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No, not at all. GPA tells the difference between "mastered the material" and "did well enough not to get expelled" which can be a useful signal for an employer,

No, not at all. GPA tells the difference between "mastered the material" and "did well enough not to get expelled" which can be a useful signal for an employer, but universities and professors don't view it as their responsibility to sort students for industry's needs. For starters, the quality of students is not uniform across universities. Middle of the pack at Harvard is a very different thing from middle of the pack at a party school. To get a useful ordering, you'd need to give every CS graduate the same standardized test, like the bar exam.

wahern 8y ago
Grades are relative to other people in your school and program; it's why you mention the institution on the resume. And IME you don't often communicate your grade but your class rank, most notably if you're at the very top (valedictorian, etc); even with grade inflation schools still must be able to differentiate the very top students from everybody else so they can actually provide these honors. You can't graduate an entire class of "top" students, no matter how earnestly they studied. With few exceptions there is no mastering the material, or at least there shouldn't be. Not in college. There's always more complex material you can use to differentiate students. When you grade on a curve the test should be difficult enough that even the best students will typically get at least one question wrong, with most students falling along a nice bell distribution. (I say most because it's probably better to err on the side of a handful of students clustering at the top rather than at the bottom, especially if the bottom means flunking out.) This can be more difficult for smaller, seminar style classes. One solution is giving the professor leeway to shift up and tighten the curve so he's not forced to give Fs or Ds. These classes are usually in the latter years of a program, particularly in undergraduate, where it's less important to winnow students out and ensure challenging curriculums. That latter point is important. If you don't enforce some sort of statistical distribution how can you gauge the quality of your curriculum? If everybody is getting As is that because all your students are smart and disciplined, or because the material is too simple? If you require a bell distribution, then the curriculum will by necessity be a good fit for your cohort of students. In this way a university can maintain a quality curriculum without having to resort to external metrics or comparisons with other schools.
- closeparen 8y ago
  I'm aware that this philosophy of education and grading exists, and it may well be superior, but it's not how things worked in any part of my education. Grades indicated how well you met the instructor's expectations. Most classes gave mostly As and Bs: if you weren't going to do well relative to the course, you wouldn't let it get to the point of a letter grade. Instead the differentiation was between departments and courses. It was well understood that X majors were Y majors who couldn't hack it, and that within a major, certain classes were for high-achieving masochists while others were schedule padding. (This was crucial information, not just dick-measuring. You could easily put yourself in crisis by taking a class beyond your abilities, or multiple hard classes at once. Friends helped each other avoid such nightmares). If you asked me to evaluate a classmate's transcript, I wouldn't even look at their grades, only at the classes they allowed themselves to have grades in. No one has ever asked me that, or to see my transcript.

wahern 8y ago

Grades are relative to other people in your school and program; it's why you mention the institution on the resume. And IME you don't often communicate your grade but your class rank, most notably if you're at the very top (valedictorian, etc); even with grade inflation schools still must be able to differentiate the very top students from everybody else so they can actually provide these honors. You can't graduate an entire class of "top" students, no matter how earnestly they studied. With few exceptions there is no mastering the material, or at least there shouldn't be. Not in college. There's always more complex material you can use to differentiate students. When you grade on a curve the test should be difficult enough that even the best students will typically get at least one question wrong, with most students falling along a nice bell distribution. (I say most because it's probably better to err on the side of a handful of students clustering at the top rather than at the bottom, especially if the bottom means flunking out.) This can be more difficult for smaller, seminar style classes. One solution is giving the professor leeway to shift up and tighten the curve so he's not forced to give Fs or Ds. These classes are usually in the latter years of a program, particularly in undergraduate, where it's less important to winnow students out and ensure challenging curriculums. That latter point is important. If you don't enforce some sort of statistical distribution how can you gauge the quality of your curriculum? If everybody is getting As is that because all your students are smart and disciplined, or because the material is too simple? If you require a bell distribution, then the curriculum will by necessity be a good fit for your cohort of students. In this way a university can maintain a quality curriculum without having to resort to external metrics or comparisons with other schools.

closeparen 8y ago
I'm aware that this philosophy of education and grading exists, and it may well be superior, but it's not how things worked in any part of my education. Grades indicated how well you met the instructor's expectations. Most classes gave mostly As and Bs: if you weren't going to do well relative to the course, you wouldn't let it get to the point of a letter grade. Instead the differentiation was between departments and courses. It was well understood that X majors were Y majors who couldn't hack it, and that within a major, certain classes were for high-achieving masochists while others were schedule padding. (This was crucial information, not just dick-measuring. You could easily put yourself in crisis by taking a class beyond your abilities, or multiple hard classes at once. Friends helped each other avoid such nightmares). If you asked me to evaluate a classmate's transcript, I wouldn't even look at their grades, only at the classes they allowed themselves to have grades in. No one has ever asked me that, or to see my transcript.