[acuster]

One of the better ways that occurred to me when we Cal grad students were protesting a couple of decades ago was, rather than withhold the grades, simply to give everyone an 'A'. That form of protest most directly targeted the institution since it simply affected its reputation. The students were not hurt, the grad students could comply with their obligations and move on. I am surprised that such an approach never took off.

[davrosthedalek]

How are the students not hurt if the reputation of their university is damaged? Especially if you are a good student. Graduate admissions are aware of this kind of stuff, and it will screw over real A students royally.

[AlchemistCamp]

Harvard awards nearly all A's and their reputation hasn't suffered for it:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...

I suspect it would take a lot more than one "A strike" to substantially impact a school's reputation.

[davrosthedalek]

I can tell you with 100% confidence that grade inflation is taken into account in grad admission. Been there, done that. Same as arbitrary scale changes (Let's give A+...). But it will be a long time until this impacts Harvard. OTOH, it seems Princeton steered back.

[tantalor]

> comply with their obligations

It's a dereliction, not compliance. Your job is to sincerely, fairly, and justifiably assign grades, and not arbitrarily.

[chrisseaton]

> The students were not hurt

They’re not getting genuine feedback on their work.

[praptak]

You can still give them feedback. Damn, you should, regardless of grades.

[Balgair]

UCSC is a bit strange.

At first, they did not give out grades at all. There was only a written evaluation that the professor did for each student at the end of the quarter. Eventually, in the mid 1980s or so, other schools demanded that UCSC give out a grade in addition, so they they could compare Slugs to other students when admitting for post-secondary education. When I send my official transcript over, it's ~75 pages long, not just one page. It's chock-full of detailed personal information about my efforts in Psych-101, Intro to Jazz, etc (or, rather, the total lack of effort, in my case).

[rubidium]

The former system is ideal.

[xenonite]

Could you elaborate that?

[rubidium]

Grads don’t provide meaningful feedback for how a student can grow or the challenges they’re facing. As soon as you introduce grades they become the sole metric to be gamed.

I understand there’s real issues with scaling, but national tests seem to resolve that. At most a pass, high pass or fail system would be best. Letter +/- grades are just silly when you step back and think about the goal of education.

[chrisseaton]

Part of feedback is the grade.

[praptak]

The least useful one. Edit: Here's an opinion about that: https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-...

[saagarjha]

Ha, wouldn’t that be nice :) I’m not sure if professors would allow that to go through, though…

[jlg23]

How is a student not hurt when given an incorrect assessment of their academic abilities?

[swiley]

Undergrad students? If it’s a CS class and not one of the intro to programming/algorithms ones you’re probably mostly checking if they read the book they were forced to buy (thanks ACM) so I would say it doesn’t really hurt them.

[Jtsummers]

If that’s all your undergrad CS courses did, you should’ve gone to a better school.

[chongli]

A student who gets an A when they should have failed the course may be wrongly encouraged to continue in that direction when they really ought to change programs. This could end up costing that student a huge amount of time and money, to the point of jeopardizing their ability to graduate and ruining their future.

Failing grades aren’t supposed to just be a punishment for not studying hard enough. They can be a warning sign that the student may need to try something else.

[mrep]

Depends on the school. All of my math classes and most of my CS classes at purdue were bell curved around like a C+/B- and you had to get a C to pass the class. Thus, a portion of each class would not pass and be effectively forced to retake the class to learn it better or switch to an easier major.

What schools do you have experience with? Also, never heard of ACM so I have no idea if that was used whatsoever for our classes.

[saagarjha]

> never heard of ACM

ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery. Hopefully someone mentioned it to you before you graduated…