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Comment by yiyingzhang | Hacker News Reader

As a university professor, I honestly don't understand the point of grading. Who will look at and care about grades? Likely company HR. But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free? Also, grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

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Your employer (the university) sells a credential (diploma and transcript) that your customer (the student) uses to help them get a job.

You are not doing it for free. Grading is part of what UC gets for the $250k+ they pay a professor in salary and benefits.

HR departments will use whatever signals exist. If smart people tend to have college degrees, they'll use that as a filter. If smart people tend to have gone to a certain set if universities, they'll use that list as a filter. If colleges hand out transcripts with grades, and smart people tend to have better grades, they'll ask for transcripts.

HR departments didn't invent grades or transcripts.

I agree with your final sentence. The signal in grades (and even graduation) has been greatly diminished (even at brand name universities).

If you want to improve that situation a good step you can take right now is add your name to this open letter from UC STEM faculty: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwvDywR-CAt3t_U3Aw...

Wow. Do you care at all about the reputation of your university?

I worked briefly in post-secondary CS education a long time ago, before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today, and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job.

Also, grades have long been inflated

Then stop inflating them. This is also what standardised testing is good for --- but no surprise, so many are against it because it would just show how terrible they actually are.

"The fish rots from the head."

Good idea! Nothing bad could possibly come from advocating for centralization of academic assessment! Let's give more authority to a handful of private publishers who adapt their curricula to the whims of Texas!

It's not just because "it would just show how terrible they actually are"

I know someone who went to Reed College, which has semi-famously not suffered from grade inflation[1]. They send your transcripts out with an explanatory note, so that the recipient will not view the graduate poorly when they see the numbers.

Interestingly, at Reed, there is a low emphasis (or even anti-emphasis) on grades — a student has to go out of their way to obtain them. Instead, emphasis is on written feedback and discussion, to understand one's performance on assignments.

All this to say: de-emphasizing grades in school is not necessarily a bad thing, and does not necessarily harm the reputation of the university. It can be a sign of good priorities (eg: learning, rather than numbers-gaming).

[1] https://www.gradeinflation.com/Reed.html

> They send your transcripts out with an explanatory note, so that the recipient will not view the graduate poorly when they see the numbers.

That's odd, I would expect any employer for whom the class of degree mattered to know the reputation of the university. For instance second from Oxford is probably going to be as desirable as a first from Oxford Brooks (formerly Oxford Poly).

Everyone knows Oxford, but the are many thousands of universities, most of which are not known to most employers. I am not an employer, but I work in higher education and see transcripts of transferring and exchange students, and many (probably most) come with some kind of guide on how to interpret the grades, because there are a huge variety of ways of assigning them and defining them (e.g. at some universities a D is a fail, and at some a D is a pass - to know which you're looking at, you need a guide!).

It's a bit more standardised in Europe I think.

I can't marry this:

> before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today

with this:

> and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job

Weren't universities supposed to be exactly the kind of place where unorthodox ideas could be freely said out loud? To fire an educator for saying the wrong opinion about education doesn't make your university sound like the great place you suggest it was.

Education reform, including changing or ending grading, should totally be the kind of thing that people can safely discuss.

We've been discussing this in our department for some time. No one gets fired yet :)

"Have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."

Grading is to provide your students with a goal, one that isn't so high-minded as "the goal is education". The human mind uses a "reward system", within a feedback cycle. If you want to do away with that, just because it's what you prefer, then you're ignoring the reality of being human.

Indeed, and it also gives students a way to budget their time between the demands of multiple classes. I studied enough for each course to put me in good enough stead for the exams, then moved on to the next course. I got it right most of the time.

Education has existed in some form since prehistory. Grading didn't become widespread until the 1940s.

grades are important as feedback and to make sure students who learned nothing in a class fail and have to retake it instead of making trouble in more advanced classes. but they should never be a permanent record employers can demand.

the best way to do that would be making it school policy to issue transcripts with any grades you want any time after you finish your degree. set it up so theres no difference between one you got at graduation and years later. even if you never request one the fact that its possible makes it so treating everyone from that school equally is the only rational option.

but for that to work all the schools in a state would have to use the system so employers cant be like "you graduated XY university? thats the one that lets you fake grades right?" and treat you like you got a 1.0 GPA. we need to get the government involved.

or if you want a less radical/more realistic solution let people retake classes after they graduate to retroactively get better grades. the point is some number on a piece of paper you get in your early 20s shouldnt be visible and affect the rest of your life.

