College Grades Have Become a Charade. It's Time to Abolish Them.
wsj.com
wsj.com
Anecdotally, my father and I went to Ivy League schools. I saw his application and his school work. His writing was substantially worse than mine despite his focus on the humanities and mine in programming. I simply don’t believe that the increase in GPA has meaningfully eroded the quality or ambition of work.
Scientific one?
Absolutely not.
Also, imho your view is very US centric where quality of education seems very low even in allegedly good colleges. I have been an exchange student at OSU (some other friends went to more ivy league for their ones) and we all found the exams just...insanely easy.
I couldn't believe people would not pass exams, not only it was overwhelmingly multi choice exams, but professors would even grade you based on assignments and would post "example exams" days before the tests.
I really lost a lot of respect for US universities based on my and my colleagues experience.
I know and I hope some places have it tougher, but even people at MIT or UCLA told me similar stories.
In Italy for comparison you needed to know from A to Z and would have to do exams again if you didn't know anything.
Which is obvious!? How can you build bridges if you can barely scrap Calculus 1 or 2. Insane.
Please remember a few things whenever you talk about the quality of education in the United States (if you care to sound informed and thorough): - The United States is a very large country, with many states (50!) - Education quality is not federally organized (there are guidelines, but states make most of the rules) - Education quality depends on many factors, including but not limited to, the state, the county, the demographics of surrounding areas, the property value of surrounding areas, etc
There is no need for rash and poorly informed takes on the quality of education when there is so much room to criticize on more legitimate grounds.
If you mean access to research opportunities and resources including mentorship then you are probably right.
If you mean the research itself then no in STEM at least. For example you would need much more knowledge than Einstein had when he started doing research in the same field.
- Pushing students to be their best - Discriminating between good and bad students of the same year.
You merely compared age cohorts.
But it is an interesting and testable hypothesis. Many American unis have this exponential increase in applicants where we see the pattern. But as we all know populations in my locales seem to no longer increase exponentially but in fact decrease (presumably also exponentially). So it would be interesting to see .. if we hypothesize grade inflation is secondary to population booms, should we also observe grade deflation in population shrinkage regions such is nippon or korea? My hypothesis would be a little bit of A, a little bit of B, the inflation process, even if initially driven by population, also implicitly becomes a standard of grading that we'd expect less competitive schools to not only follow, but perhaps also cheese a bit to improve their market value.
One possible way to mitigate this slightly is to calculate grading averages as a root-mean-square, similar to finding the length of a vector where each course represents a different "dimension". This will tend to deëmphasize the occasional poor performance. Its utility is limited when practically everyone gets an A at everything, but it does help the student with one bad semester mount a comeback.
I have previously argued for root-mean-square grading within courses, but the same principle applies when used to calculate averages among multiple courses.
Put another way, if I am hiring a student for writing, physics or engineering I don’t necessarily care if they are better than their peers as much as I care if they can write well, solve the math or engineering problems to get the write answer.
Finally, take law school as an example. LSAT scores, which are considered a reasonable proxy for IQ testing, are significantly hiring now for top schools than they were 30-40 years ago. That supports the thesis that law students today have a higher aptitude than previously so if grading is an objective measure of performance rather than a comparative measure of class rank it’s expected for average grades to increase.
Also, the LSAT is not static. It has changed over the years as instruction methods have also changed and as demographics have changed; so it is not a reliable measure of aptitude in any way.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/03/22/1-in-3-companies-are-dit...
Meanwhile, we’re also at the point where 52% of graduates are underemployed within a year of graduation, and 45% still are after a decade. Employers don’t care nearly as much anymore. Tell your children their odds of it working out are literally flip a coin, and it changes the conversation.
That party is now over but most businesses still depend on desktop and laptop computing for much of their business operations and expectations haven't caught up.
Whether or not someone gets an A or a C in a course for Physics likely will not have any bearing on the needs of an employer who needs someone who is a Python wiz for data science.
Maybe the bigger problem is colleges offering undergraduate majors which lack demand, coupled with in-demand majors not having enough relevant course content for the job market, or maybe employers have just gotten more unreasonable in terms of expectations for graduates over time?
