6 ms·

One of the better ways that occurred to me when we Cal grad students were protesting a couple of decades ago was, rather than withhold the grades, simply to giv

One of the better ways that occurred to me when we Cal grad students were protesting a couple of decades ago was, rather than withhold the grades, simply to give everyone an 'A'. That form of protest most directly targeted the institution since it simply affected its reputation. The students were not hurt, the grad students could comply with their obligations and move on. I am surprised that such an approach never took off.

saagarjha 7y ago
Ha, wouldn’t that be nice :) I’m not sure if professors would allow that to go through, though…
chrisseaton 7y ago
> The students were not hurt They’re not getting genuine feedback on their work.
- praptak 7y ago
  You can still give them feedback. Damn, you should, regardless of grades.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Part of feedback is the grade.
    - praptak 7y ago
      The least useful one. Edit: Here's an opinion about that: https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-moral-problem-of-grading-extended.html https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-...
  - Balgair 7y ago
    UCSC is a bit strange. At first, they did not give out grades at all. There was only a written evaluation that the professor did for each student at the end of the quarter. Eventually, in the mid 1980s or so, other schools demanded that UCSC give out a grade in addition, so they they could compare Slugs to other students when admitting for post-secondary education. When I send my official transcript over, it's ~75 pages long, not just one page. It's chock-full of detailed personal information about my efforts in Psych-101, Intro to Jazz, etc (or, rather, the total lack of effort, in my case).
    - rubidium 7y ago
      The former system is ideal.
      - xenonite 7y ago
        Could you elaborate that?
        rubidium 7y ago
        Grads don’t provide meaningful feedback for how a student can grow or the challenges they’re facing. As soon as you introduce grades they become the sole metric to be gamed. I understand there’s real issues with scaling, but national tests seem to resolve that. At most a pass, high pass or fail system would be best. Letter +/- grades are just silly when you step back and think about the goal of education.
        Balgair 7y ago
        To be fair, the written feedback varied greatly. Some literally just put down my scores on tests/papers. Some just copy-pasted the class description and then gave the grade I got. Others wrote pages of feedback, not all of which was useful. My name is common enough that I was confused with another student once, including with my grade, so that was fun. In large 500+ person intro classes, the feedback could never have been meaningful due to class size. In other 10 person classes, the feedback was generally pretty good. Upper division classes were better in term of feedback, broadly. In practice, it's a bit of a mixed bag and each professor was different and themselves differed over time. Generally it's great though, even years after the events. When I send in my transcripts, I vainly go over them again, and it's always a welcome exercise. Seeing my growth (good and bad) is so incredibly rewarding. It's very rare to get to be assessed like that in such pivotal years. Some of those forms are the last communications I will ever have with those people as they have since died. Even if those forms are generally bland, I treasure them, as those people helped me so very much and were generally kind to me. I'm tearing up right now thinking about one professor I never got to say goodbye to (Dearest Reader: this is the universe telling you to email that person you've been meaning to email, FYI). One last thing: if you are a person that designs websites that happen to accept transcripts, please bump the file limit up from ~25mb. Mine is ~200mb as the official download from the school and I always have to go in an scale down the .pdf to the varying mb limit that the website accepts, none of which are the same limit. Also, it always looks terrible after I scale it back.
jlg23 7y ago
How is a student not hurt when given an incorrect assessment of their academic abilities?
- swiley 7y ago
  Undergrad students? If it’s a CS class and not one of the intro to programming/algorithms ones you’re probably mostly checking if they read the book they were forced to buy (thanks ACM) so I would say it doesn’t really hurt them.
  - Jtsummers 7y ago
    If that’s all your undergrad CS courses did, you should’ve gone to a better school.
  - chongli 7y ago
    A student who gets an A when they should have failed the course may be wrongly encouraged to continue in that direction when they really ought to change programs. This could end up costing that student a huge amount of time and money, to the point of jeopardizing their ability to graduate and ruining their future. Failing grades aren’t supposed to just be a punishment for not studying hard enough. They can be a warning sign that the student may need to try something else.
  - mrep 7y ago
    Depends on the school. All of my math classes and most of my CS classes at purdue were bell curved around like a C+/B- and you had to get a C to pass the class. Thus, a portion of each class would not pass and be effectively forced to retake the class to learn it better or switch to an easier major. What schools do you have experience with? Also, never heard of ACM so I have no idea if that was used whatsoever for our classes.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > never heard of ACM ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery. Hopefully someone mentioned it to you before you graduated…
davrosthedalek 7y ago
How are the students not hurt if the reputation of their university is damaged? Especially if you are a good student. Graduate admissions are aware of this kind of stuff, and it will screw over real A students royally.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  Harvard awards nearly all A's and their reputation hasn't suffered for it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/04/harvard-colleges-median-grade-is-an-a-dean-admits/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/... I suspect it would take a lot more than one "A strike" to substantially impact a school's reputation.
  - davrosthedalek 7y ago
    I can tell you with 100% confidence that grade inflation is taken into account in grad admission. Been there, done that. Same as arbitrary scale changes (Let's give A+...). But it will be a long time until this impacts Harvard. OTOH, it seems Princeton steered back.
heligate229 7y ago
grade inflation at its finest...
tantalor 7y ago
> comply with their obligations It's a dereliction, not compliance. Your job is to sincerely, fairly, and justifiably assign grades, and not arbitrarily.

