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Prof here. Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. I would happily give out nothing but A

Prof here. Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. I would happily give out nothing but A's (those would be 6's here), if all students deserved them. On the other hand, I have taught classes where 3/4 of the students failed, because they deserved to. Giving out unjustifiably high grades devalues them. Why should a top student apply themselves, if everyone is going to get an 'A'? A student putting in low effort needs to get a wake-up call by failing exams or assignments. Grades tell the school how a student is doing, and may serve as a basis for admission to particular courses or projects. Grades tell the student how they are doing, and where they need to invest more effort. Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are. Ok, stepping back: one possible reason for undeserved high grades can be found in the school administration. Students who fail too many courses must leave the school, and that costs the school money. Administrators tend to think of this year's finances, and don't care a whole lot about long-term reputation. Professors and instructors have to push back, have to insist on maintaining a level of quality. No one wants to teach for a diploma mill.

ecf 3y ago
> Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are. I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had. Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn’t have the luxury of studying as much as others did.
- tekla 3y ago
  Funny, most of my class considered it a red flag if a employer didn't check for grades. Mostly because it meant everyone who had < 3.0 GPA or so would mob them. All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
  - gloryjulio 3y ago
    > All the best employers had 3.5 or bust. Not sure about that. Don't know any faang companies that care about your grade.
    - brewdad 3y ago
      They don't care about the difference between a 3.5 and a 4.0 but they absolutely have a minimum grade standard for new college grads. Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to know whether you have a degree and your work experience. Grades certainly matter when first starting out however.
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        Google was happy to attempt to recruit me from a no-name school with a 3.2 GPA Pretty much anything above a 3.0 for a STEM degree is just a measure of how much you cared, or how much free time you had anyway.
      - gloryjulio 3y ago
        > Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to know whether you have a degree and your work experience. Grades certainly matter when first starting out however. Not really, even half a year of internship in a average software shop/your own software project/working experience in any software position is enough to win over a great student with 0 experience to score you a chance of interview. And the interview experience is the same for everyone. The school experience frankly doesn't account for anything except whether the candidate has the fortitute. You learn on the job anyway. It's like how they use leetcode where they just want to see how hard you want the job. Source: I am in faang.
  - tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
    I applied to ~15 employers in my last semester of school and 0 of them asked for or about grades (in the US).
    - tekla 3y ago
      Any employer of new grads that didn't ask for grades were all pretty obviously lower tie. It was also much harder to get an interview because of sheer numbers of students standing on line. The high tier companies told everyone before they stood on line that unless you have a minimum of 3.0, you were better off going somewhere else.
      - tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
        I went through multiple rounds of interviews with Google and received an offer from Amazon without ever providing a transcript (2013).
    - hilux 3y ago
      I know someone who couldn't get an interview at Google, within the last couple of years, because his grades (at Caltech - the last holdout against grade inflation!) were too low. IIRC he was above average at Caltech, but GPA was abysmally low compared to applicants from Stanford, Harvard, Pomona, and other egregiously inflating schools.
      - ChainOfFools 3y ago
        Just curious, why would you include Pomona ( if we're talking about the Claremont colleges generally) but exclude Harvey Mudd, which is definitely in the Caltech position of fiercelyresisting grade inflation, if not even more rigorous than Caltech (and probably anywhere else STEM-oriented) in that regard.
        hilux 3y ago
        The schools I mentioned are well-known to be grade inflators, and at one point I checked out Pomona's website (which discusses their grading), so it was on my mind. From a distance, I think highly of Harvey Mudd, but I don't know their grading policies. I doubt they grade harder than Caltech, since HMC's branding is all about "we want to help you succeed" and Caltech is more of "we're going to beat you up [intellectually]."
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Often professors grade gently to avoid being mobbed at the end of the year as I was told by a few myself. Students have been getting worse by the year at that. The worst part of the modern college experience I think is the fact in many majors, you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the courseload. This obviously sets up a world where more advantaged students who can afford free time to such things continue to hold the best outcomes, despite recent DEI pushes from admin to avoid these things. I’ve heard a professor actually state with pride how the lab classes in their department have not changed in over 40 years, so that grades from 40 years ago could be compared to todays grades, somehow believing that is more useful to employers than getting qualified candidates. Then on the other hand students have to take so many concurrent credit hours in different classes that they will admit to triaging their study time and giving up on certain classes, where they might have succeeded if allowed more time for focus perhaps in one of those month-mester formats, where you can get a semester’s course done in a month or so.
