18 ms·

Hyperinflation in America: The End of Grades?

96 points by wallflower 10y ago

jernfrost 10y ago
It is just one other indicator of the flaws of the free market approach to everything in the US. Whether it is health care or education, treating it as a product or service sold to consumers creates perverse incentives. The market has become a religion in the US. It is taken as dogma that it is always the most efficient way to do things. When it is stunningly inefficient. I've used health care in the US a number of times, at it is quite grotesque how they treat it as a sales transaction dishing out as much pills and treatment as they can, almost like a car salesman trying to get you to buy add-ons. My US doctor insisted on giving me anti-biotics despite the fact that I had the common cold and protested that this does not work for a virus infection. Whatever you issue is they attempt to give you the most expensive treatment even if something cheaper would do. And there is in an unhealthy obsession with unnecessary frills. Anything to get the customer to keep coming back. I quite liked American university, but it was extremely lax. They gave students endless opportunities to fix their grades. Again anything to make the customers happy. Grades was rather pointless as it only seemed like A's mattered.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Before Obamacare, 1 out of every 2 dollars spent on health care in the US was spent by the government. It is hardly a free market. The education business has heavy government financial involvement, too. On the other side, check the software business. It's a powerful engine for growth and wealth in this country, despite having driven prices for software literally to zero. And the software business in the US is the most free market industry in the country - no licenses, permits, subsidies, tariffs, regulations, etc.
  - calibraxis 10y ago
    Government subsidy (and occasional gov't supported monopolies like Bell Labs) is responsible for the software industry. This is very well-documented. Public takes the biggest risks, then rewards are privatized. Hence the economic importance of programs like DARPA. http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/ http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/
    - awt 10y ago
      How do you know tech wouldn't be more advanced than it is now if the public hadn't been forced to pay for government science?
      - lunchTime42 10y ago
        True free market approach would be to have two variants of running buisnesses run against one another.
        hypeibole 10y ago
        Isn't that mostly what happened? US pushing science and education during the Cold War to compete against the USSR?
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      Hmm, I've been in the software industry for 40 years. Never got a dollar in subsidy.
      - drauh 10y ago
        Because anecdote == data?
        WalterBright 10y ago
        What significant subsidies did Microsoft/Google/Apple/Oracle/etc. get? Also, Edison invented the vacuum tube upon which it is all based. I read a biography of him, and he never got a subsidy. Shouldn't he get all the credit?
        hobs 10y ago
        Google started university research project with NSF grants helping them to create the goliath we see today, they probably would not exist otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Early_histor... Also I would call most of the government projects that Oracle is on subsidies considering how little value they deliver and how much they cost.
  - lunchTime42 10y ago
    Its never free enough. And if it where, it was the customers fault. And if the customers behaved flawless and it would not work. There would be traitors, sabbotaging a perfect system. In a closed worldview critque acceptance is not even possible anymore. Anything brought up is not evaluated but instantly deflected. There is no - "Lets measure this" and compare (Lets call it the free market approach to ideas ;) just offense and defense. Thanks for proving the Pa-OP right.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      When you define "free market" as "absence of government regulation" then you can get whatever result you want, because you can build something that looks like a government inside it, not call it a government, and have it do the thing you need a government to do. And then if you get one of those things which is doing the bad things governments do, you do call it a government and it isn't a free market anymore. The lesson from this is not "free markets are bad," it's "simplistic ideologies are useless." We know that private actors are bad at some things, like funding basic research and building roads and utilities. We also know that governments are bad at some things, like making consumer products. So let the government build the roads and let GE make the washing machines. The worst alternative is to have the government do half of something. This is the US healthcare system. Single payer has problems, but it works. The complete absence of government in healthcare would have different problems but would also work. What we have doesn't work. It's a corrupt mechanism for funneling public money into drug companies. Here's the test for whether the government should do something: Does it make sense for the government to pay for this and then give it away for absolutely no money whatsoever to every citizen of the country? If not, the government shouldn't do it. Notice that the answer for healthcare is then not obvious, but the thing we have is not a valid answer.
    - jerf 10y ago
      The point is not that making health care more free market would necessarily improve it. The point is that using the US healthcare system to beat up on free markets is fallacious, because the US healthcare system is not a free market in the first place. Cards on the table, I do think that more freedom in the market would be good for the entire system, from top to bottom. But I can find myself in total agreement with those who think it should be more socialized that what we have now is a really crazy, chaotic system that seems to manage to combine the worst of both worlds. As a result, it's every bit as valid to claim that socialized health care is a disaster because the US health care system proves that it doesn't work... which is to say, an entirely invalid and fallacious claim.
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    The issue with health care and free markets, is that a fully free health care market would not morally sit well with a lot of people, and some sectors of health care lack the ingredients that make free markets work. EG: in a free market, if someone has a healthcare emergency, yet cannot afford to pay for the service required, the free market would say -- dump this person in the street. Not exactly a morally pleasing choice. Free markets assume a rational and informed consumer; a person having a medical emergency is not always going to be a rational and informed consumer. Not to say there is plenty of scope for a competitive marketplace in healthcare (there is, particularly for less critical care and wellness etc.), but certain portions really don't fall in scope in my opinion. The problem with the US healthcare market is that it kind of pretends to be this "free market healthcare" system, while in reality being a half-baked socialized medical system built in bits and pieces over time. Some people are covered by the government (Medicare and Medicaid). The government relies on companies to provide much of the remainder (with tax incentives), but heavily regulates the type of health care that can be offered (eg HMOs). Since not everyone is employed by a large company, this leaves many gaps where people have no de facto health coverage at all. Except for emergency rooms, which (thanks to some notorious emergency street dumping instances in the 1980s) will accept anyone these days. It's a mess. "Obamacare" merely plugged a couple of gaps. Much greater reform is needed, IMHO. But there does seem to be a chorus of people who, with their strong belief in free markets, believe that the US healthcare system is a free market one (it's not) and consequently believe that the US healthcare system is the best in the world (anyone who has traveled knows how laughable this statement is). It's hard to get meaningful reform as long as this belief persists.
    - neonhomer 10y ago
      > EG: in a free market, if someone has a healthcare emergency, yet cannot afford to pay for the service required, the free market would say -- dump this person in the street. So before the EMTALA was passed in 1986 people were dying in the street? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
      - soundwave106 10y ago
  - xenadu02 10y ago
    Healthcare is not and cannot ever be a free market. There is a massive asymmetry because everyone will need it at some random point not of their choosing and when they do need it the consequences of not having it can be death. Healthcare is not a fungible good. If you have aggressive cancer you can't just switch to a phsychiatrist because he/she is a "cheaper good" than your oncologist. Delaying purchase of your heart surgery may mean death.
    - rqebmm 10y ago
      Not to mention the inability to negotiate. "Excuse me sir, I know I might be having a heart attack, but can you please provide me a quote for this ambulance ride? I'd like to do some due diligence." Said exactly no one.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - fbonetti 10y ago
    Software is essentially a luxury item though. I know that we engineers like to think we're the gods of the universe, but nobody needs software to survive. People survived just fine without software for literally all of human history.
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Grade inflation is a very good example of why the institution offering the education should not be in charge of testing if the education was effective.
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    In the UK we have examination boards for school level exams, I'd love to see that extended to degree qualifications as well.
    - danieltillett 10y ago
      Didn't you have a major problem with schools choosing the examination board that marked the easiest?
      - red_admiral 10y ago
        Yes, and we also have grade inflation - we used to mark on an A-E scale but now we have an A* too. BBC article, with interesting graphs: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11012369 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11012369
      - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
        Yes, but I don't think that is too difficult to resolve.
        danieltillett 10y ago
        Yes don't let the schools choose who is going to be assessing if their teaching is effective.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - Jach 10y ago
    The institution offering the education must be able to test if their education is effective, education doesn't work well without tight feedback loops. Neither teachers nor students are drones whose behavior can be measured by some perfect third party process or human(s). That said what passes for education at most places works best when you do start treating teachers and students as drones. The logical conclusion of that is something like Khan Academy with spaced repetition, and the savings in time and money worldwide would be tremendous if that system were to be embraced by the US department of education. What passes for education is definitely worthwhile for some things, but it's not really in the traditional spirit of education.
