6 ms·

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, majo

by lumost 2y ago

My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach. In my opinion, the solution is to reduce the reliance on assessments which are prone to cheating or which in the real world would be done by computer.

skhunted 2y ago
I think grading is obsolete. Grade inflation increased a lot the past 30 years. Ironically, it has increased the least at the least prestigious colleges. Pass/fail is the way to go. Don’t know if this would mess up things like applying for graduate school or jobs but let’s end the farce that grading has become.
- CBLT 2y ago
  Getting rid of grading sounds crazy, but it's actually happening. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in America, is moving to "equitable grading", which amounts (imo) to pass/fail with extra pageantry. Teachers are being retrained _right now_ to equitable grading. I know an equitable grading champion at an LAUSD school, I'll see if I can get material to share. EDIT: I just received [0][1][2][3]. [0] (5 page pdf) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YO7SQEwisAbHHi6mfgj7XU9FcSB2l-Rh/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YO7SQEwisAbHHi6mfgj7XU9FcSB... [1] (4m30s video) https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eWor4uhSxR8ZITA1w3kzqhTOX0Hx-ZK/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eWor4uhSxR8ZITA1w3kzqhTOX0... [2] (audio interview) https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/fair-grades-dropping-grades-grading-versus-knowledge/ https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/fair-grades-dropping-g... [3] (article) https://ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-grading https://ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-gradin...
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    In a pass/fail system, what does a student need to do for a teacher to be willing to fail them? What is the minimum bar to pass?
    - Spivak 2y ago
      At most universities you can talk most classes pass/fail by choice which means A-D is pass and F is fail. The nice thing about an all pass/fail system is you can formalize the 'new' way grades are actually done in which A means meets expectations and anything less means did not. Making pass mean A/B takes a lot stress off students and C/D is already failing for practical purposes as often you can't continue with less than a B.
    - dehrmann 2y ago
      Since this was at LA Unified, I suspect the bar for passing is extremely low. Not commenting on that district specifically, but not graduating from High School on time takes some doing. The system is very good at moving kids through, and it's why a high school diploma means so little.
    - CBLT 2y ago
      According to the equitable grading materials I just received (and posted above), that determination is... entirely up to the individual teacher's discretion? I might be misunderstanding.
    - odo1242 2y ago
      One of my teachers implemented a system like this. What they ended up doing was making it so that you had to score a (effectively) 9/10 on major assignments to pass the class (minor assignments were graded on completion), but had an infinite number of revisions with which to get this grade with feedback being provided each time you tried. Pretty much everyone passed, with more work required from some than from others. The only issue it ran into was with the final paper, where you (realistically) only had time to receive and make one to two revisions before the end of the semester and the deadline to submit grades.
samatman 2y ago
Disagree on the order, unless the next institution is also an educational one, which for undergraduates is mostly not the case. If it's a job, the order will be school, school, major, everything else on the résumé, grades maybe.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Agreed, I didn't know people put their GPA on resumes.
  - je42 2y ago
    Sometimes it is even a form field on Linkedin job openings.
- _proofs 2y ago
  except for a plethora of companies that require GPA disclosure on their submissions.
dataflow 2y ago
> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. That's not the cost of not getting an A, it's the cost of appearing to underperform compared to too many of your peers. Which is directly tied to how many of them cheat. If not enough cheaters got an A then the cost would no longer be tied to not getting an A, it would be tied to whatever metric they appeared to outperform you on.
_ea1k 2y ago
This really can't be emphasized enough. Universities and the initial hiring process really optimize for a score and not for learning. Those could be, and sometimes are, correlated, but it isn't necessarily the case. Really focusing on stretching yourself necessarily means lower grades. Why is that penalized? TBH, in software engineering a lot of people with lower grades tutor the ones with 4.0 averages. The skillsets required to code and the skillsets required to get a good grade on a test are different.
- curiouscavalier 2y ago
  And it penalizes in many ways. Focusing too much on grades can be detrimental in graduate studies, despite graduate admissions focusing on GPA and test scores. I remember seeing 4.0 undergrads really struggle with research in grad school, sometimes to the point of dropping out. Certainly not always the case, but for the ones that did I think it speaks to your point about different skillsets. Maybe worse was seeing the undergrads who passed on research opportunities out of fear it would distract them from keeping a high GPA.
  - lumost 2y ago
    Curiously, while I had a 2.7 in undergrad. I thrived in the workplace. The initial GPA restricted my options for the first 3-5 years, but I eventually became a Principal Engineer at a FAANG. In hindsight, I wish I had balanced my objectives more - but I also lacked the discipline to do things I didn't want to back then. The follies of youth and all that :)