- nradov 3y ago
  Colleges aren't intended to be trade schools teaching job skills. This does, however, put some students in a difficult position. If someone wants to become a professional software developer and isn't particularly interested in becoming a well-rounded individual with a broad, liberal education then there aren't many good options. Coding boot camps exist but are generally limited and low quality. You might not realize this yet, but occasionally overloading students with coursework is actually a positive. I attended an academically rigorous college and as an average student there was just no way I could finish everything on time in a high quality way. This taught me effective time management, ruthless prioritization, and the pointlessness of perfectionism. Those lessons were more valuable than the content of any particular course.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    While this style of educational methods might work for you, they don’t work for everyone and in fact they are very harmful to a subset of the population. Colleges seemingly are more willing to install fencing in parking garages than to look inwardly at why they have had to install this fencing in the first place.
jimbob45 3y ago
Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. You're in the very small minority. Virtually every professor I had in college employed scale adjustments to grades based on class averages.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  I think its very common to grade on a curb, mostly because most professors don't have a natural high water mark defined (like what does "A" work mean independent of your peers?). And if they did have an idea, they probably have taught the class many times to get that idea. Especially for smaller upper division classes that are not taught at scale, this is probably not very feasible.
- itronitron 3y ago
  And yet GPA is used to rank applicants in pretty much every academic admissions process.
jseliger 3y ago
That can be true and yet the incentives remain: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/ https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...
mise_en_place 3y ago
A sneakier thing that some of my professors did was to inflate the lower percentile of grades. So not everyone would get an A, but nobody would get lower than a B-/C+.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  The democratization of the gentleman's C[1] [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentleman%27s_C https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentleman%27s_C
- vanilla_nut 3y ago
  In my experience, administration cares a lot about pass/fail ratios. Much less so about the distribution of passing grades. I've seen situations where administration forced a curve in a difficult class because they weren't willing to face the music when over 50% of a class failed. Mostly because the students and their (helicopter) parents would raise a shitstorm of busywork and a lot of bad press. Of course, sometimes 50% of a class fails because the teaching is shoddy, or the grading is unfair, or the prerequisites weren't properly set or enforced. It isn't always a failure on the part of the students. Failing grades are inherently a failure of the system to prepare and guide a student through material. A common symptom of that systemic failure? Lazy, unmotivated students.
  - mise_en_place 3y ago
    Schooling as an institution is decaying, and there are alternate institutions popping up in the decentralized Network State. Will future employers prefer students who went to woke Harvard, or an autodidact who was homeschooled, utilized an AI tutor (Synthesis), and then went on to the Thiel Fellowship. Time will tell I suppose.
Cheer2171 3y ago
> Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. This was not my experience in a large public US research university for undergrad and masters in math and CS. So many of my STEM classes had exams that were not calibrated at all to any "bar" of minimum expectations. Often the median grade for exams (out of 100) was 30-60. So the prof fit it to a normal distribution and then put arbitrary cutoffs for what counted as an A, B, C, D, and F. Social science and humanities was often very different grading. I had a humanities prof tell me exactly what you said when I asked about the curve: there is no curve, I do not compare you to other students, I compare you to my own standards.
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  One of my favorite finals had two parts. One was a normal test on the material. That was not graded on a curve. The other was a more open ended set of problems. That was graded on a curve, and was a lot of fun. But yeah, every other CS class I took was on a curve.
  - jprival 3y ago
    I recall certain intro CS courses being calibrated to be difficult enough to fit with the department’s (generally tough) grading guidelines without actually applying a strict curve to exam results after the fact, so as to encourage students to see it as a collaborative endeavor rather than a competitive one. That seems kind of ideal if you can make it work. But yes, it’s hardly unusual for grades to work a lot like stack ranking.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  In my most extreme case of this, I had a C.S. midterm where I nearly doubled the second highest score (90 vs 47). The cutoff for an A was around 40. The only one of my humanities classes that had a curve was the "Introduction to logic" (which was offered by the philosophy department). It was a rather gentle curve, but the tests were also open-book.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  One of the amusing things I encountered in grad school was taking a course where both grad students and undergraduates were allowed. The course was curved for the reasons you mentioned but what was interesting was that the grad students and undergraduates were curved separately. To protect the undergraduates, right? Actually as it turned out the grad students scored worse on average!