- chjohasbrouck 10y ago
  I used to read about countries where it was a common practice to pay bribe money to be given a job, and think how awful that was. Now I live in a country that buries its youth in debt that can't be discharged through bankruptcy, to pay for an increasingly ineffective education, to get a job almost anyone could do, that lists higher education as a requirement when it really doesn't have to. If you zoom out to the big picture, it's almost as if employment in the US is becoming a pay-to-play system.
  - Jach 10y ago
    For your first bit, do you mean things like fathers paying some shop owner some money to give their sons a chance at a job over some other kids that went through a hiring process, or do you mean things (still going on) like politicians backing certain regulations that just so happen to mightily benefit the corporation they become a highly paid member of when they lose their reelection or retire? Pay-to-play, spending money to make money, has usually been the rule even if you're born rich. The trick is always on how to spend less money than other people at your level to make the same or more -- your required piece of paper, while still more expensive than it used to be, isn't unavoidably crippling-debt expensive, and so with a little forethought you can get in the game with a lot less expense than some of your peers. If basic income can somehow work economically we might turn into a free-to-play system, I don't know if that would actually be better overall though.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      >> I used to read about countries where it was a common practice to pay bribe money to be given a job > For your first bit, do you mean things like fathers paying some shop owner some money to give their sons a chance at a job over some other kids that went through a hiring process, or do you mean things (still going on) like politicians backing certain regulations that just so happen to mightily benefit the corporation they become a highly paid member of when they lose their reelection or retire? I assume he's talking about neither of those, but rather the common practice of buying a job for yourself. For example, you might go to a highly-placed English functionary with a big bag of cash and purchase a post as customs inspector for a port somewhere in the Empire. Historically this was more the norm than the exception in colonial Europe. (Fun fact: the customs inspector position was generally a lot more expensive than notionally better jobs like "governor" (also for sale). That's because the customs inspector was ideally placed to take bribes himself.)
- neonhomer 10y ago
  > What caused the most recent bout of grade inflation? Some point to the rise in tuition—and educational debt... One of the largest reasons for skyrocketing tuition is the US government's guaranteed student loans. And those loans are very difficult to discharge by declaring bankruptcy, which makes the loans less risky to the schools. This is the farthest thing from free market capitalism.
- cpursley 10y ago
  Calling the American healthcare system "free-market" is disingenuous at worse and hilarious at best. It's probably the most regulated and convoluted sector of the US economy. In contrast, the pet healthcare system in the US is much less regulated. As a result, getting care for my pets is so much easier to navigate (you can actually get price quotes!) and much multitudes cheaper than human healthcare, despite the similar medical procedures and training required of doctors.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Okay this is the worst argument for an unregulated healthcare system I have ever heard. 1) How much money goes into pet medicine research vs human? 2) What happens when a pet is sick and the cost of care exceeds money of owner? You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no research, and most bills > $1000 lead to euthanasia? Sure that would be a cheap healthcare system...
    - refurb 10y ago
      You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no research What? Animal health is a huge industry. Zoetis was spun off of Pfizer and is making money hand over fist. Lots of new animal drugs are approved each year.
    - xkcd-sucks 10y ago
      Animal drugs are the same as human drugs, plus all the human drugs which fail fairly late in the development pipeline. Animal physiology re: absorption, toxicity, metabolism etc. is pretty well studied because most mammals are used for drug testing/as models of human disease.
    - crpatino 10y ago
      You have packed a large number of biases in a single line: > You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no research, and most bills > $1000 lead to euthanasia? Sure that would be a cheap healthcare system... 15-20 year technology (and I hope you agree modern medicine is, broadly speaking, a form of technology) is not old; it is robust and time tested. Today, building business critical operations in Fortune 500 companies on top of Linux is a no brainer, but not so much in 1996; and whoever told you otherwise back then was both unprofessional and self-deluded with evangelist zeal. Your claim that veterinarian medicine has "no research" does not hold water either. Sure, there might be less money being expended in researching animal health care than human health care, but this does not mean that the science behind veterinarian medicine is any less valid. If anything, it's probably more valid because there are so many less emotional hot-button issues and underhanded political agendas lurking around it. About the $1k bills, there are two ways to see it. You claim that it is a bad thing that most >$1K procedures end up with pacient death. I, on the other hand, would like to point out that this is a proof that it is possible for a whole calss of modern health care professionals to charge <$1k for procedures that solve most non life-threatening conditions and remain gainfully in business. Note this argument is valid regradless of your position on human euthanasia. Finally, your use of "cheap" healthcare system is used as a double-entendre. You are conflating "affordable" with "stingy" in that single word. As exposed above, you can clearly see that the first not necessarily implies the second.
- snarfy 10y ago
  If it were a free market, you would see prices advertised. This is how you know it's not a free market. This is true in a lot of markets, not just healthcare.
  - neonhomer 10y ago
    Good point, there's only one medical center I've heard in the US that actually advertises their prices: http://surgerycenterok.com/pricing/ http://surgerycenterok.com/pricing/
- micahbright 10y ago
  "...the free market approach to everything in the US"...It's almost as if you believe there is a free market in education or healthcare or...almost anything in the US.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  The only flaw with free market economies is assuming the US actually has one. The regulation of commerce is so extreme in some areas as to border on near fascism (don't equate the term with NAZI) : where government dictates prices for goods and services without risking anything of its own. Politicians setting rates and guarantees that are not driven by market need. grade inflation exists because of this unwillingness to offend people and telling people they are not the best if offensive. hence why colleges like affirmative action is that they will get candidates not used to being at the top of their class and be more willing to accept lower grades (go look it up, it does exist and been studied) the US health care system, well it only got into the condition it was in because of over regulation. preventing insurance from crossing state lines pretty much doomed it
- refurb 10y ago
  My US doctor insisted on giving me anti-biotics despite the fact that I had the common cold and protested that this does not work for a virus infection. Your doctor doesn't make any money when they prescribe something. They make money off the office visit. There was absolutely zero financial gain for the doc prescribing you antibiotics.
- specialist 10y ago
  "flaws of the free market approach" But, but, (sputters), but the Patriotic American Baby Jesus loves Freedom Markets™.
dukoid 10y ago
Probably will lead to a more fine-grained scale for the A grades....
- efaref 10y ago
  In the UK we introduced the A* grade as a "solution" to this problem; first at GCSE level (end of compulsory high school, age 15-16) and then at A level (pre-university, age 17-18). Even that just postpones the problem, as grade inflation continues. I expect we'll see A* * before long, and then eventually grade sheets will look like eBay reviews, and students will just get a star count.
- coldcode 10y ago
  Given the tendency of clustering of grades there is no scale which cannot be compressed. A1, A2, A3 could become A.000001, A.000002... and thus still mean nothing useful.
jacobolus 10y ago
Grades are both a poor pedagogical tool and a poor measuring stick. They’re too coarse, too removed from the immediate learning feedback loop, too inconsistent from course to course, and too ambiguous in meaning (should you get the best grade for working hardest? for understanding the material best? for the best writing or mathematical reasoning skills?). At best, they provide a tremendous distraction for everyone; at worst, they convince some students who are performing well they can slack off, make students at the bottom give up hope and stop trying, cause incredible anxiety for students in the middle, and also create huge headaches and heartbreaks for instructors. Simultaneously, they give parents the misleading impression they know what is happening at school, and thereby discourage parents from getting more directly involved in their children’s education. The main reason grades were adopted and persist is that they’re relatively easy to apply, aren’t that complicated to reason about heuristically (even if this is often misleading), and they scale across an institution / between institutions. In my opinion, grades should be entirely abolished for students up through middle school, and replaced with written reports from the instructor. They aren’t really appropriate later, either, but high school grades seem to be one of the only available tools for guiding the college admissions process and I don’t presently have any better equally scalable idea. Colleges should of course do whatever they want, after all, the students are adults at that point. Then again, I feel rather the same way about institutional schooling in general.
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  I went through my higher education basically without grades. Almost all courses were project based, which were done in teams. If the team decided you were a non-perfomer, there would be a discussion with a teacher. This freed up a lot of time for the teachers, so general knowledge was tested by teachers in personal meetings, where you had to explain to him/her what you had learned. If your explanation wasn't good enough, the teacher would explain things again so you would understand. So it's not just a test, but a more personal way for a teacher to feel if you really understood the subject. A system like this only works when everyone loves what he or she is learning. 40% of the students didn't finish the first year. After the first year almost everyone made it.
