Hacker News Reader

Comment by ponderatul | Hacker News Reader

What about grade deflation ? in the UK, where at least in social sciences ( Business Degree included) you are not graded against set standards but graded against your fellow students, with whom you are supposed to collaborate with as I understand it.

Even more, students are awarded between 0-70 max,although the documentation says it's 0 - 100. I've also discussed with several professors that they are encouraged to degrade the student, even if they find nothing wrong with the paper, because otherwise the results won't be consistent with past data.

Does anyone see any problem here ?

View on HN

What if you infuse your papers with some minority and gender studies crap (even if it's not related)? Wouldn't it improve your grade?

Well, if you hadn't studied those topics in sufficient depth, the examiner would doubtless decrease your mark for writing crap. If they weren't relevant, your mark would be decreased for writing irrelevant things.

I suspect your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sick of humanities-bashing. If people don't like culture, that's fine, but they don't have to go around oozing their contempt.

>but I'm sick of humanities-bashing

Humanities (crap), finance (useless banksters), business (lol MBAs), economics (the an inevitable discussion every year here about how the Nobel Prize isn't a real Nobel). It's annoying, but I'm used to it.

Well said. And yeah, I usually don't complain, but it does make me sad. Science, mathematics and computers are wonderful, and I love them. But there is more to life, and people shouldn't try to tear down others because they happen to be interested in those other things.

>If people don't like culture, that's fine

I thought the whole point of the modern humanities is that culture (or at least western culture) is evil and oppressive. In my experience the average humanities course is not concerned with "culture" in the "cultured" sense of the word, which I assume is the definition you were using. The university I attended recently dropped all the Greek, Latin and Classics courses, for instance, and fired (negotiated generous early retirement packages with) all the staff who had taught them.

I disagree that modern humanities have abandoned those topics. I know plenty of people studying Greek, Latin, Classics, etc. Especially if you count people studying them as modules, rather than as the entire focus of their degree.

I get the impression you don't value things like anthropology, non-Western history and gender studies. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'd disagree here as well, though. I value and respect those disciplines, and I don't see their growth as a bad thing.

I suspect if you compared the relative number of people studying those topics now to fifty years ago, there'd be significantly fewer now studying classics etc.

I've nothing against anthropology, gender studies etc. as disciplines, just with how they're often taught, with a focus on promoting particular ideologies rather than detached critical thinking.

I hope you don't honestly believe the garbage you are spouting, and are just trying to be incendiary on purpose to try to work people up and make a political point. In that case you should simply stop.

Wow, what a productive comment. Nothing like a quick and irrelevant jab at the humanities!

Not really, I have nothing against e.g. ancient and modern languages, literature, philosophy, general history, archaeology, general anthropology, law, semiotics and linguistics.

I wasn't looking for grade improvement, I was looking to point out the discrepancy in grades between the hard and soft sciences. Whereas for Math, CompSci, students are graded on the 0 - 100 scale the more social sciences are studied on the 0 - 70ish, as there are no solid requirements for each milestone grade (i.e. 70; 80; 90), as opposed to the hard sciences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com