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail, that sounds like a dysfunctional system. Maybe the course prerequisites were poorly designed. How do you determine with such certainty that it was the student's fault? Do you ever look at those stats and consider whether you're actually doing a good job at teaching? I've definitely encountered some professors are just terrible educators that take pride in failing as many students as possible... Not that I'd claim this is the case for you, but I always wonder when people bring up these massive rates of failure.
- burnished 3y ago
  It would be weirder if it never happened.
- JadeNB 3y ago
  > If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail, that sounds like a dysfunctional system. Maybe the course prerequisites were poorly designed. How do you determine with such certainty that it was the student's fault? Do you ever look at those stats and consider whether you're actually doing a good job at teaching? I think "only a poor teacher blames their students" is a pretty tempting companion to "only a poor craftsman blames their tools," but, at least from my motivated thinking as a teacher, I don't find it completely true. The structuring of universities as businesses means that there's a strong, if seldom explicitly acknowledged, tendency to view a degree as something that is purchased, rather than earned. This means that there is a lot of pressure from administration to make sure that a large proportion of an increasingly large population of students—students whom the faculty had no voice in choosing—eventually get their way to a degree. The students who are interested in their education still work sincerely towards that goal, but the ones who view a degree as a credential they are purchasing can fall, intentionally or unintentionally, into the trap of relying on this institutional pressure to shepherd them through as long as they play the system correctly. And then, as a teacher, your choice is to connive at this "go along to get along" mentality, or to be stuck in a situation where there is no reasonable way to get students who came to you unprepared—for societal and educational reasons—to a point where one can honestly say that they have mastered this course's material and are ready for the next.
jncfhnb 3y ago
As someone who comfortably was at the top of every class without a ton of effort I found grading to be stupid. Incentives demanded you have As. Teachers who were rigid graders with thresholds at 95% for As were very frustrating. The difference between an A and an A- is not one of mastery but of minor errors and lapses in focus. Teachers don’t have the ability to meaningfully measure top performance. Imo grading should have a lower ceiling for an A but no curve. So much anxiety would be lost if everyone just chilled out and said, look, if you generally understand all the material, you get the top mark.
ren_engineer 3y ago
universities have gone from having the goal of actually educating to giving credentials in return for a lot of money
tonymet 3y ago
i would hire a student to do a regression on your grading over the past few years and see if that's true
fjjfjfj 3y ago
Maybe grading is not stack ranking for you, but for other professors it openly and explicitly is. And it's hugely problematic to have inconsistent grade scales between professors. When two Intro to Statistics professors teach the same curriculum but one routinely fails 0-5% of the class and the other routinely fails 40% of the class and grades matter for getting internships or into grad school, that matters and the 40% professor is probably just on an ego trip. I found out the hard way that this is why there was a waitlist to take math classes in the engineering department but no wait list to take them in the math department, because in the math department a D was passing and you could get into a graduate program with >2.5, but in the engineering department a D was failing and you weren't getting into grad school with below a 3.2. Yet engineering department administrators were recommending students take math department classes and not explaining that. You had to figure it out yourself. Usually by going to the honors society's office and asking the students who spent all their time gaming their GPAs.
- hollandheese 3y ago
  >Maybe grading is not stack ranking for you, but for other professors it openly and explicitly is. And it's hugely problematic to have inconsistent grade scales between professors. When two Intro to Statistics professors teach the same curriculum but one routinely fails 0-5% of the class and the other routinely fails 40% of the class and grades matter for getting internships or into grad school, that matters and the 40% professor is probably just on an ego trip. Intro to Stats: it's vastly vastly more likely that the 0-5% failure professor is not doing their job and is just passing every student regardless of the quality of their work.
andrewmutz 3y ago
> Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are. As a potential employer, I would prefer to know where the student landed relative to their peers rather than an absolute score. Maybe in addition to the absolute score we could know the students percentile score in the class. It's not impressive to get an A at Harvard, all that says is they aren't in the bottom 21% of the class. Being in the top 10% of the class is impressive.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  Do transcripts in the US not show the class average?
  - MichaelNolan 3y ago
    Not at any US college/university that I’m aware of. Mine certainly don’t. It’s an interesting idea though.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      Huh. Mine does, from a Canadian university.
lizard 3y ago