  - 10y ago
spiderfarmer 10y ago
I love the US, but only as a tourist destination. There is no policy in the US that I can think of that I prefer over the way things are organized in my own country. I don't care if I pay 60% taxes. I'm well off, as well as my temporarily unemployed neighbours, there are no beggars in the streets, the roads are paved nicely and I can visit a doctor without him bankrupting me.
- someguydave 10y ago
  To be fair this the lifestyle most elites in the US also have.
  - emp_zealoth 10y ago
    They also live in gated communities with armed guards, have to put up with theft and batter, carjackings, etc. I genuinely do not understand how you can tolerate living like that - youtube channels telling people how to stop their house being robbed ("It works! My house is the only one that wasn't in the whole neighbourhood! Woo!")
    - jjnoakes 10y ago
      You think that sensationalist view reflects reality for a vast majority of Americans? I've lived here for decades in 15 different states. I've been poor. I've been middle class. I've been friends with the "elite". I've lived in big cities and small towns. I've never seen a car jacking. I've never seen an armed guard assigned to a gated community. I've never seen a mugging. I'm not sure I've ever witnessed a crime beyond traffic violations. I'm sure they exist. But to think they are common from watching YouTube?
      - spiderfarmer 10y ago
        I've been to the states for three weeks, driving from cheap motel to cheap motel. As you say, most of the US is just fine. But even in my three weeks I have seen lots of homeless people at busstops and intersections. I've heard distant gunshots in the (very) cheap motel in LA, where the police sirens were so common that I mistakenly thought that we were really close to a police station. I saw so many people who were dangerously obese that I can't blame the people who repeat the "FAT MURICANS" meme. Some major roads were riddled with potholes and looked nothing like the images we saw in movies that supposedly play in LA. Let's just say the image I had beforehand (mostly instilled by Hollywood movies) was exactly the opposite.
koliber 10y ago
It depends on what you want grades to express. If you want grades to express students' strength relative to each other, a quota of say 35% A's per course might be appropriate. On the other hand, if grades are meant to show how students do an a more objective and time-invariant set of criteria, maybe grade inflation is OK. Maybe it means that student's are getting generally smarter, or more efficient at learning. IQ has been rising over time as well, as has efficiency in many workplaces. Perhaps grade inflation, at least partially, reflects this as well? I am not saying that this is the case. Rather I would like to throw a hypothesis out there, as it is one that is not often expressed. I would love to hear arguments for and against the above ideas.
- Retric 10y ago
  US IQ's have stopped increasing, we are also getting shorter.
  - pc86 10y ago
    [citation needed]
    - Retric 10y ago
      Americans shrinking as junk food takes its toll https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/apr/04/usa https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/apr/04/usa America Loses Its Stature as Tallest Country http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/12/AR2007081200809.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08...
      - whamlastxmas 10y ago
        The article, at a glance, doesn't really seem to give information on the data that lead to a "shorter" conclusion. Does it account for the fact that the US receives a ton of immigration from Mexico and South America, whose population is quite short? Are American families with no hispanic genetics also getting shorter? My guess is no.
- 10y ago
Jach 10y ago
A lot of the "stress" of grades seems to be bucketed into a general claim of ego-shattering "I'm different and moreover lesser than my better peers!" effect. I think it would be bad if we got rid of grades based on that philosophy of coddling. The more significant cause of stress I think is simply that grades are tied to things beyond the student's particular ranking in a class. The article mentions that the possible beginning of the inflation trend was the simple relation of your grades to the likelihood of being shipped off to Vietnam. Since then it's only gotten worse, and I can think of several other things grades now tie in to. If your grades are bad enough, you might lose your funding that allows you to go to school in the first place, and you need that for the pretty much unrelated problem of tuition being ridiculously high. (I don't really think the students-as-customers mentality that has developed also comes along with a I've-paid-now-give-me-an-A mentality.) I would find the threat of losing a scholarship a lot more stressful than the fact that some people in my class are smarter and/or work harder than me, and knowing a few people with such scholarships I was amazed by their apparent composure come finals season. If your grades are bad enough, certain companies won't look at you when you apply. This has become less of a deal in tech (though one place I interviewed at did ask for my GPA) but is still a common filter. If your grades are bad enough, graduate programs won't have you even with a strongly worded letter of recommendation from one of your professors. The article proposes some sort of top-down solution (from the government's department of education?) is needed. Maybe that can work, I'm skeptical. The approach is at odds with keeping rankings private to the school and unconnected to external things.
whack 10y ago
The author is depressingly right. The people this is ironically going to hurt most: The really smart/hard-working students who attend public universities. I used to be one such student. I attended a large public university that had a great deal of "intellectual diversity." The majority of the students were average, in terms of their drive/motivation/intellect. However, there was also a numerically large minority that was just as talented and driven, as the students whom you would find in the Ivy Leagues. Which is why companies like Google and Facebook still showed up to recruit at our college, every single year. Which is why elite post-grad programs like Stanford's recruited a lot of our graduates, every year. They wouldn't be interested in the average student at our college, but they were certainly interested in recruiting the top 10-20% of our student base. With grade inflation though, if everyone's grades are bunched up together in the 3.8+ range, it becomes extremely hard to distinguish between the top students and the average students. And one unlucky bad grade is all it takes for a top student to suddenly seem like an average student. In such a world, without any reliable way to distinguish between the top students and the average students, companies like Google would not even bother showing up to recruit at public universities like ours, and would instead restrict themselves to selective universities like Stanford. One of the most important roles of the university system, is to serve as engines for social mobility. "Even if you're born into an average family and attend an average public university, if you work really hard and get good grades, you can still get a post-graduate degree from an elite university, and get recruited into elite jobs." Grade inflation, or getting rid of grades entirely, may lead to equality of outcome within a university, but it's also going to severely weaken one of the most important mechanisms for social mobility.
- vitobcn 10y ago
  I find this graph outlining the frequency of different grades from 1949-2009 to be enlightening [1]. Around 1940's only 15% of grades were "A", and in the last few years they went up to close to 45%. The source data is coming from research compiled by Rojstaczer and Healy [2]. --- [1]: http://pazymino1evolutionliteracy.blogs.umassd.edu/files/2012/01/Grade-Distribution-American-Colleges-Evolution-Literacy.jpg http://pazymino1evolutionliteracy.blogs.umassd.edu/files/201... [2]: http://rampages.us/profjhonn/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/2015/10/Where-A-Is-Ordinary-2012.pdf http://rampages.us/profjhonn/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/20...
galfarragem 10y ago
Grade inflation is known for a long time and really bad for students. According my teachers, when they graduated (40 years ago) the best student of my college scored 14/20. When I graduated, the top student scored 18/20. The real problem is that public intitutions hire based on college scores so younger grads have an unfair advantage. To solve grade inflation a bell curve would work: best tests would grade A+, next ones would grade A and sucessively independently of scores itself. You would have always the same relative amount of each grade scale along the years.
- MikeNomad 10y ago
  When I first started teaching (university level), trying to come up with what I thought would be acurate grades would keep me awake most nights. Asking fellow faculty revealed that they too had wrestled with the same problem, they developed a "feel" for what was right, and that they had simply accepted it as a pain point. I refused to accept that. One semester I told them at the beginning of the semester that they were competing against their classmates. I was not setting upper and lower bounds for grades, their classmates were. I used the full range of grades (A+ to F), and when I tabbed the grade distribution, the results freaked me out: It was an almost perfect bell curve. I decided to use the method again the following semester. Same results. I did it again the following semester. Same results again. I then permanently adopted the method. Other results included the, "Why didn't I get an "A" on Project/Paper X" drama during office hours dropping off to nothing; Student's were much more comfortable knowing they were competing against their classmates, rather than trying to "figure out" their professor; My Teacher Evaluation scores didn't change across my changing grading methods; My stress level went _way_ down, and allowed me to better concentrate on creating and delivering content.
  - MikeNomad 10y ago
    Ugh. Should read, "One semester I told my students at the beginning of the semester..." Sorry.
heartsucker 10y ago