It's hard to make the argument these students are less qualified.. look at the acceptance rate of top schools over time, its essentially at or near all-time low percentages for the majority.
Likewise, when I got into the CS major the entry requirement was a 2.5 GPA, by the time I graduated the next crop needed a 3.4 or 3.5 - and I’d be screwed if were just a couple semesters behind. That's a microcosm but that's the general trend. Look at the shit show ‘23-25 graduates are heading into now.
If it were the case that employees are worse why has Productivity has increased steadily? I’d instead posit that Employers expect way more than they did before. Technology and skill level expectations are drastically higher and employees are delivering.
I think the article's suggested solution of making all classes pass-fail would give you the information you're asking for.
Your competitors hope that what you are saying is true.
If you take an exam with 100 questions that have right answers and score a 98 and I score a 98, we are equivalent. Why would anyone care which student they hire?
Further, if you score a 88 to my 98 there is still a comparison between two students but just on an absolute score of performance rather than a cohort analysis. My point is why do we need to lower that to a 2.5 gpa instead of a 3.75 and 4.0?
Finally, my point is that at a certain level of performance minute differences don’t matter.
Would employers accept that and consider it fairly when judging against their grade-inflated predecessors? I doubt it.
And if the employers actually care about the grades, they'll learn about the change too. (But that's a minority)
In 2019 Germany, tens of thousands of pupils protested against what they thought were hard math tests on the "Abitur" – the last exam in school before university. Bad grades there would worsen their chances to secure a spot on a prestigious university or a desireable subject of study against pupils who got good grades from the old regime. (Or, if the next exam was easier, even against the next age cohort!)
That's the thing. They weren't for most professions. Even for the professions that do require abstract theoretical knowledge, it's debatable how much of the degree itself was actually meaningful vs it just being easier to use as a long weed-out process than a set of exams.
They were mostly a status marker. Pre-WWII, colleges were almost entirely finishing schools for the rich and networking opportunities. And they also ran research because being a patron of the sciences has been high status for ~700 years.
There's also an argument about universities being useful for society, as they create well-rounded citizens. That argument may have some validity, but it's unclear why that was put in as a prerequisite for having a generic corporate job.
They were also excellent proxies for IQ, which employers aren't allowed to discriminate based on this side of the 70s. My guess is that companies dropping degree requirements means this correlation is breaking down. The only way to make the degrees meaningful in that sense again would be to stop granting degrees to low IQ people.
And really opens the question of why this should not be part of education every citizen gets? Surely what 10 to 12 years should be enough time to get everyone capable to this point.
It is pretty sure that degrees simply were filters. At least outside some degrees where there was job specific knowledge that saved lot on training that could potentially fail.
I actually wonder with AI and LLMs and such will we soon see every application contain some type of generated test that applicant will have to fill when sending job application. Just so they can filter people and possibly even ignore oversaturated degrees in process.
Teaching assistants / teaching fellows are the ones issuing the grades for the most part, meaning other students.
Okay, what is a Math grad student or senior trying to tell a freshman when he gets a B?
“Don’t major in math.”
It’s that simple. So you sort yourself into somewhere where you thrive. Is that bad? No. And compounded with a smaller compulsory curriculum and more options for majors / concentrations generally, students sort themselves better.
This also explains why universities with compulsory 1st year premed like Caltech - which by the way lets students cheat, if they really want to - have worse grades. It’s not really about standards per se, but at the highest levels everyone has enough cognitive gifts, even the sons and daughters of rich and powerful CCP members, to be good at something.
I don’t know. I feel like these opinion authors aren’t really paying attention to the very most basic mechanics and dynamics of what is going on. It’s always about “DEI” as the antagonist for them.
And it was rough, yeah, but really nice too. You're getting real feedback sometimes for the student and the admissions office.
I really liked it and wished more professors would have bothered to, you know, give a shit about the students. And the admins offices that got the 80 page transcript and read it, well that made me want to actually go to those schools.
Eval transcripts are hard, so I doubt they'll ever come back. But I really treasure mine
Back then, anyways.