That's fine for a well establish course and curriculum, where its pretty well known where the students are at (or should be) and the material is presented in a consistent manner that has successfully filtered the deserving and undeserving. Which is something that all teachers and schools should strive for, but probably not where many are at. New topics are added, new teachers, new academic plans defining which courses are required and when. New initiatives, programs, and policies are created all the time that change how people move through the education system. Even someone teaching the same course for 30 years is going to experience their own ups and downs that they may, inadvertently, project onto their students in different ways at different times. I'm not saying you should hand out undeserved grades. I agree with your perspective that grades have to mean something and high grades need to be earned. My personal take is that as a society we just need to get comfortable with C's, because that's where the average should be. (Sure, who wants to hire a Writer who's only average at writing? But by letting them know they are only average in writing you can now give them opportunities to _measurably_ improve, or highlight that they are above average in math and might be more successful there.) But if 3/4 of the class failed then _something went wrong_, and I would hope that our educators are able to reflect on that a little more then, "because they deserved to." The only thing those students got out of that class was an F. And the one thing the school administration has got right is that giving out F's is a failure of the institution. The problem is that right now their incentives are to reduce the number of F's rather than improve the teaching and learning. If those students had learned something or got your wake up-call, they would have done better. I'm not blaming you. There's a whole institution behind you, and several more over a student's education, with all sorts of problems and not enough of them having anything to do with actually educating people. But solutions have to start somewhere, so I would still look to you to talk to your fellow faculty and leadership; tell them that 3/4 of your class couldn't even hit average marks compared to every other time you've taught the course, and that we have got to do better to prepare incoming students for the material they are about to learn. Education isn't about regurgitating the same things over and over and keeping up the same bell curve until you retire. It's about teaching and learning and creating new opportunities for people to grow. That won't always work for everyone. You'll have to give out a an F here and there. But just like high grades should mean something, low grades should too. A student putting in low effort but grokking the material should be getting a C. An F is an indicator that something is wrong and the student isn't where they need to be.
devwastaken 3y ago
If an org is designed in such a way that students are failing at a large scale then it is by nature the org that is the root cause. Why would you have students in a position to fail spectacularly? The answer is obvious to any student but eludes employed academics - the schooling system from the 1950's does not solve 2020's problems. Educational orgs were founded by motivated people with specific vision that fit their time. Those people are long gone and now they are grand beiracraucies that have tried and failed to systemize knowledge and responsibilities. They are endlessly trying to recapture magic because the orgs evolve into many non cohesive groups. Grand systems with many abstractions work when an org is for profit and owns enough fundamental intellectual property and market share that their relevance is by market force. If they didn't have that then a startup could replace them tomorrow. Education on the other hand is propped up by welfare. It is effecticely the law that only accredited institutions can be "education". Yet we know for a fact that a 10 minute YouTube video has significantly better effects on learning than a semester of classes. The market of education needs to be disrupted in order for students to succeed.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  If you think college students these days have the attention span for a 10 minute video assigned to them in class I have some bad news for you as an instructor
  - devwastaken 3y ago
    They do! I would know :) the problem isn't even the length, the problem is in the performance, the presentation, how cohesive the information is to a new learner. If an instructor plays a video in class, it doesn't work well. "Why are we here again?". If the video is assigned, then its ignored because students have to pay on the private loans that pay you. They have to optimize their life because late stage capitalism and government obesity is squeezing the life out of the younger generation. It's human nature but it's often ignored in favor of easy explanations. If you disagree then simply listen to the conversations students have when they think nobody is listening. The solution, which can be gained by asking any successfully educator (rarely professors), is this - you are a content creator. If you don't know how to play that role, then you can't educate well. The whole purpose of an instructor is to take difficult concepts and make them easier for the human ape brain to understand. We do this by leveraging visual recognition, memory, and social behaviors. For example an instructor that presents good information with a poor performance will result in poor communication of that information. This is so common I could walk into a classroom and example it right now. The problem can only be solved by competition with the existing orgs. There are far better methods, and you can find them if you search.
eska 3y ago
* Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.* Citation needed. As somebody who just wasn’t compatible with the school and academic system, eventually dropping out because it took a mental toll on me, doing engineering research in the industry nowadays and considered to be a high performer at work, I’m lucky my employer didn’t care about my grades but looked at my private projects instead.
j7ake 3y ago
I disagree that grading is not stack ranking. Everything about going to college is to a stamp of approval that you are “better” than others. Better than people from other schools and better than people within your class. The entire academic system is also “stack ranked”. Promotions depend on getting published in journals, winning awards, and getting grants that others cannot get.

