
Make School Hard Again - pseudolus
https://reason.com/2019/05/26/make-school-hard-again/
======
jknoepfler
I find the tone and tenor of the article to be closed-minded and exceptionally
naive, almost as though the author had never really left the confines of the
academy.

I disagree with the belief that schoolwork performs a valuable filter function
when it is "rigorous". I agree that rigorous coursework that emphasizes book
smarts selects for something, but I don't value that something outside a set
of very narrowly defined circumstances.

Having completed both a masters in philosophy and an M.S. in computer science,
I'll go as far as to say that I don't think college matters at all any more,
in tech, and that's fine. My career path in tech went from Amazon, which
didn't care about my "pedigree" to being self-employed, to my current job
which just valued the evidence that I could get shit done. I don't like hiring
new grads, but when I do what I look for is exclusively accomplishment outside
the classroom. Sure, a B student from an MIT csci program will have a degree
of algorithmic agility that j-rando web dev who's been hacking away for a
decade won't, but I can think of exactly zero times that's mattered.

So I think the "academy" should be an opportunity to climb, to make things
happen, to go above and beyond, but I don't think it fulfills its primary
purpose by insisting upon harder coursework. In fact, de-emphasizing
coursework in favor of making or doing things in the world of
research/business/politics/etc. seems preferable to me.

~~~
bko
> Having completed both a masters in philosophy and an M.S. in computer
> science, I'll go as far as to say that I don't think college matters at all
> any more, in tech, and that's fine

I always find interesting that the most vocal proponents of the "school
doesn't matter" argument are often the most educated. Why did you get an
undergrad and even go as far as to get a masters? Did you come to the
realization after you finished your masters?

Would you advise family members to forgo a college education since it doesn't
matter? How confident are you of your convictions?

It's easy to say school doesn't matter after you've achieved all the benefits
from the signaling effect

~~~
michaelt
We can't accept people who never went to college saying college doesn't
matter, because how would they know never having experienced it?

And we can't accept people who have been to college saying college doesn't
matter, because their revealed preferences are different and/or they're
hypocrites.

~~~
bko
I personally can't remember anyone that didn't go to college tell me that its
not worth it. Either they say its not for them, they don't like sitting in a
classroom, or they were faced extraordinary circumstances where they decided
to pursue an opportunity.

> And we can't accept people who have been to college saying college doesn't
> matter, because their revealed preferences are different and/or they're
> hypocrites

I would accept the argument of a college educated individual if they actively
discouraged their children from attending university. Telling strangers on the
internet is easy, but with your own children you have skin in the game. To me
that's more telling of their true beliefs

~~~
reitanqild
> I would accept the argument of a college educated individual if they
> actively discouraged their children from attending university.

I was pushed into higher education. I'll try to accept or even encourage if my
kids prefer vocational education. It's easy for me who live in Norway to say
because

\- many ordinary jobs now pay extremely well if you put some effort into it.

\- moving from carpenter or electrician to engineer etc is way simpler than
the other way around && real world experience seems to actually be appreciated
if/when you later decide to take higher education.

And yes, I have a bachelor degree and I while it was more interested than I
expected I think the vast majority of what I know comes from colleagues as
well as reading the Internet.

------
lioning
As former [tenured] faculty, I'm not sure what to say about this. Good luck
doing it in a reasonable way. It's not like [some] universities don't try to
rein in grade inflation. Instructors do regularly give out Cs and Ds or Fs at
many institutions. Our university kind of did audits to just see if there was
something glaringly wrong about grade distributions in courses systematically
for certain courses.

Anyway, grades shouldn't be arbitrarily difficult either, or curve just to
curve. That's misguided as well; there are reasons for grade inflation other
than just being nice -- I think old school grading was often somewhat
capriciously difficult and arbitrary which has its own downsides.

I think in my undergrad courses the average grade was usually about a B, which
seemed about right to me. Of course I'm biased because it's my own grading,
but these were usually upper-level students, who got to that point because
they were reasonably competent, and my sense of things was that they had about
a B level grasp of the material on average. That is, they understood most of
the important points of the material pretty well, but might have become a
little lost in the finer points. Why knock their grades down just to make the
grade distributions prettier?

My experience was that the trickier part was dealing with new freshman, who
didn't always seem as prepared as they should be for college, especially with
writing. But it's hard to know if that's actually any different over time;
there's been a couple of times I've found decades old samples and I was
surprised how little things had actually changed.

~~~
ben7799
You either learn the material and get the questions on the tests correct,
complete projects that work, write essays that make sense, etc.. or you do
not.

In the case of writing & humanities often the problem is that it is a lot more
difficult to tell a correct answer from an incorrect answer. It could be as
subtle as the students writing not matching with the professor's political
bent.

But for STEM it is way more clear. Wrong answers on a math test are wrong.
Software projects that don't compile should fail.

Not sure what the problem is. If the whole class is failing either the school
is letting in students who don't belong, whoever taught the prerequisite
classes failed to teach the students and passed them on with a curve, or the
professor just didn't teach well.

~~~
ctrl-j
> Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile
> should fail.

As a former grader and TA for both math and physics, I can tell you this is
not the case. I've had students get the right answer the wrong way, stumbling
into the correct numeric answer with invalid or incorrect math. I've also had
students get 90% of the way through a large problem only to make a simple
arithmetic error that lead to the wrong numeric answer.

Which student deserves more partial credit? Or should I pass the student who
made math errors but got the right answer, and fail the student who grasped
the concepts but made a trivial calculation mistake?

~~~
asdff
According to my math and physics profs, the student who got the right answer
the wrong way would get 100% credit, the student who didn't would get 0% if
it's multiple choice (often with those common math errors from years past
intentionally given as potential options), and maybe 50% or so if it was a
long form answer and the class was merciful. For those long form answers, we
would be given explanations on exactly how they would be graded by the
lecturer and later the TA in recitation before the exam. For ochem synthesis
problems, the prof would give you credit if you reached the correct
intermediates at least, even if you couldn't solve the entire reaction, or the
TA would take a point off for every mistake, and if the question was weighted
for 8 points and you forgot 9 things, you'd get a fair zero.

These aren't shades of gray, they are just protocols you need to establish and
stick with before these questions come up during grading. Then you need to
stick with these protocols as department policy for decades, so your
department is able to maintain the grading scale no matter who the faculty
will be 50 years from now. That's the sign of a good department.

------
duxup
I have mixed feelings on this topic.

I'm sympathetic to some extent. I'm a product of a boot camp (granted I had a
technical background before that) and I've worked with CS grads who I'm a bit
astounded by their inability to just debug something on a basic level (form a
theory, test it, make a logical next decision). On the other hand I wonder if
that is a case where they should have been filtered out, or if the issue is
they weren't taught / tested on the right things?

>The old academic criteria, imperfect as they were, were in fact doing a
reasonable job of selecting individuals able and willing to handle the rigors
of traditional college. The blunt fact is that the majority of people who
scored below a 1200 on the verbal and math sections of the SAT would have
found it difficult or impossible to handle a curriculum like that required to
earn a state-school engineering degree or comparable certification. Today,
thanks to grade inflation, such students can and do pass through top schools
with top honors, especially in the liberal arts.

Do we really want to just go by the "old academic criteria"?

Are the people who just scrape by all just bad?

Would it be better if those people just be pushed out the door?

So let's say we make it "harder", is that harder testing? More work? What
then?

I feel like as far as learning about how people learn that it is pretty clear
that some people work well in what has become the traditional education
systems, and others less so, and I"m not sure that filter really determines
who will be productive or if that's all we want from education... to filter
folks based on how the education system works now?

Personally I'm inclined to lean towards more / better education, less focus on
making everything "harder".

