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There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrock

There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. Students today are faced with an ever ballooning bulk of knowledge with which they are supposed to find the boundaries and gain control of enough interconnected parts to become a useful contributor to society. There's a lot of noise in the system, but the system is growing larger and larger. There's more footwork that could be done. Is it so hard to believe that more students are performing at a close enough level to their forbears to deserve the honor?

ss2003 8y ago
I don't think the point is how their performance compares to their forebears so much as how do they compare to their peers. If you compare today's students to those of 50 or 100 years ago of course they have more information and advanced skills to master. It's apples and oranges. These honors really only have meaning when comparing within the same cohort.
krapht 8y ago
Yeah, it is. Grade inflation is a well known, documented phenomena. Unfortunately I have no time to link the papers on this subject, but if you search, they are there.
- matte_black 8y ago
  Have school grades ever deflated? Or undergone some sort of correction? No citation needed, anecdotes are fine.
  - oconnor663 8y ago
    My grades underwent a correction or two back in the day :)
  - hashkb 8y ago
    Yes. At my school we had a real curve. If we all got perfect scores, that's a C for everyone. (More often we all got 15s and they became C's). Teachers who gave too many A's would be benched. We laughed at Ivy League 4.0s which just require a phone call from a parent.
    - drewg123 8y ago
      MIT? My wife went there, and while most STEM grad schools understood that grades at MIT were not inflated, medical schools did not seem to care. One of her friends had to first get inflated grades doing a STEM masters degree before she could get into med school due to her uninflated MIT undergrad grades.
      - hashkb 8y ago
        GT. I heard you all got to play with kittens freshman year. In response, GT professors replaced 20% more lectures with exams.
        lordCarbonFiber 8y ago
        Almost no one at GT does true curves anymore. Just like stack ranking, trying to implement true curves with a non random distribution is a fool's errand and poor knowledge of statistics.
        mrexroad 8y ago
        To hell with Georgia!
    - joshvm 8y ago
      This is standard practice at a lot of universities. At my university results were scaled based on the class performance in that exam and the performance of everyone in other exams. So if you're all 4.0 students, but the exam is horrendous and everyone only gets 20%, you'll probably end up with a good grade still. I studied physics. It was possible to game the system to a certain extent. If you took the (subjectively) hardest modules like gauge theory, you could get a high grade even if you only answered half the paper. So if you were smart, but not top of your class, you'd be better off taking the hard subjects because every mark you got was effectively worth more. If you took the easy and popular modules, every mark would count and it might even be normalised down.
  - rxhernandez 8y ago
    One of the Cal Polys has an engineering program which curves the average grade to a C+ which automatically disqualifies the average from many engineering jobs.
    - cobookman 8y ago
      That's similar to Georgia Tech. Undergrad Eng courses are curved to a C+. With the average GPA being a bit below a 3.0. We used to joke at all the pre med students as to why they chose Georgia Tech as just about every other school had gpa inflation. And grad schools don't take Tech's lower grades into account.
      - hashkb 8y ago
        Which was totally fair given how the HOPE scholarship works. Not that I am bitter.
        amdsn 8y ago
        Except now STEM courses are weighted as of 2017 in all GA university system schools: Effective fall 2017, when calculating the HOPE and Zell Miller Scholarship postsecondary Grade Point Average (GPA), an additional weight of 0.5 will be added to grades of B, C, and D for approved degree level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses I think it's good since it doesn't affect their Institute GPA but can help them keep the scholarship. I knew a lot of people who lost HOPE/Zell and the increased financial burden made keeping their grades up that much harder.
        hashkb 8y ago
        That's still stupid. The freshman writing courses at GT are harder than graduate CS at UGA or Valdosta. Edit: Valdosta doesn't offer graduate CS. But imagine that it did.
    - a_c_s 8y ago
      A curve distorts grades: they tell you how the person performed relative to their peers not relative to their mastery of the material.
  - discreditable 8y ago
    At the high school I worked at some years ago we pushed the margins for letter grades up a little. For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100%. Whether or not that affected the overall GPA distribution I could not say.
    - 394549 8y ago
      > For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100% That sounds something like an older system. I don't remember it entirely, but IIRC, very early in my school career, an A was 93-100% and an F was anything less than 70%.
  - camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago
    Historically, I have no idea. Anecdotally, having recently graduated from a liberal arts school(BA CS & Math) I can say the trend seemed to differ wildly depending on the instructor and course. The CS and Stats professors had radically different expectations of what an, "A" performance in their classes was verses general professors. The tears of those students who had only ever gotten A's when they got a B- in Algorithms or Stat465... So much angst and hate over what should reflect an adequate grasp of the material. That said I feel like it's the responsibility of the institution to instill consistent criteria for evaluating performance. Having applied and been accepted to graduate school, I was nearly rejected for having earned C's in two of the hardest courses offered by the school. Turns out the same (tough) professors didn't care about that fact, admitting those of higher GPA's from easier majors no-questions-asked, subjecting me to the microscope. So their distress was qualified in the end. I ended up saying, "f this noise" and took a great job where I get paid to write HN comments on the toilet, btw. Hey, you asked for anecdotes.