ecf 3y ago

> Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are. I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had. Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn’t have the luxury of studying as much as others did.

tekla 3y ago
Funny, most of my class considered it a red flag if a employer didn't check for grades. Mostly because it meant everyone who had < 3.0 GPA or so would mob them. All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
- gloryjulio 3y ago
  > All the best employers had 3.5 or bust. Not sure about that. Don't know any faang companies that care about your grade.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    They don't care about the difference between a 3.5 and a 4.0 but they absolutely have a minimum grade standard for new college grads. Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to know whether you have a degree and your work experience. Grades certainly matter when first starting out however.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      Google was happy to attempt to recruit me from a no-name school with a 3.2 GPA Pretty much anything above a 3.0 for a STEM degree is just a measure of how much you cared, or how much free time you had anyway.
    - gloryjulio 3y ago
      > Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to know whether you have a degree and your work experience. Grades certainly matter when first starting out however. Not really, even half a year of internship in a average software shop/your own software project/working experience in any software position is enough to win over a great student with 0 experience to score you a chance of interview. And the interview experience is the same for everyone. The school experience frankly doesn't account for anything except whether the candidate has the fortitute. You learn on the job anyway. It's like how they use leetcode where they just want to see how hard you want the job. Source: I am in faang.
- tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
  I applied to ~15 employers in my last semester of school and 0 of them asked for or about grades (in the US).
  - tekla 3y ago
    Any employer of new grads that didn't ask for grades were all pretty obviously lower tie. It was also much harder to get an interview because of sheer numbers of students standing on line. The high tier companies told everyone before they stood on line that unless you have a minimum of 3.0, you were better off going somewhere else.
    - tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
      I went through multiple rounds of interviews with Google and received an offer from Amazon without ever providing a transcript (2013).
  - hilux 3y ago
    I know someone who couldn't get an interview at Google, within the last couple of years, because his grades (at Caltech - the last holdout against grade inflation!) were too low. IIRC he was above average at Caltech, but GPA was abysmally low compared to applicants from Stanford, Harvard, Pomona, and other egregiously inflating schools.
    - ChainOfFools 3y ago
      Just curious, why would you include Pomona ( if we're talking about the Claremont colleges generally) but exclude Harvey Mudd, which is definitely in the Caltech position of fiercelyresisting grade inflation, if not even more rigorous than Caltech (and probably anywhere else STEM-oriented) in that regard.
      - hilux 3y ago
        The schools I mentioned are well-known to be grade inflators, and at one point I checked out Pomona's website (which discusses their grading), so it was on my mind. From a distance, I think highly of Harvey Mudd, but I don't know their grading policies. I doubt they grade harder than Caltech, since HMC's branding is all about "we want to help you succeed" and Caltech is more of "we're going to beat you up [intellectually]."

kjkjadksj 3y ago

Often professors grade gently to avoid being mobbed at the end of the year as I was told by a few myself. Students have been getting worse by the year at that. The worst part of the modern college experience I think is the fact in many majors, you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the courseload. This obviously sets up a world where more advantaged students who can afford free time to such things continue to hold the best outcomes, despite recent DEI pushes from admin to avoid these things. I’ve heard a professor actually state with pride how the lab classes in their department have not changed in over 40 years, so that grades from 40 years ago could be compared to todays grades, somehow believing that is more useful to employers than getting qualified candidates. Then on the other hand students have to take so many concurrent credit hours in different classes that they will admit to triaging their study time and giving up on certain classes, where they might have succeeded if allowed more time for focus perhaps in one of those month-mester formats, where you can get a semester’s course done in a month or so.