At my university (UCSB '12), grades were close to meaningless. I got a BSc in Math and graduated with a 2.8 (or lower?) because I loaded up on upper division math courses. I had friends who got 3.9's because they got a BA in communications or biz. econ. So clearly GPA varies heavily with degree, not to mention institution. There were some professors who straight up said they always failed the bottom X percent of the class. So if you knew the material and "passed," you still got an F. Or the professor whose final was literally "memorize this two page proof and regurgitate it verbatim." Or the <ethnic/gender> studies professor who fail your papers for disagreeing with them. There should just be Pass / Fail. Enough with this GPA circus.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  I couldn't agree more with most of your points but I think that pass/fail isn't the right approach. Taking an aggressive schedule in order to get your "I spent four years doing what I was told" paper and GTFO ASAP hurts your grades Working a job hurts your grades Extracurricular hurt your grades. What I see is a simple duty cyle problem. Students have a finite productive capacity (not sleeping isn't a semester-term solution). If they take a schedule that requires more than a certain % duty cyle then they take a GPA hit. If you could account for the amount of productivity required by a class you can take duty cycle into account when calculating GPA. For example, 120 credits in 4yr is a lot easier than 120 credits in 3yr. Five 1xx or 2xx gen-eds in one semester is a ton easier than four 3xx or 4xx classes in a STEM discipline. Having some way to account for the extra effort required to run wide open for a semester or run close to wide open for 3yr would go a long way. People playing the game (college) on easy mode (BA in business, no job, is a member of a frat with a really good test bank his major, etc) get the same GPA as people playing on hard mode (engineering degree with minor in something else, academic club involvement, works a job on the side, etc) and there's no way to tell them apart when it's all said and done. If there was a way to score classes (and professors) based on typical grades then profs could grade how they want and students could take what they want and not be punished. You could do something like track the average grade for a class/prof combination and track average grades for students. You could eliminate the effect of one prof who teaches one of many sections of one required class as well as the effect of a bunch or really good/bad students enrolling in a class on one particular semester. You could also eliminate the effect of taking a ton of really hard classes or unknowingly enrolling in a section taught by a really tough prof. Basically if you applied dynamic curves to classes at the university level then you can account for easy/hard classes, profs and schedules. There's got to be some catch but I can't think of one that couldn't be worked around with effort since it doesn't have to be perfect, just better than nothing. You don't need to make getting bad grades in four hard classes have an equivalent GPA to getting good grades in four easy classes, just making some way to partially account for the difference would help. Obviously this wouldn't be in the financial interest of colleges but that's a different issue.
sgarg26 10y ago
Some of the most elite private high schools in America do not issue grades. Instead, universities have to rely on standardized test scores and recommendation letters
randcraw 10y ago
Why not use percentile instead? It's fair. It's clearly the best way to compare students within a class or within a school. (I've heard India has been doing this for years.) If you then insist on normalizing the percentiles across schools and eras, have the students also take a standardized final exam (like GRE, but specific to each course). You don't have to test every course, just the ones that teach fundamentals. This should be more than sufficient to make schools (and percentiles) comparable. This is comparable to the british first/second/third-class system. It'd also do wonders for pressuring schools to up their game. It's be mighty embarrassing if a tony private school scored substantially lower on their standard tests than a moo U. It could also validate MOOCs and other alternative forms of instruction.
restalis 10y ago
I met teachers whose grading philosophy was that the results has to form a normal distribution across the pool of students. If we're adopting that then we're having grades denoting a relative quality not an absolute one (which pretty much everyone assumes). The author may be right in her implication of faulty grading, but the evolution of grade concentrations over the span of many student generations does not necessarily denote an existing issue. The education got better over the years, maybe the results are from increased learning and teaching efficiency. Was there a test taken both now and 60 years ago and considered their respective grading results in the drawn conclusion? And finally, I don't want to criticize the author, but the idea of "world without grades" is just silly. Grades are the result of a measurement and the measurement in itself is something valuable everywhere, including in education. The author could have had a more limited claim, by only denouncing current grading practice performed at the same institutions that do the teaching.
- Erik816 10y ago
  I can't imagine anyone who has gone through school and thought that grades were somehow an "absolute" measure of quality. It's quite clear that grades are relative to both the standard of your fellow students and the current academic standards for your school. The whole idea of a "grade" is to sort the relative quality of various things or people, and that is what they are supposed to do. The problem comes when people start to THINK they are an absolute measure of worth, and thus believe that they are entitled to an "A" because they worked hard. Never mind that everyone else worked hard too, and some of them performed better.
dcre 10y ago
I wonder if this could be related to more classes being taught by adjuncts. Tenured professors don't have to care what students think of them. I'm surprised this question was not raised by the article.
Retric 10y ago
The short answer is no, because the population demographics is not changing that rapidly. Also, More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S. Net Loss of 140,000 from 2009 to 2014; Family Reunification Top Reason for Return http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s/ http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-... PS: But don't let facts get in the way of your preconceived notions.
- pc86 10y ago
  That's Mexico specifically. Immigration in the US across the board increases the population. I don't know if immigration from Mexico + Central America increases or decreases. And you seem to have conveniently ignored > The article, at a glance, doesn't really seem to give information on the data that lead to a "shorter" conclusion. and > Are American families with no hispanic genetics also getting shorter?
  - Retric 10y ago
    If you want to break it down by races: Hispanic Americans are getting taller. White Americans are getting shorter. Crap diet seems to be the main cause for whites, with improved economic situation helping out Hispanics. Anyway, again your just picking ideas from thin air, do some research. And no I am not going to give more sources when your countering with arguments backed up by hot air. PS: I left the rest of his comment alone because while incorrect it was not comically wrong.
    - pc86 10y ago
      The only two things I've said in this thread were that a citation was needed (which doesn't mean I disagree or don't believe you, just that a citation was needed), and that when someone asked a question about Hispanics your response was specifically about Mexicans. And in that comment I literally said the phrase "I don't know." Meanwhile you've acted as if your facts need no citations and that I am somehow "picking ideas from thin air" when I've only asked questions about things about people have said. But taking your own advice, I did "some research." From the first search result when Googling "are Hispanic Americans getting taller:"[0] > The reason [Americans are not getting any taller], explains Leonard, is most Americans now face few nutritional or health-related stresses in their youth. People grow most as infants and then as adolescents, and most Americans have avoided disease and eaten enough meat and milk in their youth to reach their genetic height potentials. > "There is large heterogeneity in ethic compositions," he says. "When you look at Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans — those are the pockets where increases in height are still happening." So one supports your claim that Hispanic Americans are growing, but not that "White Americans are getting shorter." [0] http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98438&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98438&page=1
epicureanideal 10y ago
Disclaimer: I don't think this explains grade inflation, but it might be a partial reason. I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate here. Percentage of A's given at Yale is increasing? Could be grade inflation. Could also be that they're picking the top 0.01% and smaller of students from a larger and larger total population. Example math: If 50% of students were worthy of A's when they were able to recruit the top 1000 students out of let's say 100,000 (the top 1%)... If the population doubles relative to the number of students they admit, they can recruit the top 1000 students out of 200,000 (the top 0.5%), all of which would have been more likely to be "A" grade students. Now everybody is getting closer to 100% A's as long as there's been no change in grading standards.
- daveFNbuck 10y ago
  That works at Yale, but you'd actually expect this type of effect to deflate grades overall as higher and higher percentages of the country are going to college.
  - lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
    That included a lovely hidden assumption that the population has some static or perhaps declining intelligence/academic motivation. Given the increase in student resources, as well as as rising trend in standardized test scores (SAT, ACT, etc) I'm inclined to dismiss the hypothesis.
- lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
  Building on that, the resources available to students are increasing. Miss a lecture or have a gap in understanding the material is but one click away in a multitude of formats so students can supplement as needed. The school itself is providing TA hours and tutoring sessions on top of that to help catch students falling through the cracks (the cynic says getting them to pass to milk them for more money, but it is to some degree symbiotic). The number of well qualified and motivated students attending college has never been higher and it always baffles me when people suggest the universities should respond by jacking up standards to preserve some nonsensical ~academic elite~.
heisenbit 10y ago
Grad inflation are a serious problem for excellent but poor students and their social mobility. It used to be that one could distinguish oneself with grades. Not so anymore. One of the most significant remaining factor: Alma mater brand name.
jordyjordy 10y ago
We are bank of hackers based in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, we offer hack services such as school grades change,DDOS hack, database hack, bank transfer,emails, clearing of criminal records, credit, and all forms of hack, contact us today via email, jordanrowly@gmail.com
homicidehack 10y ago
contact homicidehack at gmail dot com for your hack jobs

