5 ms·

MIT doesn't really have "tough" grading per se, it has a lot of tough courses that are graded by mastery of the material. If you've chosen an appropriate major

by hga 12y ago

MIT doesn't really have "tough" grading per se, it has a lot of tough courses that are graded by mastery of the material. If you've chosen an appropriate major for yourself, you'll be getting mostly As and Bs. This eliminates dire competitive stresses that prompt sabotage in other schools, and encourages helping out each other. There's also a committee watching out for abuses by professors that would go so far as taking a class away from one if he thought there was cheating and decided to punitively grade as a result (although they're more focused on demanding too much, e.g. too lengthy finals, or otherwise too much required stuff at the end of term). For freshman, it was graded pass-fail for the first year when I attended back in the '80s, now just for the first semester; that's more to ease the transition than anything else, and "hidden", unofficial grades are kept in case you need them for e.g. medical school applications. And the reported GPAs treat an A as 5.0. Some figures for applications, as of some years ago, I think more people are applying now: 13,000 applications, but MIT has a high bar in terms of being able to do the general requirements of a semester of math past the AP Calculus BC sequence, one term each of mechanics and E&M calculus based physics, and other stuff like chemistry and a lab. So no legacy admits per se, instead the admissions office identified 3,000 applicants who they thought could "do the work", then constructed a class of ~1,100.

usmeteora 12y ago
Interesting. It is silly that articles come out with tough grading rankings, based on what? I was just stating an article to further prove the point that not all schools are just a breeze and hand out As, and the higher grades are more likely attributed to having higher performing students, the trends of which become more obvious as competition for college acceptance goes up every year. I think for my school people did choose the right majors but the Professors were hired based on their ability to bring in research/grant money and had no interest/some even acted disgusted at having to bother to teach a class, therefore alot of the class, despite being high performers in general, found that alot of classes, almost 100% consistent with the Professors mainly focused on research as opposed to teaching, caused lower grades overall. We have a very low endowment and overall much less money than MIT, so the pressure/incentive to hire Professors based on their ability to bring money in the school always trumps their ability to teach or produce a stimulating curriculum in general. I would say this results in higher curves due to lower test performance in classes, that do not actually result in curving everyone up to an A, and thus is perceived by the outside world as "tough grading" but I think the students are of high caliber, but really it is a result of poor teaching. If the 64 students who have made it through the first two years of a college with high grades, all go into one class, and suddenly the average is 18/100 on an exam, and the 4.0 student makes a 55/100 and also gets an F without a curve, then we could say, maybe this is an issue with the a construct of incentivizing Professors to actually bother teaching and not so much that the students werent cut out for the major. To add more stats, according to 2013, there were 16,000 undergraduate applicants to my school with an incoming freshman class of 1,204 so similar. But on the more general point, I don't think the main driver for the disparity between high grades in private schools is due to a scandal or grade inflation, as most of my points support, in general higher performing students get into higher performing schools and those more competitive schools are good, especially with a large applicant pool, at deciding who is capable of doing well there, though I would say MIT is much better at this than my school was.
- hga 12y ago
  Hmmm; while MIT doesn't have a truly huge endowment (its management of all that sort of thing was downright criminal until the '90s, details on request, and it then managed to benefit from the following financial bubbles), it can get away with hiring those sorts of research professors. With exceptions that prove the rule, like SF author Joe Haldeman, all professors are tenured or tenure track, they only get tenure by being #1 or #2 in their field (very occasionally #3, and this is strongly enforced in multiple ways), and that of course means they're able to support themselves with grant money (plus one day a week to otherwise earn money). And they must be adequate teachers, and I came across/knew of very few who weren't serious and sincere about education, although of course their ability varied. And this is enforced a whole bunch of ways post-tenure, e.g. I witnessed a case where a professor a lot of us have heard about was sat down by the head of his department (who I worked for at the time) and forced to read all the student evaluations of a course he'd just taught, which were all strongly negative except for another exception that proved the rule (we'd read them prior to the confrontation), and was then told he'd never teach that course again, he'd screwed up so badly. Anyway, yeah, I can see all your points, which reinforce what I've been reading and occasionally witnessing starting in the '70s. One might more broadly correlate it with caviler way colleges and universities let students take on massive debt with all too often little chance of repaying it in a reasonable amount of time, the massive bloat of administrators, and how the latter are wresting more control from the faculty ... too many of these institutions just aren't all that serious about undergraduate education.

by hga 12y ago

usmeteora 12y ago

Interesting. It is silly that articles come out with tough grading rankings, based on what? I was just stating an article to further prove the point that not all schools are just a breeze and hand out As, and the higher grades are more likely attributed to having higher performing students, the trends of which become more obvious as competition for college acceptance goes up every year. I think for my school people did choose the right majors but the Professors were hired based on their ability to bring in research/grant money and had no interest/some even acted disgusted at having to bother to teach a class, therefore alot of the class, despite being high performers in general, found that alot of classes, almost 100% consistent with the Professors mainly focused on research as opposed to teaching, caused lower grades overall. We have a very low endowment and overall much less money than MIT, so the pressure/incentive to hire Professors based on their ability to bring money in the school always trumps their ability to teach or produce a stimulating curriculum in general. I would say this results in higher curves due to lower test performance in classes, that do not actually result in curving everyone up to an A, and thus is perceived by the outside world as "tough grading" but I think the students are of high caliber, but really it is a result of poor teaching. If the 64 students who have made it through the first two years of a college with high grades, all go into one class, and suddenly the average is 18/100 on an exam, and the 4.0 student makes a 55/100 and also gets an F without a curve, then we could say, maybe this is an issue with the a construct of incentivizing Professors to actually bother teaching and not so much that the students werent cut out for the major. To add more stats, according to 2013, there were 16,000 undergraduate applicants to my school with an incoming freshman class of 1,204 so similar. But on the more general point, I don't think the main driver for the disparity between high grades in private schools is due to a scandal or grade inflation, as most of my points support, in general higher performing students get into higher performing schools and those more competitive schools are good, especially with a large applicant pool, at deciding who is capable of doing well there, though I would say MIT is much better at this than my school was.

hga 12y ago
Hmmm; while MIT doesn't have a truly huge endowment (its management of all that sort of thing was downright criminal until the '90s, details on request, and it then managed to benefit from the following financial bubbles), it can get away with hiring those sorts of research professors. With exceptions that prove the rule, like SF author Joe Haldeman, all professors are tenured or tenure track, they only get tenure by being #1 or #2 in their field (very occasionally #3, and this is strongly enforced in multiple ways), and that of course means they're able to support themselves with grant money (plus one day a week to otherwise earn money). And they must be adequate teachers, and I came across/knew of very few who weren't serious and sincere about education, although of course their ability varied. And this is enforced a whole bunch of ways post-tenure, e.g. I witnessed a case where a professor a lot of us have heard about was sat down by the head of his department (who I worked for at the time) and forced to read all the student evaluations of a course he'd just taught, which were all strongly negative except for another exception that proved the rule (we'd read them prior to the confrontation), and was then told he'd never teach that course again, he'd screwed up so badly. Anyway, yeah, I can see all your points, which reinforce what I've been reading and occasionally witnessing starting in the '70s. One might more broadly correlate it with caviler way colleges and universities let students take on massive debt with all too often little chance of repaying it in a reasonable amount of time, the massive bloat of administrators, and how the latter are wresting more control from the faculty ... too many of these institutions just aren't all that serious about undergraduate education.