It’s goddam nuts. Even elite institutions don’t calibrate the average score to a C grade.
It all starts with idiotic participation trophies and gets worse.
I also fail to see how teachers grading assignments unfairly makes the US a 'failed state'. This isn't a problem unique to the United States by a long shot.
If F is a 50%, why is the lowest score a 0? What is the significance of all the numbers between 0 and 50% if all of those numbers mean the same thing?
If I have 10 assignments and I don’t show up for 5 of them and got a perfect score on the other 5, in a system where my score is 0% for the 5 missed assignments I average out to getting the exact same final grade (F) as someone who didn’t show up for a single test. That doesn’t really make much sense, either.
Put another way, every other letter grade has somewhere close to 10 points in the grade range but then F has 50 points in its grade range.
Most certifications have a 70% minimum cutoff. A few require 80% or higher.
> There are plenty of lessons to be learned from this story. One is the dangers of teaching in a state with few job protections and deliberately weakened unions for teachers. Another is to beware of these sorts of viral stories, because maybe there were other reasons she was let go and maybe the school doesn't actually have a no zeros policy.
> But even though the story is five years old, it still has legs because no-zero grading is reliably click-generating and button-pushing. For some folks it just rings the fuzzy-headed liberal bell. Your uncle who bitches about participation trophies also hates no-zero grading. ...
> I know most of the arguments from the years we debated a no-zero policy in my district. We had switched from a letter grade system for nine weeks grades to a 100-point scale, and shortly after, the district created a policy that no student could receive a grade lower than 50% in the first grading periods of a course.
> There was nothing nice or progressive about it. It was practical matter of teacher preservation. ...
> Under a letter grade system, with averaging math based on a four point scale (A=4, B=3, C=2, D=1 and F=0), an F was not a grading catastrophe. But with a 100 point scale...well, imagine a worst case scenario. With 70% the lowest passing score (as it was for many years), a student needs to hit 280 total for the year. If the student pulls a 0 in the first nine weeks, that student needs to hit the low nineties in the remaining three quarters.
> Again, the no-zero policy was not about the student's tender feelings or vulnerable ego. It was about the problem of spending 135 days with a teenager in your classroom who knows he cannot possibly pass your class, that his failure is already written in stone, and so has A) no reason to try and B) nothing to lose. A no-zero policy is not doing the student a favor; it is giving the classroom teacher one more chance to hold onto one more piece of leverage for just a little bit longer.
Sounds like the system is just stupid overall.
Maybe that's an overly contrived example, but it gets to the basic idea. There is a certain minimum threshold needed to pass the class, and if you can't meet that, the degree to which you failed is irrelevant.
Med students are adults, voluntarily studying for a profession.
This teacher - who seemingly lied about the reason she was fired as the district does not have the policy she claimed it does - was teaching eighth graders who are required by law to attend school, and where the state as an interest in them getting a good basic education.
Furthermore, 'on each test' is far different from 'one test', and the claim concerned a homework assignment.
Furthermore, med schools tweak their grades, like "U Pitt: Fail is 2 standard deviations below the mean" - https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/which-med-schools-g... and the MCAT is graded on a curve ("The MCAT is graded on a curve where 500 is the average for all four sections of the exam with scores ranging from 472 to 528.")
Grading on a curve means that if a student could only answer 45% of the questions on each test, while the other students could only answer 40%, then the 45% student definitely passes.
It also means that someone who gets 95% right could fail.
If someone gets a 0 because they couldn't be there for the test, but were otherwise a competent C student, then should that one missed test doom the student to a D grade?
(75 + 75 + 75 + 75 + 75 + 75 + 75 + 75 + 75 + 75 + 75 + 0) / 12 -> 68.75
Is that pattern really the sign of a D student?
From https://www.ksat.com/news/2018/09/26/district-blasts-fired-t... .
> She wrote a note to her students on her final day on her classroom whiteboard that reads:
> “Bye kids. Mrs. Tirado loves you and wishes you the best in life! I have been fired for refusing to give you a 50 percent for not handing anything in. Mrs. Tirado.”
