

The unrecognised benefits of grade inflation - robinhouston
http://www.voxeu.org/article/unrecognised-benefits-grade-inflation

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danieltillett
The argument basically boil down to if you can't judge the individual (since
everyone gets an A) then you have to judge the institution. This means the
institution has an incentive to improve their reputation. The authors then
make the leap in logic that institutions will try to raise their reputation by
improving their education quality. Given that improving teaching quality is a
hard problem, the much more likely approach that they would take is to improve
the apparent teaching quality by investing in flashy things like new buildings
and rock star academics. At least we now have a rational explanation for the
recent activities of university management.

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jiggy2011
The best way to improve the reputation of the institution is the improve the
calibre of students you admit. But how do you do that if they all come to you
with inflated grades?

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coldcode
So why have grades at all if everyone gets an A. Of course that would suppose
that students and institutions are capable of being completely idealistic and
self motivated which I doubt.

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calibraxis
The article's underlying assumptions are depressing. A nice aspect of being a
developer in "startups" is that no one ever cared about my grades. The notion
that a university feeds you to employers after stamping a grade on your
head... pathetic. If these institutions are the best our current world has to
offer, guess we're born into a rather silly time.

Some of my friends and I pay someone to teach us regularly. We research how we
each learn effectively, and expect that to be respected. (Or we find a more
respectful teacher.) We use techniques like retrospectives to help steer us.
Reducing that to some silly letter/number, for some managerial bureaucrat,
would be dignity-less and counterproductive.

We're pretty privileged, so with a little money we can escape the substandard
education that most people suffer.

