Teaching a physical science at an okay university can be a bit depressing. Students tend to view education in purely economic terms: They pay the university, a

Teaching a physical science at an okay university can be a bit depressing. Students tend to view education in purely economic terms: They pay the university, and therefore they are entitled to "receive an education" in the form of high grades and a degree. This does not facilitate any sort of learning, and this problem will not be solved by getting rid of grades and degrees. At some point, the wheat and chaff need to be separated. Whether this is done by employers, universities, etc. is somewhat immaterial-- But it's not likely to be accomplished by self-reflection on the part of the students, because (the vast majority of) students simply do not care. Grades should be useful, and the reputation of a school should have some bearing on the competence of its graduates. However, grade inflation has essentially rendered grades useless. Poor grades lead to poor faculty evaluations and endless unpleasantness. The dominant viewpoint seems to be: Give everyone high-ish grades, and let them become someone else's problem. Which is irresponsible and devalues the university's degrees, but such is life. The computer programming model of evaluating peoples' competency via open-source contributions seems like a good idea. I wonder how this sort of thing would work for sciences or humanities. I also wonder how to make a system of evaluating competency immune to being gamed.