- noobiemcfoob 8y ago
  Is it possible that grade inflation has grown in pace to the expanding web of knowledge?
  - losteric 8y ago
    Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge. So, it's possible there's an incidental correlation but there's no causation if the phenomena is real. If you've seen how the average kid uses the internet, it's a rather laughable suggestion... there is little overlap between social media entertainment sites and the web of knowledge. The biggest contributor to higher grades are the book summary and answer-key sharing sites.
    - xstartup 8y ago
      Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge. If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance. If the institutions have to stay relevant, they'll have to make sure the grades are correlated to successful people in some way even if it means handing out grade A to any student!
      - 394549 8y ago
        >> Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge. > If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful business people then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance. What you describe is grade inflation. Grades aren't meant to be predictors of career success, they're meant to be indicators of past academic performance. My understanding is that once upon a time, a "C" grade meant your work was average or typical, which was perfectly respectable. An "A" or "B" mean your academic work was above the norm or outstanding. People could get C's and go on to have successful, non-academic careers (such as in business) with little comment. With grade inflation, when "average" is an A or B, it's much harder to distinguish the truly academically talented based on their grades, since they're grouped into the same category as average performers.
full_pint 8y ago
I spent several years out of the school system after finishing high school, and while I had a lot of great offers from schools, I wanted to go into a trade. Several years later I began work as a developer because I had always programmed, and had come to the conclusion that it was something I really loved and wanted to spend my life doing. Fast-forward, I'm a mid-20's senior in Computer Science, and you're absolutely correct about the VAST amount of information that is required to learn to be successful. So here is my take: 1) There is a lot of sink or swim, at least in the program I'm in. And if you learn to swim, then your GPA balloons because you learn how to handle this vast amount of information thrown on you -- useful or not, it is the professors discretion -- which I think is one of the points of school to begin with. 2) Those who sink, end up going to departments with maybe less expectations, where they end up succeeding after having to deal with the previously higher expectations. It's interesting. With that said -- I grew up with a lot of GPA chasers, who I wouldn't trust with anything I personally needed done. But what they've done throughout their lives is signal that they can get whatever task you give them done, not necessarily come up with what task should be done, or how to interconnect subjects outside of an exam, or what was previously derived for them. Learning how to bridge the gap between subjects is also another point of school. It's interesting because those lines everyday seem to be blurred more and more, especially with advancement of computing, so it's kind of hard I think for a lot of students to make that jump, to bridge. And also the stigma of Liberal Arts -- that many STEM kids subscribe to -- has lessened the ability of many students to be life-long students. I have a few friends in grad school, who really, really struggle with that particular advancement. For example, one is in a neuro-lab and while they did have experience in FMRIs, they had never really invested in either math or computing. Now they're completely lost doing FICA and the like with MATLAB, and absolutely hate the work. They've called me to ask me about everything from what is an eigenvalue, to how to split a 3D Matrix into 4 based upon a fix set of indices. It's a shame because they are really smart, and passionate about the subject. Sorry that was a bit of a ramble.
BeetleB 8y ago
>There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. I'm not so sure you are talking about the same thing as grade inflation. For a particular course, in most fields, the content has not changed in 20-30 years. Most of my undergrad engineering classes have not changed in 20-30 years (with the exception of the software ones). I'm pretty sure if I look at the curriculum of, say, a circuits/EM/communications course today it will be the same as it was 2 decades ago. Math courses definitely have not changed much. I agree with you about the ballooning bulk of knowledge to be successful, but not to get a better grade for a given course.
StanislavPetrov 8y ago
>There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. As someone who has been in academia for several decades I can tell you, without a doubt, the opposite is true. Academic standards are vastly lower than they were just a couple of decades ago. Many incoming freshman lack even basic literacy skills. Much of the "core" curriculum is now comprised of remedial work that should have been mastered in high school (or middle school!). Basic reading comprehension, the ability to write papers and express complex thoughts coherently and the capability to think critically and engage in substantive debate are all severely lacking - virtually across the board. Society may be growing more complex, but the educational system in this country, on every level, is decaying rapidly. While my statement will be rejected by many young people who view it as an attack on their intelligence, it is beyond dispute. I welcome anyone interested in disputing my assertions to look at the reading list and curriculum of any college class offered before 1990, and compare that to the reading list and curriculum of the same class today. I challenge you to read papers written by students from 30 years ago (before they had easy access to information from the internet, no less), and compare them to the papers written by students of the same year today. There is no comparison - none.