~~~
i_am_proteus
I believe that the key is rigor: if grades are a reflection of whether or not
a student has mastered some material, and the grading is rigorous, the only
way for a student to attain a high grade is to master that material. That's
the point of grades, isn't it?

~~~
MR4D
It is, but how do you know the material is hard enough?

If I teach history and have a finale exam with one question, “who was the
first president of the United States?” then the students will all get A’s, but
nobody would consider that a college level history test, and even if you made
an A, there is no way to know that you mastered the subject.

That’s a simplification, but in essence the issue at stake here.

------
eledumb
When did education become a competition and why does John V.C. Nye want to
make it more of a competition?

I stupidly thought the goal of education was for everyone to learn, but I
guess the process of education is to stratify the populace.

I hated, and still hate the gamesmanship that takes place with
teachers/professors. The trick questions on tests, etc. I never had the
patience for any of the nonsense. For things that were nuanced I understood
the reason to test on details, but to just play games, always pissed me off. I
was an OK student because I wouldn't play their games.

During college I was a Comp Sci major and the Business Majors needed to take
two computer science classes. Being the entrepreneur that I was, I started
tutoring as many of the girls as their parents would pay my $25 and hour
tutoring fee with a money back if you don't get a B or higher guarantee. In
the first two years everyone of my students got A's. I made sure every student
understood the material, their programming projects were always unique and I
made the student do all the work. At the end of the class everyone of my
students knew the material cold.

I was so successful that they Comp Sci department and the Business department
tried to ban me from tutoring, not to mention that 3 students switched majors
to Comp Sci and a couple others added Comp Sci as a minor. Their argument was
that I was ruining the grade distribution in the classes I tutored, I guess
the Comp Sci courses were weed out classes for the Business Majors. I had
letters from every parent and every student, the University President laughed
in the faces of the department heads and he dismissed me from the meeting, and
from what I heard he spent 40 minutes yelling at them for being stupid and
degrading the reputation of the University. Of course I somehow never got an A
on any programming projects again, but it wasn't payback, even as a senior
when in one class I wrote everyone else's programs for them, just to prove a
point, everyone else got an A, I got a C+.

Education is not about learning, it'a a business, just like health care isn't
about making people healthy, it's about profit and loss.

~~~
jolfdb
Why girls?

~~~
nv-vn
Maybe the GP went to an all girls school?

------
helen___keller
>It is still very hard to get into elite schools, but it's not at all
difficult to graduate.

I can't say for all degrees at all elite schools, but in the elite CS program
I attended, I worked much harder than I ever did before attending, and much
harder than I ever did after graduating.

In the weeks immediately following graduation I used to feel guilt if I would
spend over an hour on something fun, like a movie or a video game, because
over the course of my degree I had conditioned myself to spend every waking
moment working.

~~~
arethuza
"over the course of my degree I had conditioned myself to spend every waking
moment working"

I'm _pretty_ sure that's not the best way to actually maximise performance -
in the same way that even professional athletes don't spend 100% of their time
training. You need recovery periods and, I find, breaks for stuff to actually
sink in.

~~~
helen___keller
Sure, I don't disagree. I learned a lot about working more efficiently after
graduating and forcing myself to work strictly 9-5.

Fact is, when you have weekly assignments in 4 classes that each require many
hours to complete, it's easy to find yourself in a cycle of coding until 3 am
only to realize you have to do it again the next day to finish a math problem
set.

My point is just that "hard to get in, easy to graduate" does not meet my
experience at all.

~~~
arethuza
It wasn't my experience either, but my wife certainly had that experience at
the UK law school she went to - which was rather more prestigious then the
relatively humble uni we both did our first degrees at.

------
mfer
What is the goal of these universities and colleges? What are they trying to
produce in their graduates? People who are well prepared for careers? Social
change?

University of Michigan has a top 20 education program (to pick an example).
Their vision is...

> The vision of the U-M School of Education is to be a premier School of
> Education devoted to developing civically engaged children, youth, and
> adults for a diverse and inclusive society.

[http://www.soe.umich.edu/about/](http://www.soe.umich.edu/about/)

I recently read an interesting piece on Australia's top journalism program
that wasn't all that hard but seemed to have an underlying purpose of social
change... [https://quillette.com/2019/05/22/when-the-authorities-
tell-y...](https://quillette.com/2019/05/22/when-the-authorities-tell-you-to-
dissent/)

People tend to chase after their goals. If the goals have changed from what
they used to be, shouldn't we expect the output to be changed as well?

------
kemiller2002
What we really need to do is stop basing a person's capability based on their
college record at all. I completely understand why students want grade
inflation, professors want it, and the universities want it. Too much is based
on someone's GPA (and an extent their degree type). I've seen many places lump
every applicant together regardless of where they went to college and say, "we
only will hire someone with a 3.5 or above." That doesn't take into account,
the difficulty of the college, the classes taken, or the personal circumstance
of the individual. In instances like this, if you go to a harder college and
have a lower gpa, you're at a disadvantage even if you are more qualified.
That doesn't behoove anyone, and so grade inflation helps correct that. Now
I'm not saying I'm in favor of it, you should get what you work for, but the
world is rarely fair, so I at least understand why it occurs.

------
citilife
> Though grades have always been lower in science, technology, engineering,
> and math (STEM) subjects than in the arts and humanities, graduating from a
> good school with a degree in any major did not use to be a cakewalk. Average
> GPAs have risen by a full point or more since the late 1960s.
> Collegeinflation.com shows that at Michigan State, for example, the
> percentage of As doubled to about 30 percent of all grades from 1963 to 1973
> and then rose again by about 50 percent from 1983 to 2013. This is
> consistent with other research on the widespread change in grading standards
> nationwide.

To be fair, during that same time we have seen an increase in IQ to match[1].
In part this is attributed to better education, better nutrition and possibly
the most important _removing lead from toys_. It's quite possible, that school
is just as hard as it used to be, it's just we are smarter.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't make school more difficult to match OR
potentially graduate individuals quicker.

[1] [https://www.123test.com/flynn-effect/](https://www.123test.com/flynn-
effect/)

~~~
MisterBastahrd
Advocates for "harder classes" also seem to be completely ignorant of the fact
that students have far more learning resources than ever before and that the
quality of education as it relates to conveyance of course material to
students has increased since the 60s. Students have far more access to
professors, TAs, and each other than they did in the stone ages.

