Sep 6, 2024 07:14 AM
Abolish grades
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/abolish-grades
EXCERPTS: Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.
The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the United States, the most commonly awarded grade is now an A.
Some professors and departments, especially in STEM disciplines, have managed to uphold more stringent criteria. A few advanced courses attract such a self-selecting cohort of students that virtually all of them deserve recognition for genuinely excellent work. But for the most part, the grading scheme at many institutions has effectively become useless. An A has stopped being a mark of special academic achievement.
If everyone outside hardcore engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system becomes vacuous. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend—to themselves as well as to others—that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, the system as currently constituted creates bad incentives. To name but one example, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses.
[...] All of this contributes to the strikingly poor record American colleges have at actually educating their students...
[...] In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them.
It’s high time for a radical reboot of a broken system... (MORE - details)
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/abolish-grades
EXCERPTS: Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.
The more elite the college, the more lenient the standards. At Yale, for example, 80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses. But the problem is also prevalent at less selective colleges. Across all four-year colleges in the United States, the most commonly awarded grade is now an A.
Some professors and departments, especially in STEM disciplines, have managed to uphold more stringent criteria. A few advanced courses attract such a self-selecting cohort of students that virtually all of them deserve recognition for genuinely excellent work. But for the most part, the grading scheme at many institutions has effectively become useless. An A has stopped being a mark of special academic achievement.
If everyone outside hardcore engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system becomes vacuous. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend—to themselves as well as to others—that they are performing exceptionally well. Worse, the system as currently constituted creates bad incentives. To name but one example, it actively punishes those who take risks by enrolling in truly challenging courses.
[...] All of this contributes to the strikingly poor record American colleges have at actually educating their students...
[...] In one of the oldest jokes about the Soviet Union, a worker says “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” To an uncomfortable degree, American universities now work in a similar fashion: Students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them.
It’s high time for a radical reboot of a broken system... (MORE - details)