<story><title>Make School Hard Again</title><url>https://reason.com/2019/05/26/make-school-hard-again/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lioning</author><text>As former [tenured] faculty, I&amp;#x27;m not sure what to say about this. Good luck doing it in a reasonable way. It&amp;#x27;s not like [some] universities don&amp;#x27;t try to rein in grade inflation. Instructors do regularly give out Cs and Ds or Fs at many institutions. Our university kind of did audits to just see if there was something glaringly wrong about grade distributions in courses systematically for certain courses.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, grades shouldn&amp;#x27;t be arbitrarily difficult either, or curve just to curve. That&amp;#x27;s misguided as well; there are reasons for grade inflation other than just being nice -- I think old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary which has its own downsides.&lt;p&gt;I think in my undergrad courses the average grade was usually about a B, which seemed about right to me. Of course I&amp;#x27;m biased because it&amp;#x27;s my own grading, but these were usually upper-level students, who got to that point because they were reasonably competent, and my sense of things was that they had about a B level grasp of the material on average. That is, they understood most of the important points of the material pretty well, but might have become a little lost in the finer points.  Why knock their grades down just to make the grade distributions prettier?&lt;p&gt;My experience was that the trickier part was dealing with new freshman, who didn&amp;#x27;t always seem as prepared as they should be for college, especially with writing. But it&amp;#x27;s hard to know if that&amp;#x27;s actually any different over time; there&amp;#x27;s been a couple of times I&amp;#x27;ve found decades old samples and I was surprised how little things had actually changed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jjoonathan</author><text>&amp;gt; old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary&lt;p&gt;Yes! The people complaining about grade inflation want to use grades to compare students across classrooms, yet the level of achievement indicated by a grade is very much specific to a particular class, peer-group, and professor.&lt;p&gt;Grades should never have been used for cross-classroom comparisons in the first place and if market dynamics have inflated them to the point where it is impossible to continue to abuse them in this manner, I&amp;#x27;d call it a good riddance!</text></comment>
<story><title>Make School Hard Again</title><url>https://reason.com/2019/05/26/make-school-hard-again/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lioning</author><text>As former [tenured] faculty, I&amp;#x27;m not sure what to say about this. Good luck doing it in a reasonable way. It&amp;#x27;s not like [some] universities don&amp;#x27;t try to rein in grade inflation. Instructors do regularly give out Cs and Ds or Fs at many institutions. Our university kind of did audits to just see if there was something glaringly wrong about grade distributions in courses systematically for certain courses.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, grades shouldn&amp;#x27;t be arbitrarily difficult either, or curve just to curve. That&amp;#x27;s misguided as well; there are reasons for grade inflation other than just being nice -- I think old school grading was often somewhat capriciously difficult and arbitrary which has its own downsides.&lt;p&gt;I think in my undergrad courses the average grade was usually about a B, which seemed about right to me. Of course I&amp;#x27;m biased because it&amp;#x27;s my own grading, but these were usually upper-level students, who got to that point because they were reasonably competent, and my sense of things was that they had about a B level grasp of the material on average. That is, they understood most of the important points of the material pretty well, but might have become a little lost in the finer points.  Why knock their grades down just to make the grade distributions prettier?&lt;p&gt;My experience was that the trickier part was dealing with new freshman, who didn&amp;#x27;t always seem as prepared as they should be for college, especially with writing. But it&amp;#x27;s hard to know if that&amp;#x27;s actually any different over time; there&amp;#x27;s been a couple of times I&amp;#x27;ve found decades old samples and I was surprised how little things had actually changed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lordCarbonFiber</author><text>The number of people that will say, without irony, that they expect upper level classes to follow a normal distirbution in grades boggles my mind. College by definition involves a great deal of gatekeeping and self selection.&lt;p&gt;As for the larger trend, I can&amp;#x27;t help but think it&amp;#x27;s as much due to better teaching and exponentially more available resources (both for self study ie internet and provided by universities (got to spend that tuition money on something)). From my limited experience (parents went to the same school I did) on a material level classes are objectively harder (more information, deeper coverage, more advanced topics) so sometimes it feels like the &amp;quot;grade inflation panic&amp;quot; is built on a older generation upset that young people might be outpacing them.</text></comment>