~~~
alexgmcm
Exactly - the alternative would be that students were doing worse or exactly
the same despite having the huge benefits from new technology, teaching
methods, resources etc.

That would be far more concerning.

As a personal example - KhanAcademy launched the year before I went to
University and helped me a lot as it meant I could be fully confident of my
calculus and linear algebra skills (we studied these topics in Further Maths
but not multivariate calculus etc.)

------
chongli
Grade inflation won't stop until signalling ceases to be a factor in education
(likely never). Generally speaking, students see education as only a means to
achieving career success. In any situation where grades are a determining
factor, you will see grade inflation. Grades are simply the most visible
signal of student intelligence, conscientiousness, and to a lesser extent
conformity.

Course difficulty, on the other hand, is much more subtle and complicated to
assess. You can look at a given school's grade inflation relative to other
schools but that is confounded by differences in the relative merit of the
students. Thus, we should predict that school difficulty sends a weaker signal
than grades.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
You could take the responsibility for grading away from the universities. We
do that with school exams in the UK, there are a couple of exam boards that
set papers for all schools.

~~~
chongli
If you did that then you might as well nationalize the universities because
otherwise they'd shut down. There's simply no way universities will grant
degrees to students who write exams that they did not administer.

Universities live and die by their reputations. The entire purpose of a
university degree is so that the school can vouch for their student, putting
the weight of their reputation behind the person so that they have an easier
time securing employment.

I would also like to take issue with your choice of the word "responsibility"
as it pertains to grading. Universities have the right to grade their
students, as organizations made up of individuals in a free society. They will
not relinquish their right to administer examinations without a fight.

Moreover, if you were to succeed, you would only replace the economic pressure
to inflate grades with political pressure. In my experience, public schools
are under far more pressure to do this than universities are. A major part of
this pressure is manifested in the tendency to standardize exams, leading to
hyper-focus on exam prep at the expense of general learning.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
_If you did that then you might as well nationalize the universities because
otherwise they 'd shut down._

Some would, others would thrive by delivering what their students want (a
qualification and the jobs that follow on from that.) A graduate from the
University of Waterloo would be considered the equal of one from Stanford
given equal results. That isn't the case now.

I imagine most universities would hate it but anything that threatens their
cosy financial situation is going to be opposed.

 _Universities have the right to grade their students, as organizations made
up of individuals in a free society._

Would you support universities having the freedom to sell grades? $100,000 for
a first class degree, $150,000 for a masters? No study needed.

They can be regulated just as any other organisation can be if society decided
that's what they wanted to do.

~~~
chongli
_A graduate from the University of Waterloo would be considered the equal of
one from Stanford given equal results. That isn 't the case now._

As a student at Waterloo right now, I'd love for this to happen but I don't
believe it would be the case. Even if examinations were standardized across
all schools, employers would simply shift to some other metric, such as course
grades.

Now that I think about it, how would it even be possible? The Faculty of
Mathematics at the University of Waterloo offers over 300 undergrad (not
including grad school!) courses alone! The vast majority of these courses are
unique to the school. Are you suggesting we wipe that out and force a
standardized curriculum? Or are you suggesting we have standardized
examinations in:

* Algebraic Topology

* Analysis of Spatial Data in Health Research

* Calculus of Variations

* Control Theory

* Fluid Mechanics

* Game Theory

* Lebesgue Integration and Fourier Analysis

* Matroid Theory

* Professional Communications in Statistics and Actuarial Science

* Property and Casualty Pricing

* Quantitative Enterprise Risk Management

* Quantum Information Processing

* Real-Time Programming

* Semidefinite Optimization

* Software Requirements Specification and Analysis

I could go on and on and on... I think you get the point. Math profs are
constantly creating new courses based on areas of active research. How are you
going to standardize examinations for those things? Every university offers
different things!

 _Would you support universities having the freedom to sell grades? $100,000
for a first class degree, $150,000 for a masters? No study needed._

For-profit "colleges" did just that, until they were shut down. What you've
described is usually called academic fraud. If Stanford did that, their
reputation would be obliterated overnight.

Look at the ongoing story over the admissions bribery scandal. It's a HUGE
story and it's _only_ a case of fabricated athletic credentials for
admissions, never mind fabricated degrees. I'm not worried about this problem
at all.

------
liara_k
The difficulty with combating grade inflation is that no one school can do it
alone. One school doing it just disadvantages their students when these grades
are compared.

A much more accurate system, IMHO, would be to switch over to a
ranking/percentile order within the school, and use standardized tests for
rough cross-school comparisons. Sure, it's not perfect, but it seems better
than what we have now.

Also, it provides a great argument for instructors when students inevitably
come-a-grade-grubbing. "I can't bump your score, because that would inexorably
bump DOWN someone else's score, and that wouldn't be fair to the other
students."

~~~
na85
They tried the standardized tests thing in Ontario when I was in school, so I
guess the 90s. All it led to was teachers teaching to the test.

~~~
b_tterc_p
I thought the AP tests were very good. I took 13 of them. The tests themselves
were just good tests of knowledge and skills so teaching to the test meant
teaching relevant content.

Standardized _aptitude_ tests were always bad because they’re supposed to test
basic skills but do so with lots of curveball tricks or specific formats... so
teachers taught the specifics of the test

------
mjparrott
Do grades matter? The point is demonstrating that you understand the content.
MBA programs have pass/fail grading that oftentimes is not allowed to be
released. If you fail a class, you should be able to take it again and if you
pass, you then "know" the content and the first fail doesn't matter. The
culture that makes failing unacceptable is certainly part of the reason
inflation exists. The discussion seems very far away from "do you actually
understand the course content".

~~~
MisterBastahrd
To me, non pass/fail grades are pointless unless you're moving onto a higher
degree, and professors are often silly about their requirements for passing a
class.

I once took a discrete math class for CS majors. I aced it. Loved it.
Classmates would ask me to explain concepts to them before exams if they were
having trouble. There was only one other student in the class who had gotten
an A on every exam leading up to the final. He had a problem that he didn't
know about, though. He didn't turn in the homework.

Now, homework for this class was not a measure of skill. It was just a way for
the professor to have an extra way to determine that you were participating. I
warned him the class before the final that he was gonna fail if he didn't get
the teacher to give him an extension on the homework, because I knew he wasn't
turning it in (there was a requirement in the syllabus that you needed to turn
in 70% of the homework to have a chance at passing). Hell, he was proud of the
fact that he was smart enough to understand the course material without doing
it. He didn't ask for the extension, and a year later, he was sitting in the
same class for which he had already mastered the material.

~~~
leetcrew
I think your homework anecdote actually supports the argument of TFA.

in many classes, homework has devolved into another technique to inflate
grades. in most of my college courses the homework was either very easy or
graded for "completion". almost always a complete waste of my time, but it was
usually worth too many points to skip entirely.

I had a couple professors who would "assign" difficult problem sets that
weren't graded at all. it was usually a bad call to skip them, because the
exams were actually hard. that's the only respectful approach, imo.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
It wasn't used in this case to inflate grades, because your homework wasn't
actually a part of your grade except that doing the work determined whether
you passed or failed. If you turned it in, you might pass, but your grade was
dependent on your test scores. If you didn't, you failed regardless of what
you did on the test.