- godelski 2y ago
  > Really focusing on stretching yourself necessarily means lower grades. I'm reminded of a saying/trope (whatever) I've seen in reference to surgeons and lawyers (I'm sure it's also been used in TV and movies). But the trope is that someone is looking for an expert and will be talking to a bunch of hotshots (let's say lawyers). They'll be bragging and then asked if they've ever lost a case, to which they proudly declare they have a spotless record. To which the person responds: then you've never taken a single risk. It's overly dramatic, but I think gets the point across in an easy to understand way. It's exactly why you see the lower grade ones tutor the high grade ones (this even happened in my undergrad and I did physics[0]). It's because learning happens when struggling. It happens at the edge. This is also a big reason some learn a lot faster than others or even why someone will say they don't understand but understand more than someone who says they do (and who believes it). Because expertise isn't about the high level general ideas, it's about all the little nitty gritty details, the subtle things that dramatically change things. But a big concern I have is that this is a skill to learn in of itself. I think it's not difficult to recognize when this skill is learned (at least if you have) but it's not something that'll be learned if we focus to much on scores. After all, they're just a proxy. Even the institutional prestige is a proxy (and I have an argument why it no longer matters though it did decades ago). I do wonder if this is in part cause for the rise in enshitification. Similarly if this is why so many are bad at recognizing issues in LLMs and ML models. I'm sure it is but not sure how much this contributes or if it's purely a confounding variable. [0] when I signed up to be a tutor at my university I got signed off my the toughest math professor. When I took the signature to the department the admin wasn't sure if I was trying to trick her because she immediately called the professor to confirm the signature. Then told me I could tutor whatever I wanted because I was one of two people he had ever signed off on. Admittedly, I'm sure a lot of that was because people were afraid of him (he wasn't mean, but he wouldn't let you be anything less than the best he thought you could be)
lacker 2y ago
Employers need to wake up to this in hiring, too. You can get a 4.0 with a degree in computer science from a top school, and still not be able to program at all. Some organizations still hire software engineers just based on resume and a nontechnical interview. This can easily be a disaster! You need to do a real assessment during the interview of how well software engineers can code.
- jacobr1 2y ago
  Also you can hire people with 20+ years of experience that also can't code (where people claim to be a software engineer). FizzBuzz was a real filter for a while. It has amazed me how some people where able to slide by in larger organizations for years and then switch (internally or to another company) when the competency mattered. You can make a whole career it!
pj_mukh 2y ago
Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions? -> GPA can be gamed, as laid out. -> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use. -> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts -> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot. What should be best practice here? Ideally something that controls for first-time interviewer jitters.
- lacker 2y ago
  You have to use on-location tests. Do your best to be fair and get a true evaluation of the candidate's skills. It's not perfect but the alternatives are worse. The other thing you have to do is that you have to be willing to fire the people who are underperforming. It's just a natural consequence of the interview process being imperfect.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    Yeah, even just making people engage with source code from your system and answer questions about it or find bugs is better than asking them about their own portfolio.
  - musicale 2y ago
    I think leetcode tends to be a randomized signal because if you've seen the problem before then it's easy, but if it's an unfamiliar problem (or class of problem) then you're basically being asked to be Knuth/Dijkstra/et al., but faster. Algorithm puzzles are fun, but they bear little resemblance to typical tech work. I think doing very basic, simple things is a better test. I also like asking candidates to explain something that they already understand well. And for code, I like reading it and also getting an explanation about why things were done the way they were. Code reading also seems to be an important skill that is probably more important than writing.
- vkou 2y ago
  > On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot They aren't 'fair' in avoiding every false negative, but they at least tell me that the passing candidates know and can do something. If I ask someone who claims to know Python or Java whether or not you can have a memory leak in them, and their answer is 'no' or 'Maybe, but I don't know how', I get a pretty good idea of whether or not they know anything about this topic. If you can't do fizzbuzz, you probably aren't a good fit for a SWE position either, you should be aiming for something more director-level. Given how much people struggle with coding, I sometimes feel like I may as well ditch my regular question, and just ask them to write that.
98codes 2y ago
> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. And every non-educational institution after that will see school, degree as a checkbox.
- earthboundkid 2y ago
