I was a TA at Yale when I did my PhD there and I contrast that experience to when I was a TA at University of Calgary. Whether it’s a higher sense of entitlement or just grinding it out to maximize your official grade the contrast between these two schools was striking. At Yale you’d better think twice about honest grading because if you did there would be an army at your door with pitchforks ready. You then have to spend hours explaining why they didn’t deserve a higher grade. At the end of the day you’re worn down and there’s very little incentive to grade honestly as you get pain nearly nothing and you’re really there to finish your PhD.
The problem is when the grades given on assignments influence what goes on your final exam papers.
At a university, only the final exam should count. This way you can give honest feedback, and the student doesn't feel obligated to point out every little mistake to try to make you change your decision. It also allows them to misunderstand things at first, but then 'get' it later.
Of course universities don't like this, since they don't consider students mature enough that they do the homework if it doesn't "count".
Really? Spreading grades out among various assignments and tests is how I managed to pass university (I coincidentally also attended the University of Calgary, hi rdlecler1!). I would have imploded if it all came down to a single giant exam. Why the heck would you want academic achievement to come down to a handful of hours of actual performance? What goal does that serve? University isn't the Olympics.
The true answer is: No grades should matter except the final exam and you should be able to take the final exam as many times as you want. (With a reasonable minimum period between retakes, possibly increasing each time.)
If you take AC motors, and fail, and study your ass off and six months later can pass it with 100%, shouldn't that really be... your actual grade? Isn't a grade supposed to represent your ability and understanding of a topic?
And then almost magically: health problems, study problems, (most) test anxiety, and other problems no longer actually matter.
>Isn't a grade supposed to represent your ability and understanding of a topic?
University education largely isn't about certifying that certain students know certain things. It's about showing that people who possess the degree meet a minimum IQ + trait conscientiousness cutoff, so that employers can preferentially hire those people.
Grades have several purposes in this framework. First is to drop low-employee-quality students so that the signal for the remainder is stronger. Second is to allow honors and GPA to provide multiple cutoff-levels to fine-tune the signaling. Third is to force re-taking of classes to extract more money out of folks who want to substitute it for IQ + effort.
As it stands, your proposed change would simply increase the amount of work that is allowed to be used as a bid for class position. That's not particularly helpful, IMO.
A grade is supposed to represent your ability and understanding of a topic, but that's only half the equation. Are exams an adequate proxy for ability and understanding of a topic? They aren't for me. When I want to understand something, I create something which requires and demonstrates that understanding - this could be a Wikipedia article, a piece of software, or a lecture. Nothing of value is demonstrated by sitting down for a few hours under extreme pressure and regurgitating my "understanding".
I've never understood how someone could master a topic yet could not answer questions about it. I know from my own personal experience that when I bombed an exam, it's because I simply did not understand the material. When I did well on an exam, I had corresponding confidence that I understood it.
It is the difference between knowing "given a task in this knowledge area, I can accomplish it" and uselessly loading up on all that information to perform in a purely artificial situation the likes of which is never seen again.
Conversely, I was able to pass (with As) some physics exams without really understanding. That became painfully obvious in my solid-state physics lab class.
That's a good point. Sometimes you need large, ambitious projects to both learn and demonstrate that learning. People learn to code well by working on big programs, and learn to write well by writing in depth on some subject.
I guess you could sum it up as: the best test of whether a person is capable of creating something of value is to ask them to create something of value and see what happens.
Taking the exam as many times as you want is a bit unfair to the professor, who has to concoct a new exam each time. If it is the same exam taken multiple times, then it is what is known as an "infinite time" exam which has a deleterious effect on students, as they will be more or less forced to spend infinite time on them.
Besides, taking a month to solve a single calculus problem that should take 15 minutes is a pretty good demonstration that you have not mastered the material.
How about periodic testing, once every 6 months? Let previous classes retake a final. That's basically the same test load as before. (Another variation could be only giving partial credit. But it's going to be fairly clear who is trying to succeed and who is trying to game the system. Hence my suggestion of increasing lengths between subsequent testing.)
Also, students are rampantly cheating by leaking previous tests. I saw it every day on campus. TA's leak tests to students and they're printed out before every exam (as the risk is too high to NOT look at a test in advance because your grades = your future in college). I've literally been in classes where everyone had last semesters final printed out... in the room before we took the current final. So the impetus is already currently on you, as a teacher, to have tests with permutations to prevent cheating.
Additionally--while I'm sure many teachers would object--tests shouldn't necessarily be written by the teacher. The teacher isn't teaching their own class, but a class meeting the departments requirements. So if students are being prepared (and not learning very specific permutations of general topics) they should be able to solve problems written by other teachers / test makers. So (on the bright side), teachers shouldn't actually be burdened at all by the testing. That could be someone else's job.
Now, of course, all of this has plenty of practical considerations that would need addressed. How do you permutate a QUALITATIVE question? And how do you easily grade highly permuted (per-person) tests? But just because there are unsolved issues, doesn't mean the underlying (god forgive me for saying using this term:) "paradigm shift" is unsound. It's just different and requires some new solutions to new issues.
But as programmers, we of all people, should be able to figure out how to further automate testing. But I think we really should decouple the idea of "testing" from "occurs at the end of class." I mean, why do we test all finals at the same time during the super-stressful "finals week"? Simply because it's practical. Except it was designed as "practical" before computers and automation were within the hands of every living person. Surely, students would test higher if they could study for a single class's test at a time and without worrying about it occurring during a family or health episode.
And what's a test for except hopefully proving that a student understands the material--but we all know thanks to "teaching to the test" culture that many students can cram for a test and then forget it within a month. But now I'm getting way off the original topic.