96 points by wallflower 10y ago

It is just one other indicator of the flaws of the free market approach to everything in the US. Whether it is health care or education, treating it as a product or service sold to consumers creates perverse incentives. The market has become a religion in the US. It is taken as dogma that it is always the most efficient way to do things. When it is stunningly inefficient. I've used health care in the US a number of times, at it is quite grotesque how they treat it as a sales transaction dishing out as much pills and treatment as they can, almost like a car salesman trying to get you to buy add-ons. My US doctor insisted on giving me anti-biotics despite the fact that I had the common cold and protested that this does not work for a virus infection. Whatever you issue is they attempt to give you the most expensive treatment even if something cheaper would do. And there is in an unhealthy obsession with unnecessary frills. Anything to get the customer to keep coming back. I quite liked American university, but it was extremely lax. They gave students endless opportunities to fix their grades. Again anything to make the customers happy. Grades was rather pointless as it only seemed like A's mattered.

WalterBright 10y ago
Before Obamacare, 1 out of every 2 dollars spent on health care in the US was spent by the government. It is hardly a free market. The education business has heavy government financial involvement, too. On the other side, check the software business. It's a powerful engine for growth and wealth in this country, despite having driven prices for software literally to zero. And the software business in the US is the most free market industry in the country - no licenses, permits, subsidies, tariffs, regulations, etc.
- calibraxis 10y ago
  Government subsidy (and occasional gov't supported monopolies like Bell Labs) is responsible for the software industry. This is very well-documented. Public takes the biggest risks, then rewards are privatized. Hence the economic importance of programs like DARPA. http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/ http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/
  - awt 10y ago
    How do you know tech wouldn't be more advanced than it is now if the public hadn't been forced to pay for government science?
    - lunchTime42 10y ago
      True free market approach would be to have two variants of running buisnesses run against one another.
      - hypeibole 10y ago
        Isn't that mostly what happened? US pushing science and education during the Cold War to compete against the USSR?
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    Hmm, I've been in the software industry for 40 years. Never got a dollar in subsidy.
    - drauh 10y ago
      Because anecdote == data?
      - WalterBright 10y ago
        What significant subsidies did Microsoft/Google/Apple/Oracle/etc. get? Also, Edison invented the vacuum tube upon which it is all based. I read a biography of him, and he never got a subsidy. Shouldn't he get all the credit?
        hobs 10y ago
        Google started university research project with NSF grants helping them to create the goliath we see today, they probably would not exist otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Early_histor... Also I would call most of the government projects that Oracle is on subsidies considering how little value they deliver and how much they cost.
- lunchTime42 10y ago
  Its never free enough. And if it where, it was the customers fault. And if the customers behaved flawless and it would not work. There would be traitors, sabbotaging a perfect system. In a closed worldview critque acceptance is not even possible anymore. Anything brought up is not evaluated but instantly deflected. There is no - "Lets measure this" and compare (Lets call it the free market approach to ideas ;) just offense and defense. Thanks for proving the Pa-OP right.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    When you define "free market" as "absence of government regulation" then you can get whatever result you want, because you can build something that looks like a government inside it, not call it a government, and have it do the thing you need a government to do. And then if you get one of those things which is doing the bad things governments do, you do call it a government and it isn't a free market anymore. The lesson from this is not "free markets are bad," it's "simplistic ideologies are useless." We know that private actors are bad at some things, like funding basic research and building roads and utilities. We also know that governments are bad at some things, like making consumer products. So let the government build the roads and let GE make the washing machines. The worst alternative is to have the government do half of something. This is the US healthcare system. Single payer has problems, but it works. The complete absence of government in healthcare would have different problems but would also work. What we have doesn't work. It's a corrupt mechanism for funneling public money into drug companies. Here's the test for whether the government should do something: Does it make sense for the government to pay for this and then give it away for absolutely no money whatsoever to every citizen of the country? If not, the government shouldn't do it. Notice that the answer for healthcare is then not obvious, but the thing we have is not a valid answer.
  - jerf 10y ago
    The point is not that making health care more free market would necessarily improve it. The point is that using the US healthcare system to beat up on free markets is fallacious, because the US healthcare system is not a free market in the first place. Cards on the table, I do think that more freedom in the market would be good for the entire system, from top to bottom. But I can find myself in total agreement with those who think it should be more socialized that what we have now is a really crazy, chaotic system that seems to manage to combine the worst of both worlds. As a result, it's every bit as valid to claim that socialized health care is a disaster because the US health care system proves that it doesn't work... which is to say, an entirely invalid and fallacious claim.
- soundwave106 10y ago
  The issue with health care and free markets, is that a fully free health care market would not morally sit well with a lot of people, and some sectors of health care lack the ingredients that make free markets work. EG: in a free market, if someone has a healthcare emergency, yet cannot afford to pay for the service required, the free market would say -- dump this person in the street. Not exactly a morally pleasing choice. Free markets assume a rational and informed consumer; a person having a medical emergency is not always going to be a rational and informed consumer. Not to say there is plenty of scope for a competitive marketplace in healthcare (there is, particularly for less critical care and wellness etc.), but certain portions really don't fall in scope in my opinion. The problem with the US healthcare market is that it kind of pretends to be this "free market healthcare" system, while in reality being a half-baked socialized medical system built in bits and pieces over time. Some people are covered by the government (Medicare and Medicaid). The government relies on companies to provide much of the remainder (with tax incentives), but heavily regulates the type of health care that can be offered (eg HMOs). Since not everyone is employed by a large company, this leaves many gaps where people have no de facto health coverage at all. Except for emergency rooms, which (thanks to some notorious emergency street dumping instances in the 1980s) will accept anyone these days. It's a mess. "Obamacare" merely plugged a couple of gaps. Much greater reform is needed, IMHO. But there does seem to be a chorus of people who, with their strong belief in free markets, believe that the US healthcare system is a free market one (it's not) and consequently believe that the US healthcare system is the best in the world (anyone who has traveled knows how laughable this statement is). It's hard to get meaningful reform as long as this belief persists.
  - neonhomer 10y ago
    > EG: in a free market, if someone has a healthcare emergency, yet cannot afford to pay for the service required, the free market would say -- dump this person in the street. So before the EMTALA was passed in 1986 people were dying in the street? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
    - soundwave106 10y ago
- xenadu02 10y ago
  Healthcare is not and cannot ever be a free market. There is a massive asymmetry because everyone will need it at some random point not of their choosing and when they do need it the consequences of not having it can be death. Healthcare is not a fungible good. If you have aggressive cancer you can't just switch to a phsychiatrist because he/she is a "cheaper good" than your oncologist. Delaying purchase of your heart surgery may mean death.
  - rqebmm 10y ago
    Not to mention the inability to negotiate. "Excuse me sir, I know I might be having a heart attack, but can you please provide me a quote for this ambulance ride? I'd like to do some due diligence." Said exactly no one.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- fbonetti 10y ago
  Software is essentially a luxury item though. I know that we engineers like to think we're the gods of the universe, but nobody needs software to survive. People survived just fine without software for literally all of human history.
danieltillett 10y ago
Grade inflation is a very good example of why the institution offering the education should not be in charge of testing if the education was effective.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  In the UK we have examination boards for school level exams, I'd love to see that extended to degree qualifications as well.
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    Didn't you have a major problem with schools choosing the examination board that marked the easiest?
    - red_admiral 10y ago
      Yes, and we also have grade inflation - we used to mark on an A-E scale but now we have an A* too. BBC article, with interesting graphs: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11012369 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11012369
    - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
      Yes, but I don't think that is too difficult to resolve.
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        Yes don't let the schools choose who is going to be assessing if their teaching is effective.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Jach 10y ago
  The institution offering the education must be able to test if their education is effective, education doesn't work well without tight feedback loops. Neither teachers nor students are drones whose behavior can be measured by some perfect third party process or human(s). That said what passes for education at most places works best when you do start treating teachers and students as drones. The logical conclusion of that is something like Khan Academy with spaced repetition, and the savings in time and money worldwide would be tremendous if that system were to be embraced by the US department of education. What passes for education is definitely worthwhile for some things, but it's not really in the traditional spirit of education.
chjohasbrouck 10y ago
I used to read about countries where it was a common practice to pay bribe money to be given a job, and think how awful that was. Now I live in a country that buries its youth in debt that can't be discharged through bankruptcy, to pay for an increasingly ineffective education, to get a job almost anyone could do, that lists higher education as a requirement when it really doesn't have to. If you zoom out to the big picture, it's almost as if employment in the US is becoming a pay-to-play system.
- Jach 10y ago
  For your first bit, do you mean things like fathers paying some shop owner some money to give their sons a chance at a job over some other kids that went through a hiring process, or do you mean things (still going on) like politicians backing certain regulations that just so happen to mightily benefit the corporation they become a highly paid member of when they lose their reelection or retire? Pay-to-play, spending money to make money, has usually been the rule even if you're born rich. The trick is always on how to spend less money than other people at your level to make the same or more -- your required piece of paper, while still more expensive than it used to be, isn't unavoidably crippling-debt expensive, and so with a little forethought you can get in the game with a lot less expense than some of your peers. If basic income can somehow work economically we might turn into a free-to-play system, I don't know if that would actually be better overall though.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    >> I used to read about countries where it was a common practice to pay bribe money to be given a job > For your first bit, do you mean things like fathers paying some shop owner some money to give their sons a chance at a job over some other kids that went through a hiring process, or do you mean things (still going on) like politicians backing certain regulations that just so happen to mightily benefit the corporation they become a highly paid member of when they lose their reelection or retire? I assume he's talking about neither of those, but rather the common practice of buying a job for yourself. For example, you might go to a highly-placed English functionary with a big bag of cash and purchase a post as customs inspector for a port somewhere in the Empire. Historically this was more the norm than the exception in colonial Europe. (Fun fact: the customs inspector position was generally a lot more expensive than notionally better jobs like "governor" (also for sale). That's because the customs inspector was ideally placed to take bribes himself.)
neonhomer 10y ago
> What caused the most recent bout of grade inflation? Some point to the rise in tuition—and educational debt... One of the largest reasons for skyrocketing tuition is the US government's guaranteed student loans. And those loans are very difficult to discharge by declaring bankruptcy, which makes the loans less risky to the schools. This is the farthest thing from free market capitalism.
cpursley 10y ago
Calling the American healthcare system "free-market" is disingenuous at worse and hilarious at best. It's probably the most regulated and convoluted sector of the US economy. In contrast, the pet healthcare system in the US is much less regulated. As a result, getting care for my pets is so much easier to navigate (you can actually get price quotes!) and much multitudes cheaper than human healthcare, despite the similar medical procedures and training required of doctors.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Okay this is the worst argument for an unregulated healthcare system I have ever heard. 1) How much money goes into pet medicine research vs human? 2) What happens when a pet is sick and the cost of care exceeds money of owner? You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no research, and most bills > $1000 lead to euthanasia? Sure that would be a cheap healthcare system...
  - refurb 10y ago
    You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no research What? Animal health is a huge industry. Zoetis was spun off of Pfizer and is making money hand over fist. Lots of new animal drugs are approved each year.
  - xkcd-sucks 10y ago
    Animal drugs are the same as human drugs, plus all the human drugs which fail fairly late in the development pipeline. Animal physiology re: absorption, toxicity, metabolism etc. is pretty well studied because most mammals are used for drug testing/as models of human disease.
  - crpatino 10y ago
    You have packed a large number of biases in a single line: > You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no research, and most bills > $1000 lead to euthanasia? Sure that would be a cheap healthcare system... 15-20 year technology (and I hope you agree modern medicine is, broadly speaking, a form of technology) is not old; it is robust and time tested. Today, building business critical operations in Fortune 500 companies on top of Linux is a no brainer, but not so much in 1996; and whoever told you otherwise back then was both unprofessional and self-deluded with evangelist zeal. Your claim that veterinarian medicine has "no research" does not hold water either. Sure, there might be less money being expended in researching animal health care than human health care, but this does not mean that the science behind veterinarian medicine is any less valid. If anything, it's probably more valid because there are so many less emotional hot-button issues and underhanded political agendas lurking around it. About the $1k bills, there are two ways to see it. You claim that it is a bad thing that most >$1K procedures end up with pacient death. I, on the other hand, would like to point out that this is a proof that it is possible for a whole calss of modern health care professionals to charge <$1k for procedures that solve most non life-threatening conditions and remain gainfully in business. Note this argument is valid regradless of your position on human euthanasia. Finally, your use of "cheap" healthcare system is used as a double-entendre. You are conflating "affordable" with "stingy" in that single word. As exposed above, you can clearly see that the first not necessarily implies the second.
snarfy 10y ago
If it were a free market, you would see prices advertised. This is how you know it's not a free market. This is true in a lot of markets, not just healthcare.
- neonhomer 10y ago
  Good point, there's only one medical center I've heard in the US that actually advertises their prices: http://surgerycenterok.com/pricing/ http://surgerycenterok.com/pricing/
micahbright 10y ago
"...the free market approach to everything in the US"...It's almost as if you believe there is a free market in education or healthcare or...almost anything in the US.
Shivetya 10y ago
The only flaw with free market economies is assuming the US actually has one. The regulation of commerce is so extreme in some areas as to border on near fascism (don't equate the term with NAZI) : where government dictates prices for goods and services without risking anything of its own. Politicians setting rates and guarantees that are not driven by market need. grade inflation exists because of this unwillingness to offend people and telling people they are not the best if offensive. hence why colleges like affirmative action is that they will get candidates not used to being at the top of their class and be more willing to accept lower grades (go look it up, it does exist and been studied) the US health care system, well it only got into the condition it was in because of over regulation. preventing insurance from crossing state lines pretty much doomed it
refurb 10y ago
My US doctor insisted on giving me anti-biotics despite the fact that I had the common cold and protested that this does not work for a virus infection. Your doctor doesn't make any money when they prescribe something. They make money off the office visit. There was absolutely zero financial gain for the doc prescribing you antibiotics.
specialist 10y ago
"flaws of the free market approach" But, but, (sputters), but the Patriotic American Baby Jesus loves Freedom Markets™.

