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> It's an excellent signal for some critical amount of intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity, where each one can be traded off for some of the others

> It's an excellent signal for some critical amount of intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity, where each one can be traded off for some of the others - but only up to a point. No amount of conformity and intelligence can explain 80% A's if there is a curve that mandates otherwise. This grading distribution can only occur if the faculty permit it to, both at an individual level and at a policy level.

ceejayoz 3y ago
> No amount of conformity and intelligence can explain 80% A's if there is a curve that mandates otherwise. A curve requiring an entire class of people who all got 90% of the questions right on an exam to have a particular distribution of As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs would be insane. Curves are supposed to account for "this test is quite difficult and has an expected range of passing scores that doesn't quite fit in the ten point scale" scenarios. If you can get into Harvard, you're supposed to be an A student.
- c-linkage 3y ago
  Then why bother giving grades at all? EDIT: The parent comment makes it sound like admittance to Harvard is prima facia proof that students are already excellent. If that is the case, then why grade students in Harvard? Students at Harvard should be trusted to learn everything they need to learn. EDIT2: Given that 80% of grades at Harvard are 'A', it seems like Harvard administration agrees that grading is not needed.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Because it indicates "this student has a good grasp of subject X". If everyone at Harvard exits with a good grasp of Calculus, that's useful information. If only half of people from BU graduate with a good grasp of Calculus, that's also good information. BU and Harvard don't need to have the same proportions of A students for it to be a useful data point.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      I think the root problem here is that some people see grades as an absolute measurement of whether someone has mastered the material, and other people see grades as a way to rank students relative to each other. If you believe the first, then it should be possible and expected for a class to be able to get all A's. If you believe the second, then it makes sense to widen the dynamic range such that you get a clear rank ordering.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    To catch people who don't meet expectation. Tests are written such that A means "you performed at the level that was expected of you" and B-D are varying magnitudes of failing to do that.
    - riskable 3y ago
      > A means "you performed at the level that was expected of you" and B-D are varying magnitudes of failing to do that. Incorrect! An A just means you got 90% or better accuracy on tests/quizzes. 60% means you earned enough to move on to the next subject. Therefore, "What's expected of you" is to get a D or better. Otherwise only an A would be a passing grade.
      - Spivak 3y ago
        This is just semantics. When tests are written to where the expected grade is an A then less than that is coming in under expectation. Also I don't know any school that lets you move to the next course if you got a D. It's enough to say you passed but not continue.
        riskable 3y ago
        In America there's a saying, "D means Degree" or "D means Diploma". D is the bare minimum passing grade. You're not going to get into a prestigious school with grades like that but community colleges will still take you.
  - xionon 3y ago
    It isn’t a zero sum game. It’s possible for all students to get As and for that to still be a meaningful measurement of skill. Grades don’t show your ability relative to others, they show your mastery of a set of knowledge and skills. You mastering something doesn’t prevent your neighbor from also mastering it.
    - c-linkage 3y ago
      It looks like grades may be different depending on when you were born. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United... In my day, Rank-Based grading was the system, but not just among the students in a specific class -- it was based on historical numbers. The same course was taught for many years so it was easy to get that longitudinal view. Especially in secondary and high school, a 'C' meant you were average for the students who took the class. The tests had questions of differing levels of difficulty. If you couldn't answer the difficult questions, you clearly didn't "master" the material and therefore couldn't get an 'A'. People with average ability would be expected to get an average on the test, so a 'C' would still mean you learned the material adequately and could move on to the next class / grade.
  - wwweston 3y ago
    Feedback to the student about their level of mastery of the coursework (relative to the coursework itself, not the rest of the class). Of course, that doesn’t have to be a letter; percentages along with specific corrections would do as well. But once there’s a convention people often use it. Grading students relative to each other gives different information and probably not precise across cohorts at that.
- namdnay 3y ago
  The obvious solution in that case seems to be to make the test more difficult . If everyone is getting 90% right you can definitely spice things up a bit