------
0thgen
I can understand the author's sentiments, but at the same time, fear of grade
inflation has let to administrators pressuring professors to have a "C"
average <\-- i think this pressure is a far worse problem than grade
inflation. Rather than aiming to get every student to the highest level,
professors are pressured into using reverse-curving and other tactics (trick
questions, ambiguous study guides) to artificially "deflate" students scores.

And that seems totally backwards. If i took my car to a mechanic, I expect
them to fix my car 100%; so why do we expect professors to produce students
with 75% achievement?

Professors are supposed to be in the business of teaching, not assessing.

~~~
mrep
> pressuring professors to have a "C" average <\-- i think this pressure is a
> far worse problem than grade inflation. Rather than aiming to get every
> student to the highest level, professors are pressured into using reverse-
> curving and other tactics (trick questions, ambiguous study guides) to
> artificially "deflate" students scores.

Depends on how you look at it. I went to a school that bell curved around a C
for most core classes and most of the curving wasn't "deflating scores" but
rather making the class hard enough that there was a wide distribution of
scores which made identifying the people who understood the most material
clear. Having everyone get A's may make you feel good, but then you are most
likely holding people back as there is no way for them to work harder and
stand out if it is so easy that everyone is getting A's. Also, that
competitive environment tends to make everyone work harder so they learn more.

While I'm not saying there shouldn't be schools where it is easy to get A's
and B's, I am 100% glad I went to one that pushed me as hard as they did as I
learned a ton and I have gotten very good job offers since graduating.

~~~
0thgen
It's very easy to provide opportunities for the best students to excel (eg,
higher level courses, research opportunities).

But if somebody enrolls Stats 101, it should be the goal of the professor to
get every student to _learn_ Stats 101, not to produce a majority of students
with mediocre understanding

------
ThrustVectoring
The problem isn't grade inflation, it's that most of the value of a college
degree is in being able to tell people that you have it. This has lead to
degree inflation - jobs that used to require a high school degree are
increasingly requiring a college one instead. People are spending more time in
school for zero-sum positional advantages. Mucking about with the details of
schooling is going to change little, we need a combination of reforms that
reduce the importance of graduating from a "good" school with an earned
degree. My suggestion:

1\. "Don't ask, don't tell" for degree status of job applicants.

2\. National exam-based standards for competency-based certificates.

3\. Remove federal guarantees for student loans.

4\. Expanded forgiveness programs for outstanding student loans.

------
cmbuck
This article completely neglects the influence of lower acceptance rates of
upper tier institutions. Between 1960-1970 Harvard and Stanford's acceptance
rates were 4-6x larger than they are today. It does not seem reasonable to me
to assume that all of the additional applicants nowadays are low-achieving
students. Assuming a roughly equal distribution of capability within the
applicant pool, it makes total sense that average achievement (and thus,
grades) would rise over time.

Yes there may be professors or programs that are artificially awarding higher
grades than deserved. But the more likely case is that the admitted pool of
students is just a higher caliber with stronger educational background than 50
years ago. If you agree that grades are a metric of academic mastery, then it
makes sense average grades are improving, and are not necessarily an
indication that somehow school has gotten easier than back in the "good 'ol
days".

~~~
btilly
Nice theory, but the facts don't support it.

While elite institutions use such arguments to justify their grade inflation,
grade inflation is actually seen across all kinds of educational institutions.
The system overall is less selective than it used to be. And grade inflation
is proceeding far too quickly in recent years to be explained by a changing
student body.

See [http://www.gradeinflation.com/](http://www.gradeinflation.com/) for data
backing up what I claim.

------
gww
Some grade inflation comes down to faculty that have become increasingly
apathetic. When I was a TA in Canada 11 years ago the professor(s) that ran
that class became so frustrated with students who needed a bump of X% (usually
in the range of 3-10%) to keep their GPA average for medical school
applications. One of the profs confided in me that he just gives them what
they ask otherwise the students would waste a tremendous amount of the profs
time going through assignments and exams to try to argue for extra marks.

~~~
analog31
In the US, students fill out course evaluations that are known to be driven by
the grade that they expect to receive in the class. This creates a perverse
incentive to raise grades. I saw this when I was teaching.

------
lucisferre
I mean I want to agree with this, but I also have to ask why? In what way are
grades important to any kind of overall outcome?

~~~
jonnycomputer
In my data structures course, the final exam was about 50 pages of difficult,
tricky problems. I completed maybe 8 of them and got a B+. The instructor told
us that only one student in his career had completed the entire exam.

As an approach I think this makes a lot of sense. First it gives the very best
students an opportunity to really show their stuff. For the others, it gives
them the opportunity to pick and choose the problems to show that they've at
least mastered some of the material (generally, there is often more presented
than can realistically be mastered of the course of a semester (between and
within each course)).

(nested parens are (the best))

~~~
tomsmeding
I'd think that making an exam like that is a hellish amount of work. One might
propose that students are definitely not going to remember all of that, so you
can basically reuse stuff from previous years anyway, but that's not how the
world works, sadly.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
I think making an exam like that is silly. Except for research work and
startups, you aren't ever going to go into a job and just decided to only
tackle certain problems.

I had a history professor who gave a test in this manner: Below there are 3
columns of 14 items of interest, whether they be people or wars or treaties or
whatever. You are allowed to cross out 2 columns, and then cross out 3 terms.
Write what you know about the remaining terms. Your grade is out of 110 on a
100 point scale.

Now, I loved the test, because I excel at soft trivia tests... but did it
really gauge what I understood about history?

Nope. It gauged my knowledge of history trivia for those terms. Understanding
history is about understanding how these things connect together.

If I were a history professor, I would base the majority of students' grades
on papers about the subjects we cover in class to discover whether they're
actually thinking about history or if they're just trying to recite facts and
figures.

~~~
jonnycomputer
Why should school exams mimic typical scenarios faced in work life.

In typical work scenarios you have more than 2 hours to tackle a problem,
anyway.

This is computer science, and a data structures class to boot. Answering any
of the questions required not only a deep understanding of the fundamental
principles involved, but analytic skills (both in parsing the problem
statement into a set of requirements and to identify problematic edge cases).

Any good class will teach more than they could possibly test on in two hours.
So the alternative here is to keep students guessing about what will actually
be on the exam? That's why, when I was a college instructor, I gave previous
exams to my students (also: i thought not doing so would disadvantage less
socially connected students; lots of old exams get passed around).

------
Nasrudith
I must disagree with the rose colored view of the Ivy Leagues always requiring
hard work (it has long been about connections and making excuses for old money
and supersonic goal posts for any upstarts who threaten their demographics by
making it an actual meritocracy)

But it is true that there are real incentive issues. GPA as a metric
especially in High School is problematic in that it encourages students going
with what they are already good at instead of where they may have room to grow
and explore. I could see a case for keeping GPA "internal only" but that puts
more emphasis on standardized tests which are already a teach to test black
hole.

------
feanaro
I think the opposite. The dual purpose of schools to both teach and grade
should be separated into two separate types of institutions. Grades and
pressure are detrimental to learning and only exist because schools double as
certification authorities. If you think about it more closely, though, these
are very different functions and there is no a priori reason why they should
be done by a single institution.

How about we make schools about learning at your own tempo, because you _want_
the knowledge? Schools should strive to be excellent at teaching, enabling you
to learn easily, not forcibly push it onto you, making you die from stress.