  I have hired for many positions over the years and never once asked for grades.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    > I have hired for many positions over the years and never once asked for grades. I'm not sure what your point is, but if you're trying to claim that GP is incorrect and companies don't ask for GPA, you are (unfortunately) wrong. There are plenty who do. It seems to be especially the bigger and/or more conservative companies so it's trending away, but it definitely happens.
fsndz 2y ago
> My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. This is so true. I was recently pondering about the impact of AI cheating in Africa and came up with the conclusion that it won't be as significant as in EU/US precisely because most evaluations in African countries are in person https://www.lycee.ai/blog/can-africa-leapfrog-its-way-to-ai-relevance https://www.lycee.ai/blog/can-africa-leapfrog-its-way-to-ai-... Your take reminds me of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Same is true with GPA and all. But I am pessimistic about seing that change in the medium to long term because it is so politically sensitive.
BeetleB 2y ago
The solution may also be not to make classes too hard. If, for example, your physics classes were of the same difficulty as the ones in my undergrad (easy to medium difficulty for the most part), then the 2.7 GPA is probably an accurate reflection of your abilities. But if you went to a top university with brutal courses, and got a 2.7 GPA, then all I'm seeing is you're not elite material. The number otherwise does not help me one bit in evaluating you. BTW, having spent a lot of time out of the US - it's still pretty laid back in the US. A person who is 2.7 GPA material in the US would simply not get admission in any decent university in some countries. And plenty of people in the US start all over at another institution and do well - something many countries don't allow (state funded, lack of resources, you have to move out of the way to let the younger batch in).[1] [1] A good friend of mine totally flunked out of his university. He spent time off in the military. Then started all over at a new university. Got really high grades. Went to a top school for his PhD and is now a tenured faculty member.
JellyBeanThief 2y ago
> As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach. I can, too. I wanted to learn, but I also wanted to achieve a high GPA. I had a privileged background, so I got to retake classes after earning Cs or Bs until I got an A, without cheating. The consequences: My degree took a long time to get, cost more money than my peers in the same program, and I now have a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy.
FigurativeVoid 2y ago
> My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. I agree with the first part, but I think the second follows from it. Take a class like organic chemistry. When I was in school, the grade was based on 5 exams, each worth 20% of your grade. Worse still, anything less than an A was seen as a failure for most students dreaming of medical/vet school. Of course you are going to have people that are going to cheat. You've made the stakes so high that the consequences of getting caught cheating are meaningless. On top of that, once enough students are cheating, you need to cheat just to keep up.
- adamc 2y ago
  The consequences of cheating could be made much more severe. I am troubled by this argument because it suggests people have no ethical core. If that is true then we are going to have problems with them regardless.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    When we talk about an ethical core, that sort of behavior exists between individuals. People in a family, or people who are friends, hopefully will and typically do adjust their behavior according to some sense of ethics. When we put people into a classroom, however, we’re implicitly putting them into competition with their peers for a limited set of opportunities that determine the extent to which their basic human needs, and those of their family, will be met in the future. Let me ask you, what is it about one’s ability to perform well in some arbitrary social role that makes them more entitled to their needs being met than another who lacks that particular ability? If you wanted to argue that a cheater is behaving unethically, you’d need to show that they do, in a moral and ethical sense, deserve less than their peers.
    - adamc 2y ago
      "Deserve" is a subjective and poorly defined concept. They agree to the evaluation criteria when they take the course. They are supposed to actually learn the material. Everything else in your argument is sophistry.
calf 2y ago
The person above you teaches higher ed, and yet cannot articulate what you just did. Cheating isn't the problem, the system is.
- skhunted 2y ago
  Can't or didn't? I had a different message to convey. You can't understand that. Or perhaps, you didn't understand that. Can't or didn't? I reiterate: But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. K-12 needs to be changed as well.
  - calf 2y ago
