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Discussion (18 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Looks like its best not to enroll in classes with more than 5 students.
Cynicism aside, seems like a good step.
Actual grade meaning would require criterion-referenced assessment: define what mastery looks like, grade against that standard, and let the distribution fall where it may across years and cohorts. That's hard and unsexy, so instead we get an administrative quota that launders the appearance of rigor while the underlying problem, that Harvard's admissions process selects heavily for wealth and legacy, goes untouched.
Harvard A's will now tell employers that a learner beat ~80% of a nepotism-filtered, endowment-curated cohort in a single semester. That's a relative rank, not a measure of exceptional work.
Having been on the grading side of things, this essentially never happens. As soon as you have a pool large enough where it is mathematically sound to have a curve (30 people or so), you will not find a situation where 40% do excellent work.
Coursework follows Sturgeon’s law. In a class of 30, there’s maybe 3-4 people who do excellent work, and there is a rapid fall off from there.
An employer is looking to screen two recent harvard grads by GPA, not really between a new grad and a 5/10 year ago grad. GPA may not actually be a predictive metric within a cohort, but it's measurable and capping the A grades likely offers more precision in comparison; even if that precision is not an indicator of anything useful.
I do agree that an absolute standard of mastery would also be nice... But the diploma is supposed to indicate acceptable mastery.
that's a really good point, actually. in every situation i can think of where someone is looking at your grade (always admission to the next step in the ladder, in whatever form), you are being compared to people "from the same time" as you.
and i'd like to reiterate how difficult it would be to have a "stable" standard of mastery, no matter how nice. technical fields change a lot, and fast, these days. all across STEM, in 20 years everything changes. everything's so niche, as well, sometimes it may be hard to compare two degrees with the same name of different institutions. maybe we could do it with the fundamentals (mathematics and physics)? but look at a textbook from 100 years ago (say, Whittaker and Watson) and you'll find that even this changes. and even if the field doesn't change, the world does: i'm imagining how old-timers could claim that in their time information wasn't so easily accessible.
It's a bit alien to me. Where I went to school, you used get scores from 1(lowest)- to 10 (highest) where 6 is "Acceptable". You could curve the questions, but not the students. So theoretically the whole class could all score 1s, or all could score 10s. This makes more sense to me, if everyone works hard, they should all succeed, and if they're all lazy they should fail.
You couldn't arbitrarily decide that exactly 20% gets -say- an 8. I've always wondered what the steelman is for curve grading.
Students and their often overinvolved and influential parents put a tremendous amount of pressure on instructors to provide high marks regardless of performance. This was always an issue but has become more and more uniquitous in recent decades.
Although some manage, it's extremely hard for indivudal instructors to stand up for earnest critical grading in the face of all this pressure. However, an institional policy like this lets them point to that policy as a sheild that deflects responsibility from individual teachers to a faceless, indiffent bureaucracy.
That's not to say that this is the best possible such countermaneuver, but that's the role it's trying to fulfill.
The grading system is already long broken -- far removed from your own meritocratuc ideal -- and this is a meager attempt to do something about it.
assuming that by "steelman" here you mean "the justification", i believe the point is that a curved grade shows how you compare to others. the idea is that "getting 40% of the answers right" is meaningless if you don't know how hard the test is, so you'd rather have a grade that says "top 5% of the class".
this what i see as the justification, at least. not an endorsement of the idea
it's crazy to see that mentioned so non-chalantly. my expectation is that the teacher, when they grade, is meant to be impartial, as if they were doing nothing more than taking a measurement of the student's work, you could say (this is why, i believe, we value standardized tests in some settings, even though they are worse in other aspects). it's the student who is responsible for the grade. a teacher not being allowed to give F's to everyone suggests a corruption of the system to me.
can you share more? what pressures teachers not to do this, for example?
Mostly though I was just chuckling in my head about an old curmudgeonly professor of mine who was literally retiring at the end of that semester. We were all actually quite scared he would go out with a bang given his disdain for us. We weren't like 100% Fs or anything, but I think it was obvious we thought the material was pretty phooey and the lectures interminable.
But why would this automatically cause the teacher to be the one to retire?
Are there documents or books on this? This system seems so alien to me. And yet it does seem to produce some amount of competent graduates who can -eg- launch a spacecraft into lunar orbit.
What if less that 20% of the class do "exceptional" work? What if more do?
Those pushing this either haven't thought it through, or simply want to be seen to be doing something to address grade inflation, and this is something (just not something useful).
As are for those who excel.
the question is if you'd prefer a C student from Harvard vs. straight A's from a we-take-anyone online college.