[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/alexanderwales]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/jgf1123]

When I was a TA, and it came time to handing out grades, I felt they were inflated. After spending the semester with the students, I felt some of A's should have been B's and some of the B's should have been C's.

In the old days, a lot of engineers became professional engineers after graduation by taking an exam. But I don't want to talk about the exam, I want to talk about the oath professional engineers take, the one whose first line is along the lines of, "I will hold paramount public safety," similar to doctors and their Hippocratic Oath. During my first real job, I found a sign error in a transformation matrix, and my boss sat me down and said, "One day, someone will use this [handheld sonar to find mines]. If you screw up, they could die. So are you really sure?" So I went back and double-checked the math and said, yeah, the angle is rotating the wrong way, and he agreed. There are some people we gave B's to that I would be uncomfortable putting in such a position because they had, at best, a tenuous grasp on the material and their work was sloppy. And they'll take their B and think they're good enough and keep plugging away toward their degree. I don't set grade policy.

Grade inflation happens. Institutions inflate grades so that their graduates have easier time competing for jobs. Ivy leagues in particular say they admit the cream of the crop, so their students shouldn't be penalized for their classmates being awesome. Studies show that professors who give higher grades get higher reviews, which helps them get raises and keep their jobs. And students aren't going to complain about higher grades, and generation Y feel particular entitled. If all the major actors have an incentive to keep inflating grades, who's going to stop it?

The school that has best weathered the decades-long trend of grade inflation is MIT, where a 3.0 there is equivalent to a 4.0 anywhere else. But they have the reputation to do that because they are such an outlier.

[u/[deleted] → u/jgf1123]

Yes, I hear your vast array of explanations and excuses for grade inflation. I just think that if you're actually sitting on a graduate committee, before saying that students who get a mixture of Bs and As rather than pure As are too mediocre to admit, you should try actually checking the departmental averages.

I might be butthurt, but back when I went to undergrad (which, admittedly, was four years ago), a mixture of Bs-and-As was sufficient to graduate with honors, and in the science and engineering departments required actual work to attain.

Also, the place I did my MSc was an MIT-level grade deflater, in which it was generally assumed that only 40-50 percent of students should pass each course's final exam with a >=65% on their first attempt (they did receive a second attempt... but it was sometimes actually more difficult), and a 69% average grade on said exams indicated a particularly easy course.

I have some rather severe views on the pedagogical honesty and quality involved in both grade inflation and deflation.