    I can understand that because you are not the first college professor I've interacted with. You had one chance to say something and yet you left it as an afterthought. That is the proof of your bias as a professional academic. Instead you have made an excuse that somehow your bias is inscrutable and are covering it up with more pedantry. The neoliberalization of academia extends to the attitudes of its people who reproduce its culture and clearly you are behaving consistently with that. Bear in mind, as a professor or instructor you are much more likely to hold these unchallenged biases because people like myself who have been through the process of advanced academia at elite Western universities yet come to reject the system are not likely to be interacting with you within the system any more, so you are literally not receiving certain information. And rather than reiterate, I shall elaborate on my original remark: you had stated "students are not used to doing the necessary work". You want a "system that prevents cheating" which is again full of backwards presuppositions and implicitly value laden dependency on a narrow-minded perspective. What you don't realize is how loaded such statements are, you had zero problem making those utterances. You might as well be a 60 year old centrist Boomer to say something like that so casually. It is completely oblivious to contemporary social problems. You surely have seen how racists and misogynists behave when they unwittingly say things that reveal their casual bigotry? So, I can know your mind, which is that of a typical professoriate who doesn't stay in their lane when their sociology, education, and related departments actually have something to truthful to offer in understanding this issue--the neoliberalizatiom of academia--while you are just talking out your prejudiced ass. Finally, that other commenter said it a lot better than you. That's why I was replying to them and not you.
Aunche 2y ago
> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. At least for my CS degree, this surprisingly wasn't the case. I remember our freshman class advisor gave a speech that said that grades don't really matter so long as if you pass, but we all laughed and dismissed him. I ended up getting a big tech internship with a ~2.8 GPA and an even better full time job with a ~3.2. Obviously, your mileage may vary. I graduated in a hot tech market from a prestigious university with a reputation of being difficult. Even so, overall, almost all of my classmates were stressed over grades significantly more than they needed to be.
- bombcar 2y ago
  When you graduate college all that people see is the degree; unless you go to graduate school and then they will look at grades but will notice many other things much more. Going from high school to college grades are looked at a bit more, but that's because that, the essay, and the SAT are all they have.
godelski 2y ago
I just want to second this (also did an undergrad in physics funny enough). I specifically sought out the harder professors in my undergrad and for the most part I'm happy I did it, but it's also a good thing that I'm not very motivated by money or prestige because I saw many of my colleagues who had gotten into better schools or jobs (even just the return calls on applications) who chose the easier routes or cheated. They are without a doubt wealthier. What mattered the most was the line items on their resumes and networking, but there is feedback in this so one begets the other. Fwiw, I had a 3.3. So it then becomes hard for me to make suggestions to juniors. It isn't difficult to sniff out those like you or me who are motivated by the rabbit holes themselves, nor difficult to tell those who are entirely driven by social pressures (money, prestige, family, etc), but what about those on the edge? I think it's the morally best option to encourage learning for learning but it's naive to also not recognize that their peers who will cheat will be rewarded for that effort. It's clear that we do not optimize for the right things and we've fallen victim to Goodhart's Law, but I just hope we can recognize it because those systems are self reinforcing and the longer we work in them the harder they are to escape. Especially because there are many bright students who's major flaw is simply a lack of opportunity. For me? I'm just happy if I can be left to do my research, read papers and books, and have sufficient resources -- which is much more modest than many of my peers (ML). But it'd be naive to not recognize the costs and I'm a big believer in recognizing incentive structures and systematic issues. Unfortunately these are hard to resolve because they're caused by small choices by all of us collectively, but fortunately that too means they can be resolved by small choices each of us make.
x0x0 2y ago
One of the smartest people I know did 4 degrees in 4.5 years: undergrads in physics, chem, biochem, and math. He graduated with like a 3.2 gpa, low because he took 18-22 credits of hard classes every single semester, and couldn't get into med school. They made him take some stupid biochem masters, at which he excelled, particularly with a reduced course load. He then easily got admitted to med school. If you don't want people to prioritize grades over everything else...
giantg2 2y ago
In some cases, easier classes aren't a bad thing. I had a decent GPA and took reasonably hard classes. I had a required discrete math class that was awful. The professor would assign homework for the next chapter that we hadn't gone over yet and them grade it as if it were a test. WTF am I paying you to teach me if I have to learn it myself before you ever present it and test me on that? Assign reading beforehand - great. Assign upgraded, or completion-graded homework beforehand - great. Grad it like a test before teaching it - BS. I took it with another professor after dropping the first one and they had more normal practices and it went much better.
toss1 2y ago
YUP Perhaps another way to widen the scope of what is not cheatable (at the cost of more teacher work, ugh), is to require showing all work? And I mean every draft, edit, etc.. All paper scratch-notes. Or on work on computer applications, a replayable video/screenshot series of all typing and edits, like a time-lapse of a construction site. Might even add opportunities to redirect work and thinking habits. Of course, that too will eventually (probably way too soon) be AI-fakeable, so back to paper writing, typewriters, red pencils, and whiteout. Just an idea; useful?