dukoid 10y ago

Probably will lead to a more fine-grained scale for the A grades....

efaref 10y ago
In the UK we introduced the A* grade as a "solution" to this problem; first at GCSE level (end of compulsory high school, age 15-16) and then at A level (pre-university, age 17-18). Even that just postpones the problem, as grade inflation continues. I expect we'll see A* * before long, and then eventually grade sheets will look like eBay reviews, and students will just get a star count.
coldcode 10y ago
Given the tendency of clustering of grades there is no scale which cannot be compressed. A1, A2, A3 could become A.000001, A.000002... and thus still mean nothing useful.

jacobolus 10y ago

Grades are both a poor pedagogical tool and a poor measuring stick. They’re too coarse, too removed from the immediate learning feedback loop, too inconsistent from course to course, and too ambiguous in meaning (should you get the best grade for working hardest? for understanding the material best? for the best writing or mathematical reasoning skills?). At best, they provide a tremendous distraction for everyone; at worst, they convince some students who are performing well they can slack off, make students at the bottom give up hope and stop trying, cause incredible anxiety for students in the middle, and also create huge headaches and heartbreaks for instructors. Simultaneously, they give parents the misleading impression they know what is happening at school, and thereby discourage parents from getting more directly involved in their children’s education. The main reason grades were adopted and persist is that they’re relatively easy to apply, aren’t that complicated to reason about heuristically (even if this is often misleading), and they scale across an institution / between institutions. In my opinion, grades should be entirely abolished for students up through middle school, and replaced with written reports from the instructor. They aren’t really appropriate later, either, but high school grades seem to be one of the only available tools for guiding the college admissions process and I don’t presently have any better equally scalable idea. Colleges should of course do whatever they want, after all, the students are adults at that point. Then again, I feel rather the same way about institutional schooling in general.

spiderfarmer 10y ago
I went through my higher education basically without grades. Almost all courses were project based, which were done in teams. If the team decided you were a non-perfomer, there would be a discussion with a teacher. This freed up a lot of time for the teachers, so general knowledge was tested by teachers in personal meetings, where you had to explain to him/her what you had learned. If your explanation wasn't good enough, the teacher would explain things again so you would understand. So it's not just a test, but a more personal way for a teacher to feel if you really understood the subject. A system like this only works when everyone loves what he or she is learning. 40% of the students didn't finish the first year. After the first year almost everyone made it.
- 10y ago

spiderfarmer 10y ago

I love the US, but only as a tourist destination. There is no policy in the US that I can think of that I prefer over the way things are organized in my own country. I don't care if I pay 60% taxes. I'm well off, as well as my temporarily unemployed neighbours, there are no beggars in the streets, the roads are paved nicely and I can visit a doctor without him bankrupting me.