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Why? The exam is intended to make sure you learned the material. If everyone did so, the response shouldn't be "make the grades shittier", it should be "applaud the instructor for their good teaching". My AP Physics class had 20 kids in it, 10 of us got 5s and 10 got 4s on the AP Physics exam. Should some of us had our scores lowered for a better bell curve? No; he was just a really great, engaging teacher who pushed us to achieve.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      > 10 of us got 5s and 10 got 4s on the AP Physics exam There is no problem if a subset of the total population does very well (or very badly). But if half of all AP takers got 5s and the other half got 4s, then it would be time to reexamine the test. Similarly, if there was a study group in a class that did very well, that's no problem. But if nearly the entire class gets As, that signals that the class could be more rigorous, cover more material, etc. I get why they don't do this — they don't want to disadvantage students as they go looking for jobs. But some schools are happy to have a reputation for for tough grading. My college had freshman courses where only 10% could get an A or A- (this amounted to 3 students, since the classes were capped at 30). It's a very selective college, so pretty much all of the kids were "A students" coming in. Among graduate schools and top employers, it's known to be a school that is very academically challenging.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        > But if half of all AP takers got 5s and the other half got 4s, then it would be time to reexamine the test. Maybe, maybe not. If you spot check and a statistically significant sample shows kids are indeed learning first year college physics effectively in AP courses, perhaps you do a little happy dance and be glad something's working. Employers don't seem to be hiring Harvard grads and going "holy shit this person doesn't know anything they're supposed to know" to half of them. Employers seem to be generally happy what an A student from Harvard comes to them with. > But if nearly the entire class gets As, that signals that the class could be more rigorous, cover more material, etc. Or that you've got a self-selecting population of high-achievers. > My college had freshman courses where only 10% could get an A or A- (this amounted to 3 students, since the classes were capped at 30). That's depressing. "You're an A student, but I'm required to give you a B for organizational reasons" is an absoutely nasty thing to do to a college kid.
- zelon88 3y ago
  And the difficulty of that subject matter should reflect that expectation of superb academic excellence. Harvard has a duty to increase the relative difficulty of their coursework UNTIL a certain percentage fails. Otherwise it's just a rich persons Lions club for angsty 20-somethings.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > Harvard has a duty to increase the relative difficulty of their coursework UNTIL a certain percentage fails. Why? What benefit is there to the world to making students flunk out of a school when that same student would have passed with flying colors elsewhere? "Sorry, you've got a great grasp of engineering that any firm would benefit from, but you'll work at McDonalds now, because Bob got one more question right. Thanks for the $100k and four years of your life!" The goal of education is to educate, not to flunk a certain percentage of people.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - zelon88 3y ago
      > The goal of education is to educate, not to flunk a certain percentage of people. No. The purpose of normal college is to educate. The purpose of Ivy league school is to separate the exquisite from the mediocre. If you aren't exquisite then why are you going to $100k college? Because your parents can afford it. There is some low income kid who actually is exquisite who should get that seat in the exquisite class. You don't deserve to pass just because you're not an idiot. If you are even a little bit of an idiot you should not be able to get a Harvard education. You should flunk out, lose your parents money, and try again in community College. You are not entitled to pass because you are average and your parents are rich. College is not risk free.
      - sverona 3y ago
        Right, because nothing shitty and unforeseeable ever happens to low-income kids in the middle of a semester, because kids who definitionally have fewer resources aren't held back in any way by their environment, and because the people setting the standard are unbiased angels. Dollars to donuts you've never actually taught a class.
- mangodrunk 3y ago
  I completely agree with you and fail to see why people think otherwise. It’s just so arbitrary and against actual learning to make a test hard to get a certain spread of scores. Depending on the material, breadth, and depth the teacher would like to assess what has been taught, the test can be challenging. The goal is to learn.
- MrJohz 3y ago
  > If you can get into Harvard, you're supposed to be an A student. This seems to presuppose that the grading system is universal across all universities - i.e. that we would expect the vast majority of Harvard students to get an A, but the vast majority of students at a middling community college to get a C or D. Is this really the case? I'm not American, but in the British education system, this is broadly considered not to be the case - if anything, the more prestigious institutions historically have had much higher standards for each grade. Another expectation is that students' performances at university typically cannot be easily predicted from school grades or tests, and that all universities will have a proportion of students who do very well, and a proportion of students who do not do well at all. There is no real expectation that, say, the Oxbridge universities only take students who will definitely get a first, and the other universities mop up. Oxford and Cambridge are definitely more prestigious and therefore harder to get into, but they're by no means some "sure thing" where if you've passed that hurdle, you'll be able to pass everything else.
carabiner 3y ago
Is grading on a curve desirable? Why not, if everyone is really good, everyone gets an A? If they all fail, they get F's. I had a friend who was a professional musician auditioning for orchestras. At that level, EVERY applicant to these positions had won every music award they were eligible for since they were a kid. He never paid a dime for his music degree because he had a full scholarship. Zero debt to worry about. Still the audition outcomes were basically random because everyone trying out was perfect. So what's wrong with that?