by lumost 2y ago

skhunted 2y ago

I think grading is obsolete. Grade inflation increased a lot the past 30 years. Ironically, it has increased the least at the least prestigious colleges. Pass/fail is the way to go. Don’t know if this would mess up things like applying for graduate school or jobs but let’s end the farce that grading has become.

CBLT 2y ago
Getting rid of grading sounds crazy, but it's actually happening. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in America, is moving to "equitable grading", which amounts (imo) to pass/fail with extra pageantry. Teachers are being retrained _right now_ to equitable grading. I know an equitable grading champion at an LAUSD school, I'll see if I can get material to share. EDIT: I just received [0][1][2][3]. [0] (5 page pdf) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YO7SQEwisAbHHi6mfgj7XU9FcSB2l-Rh/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YO7SQEwisAbHHi6mfgj7XU9FcSB... [1] (4m30s video) https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eWor4uhSxR8ZITA1w3kzqhTOX0Hx-ZK/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/10eWor4uhSxR8ZITA1w3kzqhTOX0... [2] (audio interview) https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/fair-grades-dropping-grades-grading-versus-knowledge/ https://www.bamradionetwork.com/track/fair-grades-dropping-g... [3] (article) https://ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-grading https://ascd.org/el/articles/taking-the-stress-out-of-gradin...
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  In a pass/fail system, what does a student need to do for a teacher to be willing to fail them? What is the minimum bar to pass?
  - Spivak 2y ago
    At most universities you can talk most classes pass/fail by choice which means A-D is pass and F is fail. The nice thing about an all pass/fail system is you can formalize the 'new' way grades are actually done in which A means meets expectations and anything less means did not. Making pass mean A/B takes a lot stress off students and C/D is already failing for practical purposes as often you can't continue with less than a B.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    Since this was at LA Unified, I suspect the bar for passing is extremely low. Not commenting on that district specifically, but not graduating from High School on time takes some doing. The system is very good at moving kids through, and it's why a high school diploma means so little.
  - CBLT 2y ago
    According to the equitable grading materials I just received (and posted above), that determination is... entirely up to the individual teacher's discretion? I might be misunderstanding.
  - odo1242 2y ago
    One of my teachers implemented a system like this. What they ended up doing was making it so that you had to score a (effectively) 9/10 on major assignments to pass the class (minor assignments were graded on completion), but had an infinite number of revisions with which to get this grade with feedback being provided each time you tried. Pretty much everyone passed, with more work required from some than from others. The only issue it ran into was with the final paper, where you (realistically) only had time to receive and make one to two revisions before the end of the semester and the deadline to submit grades.

samatman 2y ago

Disagree on the order, unless the next institution is also an educational one, which for undergraduates is mostly not the case. If it's a job, the order will be school, school, major, everything else on the résumé, grades maybe.

bongodongobob 2y ago
Agreed, I didn't know people put their GPA on resumes.
- je42 2y ago
  Sometimes it is even a form field on Linkedin job openings.
_proofs 2y ago
except for a plethora of companies that require GPA disclosure on their submissions.

dataflow 2y ago

> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. If the cost of not getting an A is exclusion from future opportunities- then students will reject exclusion by taking easier classes or cheating. That's not the cost of not getting an A, it's the cost of appearing to underperform compared to too many of your peers. Which is directly tied to how many of them cheat. If not enough cheaters got an A then the cost would no longer be tied to not getting an A, it would be tied to whatever metric they appeared to outperform you on.

_ea1k 2y ago

This really can't be emphasized enough. Universities and the initial hiring process really optimize for a score and not for learning. Those could be, and sometimes are, correlated, but it isn't necessarily the case. Really focusing on stretching yourself necessarily means lower grades. Why is that penalized? TBH, in software engineering a lot of people with lower grades tutor the ones with 4.0 averages. The skillsets required to code and the skillsets required to get a good grade on a test are different.