My thesis statement is simply: Re-testing finals is practical in modern environments and beneficial and incurs (almost) no additional flaws that the current setup doesn't also exhibit--like cheating.
Professors do need to permute the tests so that people won't just look up last year's final. But permuting them once a year is a very different proposition than permuting them an endless number of times as students demand to retake the test.
There will always be cheaters. That's why companies, as part of the interview process, ask basic knowledge questions. It weeds out a lot of the cheaters and frauds. I hear people all the time desperately try to justify cheating. I don't care if people cheat, but I wouldn't hire any of them, and I doubt many employers would.
Sure, there'll always be bad tests and bad teachers. If one could be "taught to the test" then it's a bad test. It can certainly be true that one could pass the test and yet fail to understand the material, but I'm not convinced that people can master the material yet flunk the test.
But testing, in general, works. For me, I know that the pressure of final exams would motivate me to learn the material. No pressure, no learning.
40 years after I graduated, I'd surely flunk every final if I retook them cold today. I just finished taking the MIT 18.01 calculus class online. I was surprised at how easily the stuff came flooding back into my head. It's still there, I just had to chip the rust off :-)
That's a strong counterargument. But I strongly believe homework shouldn't be graded. Incentives are completely misaligned; you're penalized for getting things wrong, when that's a natural result during the learning process. No surprise, then, when cheating becomes a major problem.
I personally found doing problem sets and being able to check my answers immediately to be the best way to learn. There's no point to just copy the answers if homework is ungraded. If students feel no motivation to do homework to learn and practice, that's on them, especially at the college level.
Except when it comes to writing programs, the homework is the only thing that even remotely demonstrates your utility to an employer. I would go as far as to say that exams should not count, only homework should.
I'm teaching an intro Web Development course at the University level right now. No exams, only projects and homework. All submissions in github, so it's likely some will be looked at!
At Caltech, the only thing that counted for your grade was the midterm and the final. The homework only mattered if a grade was on the knife edge of passing or failing.
Students were free to do the homework or not, collaborate on it or not, as they saw fit. It was regarded as a learning tool that students could decide how best to make use of for themselves.
I thought it worked rather well, although the high stakes final exams were rather stressful :-)
(Attending lectures was also optional. Institute policy was that attendance would not be taken, and would not be a factor in the grade. You were free to attend lectures or not, do the homework or not, and if you got an A on the final, you got an A for the course. Some students could do that, such as the legendary Hal Finney, but I learned the hard way that I could not afford to miss any lectures and must diligently do and understand all the homework on time.)
Another point here that was true during my time: almost all exams were take home, open book. Some were even unlimited time, although that was much rarer. Generally though, time was not the constraint keeping you from completing the exam.
The problem is that some students are terrible at exams, and exams aren't necessarily a good test of knowledge or ability.
Engineering relies on group projects and assignments a lot for your grade, because engineering isn't just about remembering some facts and writing them on paper. Then there's the problem that people have good days and bad days.
Different people are more capable in different areas of assessment, so I think that the most fair way to assess students is to give them a range of different types of assessment, so that even if they struggle with one type, they can pull through the other.
For instance, I always did really well at large assignments and tasks, especially group assignments (not because I rode on coattails, but because being in a group motivates you to do well), I was mediocre at exams, and I was terrible at small, individual assignments (<5% of final grade). You can see a direct correlation in my transcript between papers with lots of graded homework and small tasks, and poor grades. I did 200-level Algorithms the semester before I took 100-level Algorithms, and managed to get a better grade in the 200 level paper, because it had less homework assignments, despite being the second year version of the same paper.
My experience was that the top students (now PhD students at MIT, Stanford, etc) were very diligent about homework. In the honors classes, you often needed to go far above and beyond the textbook for some questions. The average students (still smart kids, many working at Google, Amazon, etc) were much more lax about it, and wouldn't work that hard to solve the hardest problems in a set.
What worked for me (Caltech) was to make sure I understood 100% of all the homework problems front to back, before going in to the exam.
Living in the dorms helped enormously with this, because I could usually find someone to help me with particular problems, and I sorely needed that help.
Anything less meant I was in deep doodoo on the exam :-) because that's the wrong time to try to figure out how to apply what was learned in lecture.
This was good enough to reliably get a B. To get an A, I had to work much harder and go beyond the homework.
The school where I studied CS as an undergrad didn't even have grades. It was all about the narrative evaluation, which considered only things the student actually accomplished or learned. So a typical narrative evaluation in the sciences would have a sentence for each of the course topics that a student demonstrated some knowledge of somehow at any point in the course, like a discrete math course might have "He showed an excellent understanding of number theory proofs in the coursework and final exam."
If you really screwed it up, your evaluation wouldn't say anything bad, but it would be damned with faint praise and they could reduce your academic credits.
Overall it's a much higher resolution picture of a student's education. I transferred from a school with traditional grades and I prefer the narrative system. It really stressed out a lot of students who were too indoctrinated in the traditional game process of getting the right number of points for their target grade; some of them never quite figured out that they should just focus on actually learning the subject.
This is how it works in Germany. One exam at the end of the semester. Nothing else counts. Studying and finding motivation to study is the students responsibility.
It's not perfect either, a bad performance on exam day might mean a bad grade even if you're good, but whatever, nobody cares about grades, anyway.
Do you honestly think students will not complain about the grade on a final exam and that the university will not continue to put pressure on students?
Not everyone performs the same way. Some students do badly under the pressure of testing, so having a variety of grades from a variety of types of assignments does help everyone do well.