ss2003 8y ago

I don't think the point is how their performance compares to their forebears so much as how do they compare to their peers. If you compare today's students to those of 50 or 100 years ago of course they have more information and advanced skills to master. It's apples and oranges. These honors really only have meaning when comparing within the same cohort.

krapht 8y ago

Yeah, it is. Grade inflation is a well known, documented phenomena. Unfortunately I have no time to link the papers on this subject, but if you search, they are there.

matte_black 8y ago
Have school grades ever deflated? Or undergone some sort of correction? No citation needed, anecdotes are fine.
- oconnor663 8y ago
  My grades underwent a correction or two back in the day :)
- hashkb 8y ago
  Yes. At my school we had a real curve. If we all got perfect scores, that's a C for everyone. (More often we all got 15s and they became C's). Teachers who gave too many A's would be benched. We laughed at Ivy League 4.0s which just require a phone call from a parent.
  - drewg123 8y ago
    MIT? My wife went there, and while most STEM grad schools understood that grades at MIT were not inflated, medical schools did not seem to care. One of her friends had to first get inflated grades doing a STEM masters degree before she could get into med school due to her uninflated MIT undergrad grades.
    - hashkb 8y ago
      GT. I heard you all got to play with kittens freshman year. In response, GT professors replaced 20% more lectures with exams.
      - lordCarbonFiber 8y ago
        Almost no one at GT does true curves anymore. Just like stack ranking, trying to implement true curves with a non random distribution is a fool's errand and poor knowledge of statistics.
      - mrexroad 8y ago
        To hell with Georgia!
  - joshvm 8y ago
    This is standard practice at a lot of universities. At my university results were scaled based on the class performance in that exam and the performance of everyone in other exams. So if you're all 4.0 students, but the exam is horrendous and everyone only gets 20%, you'll probably end up with a good grade still. I studied physics. It was possible to game the system to a certain extent. If you took the (subjectively) hardest modules like gauge theory, you could get a high grade even if you only answered half the paper. So if you were smart, but not top of your class, you'd be better off taking the hard subjects because every mark you got was effectively worth more. If you took the easy and popular modules, every mark would count and it might even be normalised down.
- rxhernandez 8y ago
  One of the Cal Polys has an engineering program which curves the average grade to a C+ which automatically disqualifies the average from many engineering jobs.
  - cobookman 8y ago
    That's similar to Georgia Tech. Undergrad Eng courses are curved to a C+. With the average GPA being a bit below a 3.0. We used to joke at all the pre med students as to why they chose Georgia Tech as just about every other school had gpa inflation. And grad schools don't take Tech's lower grades into account.
    - hashkb 8y ago
      Which was totally fair given how the HOPE scholarship works. Not that I am bitter.
      - amdsn 8y ago
        Except now STEM courses are weighted as of 2017 in all GA university system schools: Effective fall 2017, when calculating the HOPE and Zell Miller Scholarship postsecondary Grade Point Average (GPA), an additional weight of 0.5 will be added to grades of B, C, and D for approved degree level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses I think it's good since it doesn't affect their Institute GPA but can help them keep the scholarship. I knew a lot of people who lost HOPE/Zell and the increased financial burden made keeping their grades up that much harder.
        hashkb 8y ago
        That's still stupid. The freshman writing courses at GT are harder than graduate CS at UGA or Valdosta. Edit: Valdosta doesn't offer graduate CS. But imagine that it did.
  - a_c_s 8y ago
    A curve distorts grades: they tell you how the person performed relative to their peers not relative to their mastery of the material.
- discreditable 8y ago
  At the high school I worked at some years ago we pushed the margins for letter grades up a little. For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100%. Whether or not that affected the overall GPA distribution I could not say.
  - 394549 8y ago
    > For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100% That sounds something like an older system. I don't remember it entirely, but IIRC, very early in my school career, an A was 93-100% and an F was anything less than 70%.
- camelCaseOfBeer 8y ago
  Historically, I have no idea. Anecdotally, having recently graduated from a liberal arts school(BA CS & Math) I can say the trend seemed to differ wildly depending on the instructor and course. The CS and Stats professors had radically different expectations of what an, "A" performance in their classes was verses general professors. The tears of those students who had only ever gotten A's when they got a B- in Algorithms or Stat465... So much angst and hate over what should reflect an adequate grasp of the material. That said I feel like it's the responsibility of the institution to instill consistent criteria for evaluating performance. Having applied and been accepted to graduate school, I was nearly rejected for having earned C's in two of the hardest courses offered by the school. Turns out the same (tough) professors didn't care about that fact, admitting those of higher GPA's from easier majors no-questions-asked, subjecting me to the microscope. So their distress was qualified in the end. I ended up saying, "f this noise" and took a great job where I get paid to write HN comments on the toilet, btw. Hey, you asked for anecdotes.
noobiemcfoob 8y ago
Is it possible that grade inflation has grown in pace to the expanding web of knowledge?
- losteric 8y ago
  Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge. So, it's possible there's an incidental correlation but there's no causation if the phenomena is real. If you've seen how the average kid uses the internet, it's a rather laughable suggestion... there is little overlap between social media entertainment sites and the web of knowledge. The biggest contributor to higher grades are the book summary and answer-key sharing sites.
  - xstartup 8y ago
    Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge. If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance. If the institutions have to stay relevant, they'll have to make sure the grades are correlated to successful people in some way even if it means handing out grade A to any student!
    - 394549 8y ago
      >> Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge. > If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful business people then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance. What you describe is grade inflation. Grades aren't meant to be predictors of career success, they're meant to be indicators of past academic performance. My understanding is that once upon a time, a "C" grade meant your work was average or typical, which was perfectly respectable. An "A" or "B" mean your academic work was above the norm or outstanding. People could get C's and go on to have successful, non-academic careers (such as in business) with little comment. With grade inflation, when "average" is an A or B, it's much harder to distinguish the truly academically talented based on their grades, since they're grouped into the same category as average performers.

