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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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."

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"

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