To add to that anecdata, most of my mathematics classes would at least have 1% homework assignments weekly. One of my papers had 25% as homework.
They weren't super hard, if you turned up to the tutorials, you could usually get the tutor to basically hand hold you through it, and if you had any friends doing the same paper, you could just copy theirs. In fact, in first year, we had a rota for homework, so only one person would do it each week.
That's right! You're paid nearly nothing so you represent cheap labor for the Yale. I guarantee you that somebody is getting paid a lot!
The problem with these so called "Higher" institutions is that the people fulfilling the actual function of the University don't actually get treated all that well. Everyone just walks all over them, including the people in charge. It has become a crazy lopsided system. These schools are basically becoming feel-good daycare centers for adult children of rich families
Research suggests 'honest grading' is a pipe dream anyway. The book 'A Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' dedicates most of its final chapter to grading. Even people specifically trained to grade to a very strict standard were incapable of doing so when they knew almost anything at all about the student.
No, but students will go around you to the prof and they get away with things that wouldn’t have worked at UofC. Mostly you end up asking yourself how much you’re willing to go to battle. No upside, lots of downside. Grades become more binary for anything subjective. Obviously multiple choice is much easier to deal with, but even then students will get exam re-writes from the profs.
Yes when I went there but dependent on whether it was graduate or undergraduate and department. Undergraduate lower division CS classes were graded assuming a normal distribution (standard deviations from average). In my opinion, it was mostly used as a weeding out process. Graduate classes had much higher grades, mostly As, some A-s... few B+s. I heard that undergraduate Chemical Engineering had especially hard grading. It was supposedly hard to maintain a B average in that major and that major had students coming in with much higher average SAT scores and GPAs.
The system of elite schools is designed to perpetuate itself -- just like any beauracracy. The elite schools do this fairly well, imho.
Note that grading hard is basically friction in the system that is fairly efficient to avoid.
The elite schools have plenty of smart and hard-working students who don't need hard grading as a motivator to do great work. Those students are the backbone of your school.
1. How does one define the "wrong thing"? Genuine question.
2. What about soft grading makes it a scam? Since letter grades are distinctly not criterion referenced, I struggle to see a strong justification for this claim. Please help me understand.
3. What makes you think that anyone in the system wants it changed? I humbly suggest that very few people actually do -- the current system is super-low friction and allows professors to work on the things that they are actually evaluated on.
I'd say giving one a grade they didn't earn, because it is more convenient for you, is the wrong thing.
It's surely a breach of ethics to evaluate someone's work and report that they did better than you concluded they did for convenience. I'd call that ethical breach "the wrong thing."
OP said to think twice about "honest grading" so I think dishonest grading is the problem with what you are calling "soft grading."
I don't think anyone inside wants it changed, I don't think anyone ever does when a broken system benefits them more than those outside. That's why it was in quotes.
As you feel so strongly about this issue, I assume that you will not sit around and be complicit now that you are aware of the realities but instead will put in the hard work to marshall a campaign of change.
Should I have to be ready and willing to start a campaign every time I learn of something is unethical?
Am I not allowed to call out obviously unethical behavior without offering myself as tribute to correct it?
If I call you out for littering do I have to clean the whole planet?
Sorry this feels bad man, I don't think you are a dirtbag but I think you did a bad thing. Done plenty myself, my crosses to bear, but always turned out better when called out for it.
Cheating is unethical. Choosing to not aggressively grade because the costs (time away from your PhD work) exceeds the benefits is not. I put in what was expected I just didn’t put in more. My moral obligation was to my PhD work, not some grading crusade. No crosses to bear here.
It’s a system that polishes privilege, its byproduct a contempt for earned authority. Many of the people who started with this attitude had it ratified and encouraged by perhaps the most prestigious university in the world — and now they’re running the whole show.
Emphasis on now added.
Who in their right mind thinks people who attend Harvard and a handful of other elite universities and prep schools haven't been running the whole show since before the American Revolution?
The modern US has centralised more power in the hands of institutions which those Ivy League graduates dominate (i.e. the federal government and the large banks). Also other big capitalist enterprises in the past cared less about degrees than now.
So I'd say that America always had class distinctions, and the Ivy League always was a ticket to the highest class. But it dominates that class more than it used to.
Quantifying prestige and definitively ranking the three is beyond me, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Harvard was considered more prestigious, in large part because it balances (reputationally speaking) "new-world dynamism" and "old-world prestige" better than Oxbridge does. The latter without the former has connotations of sclerotic inefficiency.
I think this "new-world dynamism" but might actually count against US schools if it makes them seem non-rigorous. Oxbridge teachers I've met are rigorous (in terms of their expections of students, not their own methods).
Regarding the US, I can only offer how I came by my own priors in family that in traditional subcontinental style is always on the lookout for prestegious schools. I learned at my father's knee that US postgrad schools were the best in the world, but that undergrad education was soft and "mickey mouse".
I'd need data rather than annecdotes to say if this is really the international preception of US education, rather than just my family's the lore. But so much that I see out of America confirms that lore, that I guess other people have come to the same conclusion.
A huge portion of the middle class in the UK went to Oxford or Cambridge. Something like 25% of Etonians get into Oxford or Cambridge. For the Westminster school that number is something like 45%.
Harvard does not have that same grip on the corresponding class stratum in the US, but Harvard also has far fewer undergraduates than Oxford or Cambridge and the US is a much larger country.
Eton and Westminster schools are not open to the 'middle class'. Of course, they'll accept the upper class, because that's traditional, but what they really want is the ruling class, which is no longer the same thing. But mere middle class?
