[ziofill]

I can’t help comparing this to the system I grew up in (Italy), which is vastly different and it seemingly produces very good graduates.

University was free and there was no test for enrolling in STEM degrees, and you could retry exams every semester as much as you wanted to. But goddamit exams were HARD and if you weren’t prepared enough you would keep failing until you gave up. We weren’t entitled because we weren’t paying customers.

Also because Italy is Italy we had unlimited beer and wine on tap in the canteen. For real.

[whateverboat]

I think the problems are deeper. The problems are at school level. The variance in the level of schooling in US is huge compared to Italy in my experience. This factor means that school exams are not a good indicator of competitiveness.

Furthermore, the social systems in Italy mean that the failure is not that problematic especially for kids from poor backgrounds. And therefore, risk of depression etc was much lower.

In short what I want to say is that the university exam system is not as important as the social security/welfare state for better student outcomes.

This also ties into Harvard's grade inflation. If you think about it, if only the countries best mathematicians are joining Harvard, it doesn't make sense for any of them to receive a D on a mathematics course just because they are not that good compared to the rest of the class but are still in top 2% country wise.

The real problem here again is that US has a few good universities and a lot of bad ones. But this again, can just also be due to the size of US, but also is affected by social welfare state and equality.

[znpy]

> The problems are at school level.

Imho the problems are even deeper: they’re at culture level.

But that’s where things get controversial, so i’ll hint at the problems and stop here.

[bmm6o]

You mean the culture of cutting funding from under performing schools to enforce a downward spiral and divert money to private schools? If not you should be more specific.

[znpy]

(The two sibling comments confirm i was right at only hinting at the problem and avoiding the quarrels. No one of the two commenters is trying to engage in a healthy and honest conversation. That’s another sign of a… cultural issue)

[kelipso]

He is definitely not talking about school exams. He is talking about either university entrance exams or exams in university classes.

[try-working]

I studied engineering in Sweden. One of our courses had an 80% failure rate. A world of difference from Harvard where the average grade is A.

[zfnmxt]

This is not a good comparison.

All the students at Harvard are all selected from the tail end of the distribution and are very capable.

The students at Scandinavian universities are selected to a degree, but represent a far broader range of the distribution and correspondingly there's a broader range of exam results.

Of course, other things are at play here (there is grade inflation at Harvard, the schools obviously operate differently, student disposition is (very) different (e.g., Scandinavian students are far less likely to care a lot about their grades), etc) but students from Harvard would do well at your university in Sweden. Also, the level of the material at Harvard is likely higher.

This is my experience from attending an Ivy undergrad and then doing graduate school in Scandinavia. I actually left my MSc program in Scandinavia because I thought the level of the courses was too low. (I ultimately returned for the PhD---I found the profs and researchers in Scandinavia to be first class/excellent. Much better than I ever will be.)

[fastasucan]

>The students at Scandinavian universities are selected to a degree, but represent a far broader range of the distribution and correspondingly there's a broader range of exam results.

I disagree with that, it is common knowledge that these students will get A's if they do a semester in the US.

[zfnmxt]

From my experience in both systems, I think some of the students of course would (the best students in Scandinavia are just as good as the best students anywhere else), but certainly not all of them. And the degree of grade inflation as well as the level of courses and course difficulty is not only highly variable by school but also by individual instances of courses, so it's pretty hard to make broad claims regardless.

I should also note I've taken courses in Europe where the failure rate was like 60%, but I've also taken courses where just about every student got (the equivalent of) an A. Easy grading occurs in Euroland as well. Or other phenomenona, like niche courses that tend to only attract talented, interested students.

P.S. The "common" in "common knowledge" is not some claim of accuracy/correctness and does not lend credence to your point---a lot of things that are common knowledge are false! (I bet most things that fall under that description are false to a degree, or at least in terms of each individuals' average understanding.)

P.P.S. Failure in the US system and the European systems are very different things. In most US schools, failing is permanently recorded on your transcript and cannot be erased. You also cannot retake an exam you've failed. You just get the one shot. So the cost of failure in the US is much higher than in Europe, where it's absolutely routine. The US system also samples students more often, with course grades consisting of many homeworks, multiple exams, etc---this gives an early signal to students doing poorly they need to get their shit together and also prevents students from falling behind. In Europe it's often just a single final exam, which may be a whole of 10-15 minutes if it's an oral exam, and you may be permitted to take the exam even if you haven't really been doing the work (often you need some perfunctory thing like 50% of the points from the homework to qualify). All these factors are also responsible for high European failure rates---it's definitely not just the Americans going easy.

[AnthonyMouse]

> All the students at Harvard are all selected from the tail end of the distribution and are very capable.

It seems like there is a pretty good way to handle this. Make the only letter grades A and F, i.e. it's pass/fail, but then additionally provide class rank percentile.

Even if everyone gets an A, in a class of 1000 students, someone is going to be at the 90th percentile and someone is going to be at the 10th and you can't inflate your way out of that.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

If I get a group of 30 kids together that are incredibly intelligent and highly motivated and have had “you must be the best and you must get A” beaten into their success and livelihood since before they could talk by their parents (and let’s be real that is a good chunk of Harvard grads) - do you really think that telling them that they are going to be stack ranked against each other is a healthy and productive thing that will produce the best outcome?

[AnthonyMouse]

There are only two things you can do here. One is that some Harvard students will have better marks than other Harvard students, and the other is that the school provides no other student evaluation than pass/fail, with the general expectation that approximately everyone will pass. You can't simultaneously give them different marks than each other and not.

[try-working]

No, I was in the highest ranked and most selective program in the country. Harvard is a diploma mill, it's that simple.