> KSAT reached out to the school district, and a spokesperson responded saying, in part:
> "Ms. Tirado was released from her duties as an instructor because her performance was deemed sub-standard and her interactions with students, staff, and parents lacked professionalism and created a toxic culture on the school’s campus.
> During her brief time of employment at West Gate, the school fielded numerous student and parent complaints as well as concerns from colleagues. Based on new information shared with school administrators, an investigation of possible physical abuse is underway."
> The spokesperson also mentioned the schools grading policy, stating that there isn’t any policy prohibiting a teacher from recording a zero for work not turned in.
You write "someone getting 50% makes me assume he passed 50% of the things" but surely you know that's not the way things work.
Some of my teachers had a policy to drop the lowest score before computing the GPA. That doesn't fit your view.
Many of my teachers had a way to get extra credit. That doesn't fit your view.
Teachers don't have perfect calibration either. In one test I got 40% right, which was the highest score in the class.
Shit sandwich.
1. There is a significant interest in the US in destroying the public school system. The current iteration of this is "school choice", "school vouchers" or "charter schools". These schemes are all expensive ways to drain government coffers into private hands. This ball really got rolling when the Supreme Court decides that segregated schools couldn't get tax exempt status [1]. I'll just add that any supposed savings of charter schools are a lie. They're selective in students and don't have to deal with disabled children or children who otherwise need more attention.
2. Cutting public school funding to push "school choice" also serves the purpose of dismantling the government, the so-called "starving the beast" strategy of cutting funding and then using the resulting failures to justify further cuts;
3. The No Child Left Bhind Act under GW Bush is surprisingly not mentioned in this article but it greatly exacerbated this thin veneer of accountability. Fun fact: the NCLBA also provides the contact information of all graduating students to military recruiters;
4. The supposd meritocracy of grades (mentioned in the article) is a lie. Schools in wealtheri districts are better because they have more of a property tax base eg [2]. There's a reason people say explicit racial segregation was simply replaced by economic segregation.
Addtionally, if you come from a more affluent background, you simply have more opportunities for extracurriculars, tutoring, SAT prep and so on.
We have a useful example here. I've learned a little about how US medical education works and it's really interesting. To become a doctor you have to do a bunch of things that start with an undergraduate degree, do the MCATs, go to a 4 year medical school and then do a residency of some kind. Interspersed with this is the US Medical Licensing Exam ("USMLE") that takes place in several steps.
USMLE has 3 Steps. Step 1 in 2nd year med school. Step 2 in 4th year and Step 3 typically in the intern (first) year of residency.
Some years ago Step 1 went pass/fail instead of being actually graded. There were several arguments for this. A bad Step 1 score could be an issue with the residency match process and it's not necessarily indicative of how well you will do in residency or as a doctor.
Anyway, what's the effect of this? It looks like the Step 1 score has been replaced by the prestige of your particular medical school. It's more social proof. The problem with this is the ranking of your medical school further exacerbates existing socioeconomic issues. It can be more expensive. Admission is harder and so your extracurriculars and, say, MCAT prep matters.
In short, a well-intentioned effort to make something pass/fail has seemingly just baked in existing inequity.
This is a difficult problem.
[1]: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
[2]: https://www.tiktok.com/@carmeldeca/video/7197937009938156842...
Step 1 measures stuff people typically learn in college and med school, how well they retain the information, how well they have learned to learn (are you willing to anki all the time), and how will you do on standardized tests.
There may be some "inequity", but it is more networking inequity based on your peer choices and ability to focus than simply zip code, economic, or racial.
The med students I knew were either doing Anki every spare minute in preparation for step one, or had the ability to remember and recall after only one or two passes.
Unlike your father's doctor, med schools these days do everything in their power to keep their students paying their tuition and passing through the four years (previous generations, med schools with purposely weed out a significant number of first-year students).
Given the student loans showered on these indentured servants, there is little reason for economic inequity to be an excuse. Given, until the last year, affirmative action preferentially selected Black students so I'm not sure why racial inequity can be claimed on the standardized test - Anki does not care a bit about your ethnic history or skin color ...