nradov 3y ago
Colleges aren't intended to be trade schools teaching job skills. This does, however, put some students in a difficult position. If someone wants to become a professional software developer and isn't particularly interested in becoming a well-rounded individual with a broad, liberal education then there aren't many good options. Coding boot camps exist but are generally limited and low quality. You might not realize this yet, but occasionally overloading students with coursework is actually a positive. I attended an academically rigorous college and as an average student there was just no way I could finish everything on time in a high quality way. This taught me effective time management, ruthless prioritization, and the pointlessness of perfectionism. Those lessons were more valuable than the content of any particular course.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  While this style of educational methods might work for you, they don’t work for everyone and in fact they are very harmful to a subset of the population. Colleges seemingly are more willing to install fencing in parking garages than to look inwardly at why they have had to install this fencing in the first place.

jimbob45 3y ago

Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. You're in the very small minority. Virtually every professor I had in college employed scale adjustments to grades based on class averages.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
I think its very common to grade on a curb, mostly because most professors don't have a natural high water mark defined (like what does "A" work mean independent of your peers?). And if they did have an idea, they probably have taught the class many times to get that idea. Especially for smaller upper division classes that are not taught at scale, this is probably not very feasible.
itronitron 3y ago
And yet GPA is used to rank applicants in pretty much every academic admissions process.

jseliger 3y ago

That can be true and yet the incentives remain: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/ https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...

mise_en_place 3y ago

A sneakier thing that some of my professors did was to inflate the lower percentile of grades. So not everyone would get an A, but nobody would get lower than a B-/C+.

phone8675309 3y ago
The democratization of the gentleman's C[1] [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentleman%27s_C https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gentleman%27s_C
vanilla_nut 3y ago
In my experience, administration cares a lot about pass/fail ratios. Much less so about the distribution of passing grades. I've seen situations where administration forced a curve in a difficult class because they weren't willing to face the music when over 50% of a class failed. Mostly because the students and their (helicopter) parents would raise a shitstorm of busywork and a lot of bad press. Of course, sometimes 50% of a class fails because the teaching is shoddy, or the grading is unfair, or the prerequisites weren't properly set or enforced. It isn't always a failure on the part of the students. Failing grades are inherently a failure of the system to prepare and guide a student through material. A common symptom of that systemic failure? Lazy, unmotivated students.
- mise_en_place 3y ago
  Schooling as an institution is decaying, and there are alternate institutions popping up in the decentralized Network State. Will future employers prefer students who went to woke Harvard, or an autodidact who was homeschooled, utilized an AI tutor (Synthesis), and then went on to the Thiel Fellowship. Time will tell I suppose.

Cheer2171 3y ago

> Grading is not "stack ranking". when I give out a grade to a student, I don't care how the other students did. This was not my experience in a large public US research university for undergrad and masters in math and CS. So many of my STEM classes had exams that were not calibrated at all to any "bar" of minimum expectations. Often the median grade for exams (out of 100) was 30-60. So the prof fit it to a normal distribution and then put arbitrary cutoffs for what counted as an A, B, C, D, and F. Social science and humanities was often very different grading. I had a humanities prof tell me exactly what you said when I asked about the curve: there is no curve, I do not compare you to other students, I compare you to my own standards.

bcrosby95 3y ago
One of my favorite finals had two parts. One was a normal test on the material. That was not graded on a curve. The other was a more open ended set of problems. That was graded on a curve, and was a lot of fun. But yeah, every other CS class I took was on a curve.
- jprival 3y ago
  I recall certain intro CS courses being calibrated to be difficult enough to fit with the department’s (generally tough) grading guidelines without actually applying a strict curve to exam results after the fact, so as to encourage students to see it as a collaborative endeavor rather than a competitive one. That seems kind of ideal if you can make it work. But yes, it’s hardly unusual for grades to work a lot like stack ranking.
aidenn0 3y ago
In my most extreme case of this, I had a C.S. midterm where I nearly doubled the second highest score (90 vs 47). The cutoff for an A was around 40. The only one of my humanities classes that had a curve was the "Introduction to logic" (which was offered by the philosophy department). It was a rather gentle curve, but the tests were also open-book.
jhbadger 3y ago
One of the amusing things I encountered in grad school was taking a course where both grad students and undergraduates were allowed. The course was curved for the reasons you mentioned but what was interesting was that the grad students and undergraduates were curved separately. To protect the undergraduates, right? Actually as it turned out the grad students scored worse on average!

