As a former TA... there needs to be a clear distinction in discussions of students. Not everyone is good. Some students are 'bad'. Incompetent. Lousy. Shouldn'

As a former TA... there needs to be a clear distinction in discussions of students. Not everyone is good. Some students are 'bad'. Incompetent. Lousy. Shouldn't be there. Many students are just banging out what they need for that degree. Why are they wanting the degree? Money. Stability. Cause dad said so. Cause it's what ya do. Do they care? No. And then there are the bright students/hackers. They were so interested - it was so very fun working with them. I reckon the breakdown was 10/80/10 or thereabouts. Good teachers work for all those students. There are different strategies to try to get/maintain interest/excellence. Some try fear, others lots of homework, some general disinterest (sink or swim). (Un)fortunately, we want to have ratings on people who we hire. "Is this guy any good? Yeah? How good?" So... like any project, we have a metric, and like humans we are optimizing for the metric instead of success. This last hundred years, the metric is GPA. And, for what its worth, my recollection of the grades we gave is that it was a rough correlation with the student's ability. Anyway, my 2c.