It is interesting to see the demographics of these schools change. 20/30 years ago it was as has been for hundreds of years, the British aristocracy. Some parents/teachers express their frustration that a large segment of students are now Russian oligarch heirs, Middle Eastern princes etc.
Of course these are the future power players whether we like it or not. "Old Money" feels inadequate.
I am British, so what I would consider upper class is... upper class. "Middle class" in the UK means the same as it does anywhere else - educated, property-owning, suburban, high discretionary spend budget... middle class.
Sure, there's plenty of people who will try to redefine it to mean people with substantial investment/property income who send their kids to private schools and own second homes abroad... in general to justify claiming that cuts to capital gains and inheritance tax are 'to help the middle class'. But that stockbroker-belt lifestyle is more specific to what you'd call the 'upper middle class'. And even stockbrokers aren't sending their kids to Eton...
Be that as it may, I don't want to argue semantics, but the grand-parent is obviously not using your definition of middle class. At least that's how I read it.
>>> A huge portion of the middle class in the UK went to Oxford or Cambridge.
A huge portion of the UK's middle class cannot have gone to Oxbridge, simply because they're too small. They take 3000 people each or together 0.01% of the UK's population each year.
But what portion of the 17-19 year olds of the UK do they admit every year? I think it's around 3%. That means Oxbridge is guaranteed to have educated a greater portion of the UK's middle class than went to the US's HYP, also ran Ivy League schools, MIT, Stanford and CalTech. One thirtieth of the US population does not attend a super elite school.
Oxbridge have an average acceptance rate of 18% for undergrads. Harvard is 6%. Assuming similar applicant pools, many who got rejected by Harvard would have been accepted at Oxbridge.
And an institution with thousands of dead people behind it is obviously going to be more prestigious than one with mere hundreds. Huge, weighty anchors biting into the benthic depths of our past - that's how you get to be a Prestigious Institution of global Renown.
I disagree. There are tons of old universities in europe. University of Bologna is older than oxford, but I doubt anyone would say it is more prestigious.
Prestige is determined by money and power. Oxford doesn't really measure up to harvard or yale in this regard.
Sorry, I was sort of making a facetious joke. Sometimes it's surprising how fervently people revere tradition, and you do see it a bit more often in the UK, imo. Not that I'd be a great judge, having spent less than a month or so there in total.
The UK educates more world leaders than the US, which is impressive considering the difference in size. Although this of course could simply be down to prestige rather than quality of education. This sort of challenging of grades would almost never be accept in the UK however!
people from the ivy league run the US, so it's prestigious in the US. people from oxford and cambridge run the UK, so it's prestigious in the commonwealth. it's really not any more complicated than that.
As an american, yes. I'd say Harvard and Yale are much more prestigious than oxford or cambridge. Most americans don't even know what oxford or cambridge is.
It's also been my experience that most chinese/asians prefer harvard/yale/ivy league and of course our top engineering schools ( MIT/Cal Tech/etc ). Stanford and Carnegie Mellon also seem to be very desired by chinese/asian students as well due to prominence of technology.
Are you european? If so what's the reputation of harvard/yale in europe vis a vis oxford/cambridge and other european colleges?
No, I'm American. I've always thought that Oxford and Cambridge were much more prestigious than Harvard. If I had 2 resumes come across my desk, one from Harvard and then other from Oxford, I'd be more impressed by the Oxford one. I don't know if that is because of the fascination that I have for many things British (which is strange since my ancestors started leaving from there to the Americas in the early 1600s - I assume if they liked it there they wouldn't have left) or it may be that I've read too many books that take place in England (for some reason Oxford pops up a lot in many different novels).
This reminds me of the fact that in the early republic, the majority of American presidents and powerful statesmen were Freemasons. There was even a anti-elitist party, called the Antimasonic party, formed to counter the Masons' influence in politics.
The article is short, and only uses an anecdote to support its claim. While I can generally agree that places like Harvard work more in connections, networks, and money than intellectual rigor, the article is too short and missing enough detail to fall flat.
As a former undergrad, the points about grade inflation are 100% correct, and everything else is garbage.
> Many of the better-off young people at Harvard appeared to require intense favoritism to reassure them, perhaps because of the less-moneyed achievement and potential that loomed all around. Though some of the anointed developed their capabilities to the full, the institutional imperative to establish a hierarchy between them and us took precedence.
This is just utter nonsense. There are a lot of very legitimate ways that the school favors its privileged students (self selecting social clubs with dues, the disaster that is on campus dining, not subsidizing a whole lot of expenses that they ought to, forcing students on financial aid to work for the school, etc.) but the insinuation that the professors and other teachers at the school systematically favor privileged students in some sort of effort to reaffirm social hierarchy is totally unsubstantiated, and, quite frankly, a disgusting and slanderous accusation. I didn't like all (or even necessarily most) my professors/advisers/TAs that much, but I am honestly outraged on their behalf after reading this.
I believe you should re-examine your indignation. One window into the favoritism of these schools is legacy admissions. For instance, about 10-30% of Ivy admissions are to legacies, and on average these legacies have lower scores than ordinary admissions.
Another window is the favors offered to large donors. My wife worked in fundraising for an Ivy. There was no end to the coddling of doddering old donors, by the university president all the way down through deans and managers of large facilities.
There was a dossier on each and every significant donor, maintained by a dedicated research staff, and specific people who were tasked with maintaining and improving relationships with large donors through favors. ("Large" wasn't that large, a $1M gift would be very, very large.) One reference point here is the admission of Jared Kushner to Harvard.
To return to the matter at hand, is it not at least possible that the relevant Dean made an offhand comment to the professor that it was certainly a pleasure to see that the son of $BIG_DONOR was taking Latin this term?