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail, that sounds like a dysfunctional system. Maybe the course prerequisites were poorly designed. How do you determine with such certainty that it was the student's fault? Do you ever look at those stats and consider whether you're actually doing a good job at teaching? I've definitely encountered some professors are just terrible educators that take pride in failing as many students as possible... Not that I'd claim this is the case for you, but I always wonder when people bring up these massive rates of failure.

burnished 3y ago
It would be weirder if it never happened.
JadeNB 3y ago
> If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail, that sounds like a dysfunctional system. Maybe the course prerequisites were poorly designed. How do you determine with such certainty that it was the student's fault? Do you ever look at those stats and consider whether you're actually doing a good job at teaching? I think "only a poor teacher blames their students" is a pretty tempting companion to "only a poor craftsman blames their tools," but, at least from my motivated thinking as a teacher, I don't find it completely true. The structuring of universities as businesses means that there's a strong, if seldom explicitly acknowledged, tendency to view a degree as something that is purchased, rather than earned. This means that there is a lot of pressure from administration to make sure that a large proportion of an increasingly large population of students—students whom the faculty had no voice in choosing—eventually get their way to a degree. The students who are interested in their education still work sincerely towards that goal, but the ones who view a degree as a credential they are purchasing can fall, intentionally or unintentionally, into the trap of relying on this institutional pressure to shepherd them through as long as they play the system correctly. And then, as a teacher, your choice is to connive at this "go along to get along" mentality, or to be stuck in a situation where there is no reasonable way to get students who came to you unprepared—for societal and educational reasons—to a point where one can honestly say that they have mastered this course's material and are ready for the next.

jncfhnb 3y ago

As someone who comfortably was at the top of every class without a ton of effort I found grading to be stupid. Incentives demanded you have As. Teachers who were rigid graders with thresholds at 95% for As were very frustrating. The difference between an A and an A- is not one of mastery but of minor errors and lapses in focus. Teachers don’t have the ability to meaningfully measure top performance. Imo grading should have a lower ceiling for an A but no curve. So much anxiety would be lost if everyone just chilled out and said, look, if you generally understand all the material, you get the top mark.

ren_engineer 3y ago

universities have gone from having the goal of actually educating to giving credentials in return for a lot of money

tonymet 3y ago

i would hire a student to do a regression on your grading over the past few years and see if that's true

fjjfjfj 3y ago

Maybe grading is not stack ranking for you, but for other professors it openly and explicitly is. And it's hugely problematic to have inconsistent grade scales between professors. When two Intro to Statistics professors teach the same curriculum but one routinely fails 0-5% of the class and the other routinely fails 40% of the class and grades matter for getting internships or into grad school, that matters and the 40% professor is probably just on an ego trip. I found out the hard way that this is why there was a waitlist to take math classes in the engineering department but no wait list to take them in the math department, because in the math department a D was passing and you could get into a graduate program with >2.5, but in the engineering department a D was failing and you weren't getting into grad school with below a 3.2. Yet engineering department administrators were recommending students take math department classes and not explaining that. You had to figure it out yourself. Usually by going to the honors society's office and asking the students who spent all their time gaming their GPAs.

hollandheese 3y ago
>Maybe grading is not stack ranking for you, but for other professors it openly and explicitly is. And it's hugely problematic to have inconsistent grade scales between professors. When two Intro to Statistics professors teach the same curriculum but one routinely fails 0-5% of the class and the other routinely fails 40% of the class and grades matter for getting internships or into grad school, that matters and the 40% professor is probably just on an ego trip. Intro to Stats: it's vastly vastly more likely that the 0-5% failure professor is not doing their job and is just passing every student regardless of the quality of their work.

andrewmutz 3y ago

> Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are. As a potential employer, I would prefer to know where the student landed relative to their peers rather than an absolute score. Maybe in addition to the absolute score we could know the students percentile score in the class. It's not impressive to get an A at Harvard, all that says is they aren't in the bottom 21% of the class. Being in the top 10% of the class is impressive.

sudosysgen 3y ago
Do transcripts in the US not show the class average?
- MichaelNolan 3y ago
  Not at any US college/university that I’m aware of. Mine certainly don’t. It’s an interesting idea though.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    Huh. Mine does, from a Canadian university.