~~~
xhgdvjky
great point. the dual purpose should be more separated.

that said, grades are useful for self assessment imo

------
partiallypro
My dad was a high school teacher for several years after his stint in the
army. He was told by the Principal, etc to pass students, even if they were
failing. For two reasons really, you don't have to deal with parents, and it
makes the school look better on paper.

So I wouldn't say this is just a college problem.

------
efficax
We can only stop grade inflation if we do something that the denizens of
reason dot com would not like: make public college free. The logic in the rise
of grade inflation is very simple: students (or their parents) pay a fortune
for a degree and they want something for it, no matter their performance. Only
the most flagrant burnouts get failed out of college today because if we
restored grading to a normal distribution people would stop sending their kids
to college at the same rate, and colleges would lose tuition revenue.

------
reality_aholes
I don't think grades convey a meaningful comparison of two or more candidates
for jobs or any other activity where credentials come into play. In part due
to grade inflation and also due to not being descriptive enough.

There is nothing wrong with comparatively ranking individuals for selection,
but what does a 0.25 GPA difference really mean? It doesn't tell you anything
that helps you understand the candidate.

Instead of GPAs why not use cumulative scoring of major subjects to show total
capability. For example, in math you learn to count, do basic arithmetic,
algebra, etc. For each topic you earn a point on completing the concept which
goes toward your total score. By the end of highschool you might have a score
of 1000 points, by the end of a somewhat math heavy major you might have 2000,
nd by the end of a math intensive PhD you might have 3000-4000 points. Then,
when you're looking for talent you can focus on scores for the skillsets you
need.

~~~
b_tterc_p
Because then you’ll encourage students to acquire maximum points in minimal
time / effort.

------
Areading314
To make a somewhat cynical argument, it is unreasonable to expect universities
to be unbiased sources of information while their students are each paying
them $200k for the degree.

To have any hope of degrees actually meaning anything, grades and diplomas
need to be awarded by a standardized, neutral third party.

~~~
xhgdvjky
I think this was the original purpose of standardized testing in the US

it's impossible to fairly grade students even in one class, so I don't see any
way a multi school entity could fairly grade

------
jjoonathan
The scope and workload required to earn a grade weren't standardized, but even
people who gave lip service to this fact didn't resist the temptation to use
them for purposes of ranking and comparison as if they were. The very people
bemoaning grade inflation are the people who used grades most irresponsibly,
and their main objection is that they want to continue being irresponsible
even though the system has started to route around them.

Tough.

It looks like the system now uses standardized tests and extracurricular
competitions for cross-classroom comparisons and uses grades primarily to
assess obedience. To my way of thinking, that's the right direction, in that
it actually measures people against each other rather than measuring the
arbitrary grading scales of the professors involved.

------
Zigurd
This "It is still very hard to get into elite schools, but it's not at all
difficult to graduate." needs more nuance.

My daughter could tell you it isn't easy, at all, to graduate from CMU SCS. It
will kick your ass no matter how smart you are. That said, of the entrances to
_any_ program that's highly selective on a relevant basis, wouldn't you expect
almost all of them to graduate with a good GPA?

There a lot more diversity of ability at programs with 30% acceptance than 3%.
Grading on a curve might work there, and be a factor in motivating students to
work harder.

But is that the best approach? Would ending legacy and donor admission
concessions do more for academic rigor?

------
improbable22
It certainly won't stop just because we wish it away. Note the passive voice
in "This nonsense should cease." Who, exactly, should do this?

Some junior professor, who's up for tenure based on research output, and
teaching prizes based on being liked... in his shoes, would you decide to
spontaneously give mostly B & Cs next year, and spend weeks fighting unhappy
students?

Thinking about how we'd like the idea system to work is just daydreaming.
You've got to think about the incentives facing all the people involved. And
at the moment, these seem to point towards inflation.

~~~
jcranmer
> Note the passive voice in "This nonsense should cease."

That is not actually passive voice: note that "cease" is not inflected into
the past participle, and it is modified with a modal "should" instead of an
auxiliary (almost invariably "be"). In grammatical construction, this sentence
is identical to "You should go," which I think you should recognize as not
being passive either.

~~~
improbable22
Good catch, I did in fact get a B in grammar.

Is there a term for this? "This nonsense should cease" does differ from "you
should go" in that it demands an action on an inanimate thing, while avoiding
saying who acts.

~~~
jcranmer
Don't feel too bad, most people can't detect passive voice correctly. Hell,
Strunk's Elements of Style, when discussing the avoidance of passive voice,
has four examples of clunky writing that can be rewritten to use the active
voice, except three of them are _already_ in active voice.

------
jmull
I'm trying to find anything in this piece that moves it past a Grumpy-Old-Man-
Complains-That's-Not-How-They-Did-It-In-My-Day argument. I'm not seeing it. No
logical or imperial arguments.

Grade inflation does mean an "A" doesn't mean what it used to.

But is that bad? (Or good?)

Letter grades are an arbitrary measure and are most generally used to compare
recent graduates. For that gradual inflation is not a problem. (And, if you
were comparing between generations for some reason you could apply an
appropriate adjustment, though it's pretty unclear why you'd be doing that for
anything serious.)

There also seems to be a strong implication that we used to have a stronger
"fail 'em out if they can't handle it" approach to education and that we
should return to that. I don't know if we actually used to (didn't seem that
way to me in my day -- the mid-to-late '80s) but even so, I doubt this is an
effective educational strategy for a large proportion of students, which leads
to an inefficient educational system. (That is, it ends up providing an
effective educating fewer students at a larger cost than other approaches.)

So, low-quality arguments. Not surprising though... they let anyone write
opinion pieces these days! <\-- this is a joke

~~~
quotemstr
Grade inflation would be less of a problem if GPA didn't saturate --- but it
does. The trouble is that if you squeeze everyone on to the top end of the
scale, you diminish the ability to use GPA to distinguish talent levels. You
turn school into a pass/fail system. Since not everyone is in fact equally
talented, we end up losing information. Economic misallocation of resources
makes us all poorer. There's real value in putting the smartest people on the
hardest problems, and it's hard to do that when everyone graduates at that
"the smartest people" level.

~~~
jmull
You’re assuming grades mainly exist to solve an industry problem. But why
should that be true? If I’m running a school I’ll use grades to further my own
school’s educational goals and trust the various industries and other post-
graduation institutions to figure out how to determine who best fits their
purposes for themselves.

There certainly _is_ a real value in putting the smartest (well, most able
actually, but I know what you mean) people on the hardest problems. So better
to use a system designed for the specific purpose rather than try to repurpose
something made for a different purpose.