curiouscavalier 2y ago
And it penalizes in many ways. Focusing too much on grades can be detrimental in graduate studies, despite graduate admissions focusing on GPA and test scores. I remember seeing 4.0 undergrads really struggle with research in grad school, sometimes to the point of dropping out. Certainly not always the case, but for the ones that did I think it speaks to your point about different skillsets. Maybe worse was seeing the undergrads who passed on research opportunities out of fear it would distract them from keeping a high GPA.
- lumost 2y ago
  Curiously, while I had a 2.7 in undergrad. I thrived in the workplace. The initial GPA restricted my options for the first 3-5 years, but I eventually became a Principal Engineer at a FAANG. In hindsight, I wish I had balanced my objectives more - but I also lacked the discipline to do things I didn't want to back then. The follies of youth and all that :)
godelski 2y ago
> Really focusing on stretching yourself necessarily means lower grades. I'm reminded of a saying/trope (whatever) I've seen in reference to surgeons and lawyers (I'm sure it's also been used in TV and movies). But the trope is that someone is looking for an expert and will be talking to a bunch of hotshots (let's say lawyers). They'll be bragging and then asked if they've ever lost a case, to which they proudly declare they have a spotless record. To which the person responds: then you've never taken a single risk. It's overly dramatic, but I think gets the point across in an easy to understand way. It's exactly why you see the lower grade ones tutor the high grade ones (this even happened in my undergrad and I did physics[0]). It's because learning happens when struggling. It happens at the edge. This is also a big reason some learn a lot faster than others or even why someone will say they don't understand but understand more than someone who says they do (and who believes it). Because expertise isn't about the high level general ideas, it's about all the little nitty gritty details, the subtle things that dramatically change things. But a big concern I have is that this is a skill to learn in of itself. I think it's not difficult to recognize when this skill is learned (at least if you have) but it's not something that'll be learned if we focus to much on scores. After all, they're just a proxy. Even the institutional prestige is a proxy (and I have an argument why it no longer matters though it did decades ago). I do wonder if this is in part cause for the rise in enshitification. Similarly if this is why so many are bad at recognizing issues in LLMs and ML models. I'm sure it is but not sure how much this contributes or if it's purely a confounding variable. [0] when I signed up to be a tutor at my university I got signed off my the toughest math professor. When I took the signature to the department the admin wasn't sure if I was trying to trick her because she immediately called the professor to confirm the signature. Then told me I could tutor whatever I wanted because I was one of two people he had ever signed off on. Admittedly, I'm sure a lot of that was because people were afraid of him (he wasn't mean, but he wouldn't let you be anything less than the best he thought you could be)

lacker 2y ago

Employers need to wake up to this in hiring, too. You can get a 4.0 with a degree in computer science from a top school, and still not be able to program at all. Some organizations still hire software engineers just based on resume and a nontechnical interview. This can easily be a disaster! You need to do a real assessment during the interview of how well software engineers can code.

jacobr1 2y ago
Also you can hire people with 20+ years of experience that also can't code (where people claim to be a software engineer). FizzBuzz was a real filter for a while. It has amazed me how some people where able to slide by in larger organizations for years and then switch (internally or to another company) when the competency mattered. You can make a whole career it!

pj_mukh 2y ago

Serious question from someone who is regularly tasked with hiring Juniors. What IS a good assessment for entry-level/right out of college positions? -> GPA can be gamed, as laid out. -> Take Home assessments can mostly be gamed, I want to assess how you think, now which tools you use. -> Personality tests favor the outgoing/extroverts -> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot. What should be best practice here? Ideally something that controls for first-time interviewer jitters.

lacker 2y ago
You have to use on-location tests. Do your best to be fair and get a true evaluation of the candidate's skills. It's not perfect but the alternatives are worse. The other thing you have to do is that you have to be willing to fire the people who are underperforming. It's just a natural consequence of the interview process being imperfect.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  Yeah, even just making people engage with source code from your system and answer questions about it or find bugs is better than asking them about their own portfolio.
- musicale 2y ago
  I think leetcode tends to be a randomized signal because if you've seen the problem before then it's easy, but if it's an unfamiliar problem (or class of problem) then you're basically being asked to be Knuth/Dijkstra/et al., but faster. Algorithm puzzles are fun, but they bear little resemblance to typical tech work. I think doing very basic, simple things is a better test. I also like asking candidates to explain something that they already understand well. And for code, I like reading it and also getting an explanation about why things were done the way they were. Code reading also seems to be an important skill that is probably more important than writing.
vkou 2y ago
> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot They aren't 'fair' in avoiding every false negative, but they at least tell me that the passing candidates know and can do something. If I ask someone who claims to know Python or Java whether or not you can have a memory leak in them, and their answer is 'no' or 'Maybe, but I don't know how', I get a pretty good idea of whether or not they know anything about this topic. If you can't do fizzbuzz, you probably aren't a good fit for a SWE position either, you should be aiming for something more director-level. Given how much people struggle with coding, I sometimes feel like I may as well ditch my regular question, and just ask them to write that.

98codes 2y ago

> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. And every non-educational institution after that will see school, degree as a checkbox.

earthboundkid 2y ago
I have hired for many positions over the years and never once asked for grades.
- freedomben 2y ago
  > I have hired for many positions over the years and never once asked for grades. I'm not sure what your point is, but if you're trying to claim that GP is incorrect and companies don't ask for GPA, you are (unfortunately) wrong. There are plenty who do. It seems to be especially the bigger and/or more conservative companies so it's trending away, but it definitely happens.

fsndz 2y ago

> My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. This is so true. I was recently pondering about the impact of AI cheating in Africa and came up with the conclusion that it won't be as significant as in EU/US precisely because most evaluations in African countries are in person https://www.lycee.ai/blog/can-africa-leapfrog-its-way-to-ai-relevance https://www.lycee.ai/blog/can-africa-leapfrog-its-way-to-ai-... Your take reminds me of Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Same is true with GPA and all. But I am pessimistic about seing that change in the medium to long term because it is so politically sensitive.