ceejayoz 3y ago

> No amount of conformity and intelligence can explain 80% A's if there is a curve that mandates otherwise. A curve requiring an entire class of people who all got 90% of the questions right on an exam to have a particular distribution of As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs would be insane. Curves are supposed to account for "this test is quite difficult and has an expected range of passing scores that doesn't quite fit in the ten point scale" scenarios. If you can get into Harvard, you're supposed to be an A student.

c-linkage 3y ago
Then why bother giving grades at all? EDIT: The parent comment makes it sound like admittance to Harvard is prima facia proof that students are already excellent. If that is the case, then why grade students in Harvard? Students at Harvard should be trusted to learn everything they need to learn. EDIT2: Given that 80% of grades at Harvard are 'A', it seems like Harvard administration agrees that grading is not needed.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Because it indicates "this student has a good grasp of subject X". If everyone at Harvard exits with a good grasp of Calculus, that's useful information. If only half of people from BU graduate with a good grasp of Calculus, that's also good information. BU and Harvard don't need to have the same proportions of A students for it to be a useful data point.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I think the root problem here is that some people see grades as an absolute measurement of whether someone has mastered the material, and other people see grades as a way to rank students relative to each other. If you believe the first, then it should be possible and expected for a class to be able to get all A's. If you believe the second, then it makes sense to widen the dynamic range such that you get a clear rank ordering.
- Spivak 3y ago
  To catch people who don't meet expectation. Tests are written such that A means "you performed at the level that was expected of you" and B-D are varying magnitudes of failing to do that.
  - riskable 3y ago
    > A means "you performed at the level that was expected of you" and B-D are varying magnitudes of failing to do that. Incorrect! An A just means you got 90% or better accuracy on tests/quizzes. 60% means you earned enough to move on to the next subject. Therefore, "What's expected of you" is to get a D or better. Otherwise only an A would be a passing grade.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      This is just semantics. When tests are written to where the expected grade is an A then less than that is coming in under expectation. Also I don't know any school that lets you move to the next course if you got a D. It's enough to say you passed but not continue.
      - riskable 3y ago
        In America there's a saying, "D means Degree" or "D means Diploma". D is the bare minimum passing grade. You're not going to get into a prestigious school with grades like that but community colleges will still take you.
- xionon 3y ago
  It isn’t a zero sum game. It’s possible for all students to get As and for that to still be a meaningful measurement of skill. Grades don’t show your ability relative to others, they show your mastery of a set of knowledge and skills. You mastering something doesn’t prevent your neighbor from also mastering it.
  - c-linkage 3y ago
    It looks like grades may be different depending on when you were born. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United... In my day, Rank-Based grading was the system, but not just among the students in a specific class -- it was based on historical numbers. The same course was taught for many years so it was easy to get that longitudinal view. Especially in secondary and high school, a 'C' meant you were average for the students who took the class. The tests had questions of differing levels of difficulty. If you couldn't answer the difficult questions, you clearly didn't "master" the material and therefore couldn't get an 'A'. People with average ability would be expected to get an average on the test, so a 'C' would still mean you learned the material adequately and could move on to the next class / grade.
- wwweston 3y ago
  Feedback to the student about their level of mastery of the coursework (relative to the coursework itself, not the rest of the class). Of course, that doesn’t have to be a letter; percentages along with specific corrections would do as well. But once there’s a convention people often use it. Grading students relative to each other gives different information and probably not precise across cohorts at that.
namdnay 3y ago
The obvious solution in that case seems to be to make the test more difficult . If everyone is getting 90% right you can definitely spice things up a bit
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Why? The exam is intended to make sure you learned the material. If everyone did so, the response shouldn't be "make the grades shittier", it should be "applaud the instructor for their good teaching". My AP Physics class had 20 kids in it, 10 of us got 5s and 10 got 4s on the AP Physics exam. Should some of us had our scores lowered for a better bell curve? No; he was just a really great, engaging teacher who pushed us to achieve.