~~~
quotemstr
I would argue that ability in industry is extraordinarily strongly correlated
with ability to earn high grades.

------
SolaceQuantum
_" At the same time, schools have become more liberal about accepting
applicants based on unorthodox qualifications, from athletic ability to
nonacademic accomplishments, disadvantageous backgrounds, and demonstrated
social "awareness.""_

At this point I stopped reading the article. I'm concerned this author(a
polisci/economics professor)'s definition of 'hard' is functionally equivalent
to 'only for the wealthy whites' again, as the specific time period he cites
as the beginning of college becoming too easy (1960s) coincides exactly with
desegregation (board vs brown was mid 1950s) AND _he specifically cites
disadvantaged backgrounds as part of that reason_. If I'm mistaken and the
author later addresses this, let me know and I'll actually finish the piece.

I am in general in agreement that grade inflation is a problem, drop out rates
should rapidly increase to help stem degree inflation in our populace, as this
is associated currently with saddling our future with increasingly difficult
hurdles, which will eventually bite us in the form of lagging social security,
population shrinkage, and economic instability. However, the arguments being
used are immediately suspect to me.

~~~
XCabbage
I honestly can't tell if:

a) you've failed to parse the prose you quote and think that it's complaining
outright about universities allowing in applicants from "disadvantaged
backgrounds", when in fact it is complaining about allowing in applicants
_specifically because_ they are from disadvantaged backgrounds who would not
meet previous merit-based admissions criteria, or

b) you genuinely mean to imply that advocating for the ideal of meritocracy is
not merely flawed but somehow equivalent to supporting a policy of explicit
racial segregation and class-based admissions, or

c) something else entirely

I'm downvoting, primarily because the ambiguity about what you're trying to
say makes this comment impossible to substantively engage with.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
I'm arguing that it's suspicious to me that someone would say that things only
started getting bad around the time where black people were allowed into
white-only instutitions and had access to white-only environmnents, and before
that time it was completely fair and should be returned to. That that was the
point where I paused and decided maybe this person doesn't actually have much
of merit to say and queried HN as to if the author has any actual, substantial
points.

~~~
weberc2
There were a lot of things going on in the world in the '60s. Whatever you
think of TFA, it's simply arguing for more rigor in education. Unless you
think racial minorities are less capable of rigorous study, there's no reason
to assume the article is racially coded.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
I didn't say that racial minorities were less capable of rigorous study,
merely that the article did not actually functionally advocate for rigor with
that statement, but instead is equating meritocracy with a time period that
didn't have meritocracy because people were excluded based on race. Which is
concerning.

~~~
weberc2
The article isn't making any such equivalence. It doesn't so much as imply a
pre-60s meritocracy. The fact that two things are contemporary doesn't suggest
a causal relationship. Perhaps if the article mentioned desegregation, one
could reasonably infer that the article was alluding to a causal relationship,
but it doesn't even do that. The article (and indeed the specific sentences
you referenced) is very explicit about the problem (decline of academic
standards) and it offers an explanation (the rise in value of nonacademic
standards).

If your subtext depends on ignoring everything about the original claims
(fixating solely on a date), you're being libelous.

------
currymj
Grades are fundamentally stupid. Grade inflation is as close as we can come,
realistically, to getting rid of them, so I’m in favor in most situations.

------
quotemstr
The college system has become so dysfunctional and so diluted as a signal of
intellect and diligence that I've been advocating hiring engineers right out
of high school instead. Employees hired this way would get the benefit of a
career that's four to six years longer and that starts without debt. Whatever
skills CS programs impart could be taught internally.

------
Theodores
Is this a global phenomenon?

In the UK we had an unemployment problem when Margaret Thatcher was around,
one solution to that was to lower the entry barriers for further education.
University became remarkably easy to get into, however, the economics of this
were such that teaching was different.

In the sciences it was much more profitable for a university to run access
courses with 10x the amount of 'customers'. However, you would not have
students getting one to one tuition time and having experiments taking up ten
foot of a workbench. It was more a matter of multiple choice questions with
none of the staff personally mentoring the students.

Some of the older courses were impossible to get a first in. The course I did
had historically only ever given out one first, just getting a pass was a
heroic achievement.

Due to the elitist nature of how it worked back then a given institution had a
certain amount of reputation that went with it so an employer would know that
getting a third from a highly reputable university was of merit, not to be
compared with a higher grade issued by a mere 'polytechnic'.

I did not think the elitism was bad back then. The reason being that if the
state had invested so much money in you then there was an expectation to pay
it back. But that all changes when the onus of payment falls on the students
and the bank of mum and dad.

Perhaps that is the nub of the problem. When you have students paying for
their education you need to have a certain amount of grade inflation to make
the investment worthwhile to them.

I would be interested to know if countries that do have state funded free
tertiary education can keep a grip of grade inflation. I know that some
professional degrees, e.g. in medicine, are not internationally comparable.
So, if Western countries don't recognise East European or other degrees in the
same way, there should be no need to grade inflate.

------
DoreenMichele
_There are many ways to achieve success and fulfillment that do not involve
attending an elite college. Instead of encouraging people to pursue options
well-matched to their abilities, however, we tell young people that their
self-worth hinges entirely on the brand name on their college diploma._

Oh, please. They make it sound like going to a top school is simply about ego
enhancement. It's more like about enhancing your net worth in the long run.

Grade inflation is probably about two forces colliding:

1\. Schools being used primarily for credentialing rather than for educating
per se.

2\. Increased awareness of "diversity" issues, for lack of a better term.

What you see is that members of some in group -- in this case upper class cis
het white males -- generally get scored better than members of various out
groups, such as women, people of color and LGBTQ. There are various factor as
to why that is, but part of the problem is straight up prejudice. There is
plenty of evidence that if an in group member does x, it gets credit and when
an out group member does the exact same thing, it doesn't get the same credit.

So there is a legitimate argument to be made that if your grades at a college
most strongly correlate to a particular demographic rather than performance -
especially if that demographic is the known and long standing in group that
controls everything -- then those grades aren't really measuring performance
per se to begin with. Thus they are merely a credentialing mechanism being
used to exclude out group members and perpetuate historical injustices.

The problem is that passing out As like candy doesn't actually fix prejudice
and social exclusion. It merely serves to erode the value of the signal that
grades are supposed to provide.

I don't know what the solution is. But I suspect that's a large part of the
mechanism driving such trends.

------
BuckRogers
The primary disagreement I have with "school doesn't matter" folks is that I
see more value in formal education than just getting ready to start a career.
I was forced to learn about things that I never would've otherwise, and along
the way increasing my ability to perform critical thinking was instilled.

I'm far from a "pedigree snob". I started at a community college and am the
biggest proponent of that path for most people. It's a huge benefit to be
employable, and a career such as being an electrician grants that in spades.
Too many go to college hoping to sit at a desk afterwards, do very little, and
be paid 6 figures just because you have some degree. It doesn't happen anymore
without networking / family connections.

It's critical to be skill-based, if you can pull that off without an
education, great. But there's no downside to having an employable skillset and
formal education. I see a lot of people that are against formal education try
to make it a split decision. Not all employable folks have a formal education,
and not all with a formal education are employable. I'm employable because of
my skillset, work ethic and education. Some folks look down on me because I
didn't go to a top university (I did go to a community college first, and had
no outside funding/help). Wouldn't change a thing and would recommend my path
to anyone. Community college is a must, and overall, choose your major wisely
based on skills that people pay for.

A good employee with skills can easily get through 2-4 years of school, so
there's no real excuse to not have it under the belt. I've seen plenty of
folks that are already successful go back and finish up their bachelors. It
also never expires unlike all the certs that companies try to sell.

It does grant some degree of credibility. It has to, as starting and
completing anything does. All that said, I'm opposed to pedigree snobs and
anti formal education folks alike.

------
choeger
The answer should actually be preparation & transparency. If a school prepares
its curriculum well in advance and tells every interested party "this is what
we expect and this is how we measure the success of learning" then there can
hardly be any grade inflation. Either the school sets ridiculously low targets
or it fails to be transparent.

Note that missing success in learning can be caused both by the students and
the teachers (or school). Grades are a way to measure that success and do not
necessarily reflect on one or another.

------
the_watcher
This article touches on some very real issues: grade inflation and the fact
that you really can just major-shop until you find one that doesn't really
require any effort. However, the author comes off as an extremist by
pretending that employers don't pay any attention to things like the degree
someone actually got. Someone with an engineering degree from an Ivy League
school or Wharton undergrad absolutely remains more impressive than someone
with the equivalent GPA in Grade Inflation Studies from the same school.

------
spunker540
How about we wrap around the alphabet to introduce a new grade ‘Z’ that’s
ostensibly as hard to get as A’s used to be?