BeetleB 2y ago

The solution may also be not to make classes too hard. If, for example, your physics classes were of the same difficulty as the ones in my undergrad (easy to medium difficulty for the most part), then the 2.7 GPA is probably an accurate reflection of your abilities. But if you went to a top university with brutal courses, and got a 2.7 GPA, then all I'm seeing is you're not elite material. The number otherwise does not help me one bit in evaluating you. BTW, having spent a lot of time out of the US - it's still pretty laid back in the US. A person who is 2.7 GPA material in the US would simply not get admission in any decent university in some countries. And plenty of people in the US start all over at another institution and do well - something many countries don't allow (state funded, lack of resources, you have to move out of the way to let the younger batch in).[1] [1] A good friend of mine totally flunked out of his university. He spent time off in the military. Then started all over at a new university. Got really high grades. Went to a top school for his PhD and is now a tenured faculty member.

JellyBeanThief 2y ago

> As someone who studied physics and came out with a 2.7 GPA due to studying what I wanted (the hard classes) and not cheating (as I did what I wanted) - I can say that there are consequences to this approach. I can, too. I wanted to learn, but I also wanted to achieve a high GPA. I had a privileged background, so I got to retake classes after earning Cs or Bs until I got an A, without cheating. The consequences: My degree took a long time to get, cost more money than my peers in the same program, and I now have a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy.

FigurativeVoid 2y ago

> My personal take, we’ve made the cost of failure to high and cheating too easy. I agree with the first part, but I think the second follows from it. Take a class like organic chemistry. When I was in school, the grade was based on 5 exams, each worth 20% of your grade. Worse still, anything less than an A was seen as a failure for most students dreaming of medical/vet school. Of course you are going to have people that are going to cheat. You've made the stakes so high that the consequences of getting caught cheating are meaningless. On top of that, once enough students are cheating, you need to cheat just to keep up.

adamc 2y ago
The consequences of cheating could be made much more severe. I am troubled by this argument because it suggests people have no ethical core. If that is true then we are going to have problems with them regardless.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  When we talk about an ethical core, that sort of behavior exists between individuals. People in a family, or people who are friends, hopefully will and typically do adjust their behavior according to some sense of ethics. When we put people into a classroom, however, we’re implicitly putting them into competition with their peers for a limited set of opportunities that determine the extent to which their basic human needs, and those of their family, will be met in the future. Let me ask you, what is it about one’s ability to perform well in some arbitrary social role that makes them more entitled to their needs being met than another who lacks that particular ability? If you wanted to argue that a cheater is behaving unethically, you’d need to show that they do, in a moral and ethical sense, deserve less than their peers.
  - adamc 2y ago
    "Deserve" is a subjective and poorly defined concept. They agree to the evaluation criteria when they take the course. They are supposed to actually learn the material. Everything else in your argument is sophistry.

calf 2y ago

The person above you teaches higher ed, and yet cannot articulate what you just did. Cheating isn't the problem, the system is.

skhunted 2y ago
Can't or didn't? I had a different message to convey. You can't understand that. Or perhaps, you didn't understand that. Can't or didn't? I reiterate: But even requiring in person proctored exams is not the full solution. Students are not used to doing the necessary work to learn. They are used to doing the necessary work to pass. And that work is increasingly cheating. It’s a clusterfuck. I have calculus students who don’t know how to work with fractions. If we did truly devise a system that prevents cheating we’ll see that a very high percentage of current college students are not ready to be truly college educated. K-12 needs to be changed as well.
- calf 2y ago
  I can understand that because you are not the first college professor I've interacted with. You had one chance to say something and yet you left it as an afterthought. That is the proof of your bias as a professional academic. Instead you have made an excuse that somehow your bias is inscrutable and are covering it up with more pedantry. The neoliberalization of academia extends to the attitudes of its people who reproduce its culture and clearly you are behaving consistently with that. Bear in mind, as a professor or instructor you are much more likely to hold these unchallenged biases because people like myself who have been through the process of advanced academia at elite Western universities yet come to reject the system are not likely to be interacting with you within the system any more, so you are literally not receiving certain information. And rather than reiterate, I shall elaborate on my original remark: you had stated "students are not used to doing the necessary work". You want a "system that prevents cheating" which is again full of backwards presuppositions and implicitly value laden dependency on a narrow-minded perspective. What you don't realize is how loaded such statements are, you had zero problem making those utterances. You might as well be a 60 year old centrist Boomer to say something like that so casually. It is completely oblivious to contemporary social problems. You surely have seen how racists and misogynists behave when they unwittingly say things that reveal their casual bigotry? So, I can know your mind, which is that of a typical professoriate who doesn't stay in their lane when their sociology, education, and related departments actually have something to truthful to offer in understanding this issue--the neoliberalizatiom of academia--while you are just talking out your prejudiced ass. Finally, that other commenter said it a lot better than you. That's why I was replying to them and not you.

