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Comment by codex | Hacker News Reader

Grade inflation stepped up a notch during the Vietnam War, when professions were reluctant to fail students out of college an into the draft. Now it's done to protect a college's graduation rate, which affects rankings.

Elite Ivy League institutions admit bright, motivated high school graduates and produce bright, motivated college graduates. The institution's value add is mainly networking and branding--kind of like YC.

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It's also due to the fact that easier grading brings more positive student evaluations of profs, which are taken into account with salaries and tenureship.

I assure you that at a Research I university like Harvard, student evaluations have at best a pro-forma impact on tenureship, and probably salary as well. Faculty at Harvard are tenured and compensated on their abilities to publish high profile research and attract major grants, showing up to lectures is about all that is expected of them teaching-wise.

Maybe Harvard. But I am employed as a math professor at a Research I state school, in which context you are quite mistaken. Research is most important, but good teaching is also important.

"Universities don't care about teaching" is a fun meme to kick around, and there are anecdotes to support this, but by and large it is not true.

My comment was directed more specifically to Harvard and narrow set of top tier schools, I do not believe that universities don't care about teaching. The list of "very high research activity" (apparently research 1 is no longer used) includes 108 schools [1] of which Harvard is at one extreme end.

That said, my father recently retired after 33 years with his department at a "high research activity", the second tier, and he can't recall a single case when someone was denied tenure where teaching performance was an issue. Research, and increasingly grant acquisition were always the issues.

Personally, I went to a small liberal arts school. Having taught at two top universities, private and public, I'm happy I went where I did. Undergrad teaching was the top priority and the difference is stark.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_i...

To play devil's advocate for a moment, the tenure evaluations I am familiar with at many universities take student feedback into account, as a proxy for "good teaching," but unfortunately teachers students like and teachers that are good at teaching may not be the same. Thus universities seem to care more about keeping students happy than about "teaching" per se.

Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I don't have firsthand experience with Harvard, this is what I've just heard to be the general case with universities.

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