A professor who wanted to please the Dean (don't underestimate the appeal!) would get the hint. A professor who didn't get hints like this might not find legacies enrolled in their class. A Dean who didn't know how to finesse these opportunities might get rotated out to another position.
Yes, I knew a student like this, whose father would fly in and have a conversation with the Dean (not Harvard, but close enough).
I've heard first hand stories from friends who did their undergrad at Harvard that spoke to favoritism. One is: while playing rugby, a friend tackles another student. The coach pulls my friend aside and tells him to stop "hitting so hard" (my friend is an average to below average sized guy). Puzzled, my friend asks why, to which the coach replies, "think about the kid's name."
Interestingly, I think that story can be interpreted different ways. One interpretation is that the coach knew that if he actually caused an injury, it might come back at him in interesting ways. You can either interpret it as the coach protecting the elite, or the coach protecting the non-elite, depending on your view.
Alternative interpretation - the rugby coach was helping
seattleeng's friend by alerting him in advance to the fact that moneyed interests would make the friend's life hell if he were to seriously injure one of their own.
> the insinuation that the professors and other teachers at the school systematically favor privileged students in some sort of effort to reaffirm social hierarchy is totally unsubstantiated
How do you know for sure though? Naturally such conversations would occur away from the public eye.
Oddly enough, I'm not sure I would support subsidizing more expenses. That seems like a separate issue.
Yeah it seems like a well timed attack piece considering all the recent Harvard headlines.
Not that I disagree - Harvard is more likely concerned with reputation and possible future donors than intellectual integrity - but it doesn't make a good foundation for an article.
I just remember the difference between Stanford 30 years ago and San Jose State.
At Stanford students that were failing a class or getting a grade that was too low would just drop it and retake it the next semester. At San Jose State you couldn't drop a class after the first two days. Stanford you could retake a class for a higher grade. SJSU, you could retake a class if the grade was lower than a C. But they'd average the two grades.
San Jose States Engineering department also graded on a curve, no exceptions. Only 5-8 people out of a class of 30 was going to get an A.
Also at San Jose State if your grades dropped too low you didn't get put on academic probation, you were gone.
Not just picking on Stanford, I've heard similar reports from people that went to other high ranked schools.
The deal is when you grade on a curve a B- means something other than 'totally failed' or as an old instructor of mine said, back when I went to school a B was a good grade.
Also my mothers comment was if everyone does really really well on a test then it wasn't hard enough. The reverse is sort of true. If everyone does poorly then either the test test was too hard or the instructor failed to teach the material.
Yeah, is there a reason to grade on a curve? I don't understand the competition if it the point is to understand the material. There is no evidence that the real world operates on a meritocracy.
No matter if you got a 4.0, you're still never going to be graded the same as a Stanford grad*. It's set for life (unless you go to Stanford for a MS/PhD..)
I wonder how they're measuring it. I attended Caltech in the 70s, and the percent who entered as freshman and graduated as seniors was much lower. You could see it just in the number of students at each level, it declined every year.
This is also true of colleges to return a good return on investment. Also, their financial aid is already comparable (thinking of Standord specifically); I don't think it makes sense to speculate in the direction you're speculating any more than other directions.
It could also be at least partly related to higher selectivity and more financial aid, and/or rich parents, that make school easier.
But I dont actually know what goes on in ivy and off ivy league elite schools.
Also consider that these may just be better run schools which also provide more and more useful assistance to students.
Edit: I would like to add I think this article title is extremely clickbaity, and plays on the recently resurgent class warfare phenomenon. It pains me that articles like this, from sources like this, are becoming normalized and even acceptable on HN. There's no merit to this biased pile of shit. And I'm not an ivy league graduate having a security crisis. Journalism should be objective.
One of the issues I think is that people no longer are making a distinction between opinion pieces (which this is) and articles. They're only looking at the domain name. Given that you describe it as an article, might you have done the same? (This isn't meant as a slight. We all have overlooked things at one time or another.) I'm not sure how to rectify this. To their credit, the publications still label them as such. Perhaps the labels should be larger.
You may no particularly like the author's point of view -- but you looked carefully, you might have noticed it was placed in he "Perspective" section, which as the name implies, is dedicated to expressing what are commonly known as "points of view" -- otherwise known as "biases". Which, forming the very core of our cognitive processes as they do, are very far from flaws -- an in fact, when used properly, not just useful, but absolutely crucial to one's survival in this murky, deeply ambiguous and ambivalent world of ours.
And at least the author gave some supporting observations to back up their (clearly labeled as such) point of view. OTOH the sentence you're offering above provides no insights or justifications; it is, quite literally, a pure expletive.
Journalism should be objective.
Should it, now?
“So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here--not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”
The fact that journalists are inherently biased as humans does not imply that we should not strive toward the opposite.
I dont care either way for the author's point of view. I am bothered by the fact that a news source publishes so much in opinion, and that people end up more polarized after the article, not because of its factual content, but because of its vitriol.
I believe it irresponsible to create and publish content like this, because it amounts to propaganda - I dont care side of our false dichotomy you are on, huff post is up there with breibart.
Opinion pieces should not affect our beliefs as much as they do, but let's be real, communities feed off of opinion pieces. We all do, and I come to HN specifically to minimize my exposure to feel good emotional reinforcement that leads to irrational thinking.
Sorry for the rant.
Edit: your choice of quote may be more effective than you realize, I am a big fan of Thompson's persona. Ironic, I know.
I think I get where you're coming from. But I didn't see the piece as 'vitriol', and I don't see HuffPo (while often annoying) as being anything like Breitbart (which puts out nothing but pure drivel and propaganda). Or the WaPo as comparable to either of those two.