Aunche 2y ago

> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order. At least for my CS degree, this surprisingly wasn't the case. I remember our freshman class advisor gave a speech that said that grades don't really matter so long as if you pass, but we all laughed and dismissed him. I ended up getting a big tech internship with a ~2.8 GPA and an even better full time job with a ~3.2. Obviously, your mileage may vary. I graduated in a hot tech market from a prestigious university with a reputation of being difficult. Even so, overall, almost all of my classmates were stressed over grades significantly more than they needed to be.

bombcar 2y ago
When you graduate college all that people see is the degree; unless you go to graduate school and then they will look at grades but will notice many other things much more. Going from high school to college grades are looked at a bit more, but that's because that, the essay, and the SAT are all they have.

godelski 2y ago

I just want to second this (also did an undergrad in physics funny enough). I specifically sought out the harder professors in my undergrad and for the most part I'm happy I did it, but it's also a good thing that I'm not very motivated by money or prestige because I saw many of my colleagues who had gotten into better schools or jobs (even just the return calls on applications) who chose the easier routes or cheated. They are without a doubt wealthier. What mattered the most was the line items on their resumes and networking, but there is feedback in this so one begets the other. Fwiw, I had a 3.3. So it then becomes hard for me to make suggestions to juniors. It isn't difficult to sniff out those like you or me who are motivated by the rabbit holes themselves, nor difficult to tell those who are entirely driven by social pressures (money, prestige, family, etc), but what about those on the edge? I think it's the morally best option to encourage learning for learning but it's naive to also not recognize that their peers who will cheat will be rewarded for that effort. It's clear that we do not optimize for the right things and we've fallen victim to Goodhart's Law, but I just hope we can recognize it because those systems are self reinforcing and the longer we work in them the harder they are to escape. Especially because there are many bright students who's major flaw is simply a lack of opportunity. For me? I'm just happy if I can be left to do my research, read papers and books, and have sufficient resources -- which is much more modest than many of my peers (ML). But it'd be naive to not recognize the costs and I'm a big believer in recognizing incentive structures and systematic issues. Unfortunately these are hard to resolve because they're caused by small choices by all of us collectively, but fortunately that too means they can be resolved by small choices each of us make.

x0x0 2y ago

One of the smartest people I know did 4 degrees in 4.5 years: undergrads in physics, chem, biochem, and math. He graduated with like a 3.2 gpa, low because he took 18-22 credits of hard classes every single semester, and couldn't get into med school. They made him take some stupid biochem masters, at which he excelled, particularly with a reduced course load. He then easily got admitted to med school. If you don't want people to prioritize grades over everything else...

giantg2 2y ago

In some cases, easier classes aren't a bad thing. I had a decent GPA and took reasonably hard classes. I had a required discrete math class that was awful. The professor would assign homework for the next chapter that we hadn't gone over yet and them grade it as if it were a test. WTF am I paying you to teach me if I have to learn it myself before you ever present it and test me on that? Assign reading beforehand - great. Assign upgraded, or completion-graded homework beforehand - great. Grad it like a test before teaching it - BS. I took it with another professor after dropping the first one and they had more normal practices and it went much better.

toss1 2y ago

YUP Perhaps another way to widen the scope of what is not cheatable (at the cost of more teacher work, ugh), is to require showing all work? And I mean every draft, edit, etc.. All paper scratch-notes. Or on work on computer applications, a replayable video/screenshot series of all typing and edits, like a time-lapse of a construction site. Might even add opportunities to redirect work and thinking habits. Of course, that too will eventually (probably way too soon) be AI-fakeable, so back to paper writing, typewriters, red pencils, and whiteout. Just an idea; useful?