saagarjha 7y ago

Ha, wouldn’t that be nice :) I’m not sure if professors would allow that to go through, though…

chrisseaton 7y ago

> The students were not hurt They’re not getting genuine feedback on their work.

praptak 7y ago
You can still give them feedback. Damn, you should, regardless of grades.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Part of feedback is the grade.
  - praptak 7y ago
    The least useful one. Edit: Here's an opinion about that: https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-moral-problem-of-grading-extended.html https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-...
- Balgair 7y ago
  UCSC is a bit strange. At first, they did not give out grades at all. There was only a written evaluation that the professor did for each student at the end of the quarter. Eventually, in the mid 1980s or so, other schools demanded that UCSC give out a grade in addition, so they they could compare Slugs to other students when admitting for post-secondary education. When I send my official transcript over, it's ~75 pages long, not just one page. It's chock-full of detailed personal information about my efforts in Psych-101, Intro to Jazz, etc (or, rather, the total lack of effort, in my case).
  - rubidium 7y ago
    The former system is ideal.
    - xenonite 7y ago
      Could you elaborate that?
      - rubidium 7y ago
        Grads don’t provide meaningful feedback for how a student can grow or the challenges they’re facing. As soon as you introduce grades they become the sole metric to be gamed. I understand there’s real issues with scaling, but national tests seem to resolve that. At most a pass, high pass or fail system would be best. Letter +/- grades are just silly when you step back and think about the goal of education.
        Balgair 7y ago
        To be fair, the written feedback varied greatly. Some literally just put down my scores on tests/papers. Some just copy-pasted the class description and then gave the grade I got. Others wrote pages of feedback, not all of which was useful. My name is common enough that I was confused with another student once, including with my grade, so that was fun. In large 500+ person intro classes, the feedback could never have been meaningful due to class size. In other 10 person classes, the feedback was generally pretty good. Upper division classes were better in term of feedback, broadly. In practice, it's a bit of a mixed bag and each professor was different and themselves differed over time. Generally it's great though, even years after the events. When I send in my transcripts, I vainly go over them again, and it's always a welcome exercise. Seeing my growth (good and bad) is so incredibly rewarding. It's very rare to get to be assessed like that in such pivotal years. Some of those forms are the last communications I will ever have with those people as they have since died. Even if those forms are generally bland, I treasure them, as those people helped me so very much and were generally kind to me. I'm tearing up right now thinking about one professor I never got to say goodbye to (Dearest Reader: this is the universe telling you to email that person you've been meaning to email, FYI). One last thing: if you are a person that designs websites that happen to accept transcripts, please bump the file limit up from ~25mb. Mine is ~200mb as the official download from the school and I always have to go in an scale down the .pdf to the varying mb limit that the website accepts, none of which are the same limit. Also, it always looks terrible after I scale it back.

jlg23 7y ago

How is a student not hurt when given an incorrect assessment of their academic abilities?

swiley 7y ago
Undergrad students? If it’s a CS class and not one of the intro to programming/algorithms ones you’re probably mostly checking if they read the book they were forced to buy (thanks ACM) so I would say it doesn’t really hurt them.
- Jtsummers 7y ago
  If that’s all your undergrad CS courses did, you should’ve gone to a better school.
- chongli 7y ago
  A student who gets an A when they should have failed the course may be wrongly encouraged to continue in that direction when they really ought to change programs. This could end up costing that student a huge amount of time and money, to the point of jeopardizing their ability to graduate and ruining their future. Failing grades aren’t supposed to just be a punishment for not studying hard enough. They can be a warning sign that the student may need to try something else.
- mrep 7y ago
  Depends on the school. All of my math classes and most of my CS classes at purdue were bell curved around like a C+/B- and you had to get a C to pass the class. Thus, a portion of each class would not pass and be effectively forced to retake the class to learn it better or switch to an easier major. What schools do you have experience with? Also, never heard of ACM so I have no idea if that was used whatsoever for our classes.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > never heard of ACM ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery. Hopefully someone mentioned it to you before you graduated…

davrosthedalek 7y ago

How are the students not hurt if the reputation of their university is damaged? Especially if you are a good student. Graduate admissions are aware of this kind of stuff, and it will screw over real A students royally.

AlchemistCamp 7y ago
Harvard awards nearly all A's and their reputation hasn't suffered for it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/04/harvard-colleges-median-grade-is-an-a-dean-admits/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/... I suspect it would take a lot more than one "A strike" to substantially impact a school's reputation.
- davrosthedalek 7y ago
  I can tell you with 100% confidence that grade inflation is taken into account in grad admission. Been there, done that. Same as arbitrary scale changes (Let's give A+...). But it will be a long time until this impacts Harvard. OTOH, it seems Princeton steered back.

heligate229 7y ago

grade inflation at its finest...

tantalor 7y ago

> comply with their obligations It's a dereliction, not compliance. Your job is to sincerely, fairly, and justifiably assign grades, and not arbitrarily.