Unfortunately, most students today just want to find the easiest way to get a good grade. The percentage of students truly want to learn is very low. For the most, they'd prefer instructors who feed them with exam problems. This is very sad, but true.

Another issue is with the curriculum and course structure, which should long been updated. But that's another rabbit hole on its own, especially in public universities with a big hierarchy of system. The sad truth is professors have no passion in teaching outdated curriculum, and students have no desire to learn.

During my bachelor I remember getting a distinction for an assignment that I put a shit ton of effort into and being elated. And then finding out that my tutor had taken it to the board trying to make the case for a high distinction, and narrowly failing, but it then being archived as an example of the output that the class wanted anyway.

That bowled me over when I was young and still sort of working out effort/reward sort of stuff. I had put a lot of work into a lot of subjects where I wasnt very naturally talented and got a lot of mediocre results, but seeing that if I put the effort in continually I could make stuff thats worthy of recognition was amazing.

Meanwhile, my (now) wife was completing a diploma subject at the same institution and they were handing out pass/fail only. You could see a lot of people really confused about that. The quality of work that fit into "pass" ran a very large gamut.

If I'm studying something, it's nice to get an external assessment of how well I'm doing, so i don't fall victim to over-confidence or imposter syndrome. When you're dealing with new material it's hard to be truly objective about your own project level.

I think the point is that your college/university want the earned credential to mean something.

Presumably you need some way to gauge the quality of your graduates

You should know full well you need some method of determining if a student is competent enough to move on to the next class in whatever sequence. Perhaps universities are slacking on this front, but at a minimum a student who doesn't understand the basics of Calc I should not go take Calc II

It saddens me to see how creativity seems to "peak" at "let's go back to how we did it in 20th century" instead of asking the better questions like you did.

The flip side of this is "Chesterton's Fence"[1]. It's easy to propose "better" solutions, but grading has evolved to be what it is over the past 100+ years. Any novel solution will have different (and not necessarily better) second, third, or fourth order effects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

it saddens me to see people testing parachutes on others instead of giving them functional existing parachute designs

During my undergraduate university, the best scores had priority when choosing the limited slot numbers, including the time slots and sometimes which professor we were to attend. e.g. I would pick Calculus MWF mornings, group two because professor XxXx was in charge; lower grade students who polled agaisnt me would be bumped to a different group, or to a different time slot, or not making it to the lowest grade cut

Let's play this out further. How about high school, should there be grades there? Tests at all levels also typically involve a grade / metric -- are those included too?

To play devil's advocate, evaluations and scoring should probably be used at the systemic or team level rather than stack ranking individual employees... I mean students. Improve the educational system rather than blame the individuals.

The same logic applies.

At least where I live, universities used to run entrance exams. They didn't care about high school grades, or even if you'd ever been to high school: if you passed the entrance exam, you could enroll.

At the end in very large cohort standardised testing. And by very large I mean at least hundreds if not thousands of test takers. At that point you have enough test takers to stack rank them in properly done test. And it smooths things over the years. This is the least bad way of evaluating large number of students.

In class room stack ranking is just meaningless. Either student passes demonstrating various levels of knowledge or not.

>grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

Between this and a decline in junior hiring, this is sorting itself out in the form of sharply declining CS enrollment. Which is fine, except for anyone with an interest in keeping enrollment high.

CS enrollment is declining, but not demand. Everyone is citing the numbers from UC Berkeley showing a 26% percent decline in enrollment. What they fail to mention is that the CS department reduced their admit slots by 25% because the TAs negotiated an $80/hr rate, and they can't afford as many, so they can't open as many classes.

But the number of students applying for CS is actually up slightly.

lol they can absolutely afford TAs, i don’t know why they might reduce class slots but that’s not why

They specifically said that is why. Not sure why you think they can afford TAs at that rate (4x the average at other schools).

Here is a whole article about it: https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/2026-summer/...

Grades ideally should measure the understanding a student has of the subjects presented, and their ability to execute on that understanding. Regardless of other incentives, that alone warrants them.

Are you suggesting a pass/fail method, or something else?

> But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free?

Corporations were able to convince future employees to pay for their job training (i.e school). Getting professors to do the screening is not much.

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