full_pint 8y ago

I spent several years out of the school system after finishing high school, and while I had a lot of great offers from schools, I wanted to go into a trade. Several years later I began work as a developer because I had always programmed, and had come to the conclusion that it was something I really loved and wanted to spend my life doing. Fast-forward, I'm a mid-20's senior in Computer Science, and you're absolutely correct about the VAST amount of information that is required to learn to be successful. So here is my take: 1) There is a lot of sink or swim, at least in the program I'm in. And if you learn to swim, then your GPA balloons because you learn how to handle this vast amount of information thrown on you -- useful or not, it is the professors discretion -- which I think is one of the points of school to begin with. 2) Those who sink, end up going to departments with maybe less expectations, where they end up succeeding after having to deal with the previously higher expectations. It's interesting. With that said -- I grew up with a lot of GPA chasers, who I wouldn't trust with anything I personally needed done. But what they've done throughout their lives is signal that they can get whatever task you give them done, not necessarily come up with what task should be done, or how to interconnect subjects outside of an exam, or what was previously derived for them. Learning how to bridge the gap between subjects is also another point of school. It's interesting because those lines everyday seem to be blurred more and more, especially with advancement of computing, so it's kind of hard I think for a lot of students to make that jump, to bridge. And also the stigma of Liberal Arts -- that many STEM kids subscribe to -- has lessened the ability of many students to be life-long students. I have a few friends in grad school, who really, really struggle with that particular advancement. For example, one is in a neuro-lab and while they did have experience in FMRIs, they had never really invested in either math or computing. Now they're completely lost doing FICA and the like with MATLAB, and absolutely hate the work. They've called me to ask me about everything from what is an eigenvalue, to how to split a 3D Matrix into 4 based upon a fix set of indices. It's a shame because they are really smart, and passionate about the subject. Sorry that was a bit of a ramble.

BeetleB 8y ago

>There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. I'm not so sure you are talking about the same thing as grade inflation. For a particular course, in most fields, the content has not changed in 20-30 years. Most of my undergrad engineering classes have not changed in 20-30 years (with the exception of the software ones). I'm pretty sure if I look at the curriculum of, say, a circuits/EM/communications course today it will be the same as it was 2 decades ago. Math courses definitely have not changed much. I agree with you about the ballooning bulk of knowledge to be successful, but not to get a better grade for a given course.

StanislavPetrov 8y ago

>There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. As someone who has been in academia for several decades I can tell you, without a doubt, the opposite is true. Academic standards are vastly lower than they were just a couple of decades ago. Many incoming freshman lack even basic literacy skills. Much of the "core" curriculum is now comprised of remedial work that should have been mastered in high school (or middle school!). Basic reading comprehension, the ability to write papers and express complex thoughts coherently and the capability to think critically and engage in substantive debate are all severely lacking - virtually across the board. Society may be growing more complex, but the educational system in this country, on every level, is decaying rapidly. While my statement will be rejected by many young people who view it as an attack on their intelligence, it is beyond dispute. I welcome anyone interested in disputing my assertions to look at the reading list and curriculum of any college class offered before 1990, and compare that to the reading list and curriculum of the same class today. I challenge you to read papers written by students from 30 years ago (before they had easy access to information from the internet, no less), and compare them to the papers written by students of the same year today. There is no comparison - none.