Sorry for the rant.
Nothing to be sorry for; you're just being honest (both intellectually and in your opinions). And HST himself would probably agree that that's all that matters.
The silliness, of course, is that if you are among the "elite" and "privileged" going to an Ivy League school, nobody is going to give a shit about your grades anyway. Your career and success is already pre-ordained. Why on earth would you bother arguing with your professor that your "A-" should be an "A"? You're going to go to work at your daddy's investment bank after you graduate either way! You think big name banks and consulting firms are going to say "Gee.. he's a Kennedy, but his grades are so bad! We can't bring him in." Just party and get C's and D's--you're already set for life.
> You're going to go to work at your daddy's investment bank after you graduate either way!
Privilege has its limits. Let's take your example. If you're inheriting Dad's investment bank, you still have to keep winning their clients. Most institutional investors have policies which require them to freeze and reconsider firms after leadership changes. If you flunked your way through Harvard, that's going to be difficult.
More often, Dad doesn't own the investment bank. He's a senior officer there. This, again, confers some advantage. But outside of inheriting an estate, there are lots of controls prevent blatant nepotism.
> If you flunked your way through Harvard, that's going to be difficult.
Not really.
Maybe "flunking your way through" would be awkward, but these folks know the easy majors. See Government at Harvard. See W's surreal academic career for an example of a well-connected but relatively unintelligent person get a Yale undergrad degree and a Harvard MBA.
Yes, people like George W. Bush, who are in the top .00000001% of privilege, don't need to do well before college, in college, after college, or even as a state or country's highest elected official.
However, for most of the mere mortals at Yale and Harvard, they still have to compete with the every other college graduate, and some of those other college graduates are pretty smart themselves.
The context of the discussion was a highly connected person who will inherit their dad's investment bank -- the "elite and priveleged" mentioned in 'ryandrake's initial reply. W falls into this category, and I wouldn't say that privilege of that kind is quite as rare at elite schools as you make it out to be (~5-10% of the student body?). W might be an extreme example, ditto with "inherit an investment bank", but privilege is not hard to find at elite schools.
Exactly. I'm not saying "people at Harvard don't have to try". I'm saying "elite and privileged people whose success is already pre-ordained don't have to try to be successful (but some do anyway)". Even in my "top but not quite Ivy League" grad school, there were a handful of folks who I'd describe as sufficiently elite and privileged, such that they, for instance, really didn't need to stress out about the interviewing and the internships like the rest of us had to.
You completely misunderstand the level of "privilege" of the average ivy league student. While there are some students who are definitely going to get amazing opportunities through their parents regardless, the average student comes from a family that makes about $200-250k/year. That's wealthy and privileged for sure, but not typically "graduate with a 2.0 straight into a six-figure job set up by your parents" level of wealthy and privileged.
While I didn't go to an Ivy, that's clearly not true. Do you honestly think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Goldman, law schools, medical schools, etc., are going to accept you if you have poor grades? Not everyone can count on "daddy".
Again, I have no anecdotal experience, but I have a hard time believing that the new hires for those 3 companies are anything but students from top-tier colleges with near perfect grades. To be fair, I'm sure a couple of years of work experience and they probably don't care as much.
Full Disclosure: I work at an Ivy League institution, but not with undergrads, nor is teaching my primary job.
I also went to another Ivy League school, many years ago. I wasn't well off, but I wasn't struggling to pay for school, either. I can tell you for a fact that the pandering to student complaints described in the article wasn't the case when I was in school, but that was many years ago.
I TA'd while in grad school last century, at the University of Michigan, and I've TA'd recently at my Ivy League university's extension school, where endowments aren't a consideration. I can tell you that we get FAR more requests for grade adjustments now then we got we got decades ago. That seems to me to be as much a function of the change in the students over time as the change in institutional finance. What's surprising to me, though, is that even in an extension school, instructors STILL entertain and indulge what I would consider frivolous student regrade requests, as described in the article - even without the monetary drivers the article's author ascribes to the Harvard instructors.
So, why do professors pander to students' regrading requests, even if there is no apparent monetary motive? I believe that the cause is the rise in "instructor review" websites, and the easy communication between students. If an instructor is rated poorly by students, his class enrollments drop. If an instructor's enrollments drop too far, and they aren't tenured, they may be asked to find employment elsewhere.
So, while the monetary motive may be there, there is also the "popularity" motive. Word about poor or overly strict instructors travels very quickly among a student body. If students don't have to take a class from an instructor they feel is too strict or a poor lecturer, they won't. It's the economics of the instructor market, not the university endowment, that I feel is often the motivating factor behind pandering to students
Cultivating this attitude in future leaders does in fact seem to help them gain power. I think it ties in with the need for A) impeccable credentials and B) the ability to cavalierly invite the CEO, world leader, whomever, to play golf.
In some people we call it charisma, in others we call it entitlement. I'm starting to wonder if it's not only the person we describe, but also our own position and personal knowledge of them that influence the decision on which one to call it.
I'm working on an edtech startup and with it I've been spending a lot of time at Princeton University. From my experience with Princeton, Ivy League school are VERY overt about promoting elitism within their communities. I understand the thought behind it but a lot of these students are in for a rude awakening when they go work for an investment bank and find out that their Ivy League elitism means nothing if they can't produce in the workplace.
Eh, investment banking is arduous cause of the hours, and does require you to be pretty smart, but its not as meritocratic as your claiming. It's stacked with Ivy League kids exactly because elitism at big banks works in their favor during the hiring process.
