Interesting Article on Grade Inflation

They don't need good grades anymore, all they do is falsify their resumes. Whose CEO was it that gto fired for that not too long ago?

Maybe the cure for this spreading plague of incompetence is, as Larkin suggests, hire interns... no formal hire until demonstrated capability. ...Jim Thompson

There's probably a rule against that.

I think our biggest problem in this regard is that having a BA has become the bar over which any "serious" job-seeker has to have passed, even when there's nothing about the job that requires it.

As a consequence, people are shooting for a stellar academic record, even if it means absolutely nothing in real-world terms, other than that they are motivated and ambitious. While this is great for marketing and business types, who just need to be better at stabbing their buddy in the back than their buddy, it doesn't help the technical professions at all, where one actually does need to be good at doing the job as stated.

"Last week, the Harvard Crimson reported that the median grade at Harvard College is an A-, and the most common grade awarded is a straight A."

Look at this sorry_ss piece of work:John Donald Cody, now 67, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1972, served as a captain in the U.S. Army's military intelligence unit and once practiced law in Arizona. This country has seen quite enough of Harvard graduates. Anyone dumb enough to hire those freaks gets what they deserve:

Yep. Everyone is _equal_ under communism. So no one strives. And it shows, from OECD...

"Overall, according to the U.S. Department of Education, American students' rankings in math have slipped from 24th to 29th compared to the last test in 2010. In science, they've gone from 19th to 22nd, and from 10th to 20th in reading." ...Jim Thompson

unions

Cheers

While I agree that unions have made it difficult to remove a bad teacher (*), I think it is school boards and administrators that have created this socialist-based educational system... and the teachers are stuck with the prescribed curriculum.

(*) In the early '70's I did manage to get a teacher "fired". By then my wife and I were co-presidents of the TPA. Complaints started coming to us about a first grade teacher. I asked all callers to send me a letter describing the situation. I soon had a letter from _every_ parent in the classroom. I called the administration. They wanted the letters before they could "proceed". I said, no thanks, I'll take my letters to the TV station. They decided to "fire" the teacher. Turns out that they quietly "rehired" her two years later, after I was gone. ...Jim Thompson

Anyone stupid enough to believe that all Harvard graduates are the same deserves ridicule.

Dan

There is grade inflation, but there is also student proficiency inflation. A few years back, Harvard stated that they had enough applicants with perf ect scores on the SAT's to fill the freshman class. They do admit students that have less than perfect scores, but they do it because the student had some other talent that seemed more important. For example Yo Yo Ma may not have had perfect SAT scores, but he was a pretty good musician. Or Bill Ga tes may not have had perfect SAT scores, but showed some talent for writing software. Or Chuck Schumer may not have had perfect test scores, but had a talent for getting his face on TV. Anyway the students at Harvard are pretty bright and generally work at learning, so what sort of grades do the y deserve? Maybe not A"s, but maybe not C's.

Dan

" was ordered by a judge to pay more than $6.3 million in fines and more than $330,000"

And whose money is going to pay that fine ?

Is the judge an idiot ?

All those fines belong to the people he ripped off.

Now they are being ripped off, officially !

When I retired, I was offered a position in the mathematics dept. at UMO. One of the reasons I did not take it was trying to deal with this sort of crap.

Larry

Its a shame we can't use a technique from AI called back propagation. A professor's rating, including the reliability of his grading, is based upon the eventual outcome of his students.

A prof cranks out a lot of capable students who make it in industry and he gets a higher weighting average then the bozos who crank out the knuckle-draggers. Statistical methods spread the blame (or credit) backwards evenly throughout a student's academic history. Eventually, high value nodes (better teachers) will accumulate higher scores if they turn out a statistically higher number of successes.

Curiously a friend of mine has just started teaching at a local University. She was in a panic to get her grades in on time. Well today her lament was that she was now, less than 24 hours later getting complaints from students over their grades.

I told her that if it ever occured that she wasn't receiving complaints it would mean she was doing something wrong.

Part of the reason I could neve bring myself to teach. I wouldn't pass the knuckle draggers.

A buddy when he started teaching at Johnson & Wales and I used to play a game. I'd attend the first session of a class he taught and write down my predictions on who'd fail and who'd pass.

At the end of term we compared grades ot my list. I bagged every single knuckle dragger in the class.

IBM was doing that over 20 years ago. I don't recall anyone in the '90s or '00s getting hired in development who wasn't first an intern.

Nope. It's perfectly legitimate to hire college interns. It's done all the time. We do it now (*many* of them). Who's can bitch if they can demonstrate that they're more qualified for the job they've been doing for a few years already.

BA? Nothing that requires? We are talking about design engineers, here, right?

Stabbing people in the back? How does an undergrad do that? Give him the wrong cheat sheet for the exams?

I'm talking about grade inflation in general, actually. And job-seekers in general, too, for that matter.

Well, you just did a sterling job of totally missing the point of what I said, but since you asked:

When both my sister-in-law and one of my two sisters were undergraduates at competitive schools (Northwestern and Dartmouth, respectively), the chem lab lockers had real live locks. If you left a half-finished project in an unlocked locker, someone would sabotage it, seeking to lower the curve and thereby increase their grade.

So, there's one way. You didn't leave homework sitting out in the library, or believe things that classmates said about due dates, either.