lizard 3y ago

That's fine for a well establish course and curriculum, where its pretty well known where the students are at (or should be) and the material is presented in a consistent manner that has successfully filtered the deserving and undeserving. Which is something that all teachers and schools should strive for, but probably not where many are at. New topics are added, new teachers, new academic plans defining which courses are required and when. New initiatives, programs, and policies are created all the time that change how people move through the education system. Even someone teaching the same course for 30 years is going to experience their own ups and downs that they may, inadvertently, project onto their students in different ways at different times. I'm not saying you should hand out undeserved grades. I agree with your perspective that grades have to mean something and high grades need to be earned. My personal take is that as a society we just need to get comfortable with C's, because that's where the average should be. (Sure, who wants to hire a Writer who's only average at writing? But by letting them know they are only average in writing you can now give them opportunities to _measurably_ improve, or highlight that they are above average in math and might be more successful there.) But if 3/4 of the class failed then _something went wrong_, and I would hope that our educators are able to reflect on that a little more then, "because they deserved to." The only thing those students got out of that class was an F. And the one thing the school administration has got right is that giving out F's is a failure of the institution. The problem is that right now their incentives are to reduce the number of F's rather than improve the teaching and learning. If those students had learned something or got your wake up-call, they would have done better. I'm not blaming you. There's a whole institution behind you, and several more over a student's education, with all sorts of problems and not enough of them having anything to do with actually educating people. But solutions have to start somewhere, so I would still look to you to talk to your fellow faculty and leadership; tell them that 3/4 of your class couldn't even hit average marks compared to every other time you've taught the course, and that we have got to do better to prepare incoming students for the material they are about to learn. Education isn't about regurgitating the same things over and over and keeping up the same bell curve until you retire. It's about teaching and learning and creating new opportunities for people to grow. That won't always work for everyone. You'll have to give out a an F here and there. But just like high grades should mean something, low grades should too. A student putting in low effort but grokking the material should be getting a C. An F is an indicator that something is wrong and the student isn't where they need to be.

devwastaken 3y ago

If an org is designed in such a way that students are failing at a large scale then it is by nature the org that is the root cause. Why would you have students in a position to fail spectacularly? The answer is obvious to any student but eludes employed academics - the schooling system from the 1950's does not solve 2020's problems. Educational orgs were founded by motivated people with specific vision that fit their time. Those people are long gone and now they are grand beiracraucies that have tried and failed to systemize knowledge and responsibilities. They are endlessly trying to recapture magic because the orgs evolve into many non cohesive groups. Grand systems with many abstractions work when an org is for profit and owns enough fundamental intellectual property and market share that their relevance is by market force. If they didn't have that then a startup could replace them tomorrow. Education on the other hand is propped up by welfare. It is effecticely the law that only accredited institutions can be "education". Yet we know for a fact that a 10 minute YouTube video has significantly better effects on learning than a semester of classes. The market of education needs to be disrupted in order for students to succeed.

selimthegrim 3y ago
If you think college students these days have the attention span for a 10 minute video assigned to them in class I have some bad news for you as an instructor
- devwastaken 3y ago
  They do! I would know :) the problem isn't even the length, the problem is in the performance, the presentation, how cohesive the information is to a new learner. If an instructor plays a video in class, it doesn't work well. "Why are we here again?". If the video is assigned, then its ignored because students have to pay on the private loans that pay you. They have to optimize their life because late stage capitalism and government obesity is squeezing the life out of the younger generation. It's human nature but it's often ignored in favor of easy explanations. If you disagree then simply listen to the conversations students have when they think nobody is listening. The solution, which can be gained by asking any successfully educator (rarely professors), is this - you are a content creator. If you don't know how to play that role, then you can't educate well. The whole purpose of an instructor is to take difficult concepts and make them easier for the human ape brain to understand. We do this by leveraging visual recognition, memory, and social behaviors. For example an instructor that presents good information with a poor performance will result in poor communication of that information. This is so common I could walk into a classroom and example it right now. The problem can only be solved by competition with the existing orgs. There are far better methods, and you can find them if you search.

eska 3y ago

* Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.* Citation needed. As somebody who just wasn’t compatible with the school and academic system, eventually dropping out because it took a mental toll on me, doing engineering research in the industry nowadays and considered to be a high performer at work, I’m lucky my employer didn’t care about my grades but looked at my private projects instead.

j7ake 3y ago

I disagree that grading is not stack ranking. Everything about going to college is to a stamp of approval that you are “better” than others. Better than people from other schools and better than people within your class. The entire academic system is also “stack ranked”. Promotions depend on getting published in journals, winning awards, and getting grants that others cannot get.