~~~
0815test
The new grade will be called AAAAAAAAAA++++++ VERY SMOOTH TRANSACTION WOULD
ADMIT AGAIN.

------
theshadowknows
Back when school was hard we built the space shuttle. Now they it’s easy we
built facebook. I agree.

~~~
0xffff2
This is perhaps the falsest dichotomy I've ever read. Not only are there still
plenty of smart and capable people still graduating regardless of grade
inflation, but the people who built the shuttle are still around! The reasons
we can't build a better version are far more political than anything else.
Certainly education in a non-factor.

~~~
xhgdvjky
maybe it's mostly false, but there certainly has been an attitude change
towards high risk projects (imo)

------
jerf
In a way, calling it "grade inflation" is backwards. The problem isn't that
grades are going up, the problem is that the top end of grades to distinguish
is coming down. For a given skill that may be graded, assume for the sake of
argument that it is evenly distributed (fairly reasonable assumption) and that
the test is exactly accurate and precise (unreasonable, but makes the argument
easier and doesn't materially change the result). A grade represents an
assessment of the placement of the student between some bottom, represented by
some standard deviation, and caps everyone below that to the minimum grade,
and likewise on the top, everyone who blows out the top of the test gets
lumped into one bin at the top.

It is not particularly a problem that the arbitrary meaning of A or C is
wandering around. Many of use have played Japanese video games that give a
grade-based rank for your performance on some level. At times I've been a bit
surprised to get an A the first time I tried the level... only for me to
discover that there's also S, SS, SSS, and SSS+ actually above it. This scale
may feel weird for cultural reasons, but it still distinguishes various skills
just fine. There are some administrative problems in converting between the
various "A" grades, but that's already a problem anyhow and presumably at
least mostly solve to the satisfaction of the relevant entities.

The problem is that the ability to distinguish at the top end is being erased
as the top end of the tests get pulled down over time. This makes the tests
less useful for their own stated purpose. If one imagines for the sake of
argument a academic test whose minimum is -2 standard deviations and the top
end is -1 stddev, it's not a _terribly_ useful test. As academia goes, it's
strictly a subset of the utility of a test that measures from -3 stddev to +3.

(I qualify "academic" because there's plenty of practical, non-academic uses
for such a test, but in academia that's not very useful.)

There's nothing particular immoral about moving the "A" setpoint around. The
problem is that with insensitive tests, we lose the ability to distinguish
between someone who just barely topped out the test, and someone who is 2
stddev above it, and in academia, that's a pretty serious loss, for all kinds
of reasons.

Now, the question of _what you do_ with the grade I think is best considered
separately. You start with a clear view of the true situation, and then figure
out how you want to deal with it. You don't help yourself on _any_ level by
starting from a foundation of lies.

For similar reasons, I often remind my fellow developers, never lie to the
database. If you want to, for example, give someone a discount on service, you
don't do that by going in to the consumption database and telling it that they
used only 10 GB instead of 20. You do it by making sure your billing database
has a field for "special discount" and putting it there. You don't want to lie
to your databases, because that number isn't just used for billing, it's used
for all sorts of other things, things you don't even have a complete list of,
all of them assuming the database is telling the truth, and you don't know
what will break. Don't lie in the grades; tell the truth, and figure out how
to deal with the truth.

You may also note as a result of this that I'm actually in a bit of
disagreement with the professor. Making school harder isn't necessarily a
solution to any problem; the thing that needs to be done is to re-open that
top-end again. That's similar in some ways, but will be different in others.

------
Balgair
> Ironically, these tough standards make rigorous schools less attractive to
> many good students. I have spoken to admits who chose an elite university
> because they knew that there, they were unlikely to earn less than a B,
> while at Caltech they would have to work hard just to graduate.

John V.C. Nye's jeremiad against grade inflation is very good and well
written. However, it screams 'get off my lawn'. He is, no doubt, a very
accomplished person[0]. But I believe that he blind to the concerns and needs
of the current generation of students. Cheifly, the issue of tuition at
Caltech has radically changed the calculus of grades and of failing students.

The tuition with room and board at Caltech in 1982, the year after he
graduated from there, was $9481 for the school year [1]. In 2019 dollars that
is $26,654.02 [2]. This year the tuition with room and board is $67,887 [3],
roughly 2.5x over Dr. Nye's 'financial risk' at the time he went to Caltech.

Say you failed out after two years at Caltech fully on student loans and then
need to pay back those loans. Current rates and fees come to about 6%. So,
those two years ($135,774) at 6% comes out to ~$680 per month, just to keep
the principal at the same amount and not to add to it. At a wage of $15/hr for
the non-degreeed job you can then take, you have about $1750/mo left over,
after the debt is taken out.

Look, I'm not going to try to say that you can or cannot make it on ~$1750/mo
in Pasadena. But I think we all know that such a monthly income is not going
to be anywhere close to easy to live on. It will take some tight budgeting.
You can make up a lot of scenarios about how this 20 year old person can 'make
it work', but it'll take moving very far away from Pasadena (as it likely
would have in 1981, as well). To actually pay that down will take a LOT of
work.

Failing out of Caltech has never been a good option, despite the
consternations of old men who like to tell the young men what is what.
However, these days, the risks of failure at Caltech come with a much heavier
financial burden than they did nearly 40 years ago.