someguydave 10y ago
To be fair this the lifestyle most elites in the US also have.
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  They also live in gated communities with armed guards, have to put up with theft and batter, carjackings, etc. I genuinely do not understand how you can tolerate living like that - youtube channels telling people how to stop their house being robbed ("It works! My house is the only one that wasn't in the whole neighbourhood! Woo!")
  - jjnoakes 10y ago
    You think that sensationalist view reflects reality for a vast majority of Americans? I've lived here for decades in 15 different states. I've been poor. I've been middle class. I've been friends with the "elite". I've lived in big cities and small towns. I've never seen a car jacking. I've never seen an armed guard assigned to a gated community. I've never seen a mugging. I'm not sure I've ever witnessed a crime beyond traffic violations. I'm sure they exist. But to think they are common from watching YouTube?
    - spiderfarmer 10y ago
      I've been to the states for three weeks, driving from cheap motel to cheap motel. As you say, most of the US is just fine. But even in my three weeks I have seen lots of homeless people at busstops and intersections. I've heard distant gunshots in the (very) cheap motel in LA, where the police sirens were so common that I mistakenly thought that we were really close to a police station. I saw so many people who were dangerously obese that I can't blame the people who repeat the "FAT MURICANS" meme. Some major roads were riddled with potholes and looked nothing like the images we saw in movies that supposedly play in LA. Let's just say the image I had beforehand (mostly instilled by Hollywood movies) was exactly the opposite.

koliber 10y ago

It depends on what you want grades to express. If you want grades to express students' strength relative to each other, a quota of say 35% A's per course might be appropriate. On the other hand, if grades are meant to show how students do an a more objective and time-invariant set of criteria, maybe grade inflation is OK. Maybe it means that student's are getting generally smarter, or more efficient at learning. IQ has been rising over time as well, as has efficiency in many workplaces. Perhaps grade inflation, at least partially, reflects this as well? I am not saying that this is the case. Rather I would like to throw a hypothesis out there, as it is one that is not often expressed. I would love to hear arguments for and against the above ideas.

Retric 10y ago
US IQ's have stopped increasing, we are also getting shorter.
- pc86 10y ago
  [citation needed]
  - Retric 10y ago
    Americans shrinking as junk food takes its toll https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/apr/04/usa https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/apr/04/usa America Loses Its Stature as Tallest Country http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/12/AR2007081200809.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08...
    - whamlastxmas 10y ago
      The article, at a glance, doesn't really seem to give information on the data that lead to a "shorter" conclusion. Does it account for the fact that the US receives a ton of immigration from Mexico and South America, whose population is quite short? Are American families with no hispanic genetics also getting shorter? My guess is no.
10y ago

Jach 10y ago

A lot of the "stress" of grades seems to be bucketed into a general claim of ego-shattering "I'm different and moreover lesser than my better peers!" effect. I think it would be bad if we got rid of grades based on that philosophy of coddling. The more significant cause of stress I think is simply that grades are tied to things beyond the student's particular ranking in a class. The article mentions that the possible beginning of the inflation trend was the simple relation of your grades to the likelihood of being shipped off to Vietnam. Since then it's only gotten worse, and I can think of several other things grades now tie in to. If your grades are bad enough, you might lose your funding that allows you to go to school in the first place, and you need that for the pretty much unrelated problem of tuition being ridiculously high. (I don't really think the students-as-customers mentality that has developed also comes along with a I've-paid-now-give-me-an-A mentality.) I would find the threat of losing a scholarship a lot more stressful than the fact that some people in my class are smarter and/or work harder than me, and knowing a few people with such scholarships I was amazed by their apparent composure come finals season. If your grades are bad enough, certain companies won't look at you when you apply. This has become less of a deal in tech (though one place I interviewed at did ask for my GPA) but is still a common filter. If your grades are bad enough, graduate programs won't have you even with a strongly worded letter of recommendation from one of your professors. The article proposes some sort of top-down solution (from the government's department of education?) is needed. Maybe that can work, I'm skeptical. The approach is at odds with keeping rankings private to the school and unconnected to external things.

whack 10y ago

The author is depressingly right. The people this is ironically going to hurt most: The really smart/hard-working students who attend public universities. I used to be one such student. I attended a large public university that had a great deal of "intellectual diversity." The majority of the students were average, in terms of their drive/motivation/intellect. However, there was also a numerically large minority that was just as talented and driven, as the students whom you would find in the Ivy Leagues. Which is why companies like Google and Facebook still showed up to recruit at our college, every single year. Which is why elite post-grad programs like Stanford's recruited a lot of our graduates, every year. They wouldn't be interested in the average student at our college, but they were certainly interested in recruiting the top 10-20% of our student base. With grade inflation though, if everyone's grades are bunched up together in the 3.8+ range, it becomes extremely hard to distinguish between the top students and the average students. And one unlucky bad grade is all it takes for a top student to suddenly seem like an average student. In such a world, without any reliable way to distinguish between the top students and the average students, companies like Google would not even bother showing up to recruit at public universities like ours, and would instead restrict themselves to selective universities like Stanford. One of the most important roles of the university system, is to serve as engines for social mobility. "Even if you're born into an average family and attend an average public university, if you work really hard and get good grades, you can still get a post-graduate degree from an elite university, and get recruited into elite jobs." Grade inflation, or getting rid of grades entirely, may lead to equality of outcome within a university, but it's also going to severely weaken one of the most important mechanisms for social mobility.

vitobcn 10y ago
I find this graph outlining the frequency of different grades from 1949-2009 to be enlightening [1]. Around 1940's only 15% of grades were "A", and in the last few years they went up to close to 45%. The source data is coming from research compiled by Rojstaczer and Healy [2]. --- [1]: http://pazymino1evolutionliteracy.blogs.umassd.edu/files/2012/01/Grade-Distribution-American-Colleges-Evolution-Literacy.jpg http://pazymino1evolutionliteracy.blogs.umassd.edu/files/201... [2]: http://rampages.us/profjhonn/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/2015/10/Where-A-Is-Ordinary-2012.pdf http://rampages.us/profjhonn/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/20...

galfarragem 10y ago

Grade inflation is known for a long time and really bad for students. According my teachers, when they graduated (40 years ago) the best student of my college scored 14/20. When I graduated, the top student scored 18/20. The real problem is that public intitutions hire based on college scores so younger grads have an unfair advantage. To solve grade inflation a bell curve would work: best tests would grade A+, next ones would grade A and sucessively independently of scores itself. You would have always the same relative amount of each grade scale along the years.

MikeNomad 10y ago
When I first started teaching (university level), trying to come up with what I thought would be acurate grades would keep me awake most nights. Asking fellow faculty revealed that they too had wrestled with the same problem, they developed a "feel" for what was right, and that they had simply accepted it as a pain point. I refused to accept that. One semester I told them at the beginning of the semester that they were competing against their classmates. I was not setting upper and lower bounds for grades, their classmates were. I used the full range of grades (A+ to F), and when I tabbed the grade distribution, the results freaked me out: It was an almost perfect bell curve. I decided to use the method again the following semester. Same results. I did it again the following semester. Same results again. I then permanently adopted the method. Other results included the, "Why didn't I get an "A" on Project/Paper X" drama during office hours dropping off to nothing; Student's were much more comfortable knowing they were competing against their classmates, rather than trying to "figure out" their professor; My Teacher Evaluation scores didn't change across my changing grading methods; My stress level went _way_ down, and allowed me to better concentrate on creating and delivering content.
- MikeNomad 10y ago
  Ugh. Should read, "One semester I told my students at the beginning of the semester..." Sorry.

heartsucker 10y ago

At my university (UCSB '12), grades were close to meaningless. I got a BSc in Math and graduated with a 2.8 (or lower?) because I loaded up on upper division math courses. I had friends who got 3.9's because they got a BA in communications or biz. econ. So clearly GPA varies heavily with degree, not to mention institution. There were some professors who straight up said they always failed the bottom X percent of the class. So if you knew the material and "passed," you still got an F. Or the professor whose final was literally "memorize this two page proof and regurgitate it verbatim." Or the <ethnic/gender> studies professor who fail your papers for disagreeing with them. There should just be Pass / Fail. Enough with this GPA circus.