Well, I think what's more likely is these people will be fine since most jobs are obtained primarily based on prestige and connections, and keeping an elite job once you have it just requires minimal competence. The more elite your job, the less you are punished when you fail (CEOs, for example, get bonuses when they fail). The people who are in for a rude awakening are those that think working hard and being very smart at a decent school will get them anything close to what C students from ivies waltz into without trying once they hit the working world. Remember, the C business students are the boss, A engineering students are the employees is the general rule of thumb.
I agree with you to an extent. It's my experience in engineering that you can start a company alone based on your specialized skills. I'm not sure you can do that on business skills alone. I suppose it depends on what path you want to take.
Agreed -- though for many businesses you need capital. Engineering students by and large are far less likely to have it, students rarely go to engineering school and work that hard if they know they will inherit wealth or a business. Software is something of an exception to that rule, though not completely.
Do enough people really have a subscription to the Washington Post? Or is this trending purely because a lot of people agree with the opinionated title?
I have one. You get like 6mo free if you sign up with a Prime account and only $4/mo after that. I read more than a handful of great articles from them each month and that price seems fair.
No subscription is needed to read the article. (However, the link is broken and leads to a page with no actual article; several people have commented with corrected URLs.)
It really is frustrating. I know it doesn't help the WaPo, but I subscribe to the NYTimes and the Economist and my wife's got a couple of other subs in there somewhere, but instead every site wants their $10-$20. Micropayments now!
Outbrain is the source of the "from around the web" advertising links at the bottom of news articles. They're generally just ads for diet pills and the like, disguised as other news stories.
Other similar vendors of the same kind of service are Taboola and Lockerdome.
Outbrain is one of the ad companies that creates the ads that blend in with the article recommendations that appear at the bottom of the article. They often use misleading photo/headline combinations. It really undercuts the credibility of the organizations that use it and contributes to an a culture of distrust towards the media.
I had a different experience at an Ivy, but I'm not rich. Wouldn't say arrogant either, although I should probably leave that up to others to judge.
My point is that "rich" and "arrogant" are key words here. Such people tend to get preferential treatment in our society, at Harvard and elsewhere. It's hardly specific to Harvard.
This calls to mind the amusing Harvey Mansfield, who used to be the only "conservative" (arguable) professor in the government dept. (I missed him in my time there epochs ago.)
He gave two grades, the official, inflated, career-preserving grade, and the real (his true assessment) grade. You could come ask him for the real grade if you wanted to know the awful truth. ;-)
Cornell wasn't like this... (at least in the 90s).
3.2 would get you on dean's list.
There were freshman weed-out courses to winnow out dumb and lazies.
I remember getting D+ on a paper that nearly gave me a stroke, and professor stood by it. Asked TA to re-grade it and gave me the same grade.
Some guy in my dorm got a letter from school with threat of expulsion if he didn't improve his 1.7 GPA, after just 1 tough semester.
I once made the mistake of taking a comp sci course as an elective where most of the students were comp sci majors and already new the materials. Never went to so many TA office hours in my life, just to get B+.
Full Disclosure: I work at an Ivy League institution, but not with undergrads, nor is teaching my primary job.
I also went to another Ivy League school, many years ago. I wasn't well off, but I wasn't struggling to pay for school, either. I can tell you for a fact that the pandering to student complaints described in the article wasn't the case when I was in school, but that was many years ago.
I TA'd while in grad school last century, at the University of Michigan, and I've TA'd recently at my Ivy League university's extension school, where endowments aren't a consideration. I can tell you that we get FAR more requests for grade adjustments now then we got we got decades ago. That seems to me to be as much a function of the change in the students over time as the change in institutional finance. What's surprising to me, though, is that even in an extension school, instructors STILL entertain and indulge what I would consider frivolous student regrade requests, as described in the article - even without the monetary drivers the article's author ascribes to the Harvard instructors.
So, why do professors pander to students' regrading requests, even if there is no apparent monetary motive? I believe that the cause is the rise in "instructor review" websites, and the easy communication between students. If an instructor is rated poorly by students, his class enrollments drop. If an instructor's enrollments drop too far, and they aren't tenured, they may be asked to find employment elsewhere.
So, while the monetary motive may be there, there is also the "popularity" motive. Word about poor or overly strict instructors travels very quickly among a student body. If students don't have to take a class from an instructor they feel is too strict or a poor lecturer, they won't. It's the economics of the instructor market, not the university endowment, that I feel is often the motivating factor behind pandering to students.
There is a recurring theme of incentives becoming out of alignment with purpose. This happens in business, medicine, government...
It's become a real focus for me, and CEOs should consider this very carefully. What are the company's goals, really, and are the incentives offered, all the way from the janitors up to their own compensation, in alignment with those goals?
The professor stated blatantly: The students are paying too much for us to fail them. Said another way: The students bought their grades.
Does anyone have knowledge of incentive structures at universities that they'd defend as being in strong alignment with the goal of turning out the best educated students? What was that incentive structure?
It's an interesting anecdote, but makes conclusions about the aggregate. Give me almost any university, and with time I could probably find at least one story like this.
I'm not saying it isn't true, just that this evidence is weak.
I didn't go to Harvard and I'll freely admit that when I come across Harvard people, they are as a general pool, stunningly impressive in whatever discipline they are in.
This article has very little basis in reality based on my experience at Harvard as an undergrad and at Princeton as a grad student and TA.
Yes, students are arrogant and push for grades quite a bit. But I saw zero evidence of systemic catering to them as a whole or to any specific sub-population. I imagine the Development Office (the folks who would cater to the ultra powerful) may get involved in extreme cases? But it would be a huge to-do among the faculty (tenured faculty at Harvard and most elite institutions are incredibly powerful) and I never heard of it happening.
