredible overtrainers on data without the ability to generalise. Not sure if that's any more true here than everywhere.

Teaching so that students actually learn is extremely hard when students are more interested in the grade than they are in the subject.

Thanks for posting that talk. Its fun to watch a lecture by someone who knows how to deliver it, even if you only have a passing interest in the subject.

It does make sense because grades no longer mean anything if everybody gets the same grade.

The most informative grades would be uniformly distributed, it’s an opportunity for the geniuses to shine and give a signal to profs about who to hire for their PhDs.

Sounds like you are looking for grades to indicate class ranking. Should that be the function of grades?

Grades are most useful to a professor if it indicates class ranking of who has potential to do research level work.

The only function of giving everyone an A is to prevent shattering fragile egos who have never experienced setbacks before.

Unfortunately real life is full of set backs, so it’s better to learn to deal with it in a safe environment.

If PIs or employers want to discriminate based on class ranking, they can ask for it and do exactly that. Why conflate that with grades?

A common understanding of a grade is as an indication that the course material has been mastered. Higher grade = more mastery. This is a measure independent of the performance of fellow students.

Because it’s nontrivial to convert a grade into a ranking when everybody has the exact same grade.

If you gave a test out and the average was 99 percent, you would be ranking noise. They should make the course harder so even out the distribution of grades.

The most informative distribution (ie maximum entropy) of grades is uniformly distributed. The least informative is when all grades are the same.

> Grades are most useful to a professor if it indicates class ranking of who has potential to do research level work.

There's a bald assertion here that lots of those professors would stop you at; that good grades and capacity for research work are the same (or even necessarily closely correlated).

The grades mean something in comparison to the population of college grades as a whole.

If a class of 30 physics students all get an A, the value is in comparing their A to a B from another year or university.

Practically everyone from Harvard getting A's on everything is a clear indication that you can't compare those A's to B's from another university.

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