[0][https://economics.gmu.edu/people/jnye](https://economics.gmu.edu/people/jnye)

[1][https://caltechcampuspubs.library.caltech.edu/110/1/1981-198...](https://caltechcampuspubs.library.caltech.edu/110/1/1981-1982.pdf)

[2][https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/)

[3][https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/tuition-and-
fees](https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/tuition-and-fees)

------
arkades
Eh.

(1) I'm more sympathetic to schools that don't graduate everyone - which is
part of what the article is arguing for, explicitly - back in the old days
when you could pay for college with a couple of summers worth of full time
work. Today, it's a crushing debt that will stay with students for decades.
The school pretty much owes it to the students to ensure they graduate. That's
not an argument for making the school _easier_ , but that the school should be
going to whatever ends needed to ensure that the students _do_ get an
excellent education. The question isn't "how do I give out a curve?" it's "how
do I make sure every single person in this room gets an A-level knowledge of
the material?"

(2) I majored in a hard science in undergrad (bio major, chem and lit double-
minor). Our hardest class was OChem, where the professor would brag that only
4 people per semester would get A's. In OChem 1 I was #6 in the class and got
a B; in OChem 2 I was #2 in the class and got an A. I don't see that it did
anyone any favors: the actual class knowledge distribution was reasonably
bimodal around "people who were clawing over every single point to try and be
one of the A's" and "people trying not to get an F". Instead of a grade that
reflected their mastery of the knowledge, most of us got lumped into the
middle of an artificial bell. But it was orgo: its reputation for killer
difficulty gave the professor free reign to grade how he wanted.

(3) Do we care about inter-major inflation? Are we worried about the relative
difficulty of getting an A in Lit vs. getting an A in biochemistry? Which of
the reasoning in favor of "difficult grades" exempts inter-major comparisons?
Why don't we care that an A in literature is a joke to get compared to a B in
physics? How would we make an A in business as hard to get as an A in
chemistry? Who would actually benefit?

(4) Much of the criticism of inflation comes from credentialism. Universities
were never anything _but_ credential-producers; the only thing that's changed
is that enough of the public now attends that that's visible to "the masses."

(5) What's the value of a university education? If the answer is " the
intrinsic satisfaction of learning", grades are irrelevant. If the answer is
"social signaling", then grade inflation is already working as intended. If
the answer is "job training," then grades of any arbitrary difficulty will
still generally be a poor proxy for how one will function in an actual job
environment. What's the defense for the value of grading?

(6) I appreciate that we implicitly deny the idea that students might be
getting better. Average scores on med student board exams have been climbing
YoY for a while, as new and better study aids keep getting released. The
average med student now knows, objectively, more and better than his
predecessors did. is it shocking that something similar may occur in other
fields? If it is, damn, that's a more amazing failure of the educational
industry than any amount of inflation.

------
potiuper
Article is grade A evidence of a failed education. School is not suppose to be
"hard" or "easy". Learning, which is completely subjective, does not have an
objective difficulty associated with it rather an estimated or average
investment in time and other resources.

------
paulcole
Counterpoint: My parents didn’t pay $50,000 a year for me to get Cs.

~~~
nkrisc
I'm having trouble understanding your point. Surely if you got Cs that would
be on you. Are you suggesting you should be given As because you pay $50,000 a
year? Or that because your parents were making a large investment in your
education you made sure to work hard to earn good grades?

~~~
MagnumOpus
> Are you suggesting you should be given As because you pay $50,000 a year

To spell it out: Parents will take their dearest offspring to another similar
college where he gets an A instead of a C if grades at a particular college
are not inflated. This is a result of competition for business among colleges.

(The only places that are exempt are places so extremely selective that
admission/graduation alone is a strong enough signal, i.e. Caltech)

------
adamnemecek
Idk my experience is that in college, a lot of the TF are legitimately
clueless. I think that college needs to be more of a support environment for
self education rather than this sort of place where you literally repeat what
you are told.

Society would be better off if people were guided to autodidacticism.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _Society would be better off if people were guided to autodidacticism...._

I don't know man?

Might be fine if you're majoring in something harmless like music, or art. But
for the safety of society at large you just can't implement such a naive
system for majors like nuclear engineering or virology. It'd just be
irresponsible to the point of being outright dangerous.

~~~
jrockway
Do people learn anything from lectures about safety at school? Everyone takes
computer ethics. Everyone knows about Therac-25. Where are we 30 years later?
Engineers still implement open-loop control systems. Programmers still write
programs with integer overflows. Speed to market beats safety every time
(hello, MCAS). So was it really worth thousands of dollars for someone to tell
you about that in a class? A few people dying is always a lower priority than
a higher share price, it seems. So might as well not waste money on education,
right?

------
beezle
I believe a lot of this grade inflation can be attributed to the social
engineering goal of getting more women in college/university (but not the
women per se).

As one example, my school was extremely rigorous and a difficult grader, most
students in STEM or business programs. In the late 80s/early 90s a big push
was made to even out a biased m/f ratio. They did this by greatly expanding
the arts/humanities programs. They now have 55/45 overall m/f with over 60%
female in the arts college.

Unfortunately, humanities are well known for grading biased towards A/B and
now this university has one of the largest amounts of grade inflation of any
private school since 2000.

Above may be anecdotal, but I believe much of the grade inflation is due to
similar changes in focus away from rigorous subjects with right/wrong type
answers (ie STEM) to those where interpretations are open and grades are more
for participation and completion of assignments. That women seem to be more
attracted to those subjects has allowed instutions to expand enrollment,
balance overall populations and make a lot more money.

------
klmr
The essay is very light on evidence. Pathological cases (such as buying
grades) aside, maybe grades have generally increased because teaching has
gotten better? I certainly wouldn’t posit this as an absolute truth but
research into teaching methods _has_ gotten better. 50 years ago teaching
wasn’t the least bit scientific. Modern research into teaching methods _is_ a
proper science, even if it’s hindered by many false starts and slow adoption.
Modern technology also offers vast potential for better teaching and learning.

I’m not sure how useful grades are when everybody gets an A. But if the reason
is a phenomenal teacher (and better teachers reproducibly produce better
performing students [e.g. 1]) then maybe grades are simply an unhelpful
metric. “Stopping grade inflation” isn’t just not a solution, but actively
counter-productive. “Grading on a curve” when every student has mastered the
curriculum (which, in higher education, is entirely achievable) is bogus.

[1]
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jae.2539](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jae.2539)

~~~
mannykannot
Now we have two claims that are light on evidence (evidence that good teachers
get better results is not evidence that this is the actual reason for
increasing grades.)

~~~
klmr
Teaching research is unfortunately fairly balkanised and my brief stint in the
science of teaching was in German, so I could, for the most part, only offer
references to German text books. However, it’s established that active
learning increases student performance significantly [1], and systematic
active learning was only introduced into curricula fairly recently (and not
yet pervasively). Where this was done this has by necessity caused an at least
partial “grade inflation” but I’ll admit that its adoption is far from
satisfactory so (as my comment already noted!) it _might_ not be sufficient to
explain grade inflation.

[1]
[https://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.full](https://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.full)

