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

It certainly won't stop just because we wish it away. Note the passive voice in "This nonsense should cease." Who, exactly, should do this? Some junior professor, who's up for tenure based on research output, and teaching prizes based on being liked... in his shoes, would you decide to spontaneously give mostly B & Cs next year, and spend weeks fighting unhappy students? Thinking about how we'd like the idea system to work is just daydreaming. You've got to think about the incentives facing all the people involved. And at the moment, these seem to point towards inflation.

jcranmer 7y ago
> Note the passive voice in "This nonsense should cease." That is not actually passive voice: note that "cease" is not inflected into the past participle, and it is modified with a modal "should" instead of an auxiliary (almost invariably "be"). In grammatical construction, this sentence is identical to "You should go," which I think you should recognize as not being passive either.
- improbable22 7y ago
  Good catch, I did in fact get a B in grammar. Is there a term for this? "This nonsense should cease" does differ from "you should go" in that it demands an action on an inanimate thing, while avoiding saying who acts.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    Don't feel too bad, most people can't detect passive voice correctly. Hell, Strunk's Elements of Style, when discussing the avoidance of passive voice, has four examples of clunky writing that can be rewritten to use the active voice, except three of them are already in active voice.
toss1 7y ago
Yes, and sometimes explicitly from the top. The parent of a friend had a widely varied career working in economics for multinationals and the US State Dept. He decided at one point to take accept a position teaching economics at a nearby state school (this was in the '90s). He found part way through the term of a intro-mid level course that a significant number of the students were unable to do the basic math required for the problems, let alone work through the actual problems. Of course he was giving them failing grades. He was soon reprimanded by the administration and told to raise the grades to passing despite the inability to do even the basic work. He resigned at the end of that term. Several takeaways from that story, none of them good.

jcranmer 7y ago

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

improbable22 7y ago
Good catch, I did in fact get a B in grammar. Is there a term for this? "This nonsense should cease" does differ from "you should go" in that it demands an action on an inanimate thing, while avoiding saying who acts.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Don't feel too bad, most people can't detect passive voice correctly. Hell, Strunk's Elements of Style, when discussing the avoidance of passive voice, has four examples of clunky writing that can be rewritten to use the active voice, except three of them are already in active voice.

toss1 7y ago

Yes, and sometimes explicitly from the top. The parent of a friend had a widely varied career working in economics for multinationals and the US State Dept. He decided at one point to take accept a position teaching economics at a nearby state school (this was in the '90s). He found part way through the term of a intro-mid level course that a significant number of the students were unable to do the basic math required for the problems, let alone work through the actual problems. Of course he was giving them failing grades. He was soon reprimanded by the administration and told to raise the grades to passing despite the inability to do even the basic work. He resigned at the end of that term. Several takeaways from that story, none of them good.