dsfyu404ed 10y ago
I couldn't agree more with most of your points but I think that pass/fail isn't the right approach. Taking an aggressive schedule in order to get your "I spent four years doing what I was told" paper and GTFO ASAP hurts your grades Working a job hurts your grades Extracurricular hurt your grades. What I see is a simple duty cyle problem. Students have a finite productive capacity (not sleeping isn't a semester-term solution). If they take a schedule that requires more than a certain % duty cyle then they take a GPA hit. If you could account for the amount of productivity required by a class you can take duty cycle into account when calculating GPA. For example, 120 credits in 4yr is a lot easier than 120 credits in 3yr. Five 1xx or 2xx gen-eds in one semester is a ton easier than four 3xx or 4xx classes in a STEM discipline. Having some way to account for the extra effort required to run wide open for a semester or run close to wide open for 3yr would go a long way. People playing the game (college) on easy mode (BA in business, no job, is a member of a frat with a really good test bank his major, etc) get the same GPA as people playing on hard mode (engineering degree with minor in something else, academic club involvement, works a job on the side, etc) and there's no way to tell them apart when it's all said and done. If there was a way to score classes (and professors) based on typical grades then profs could grade how they want and students could take what they want and not be punished. You could do something like track the average grade for a class/prof combination and track average grades for students. You could eliminate the effect of one prof who teaches one of many sections of one required class as well as the effect of a bunch or really good/bad students enrolling in a class on one particular semester. You could also eliminate the effect of taking a ton of really hard classes or unknowingly enrolling in a section taught by a really tough prof. Basically if you applied dynamic curves to classes at the university level then you can account for easy/hard classes, profs and schedules. There's got to be some catch but I can't think of one that couldn't be worked around with effort since it doesn't have to be perfect, just better than nothing. You don't need to make getting bad grades in four hard classes have an equivalent GPA to getting good grades in four easy classes, just making some way to partially account for the difference would help. Obviously this wouldn't be in the financial interest of colleges but that's a different issue.

sgarg26 10y ago

Some of the most elite private high schools in America do not issue grades. Instead, universities have to rely on standardized test scores and recommendation letters

randcraw 10y ago

Why not use percentile instead? It's fair. It's clearly the best way to compare students within a class or within a school. (I've heard India has been doing this for years.) If you then insist on normalizing the percentiles across schools and eras, have the students also take a standardized final exam (like GRE, but specific to each course). You don't have to test every course, just the ones that teach fundamentals. This should be more than sufficient to make schools (and percentiles) comparable. This is comparable to the british first/second/third-class system. It'd also do wonders for pressuring schools to up their game. It's be mighty embarrassing if a tony private school scored substantially lower on their standard tests than a moo U. It could also validate MOOCs and other alternative forms of instruction.

restalis 10y ago

I met teachers whose grading philosophy was that the results has to form a normal distribution across the pool of students. If we're adopting that then we're having grades denoting a relative quality not an absolute one (which pretty much everyone assumes). The author may be right in her implication of faulty grading, but the evolution of grade concentrations over the span of many student generations does not necessarily denote an existing issue. The education got better over the years, maybe the results are from increased learning and teaching efficiency. Was there a test taken both now and 60 years ago and considered their respective grading results in the drawn conclusion? And finally, I don't want to criticize the author, but the idea of "world without grades" is just silly. Grades are the result of a measurement and the measurement in itself is something valuable everywhere, including in education. The author could have had a more limited claim, by only denouncing current grading practice performed at the same institutions that do the teaching.

Erik816 10y ago
I can't imagine anyone who has gone through school and thought that grades were somehow an "absolute" measure of quality. It's quite clear that grades are relative to both the standard of your fellow students and the current academic standards for your school. The whole idea of a "grade" is to sort the relative quality of various things or people, and that is what they are supposed to do. The problem comes when people start to THINK they are an absolute measure of worth, and thus believe that they are entitled to an "A" because they worked hard. Never mind that everyone else worked hard too, and some of them performed better.

dcre 10y ago

I wonder if this could be related to more classes being taught by adjuncts. Tenured professors don't have to care what students think of them. I'm surprised this question was not raised by the article.

Retric 10y ago

The short answer is no, because the population demographics is not changing that rapidly. Also, More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S. Net Loss of 140,000 from 2009 to 2014; Family Reunification Top Reason for Return http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s/ http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-... PS: But don't let facts get in the way of your preconceived notions.

pc86 10y ago
That's Mexico specifically. Immigration in the US across the board increases the population. I don't know if immigration from Mexico + Central America increases or decreases. And you seem to have conveniently ignored > The article, at a glance, doesn't really seem to give information on the data that lead to a "shorter" conclusion. and > Are American families with no hispanic genetics also getting shorter?
- Retric 10y ago
  If you want to break it down by races: Hispanic Americans are getting taller. White Americans are getting shorter. Crap diet seems to be the main cause for whites, with improved economic situation helping out Hispanics. Anyway, again your just picking ideas from thin air, do some research. And no I am not going to give more sources when your countering with arguments backed up by hot air. PS: I left the rest of his comment alone because while incorrect it was not comically wrong.
  - pc86 10y ago
    The only two things I've said in this thread were that a citation was needed (which doesn't mean I disagree or don't believe you, just that a citation was needed), and that when someone asked a question about Hispanics your response was specifically about Mexicans. And in that comment I literally said the phrase "I don't know." Meanwhile you've acted as if your facts need no citations and that I am somehow "picking ideas from thin air" when I've only asked questions about things about people have said. But taking your own advice, I did "some research." From the first search result when Googling "are Hispanic Americans getting taller:"[0] > The reason [Americans are not getting any taller], explains Leonard, is most Americans now face few nutritional or health-related stresses in their youth. People grow most as infants and then as adolescents, and most Americans have avoided disease and eaten enough meat and milk in their youth to reach their genetic height potentials. > "There is large heterogeneity in ethic compositions," he says. "When you look at Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans — those are the pockets where increases in height are still happening." So one supports your claim that Hispanic Americans are growing, but not that "White Americans are getting shorter." [0] http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98438&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98438&page=1

epicureanideal 10y ago

Disclaimer: I don't think this explains grade inflation, but it might be a partial reason. I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate here. Percentage of A's given at Yale is increasing? Could be grade inflation. Could also be that they're picking the top 0.01% and smaller of students from a larger and larger total population. Example math: If 50% of students were worthy of A's when they were able to recruit the top 1000 students out of let's say 100,000 (the top 1%)... If the population doubles relative to the number of students they admit, they can recruit the top 1000 students out of 200,000 (the top 0.5%), all of which would have been more likely to be "A" grade students. Now everybody is getting closer to 100% A's as long as there's been no change in grading standards.

daveFNbuck 10y ago
That works at Yale, but you'd actually expect this type of effect to deflate grades overall as higher and higher percentages of the country are going to college.
- lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
  That included a lovely hidden assumption that the population has some static or perhaps declining intelligence/academic motivation. Given the increase in student resources, as well as as rising trend in standardized test scores (SAT, ACT, etc) I'm inclined to dismiss the hypothesis.
lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
Building on that, the resources available to students are increasing. Miss a lecture or have a gap in understanding the material is but one click away in a multitude of formats so students can supplement as needed. The school itself is providing TA hours and tutoring sessions on top of that to help catch students falling through the cracks (the cynic says getting them to pass to milk them for more money, but it is to some degree symbiotic). The number of well qualified and motivated students attending college has never been higher and it always baffles me when people suggest the universities should respond by jacking up standards to preserve some nonsensical ~academic elite~.

heisenbit 10y ago

Grad inflation are a serious problem for excellent but poor students and their social mobility. It used to be that one could distinguish oneself with grades. Not so anymore. One of the most significant remaining factor: Alma mater brand name.

jordyjordy 10y ago

We are bank of hackers based in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, we offer hack services such as school grades change,DDOS hack, database hack, bank transfer,emails, clearing of criminal records, credit, and all forms of hack, contact us today via email, jordanrowly@gmail.com

homicidehack 10y ago

contact homicidehack at gmail dot com for your hack jobs