As an undergrad, I pressed for grade changes twice and was denied, reasonably, both times. As a TA at Princeton I was often pressed for grade changes and all were denied.
What almost certainly happened in this person's case is that the Professors either a) weren't tenured and couldn't bother with student push-back given a sea of work and anxiety (or mistakenly thought student perceptions matter), or b) were tenured and didn't care to deal with student push-back.
When you say "very little basis in reality", you mean "disagrees with my own experience". The difference between those two phrases isn't subtle. The author is relating their own actual experience teaching at Harvard, and the directly related experiences of other teachers.
The parent is relating their own actual experience to you. Which you chose to believe is more a product of confirmation bias than reality. The author of the article, so I'll be generous and suggest she liberally is using poetic license with the truth to make a point. Do you really believe this is how the supposed incident happened? "Then, in front of the student, he pressed me to explain the reason for my poor teaching."
If the student was well-connected, and the professor was worried about their position (nontenured) and did not find arguing worth the hassle - then yes, why not? Doesn't sound that surprising.
I was a graduate student at Harvard for five years (two Masters degrees), and the article is spot-on. Grade inflation was a big topic while I was there (some prof had written an editorial blaming it on affirmative action), and everything she said resonated with me. In fact, your comment is so clueless and un-self-aware, I'm kinda shocked that someone with your apparent bio could have written it. That you did pretty powerfully proves her point.
When I went to school back in the early 1980's the professors blamed grade inflation on the Vietnam war. They out an out said that they didn't want to fail students because they'd lose their draft deferment. When I went they'd gone back to grading on a curve.
These schools are big places, so it's not all that surprising different people have different experiences. What department, out of curiosity? I had experience in molecular biology and computer science at Harvard and mol bio at Princeton. (But yes, I saw zero of this in any of those places)
Lol, I'm so sorry, this is unkind and very possibly inaccurate, but I read your "what department" question like this:
"Where were you on the internal Harvard hierarchy that we both know is incredibly important to Harvard folks, but that the outside world generally knows nothing about. I need to know where you were on the status ladder so I can decide how much of your comment, like the article author's (she's on the lower side of the middle of the ladder) is sour grapes from someone who hit a velvet rope inside the club and is bitter about it."
Like I said, this is probably deeply unfair, and if it is then my apologies, but after spending five years there I can't help but parse it this way.
FWIW I was at the Div school, which is near the bottom, so we're all keenly aware of these issues because the lower you are on any hierarchy the more that hierarchy and your place in it defines your experience of the whole. It's only the folks on top who can afford to be ignorant of the kinds of issues that everyone below them has to carefully navigate.
I was a common undergrad in the computer science department, and my freshman Tutor was an awesome guy from the div school. I had no part in politics (although I was aware FAS sat higher than DIV on somebody's totem pole); I just saw no evidence of the behavior described in the article and was curious if other departments behaved differently from CS.
The mistake is in thinking of this as an overt control instead of a system of subtle nudges. A professor known for harsh grading gets a question from his department head and next year the curve shifts a little.
And that is how your undergrad program has a proportion of grade inflation that verges on embarrassing.
The nature of the grading system is that it doesn't have a ton of transparency. It doesn't sound too surprising that the wealthy and well-connected might use any lever possible to increase their standing. This is actually one of the many things that drew me to tech as a profession - more meritocratic and you can feel it.
At the end of the day, without more data it's impossible to know.
1. I imagine the author just became a PNG in terms of faculty hiring at any elite university. There's no way I would hire her due to what I consider her tone deaf response to her experiences.
2. The only potentially misleading part was the professor talking about grade inflation. Most people know that declarations like this are largely a formality -- grading hard creates nothing but trouble for no benefit but plenty of potential loss. Lost time dealing with complaints, fewer enrolled students/majors, lower ratings, etc.
3. Most of the real insiders know that a "Harvard A" means nothing. Back it up with a good recommendation, and it starts to mean something. Note that there is a code in recommendation letters so that professors never need to be negative and expose themselves to lawsuits and/or criticism. "[student] took my class [class name] and got an A. All work was completed on time and met the high standards for an A that are set in my classes." translates to "OMG, stay away." On the other hand, the above with added specific examples about how the student exceled or showed exceptional promise are the premium recommendations.
4. IMHO, fighting grade inflation is something best done in required courses or lower level courses. Grades for third year classes should err on the high side. I have seen this system work a lot. I have seen systems that did not do this founder frequently.
5. This has nothing to do with privileged students -- they don't need great grades for jobs or grad school. Seriously. This probably does have more to do with arrogant students. My thought? So what? Educating arrogant students is collateral damage for (usually) having great peers and having access to great resources.
6. There actually are students at Harvard who are smart, humble, and work hard. In fact, there are quite a few of them. I personally would not let a few bad apples rain on my party.
7. As far as passing someone who scored "in the teens" on a final, the so-called gentlemen's C is a real thing (especially in weeder courses). The best part of said C is that it usually keeps the student out of other courses (e.g., pre-med), so the pain of their presence usually stops there.
8 Lastly, not all students at elite schools are comparable to Guggenheim Fellows like the author. In fact, I usually say that only 20-30% of most students at elite schools would be widely considered impressive, "really smart", or "interesting" (my subjective view, but it is shared by many of my peers). Students at elite schools are not gods. A random individual from an elite school is not likely to be the smartest person you know -- not even close. I strongly suggest that people not kiss the asses of elite school students, and do due diligence just like they do with everyone else. That elite school degree may mean that there is a higher chance that the holder is exceptional, but it is nowhere near a guarantee.
