It's time to do away with grades entirely. Do what many Indian schools do -- report your score as a class percentile. At end of term, you don't get a grade, o

It's time to do away with grades entirely. Do what many Indian schools do -- report your score as a class percentile. At end of term, you don't get a grade, only a percentile. No curve. No score inflation. No bias. What's more, each school should report your score only relative to those of your peers. You should be compared only to other engineers, to other history majors, to other biology majors, etc. Because performance in physics is incomparable to english, education, or art, it's absurd to contrive a relative metric of comparison (AKA grades) to conflate them when none can possibly be meaningful or fair. Grades do an injustice to everyone. As for comparing students from one school to the next, entrenched standardized tests like GREs have become a nightmare. Especially in terms of STEM curricula, schools often differ radically in how much they challenge the students and how far their skills develop by graduation. There simply is no way a three hour multiple choice test like a GRE can accurately reveal the difference between someone who attended Columbia vs Lehigh, for example. But a big difference there is. (I know since I attended both.) To pretend that some quick A/B/C/D/E test, which explores none of the practical skills learned in labs or projects, can accurately AND reliably reveal a meaningful difference among 'peers' -- this does a disservice to everyone. Finally, there's no better illustration of disparity in the academic ranks than the rise of for-profit degree mills during the past couple of decades. The pretense that millions are not being cheated by these 'schools' is simply an abomination. I blame unchecked grade inflation and academic elitism for the tolerance for slap dash scholarship assessment that the sorry state of these 'schools' has revealed. As long as we avoid a precise and accurate accounting of the scholarly performance of the individual and the academic product of the university, we will continue to confuse student merit and invite charlatan schools to victimize their customers. Somehow all these forms of false credentialism must end, and soon, or 'college' really will become the stinking albatross that Mark Cuban and others claim they are.