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    > 10 of us got 5s and 10 got 4s on the AP Physics exam There is no problem if a subset of the total population does very well (or very badly). But if half of all AP takers got 5s and the other half got 4s, then it would be time to reexamine the test. Similarly, if there was a study group in a class that did very well, that's no problem. But if nearly the entire class gets As, that signals that the class could be more rigorous, cover more material, etc. I get why they don't do this — they don't want to disadvantage students as they go looking for jobs. But some schools are happy to have a reputation for for tough grading. My college had freshman courses where only 10% could get an A or A- (this amounted to 3 students, since the classes were capped at 30). It's a very selective college, so pretty much all of the kids were "A students" coming in. Among graduate schools and top employers, it's known to be a school that is very academically challenging.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      > But if half of all AP takers got 5s and the other half got 4s, then it would be time to reexamine the test. Maybe, maybe not. If you spot check and a statistically significant sample shows kids are indeed learning first year college physics effectively in AP courses, perhaps you do a little happy dance and be glad something's working. Employers don't seem to be hiring Harvard grads and going "holy shit this person doesn't know anything they're supposed to know" to half of them. Employers seem to be generally happy what an A student from Harvard comes to them with. > But if nearly the entire class gets As, that signals that the class could be more rigorous, cover more material, etc. Or that you've got a self-selecting population of high-achievers. > My college had freshman courses where only 10% could get an A or A- (this amounted to 3 students, since the classes were capped at 30). That's depressing. "You're an A student, but I'm required to give you a B for organizational reasons" is an absoutely nasty thing to do to a college kid.
zelon88 3y ago
And the difficulty of that subject matter should reflect that expectation of superb academic excellence. Harvard has a duty to increase the relative difficulty of their coursework UNTIL a certain percentage fails. Otherwise it's just a rich persons Lions club for angsty 20-somethings.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > Harvard has a duty to increase the relative difficulty of their coursework UNTIL a certain percentage fails. Why? What benefit is there to the world to making students flunk out of a school when that same student would have passed with flying colors elsewhere? "Sorry, you've got a great grasp of engineering that any firm would benefit from, but you'll work at McDonalds now, because Bob got one more question right. Thanks for the $100k and four years of your life!" The goal of education is to educate, not to flunk a certain percentage of people.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - zelon88 3y ago
    > The goal of education is to educate, not to flunk a certain percentage of people. No. The purpose of normal college is to educate. The purpose of Ivy league school is to separate the exquisite from the mediocre. If you aren't exquisite then why are you going to $100k college? Because your parents can afford it. There is some low income kid who actually is exquisite who should get that seat in the exquisite class. You don't deserve to pass just because you're not an idiot. If you are even a little bit of an idiot you should not be able to get a Harvard education. You should flunk out, lose your parents money, and try again in community College. You are not entitled to pass because you are average and your parents are rich. College is not risk free.
    - sverona 3y ago
      Right, because nothing shitty and unforeseeable ever happens to low-income kids in the middle of a semester, because kids who definitionally have fewer resources aren't held back in any way by their environment, and because the people setting the standard are unbiased angels. Dollars to donuts you've never actually taught a class.
mangodrunk 3y ago
I completely agree with you and fail to see why people think otherwise. It’s just so arbitrary and against actual learning to make a test hard to get a certain spread of scores. Depending on the material, breadth, and depth the teacher would like to assess what has been taught, the test can be challenging. The goal is to learn.
MrJohz 3y ago
> If you can get into Harvard, you're supposed to be an A student. This seems to presuppose that the grading system is universal across all universities - i.e. that we would expect the vast majority of Harvard students to get an A, but the vast majority of students at a middling community college to get a C or D. Is this really the case? I'm not American, but in the British education system, this is broadly considered not to be the case - if anything, the more prestigious institutions historically have had much higher standards for each grade. Another expectation is that students' performances at university typically cannot be easily predicted from school grades or tests, and that all universities will have a proportion of students who do very well, and a proportion of students who do not do well at all. There is no real expectation that, say, the Oxbridge universities only take students who will definitely get a first, and the other universities mop up. Oxford and Cambridge are definitely more prestigious and therefore harder to get into, but they're by no means some "sure thing" where if you've passed that hurdle, you'll be able to pass everything else.

carabiner 3y ago

Is grading on a curve desirable? Why not, if everyone is really good, everyone gets an A? If they all fail, they get F's. I had a friend who was a professional musician auditioning for orchestras. At that level, EVERY applicant to these positions had won every music award they were eligible for since they were a kid. He never paid a dime for his music degree because he had a full scholarship. Zero debt to worry about. Still the audition outcomes were basically random because everyone trying out was perfect. So what's wrong with that?