[delis-thumbs-7e]

I study CS at Helsinki. In most courses maybe 40% who enrolled pass. You can re-do the exam twice, but they are genuinely hard. Pretty much all courses have now moved to paper and pen -exams. I absolutely love it.

We do not have beer and wine at the canteen though :cry: But maybe that’s good because we would just drink ourselves to death.

[rendall]

Apparently Harvard is introducing a 20% cap (plus change) on As.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/03/plan-to-rein-...

No cap on A minuses though.

[Gibbon1]

Looked at my collage that I went to 40 years ago. Back then they graded on a curve.

Looking student grades for 2025.

A's 30% B's 45%

2 out of 254 got an A+

I look at grade inflation still being a problem at elite schools and shake my head.

[vasco]

Similar experience on differential calculus courses in an engineering university in portugal. Some people would try a couple of times and then some even switch university to an easier one so they could actually get a degree, or outright give up. I remember 210 guys and 10 girls started my course. Only about 25 guys and 5 girls finished the 5 year degree "on time" - most people don't give up but they will get delayed by a semester up to a year or two due to failing some classes on the first try.

[consp]

I'm glad one of my old profs in the Netherlands refused to bend and was fine with arguing his 40 percent first pass numbers (the target was 60 for some reason, hint: money). If everyone is exceptional, nobody is.

[kazen44]

also, in my experience high grades are rare in the netherlands at all education levels. I did both mbo and hbo levels, and on both levels getting a "A" (10/10 or 9/10) was a very uncommon thing.

[drnick1]

The point is that Harvard kids are all more or less exceptional. Harvard and other Ivy Leagues attract the best students in the world, not only mostly local talent like European schools. European universities are most similar to state school systems in many regards.

[sitzkrieg]

you misspelled wealthy

[PeterStuer]

First math exam at uni just 6 out of 129 students passed.

[MrDresden]

> "We weren’t entitled because we weren’t paying customers."

Having insight into the Dutch university education system I've noticed that the students here are incredibly entitled, and even cite "being paying customers" when they disagree with the difficulty of course work or the scoring they get and diagree with.

My experience of my Nordic university time, some 20 years ago mirrors yours. Not unlimited retakes, but very hard exams and no one had this "customer" attitude. Just nose to the grindstone, very long days in the library, every single day of the week.

[znpy]

Can confirm (italian here as well).

I took the cpu architecture and operating systems class exam about six or seven times. It was incredibly frustrating and demoralising at the time but looking back it made absolute sense and was completely worth it.

I’ve been living off the learning from that course for the last ten years.

And believe me when i say it’s definitely visible when you’re talking with somebody that took that course (or an equivalent one from a different university) and actually understood the topics.

[jmspring]

Having just shipped the kiddo into the real world, she's leaning liberal arts (her and her mom suck at math), but she has a benefit neither her mom or I had - EU deal citizenship. She's going to do a year here to figure things out - she's also been thinking about Europe. University in Europe, for undergrad, is different than the US.

I think the large class model and a barrier of exams to advance makes sense in Europe. I've not been in the University of California system for years, but the school I went to - some classes didn't always hold up a level of academic rigor.

[genxy]

No one has to suck at math. Any human can learn the majority of skills.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

No one has to suck at any one thing, but one person can't possibly be good at everything. Time is finite -- everything you choose to do is a choice to not do some other thing.

[ajkjk]

nevertheless most people can be a lot better at most things than they are, in the same amount of time, if the education and culture around education is of higher quality.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

I can be better at programming than I am, and I do it for a living. At certain point, I'd rather spend time kayaking or playing chess. I don't know why this is some kind of education problem -- it's opportunity cost.

[plemer]

Have you ever taught?

[genxy]

I have! My favorite students were the 55+ returning education students that really wanted to finally learn algebra and calculus.

[vnce]

Yes and I standby genxy’s comment. It was always a question of motivation, not ability.

[genxy]

And motivation was often impeded by either trauma or not finding a way to make it relevant to the student. Those are prereqs for learning anything. The common denominator for people that are good at something is that they liked it, so they did it more.

[vasco]

I know plenty of people that went through an engineering degree with me that do not like math, but they are competent at all the way up to what an electrical engineer needs to know, which is not research level math, but what most people would call advanced. I would never say I "like" math for example but I've always thought about it as something important to learn and get decent at to succeed in life.

I have way more interest in history and philosophy but the way I figured is I can learn all of that on my own because all you need is to read. Math is actually hard so I better get "trained by someone" at it.

[bawolff]

I always find these types of explanations doubtful, because you can always dismiss someone of subpar ability as not trying hard enough or you could define trying hard enough in a way that is not defacto practical.

[maxbond]

My experience teaching is limited (but I have taught some, to be clear) but I have found learned helplessness to be the biggest barrier. People have varying aptitudes for different tasks, and varying aptitude and a finite lifespan does imply some people have a lower ceiling than others in a given subject, but humans are powerful general learners. They don't generally reach their ceiling in most subjects. The limit for someone "bad at math" is almost certainly self-fulfilling prophesies they internalized.

Speaking for myself I have in the last five years or so been learning I have much more of a capacity for making art than I had thought. My art is nothing special, but I am improving every time I practice. But when I was younger I thought that I was just good at STEM-yy things and bad at other things. Relatively speaking I am better at STEM-yy than art-yy things, and I'm probably worse at art-yy things than most other people. But I have huge room for growth and I think I will eventually produce some beautiful watercolors.

As an aside, I've also found that almost everyone thinks they're bad at math? My friends with PhDs don't think they're good at math but they've forgotten more than I know about it. I think I'm bad at math but I can prove a thing or two. My spouse thinks they're bad at math, and they can't do the things I can do. But a few months ago they needed to do some simple algebra at work, and a coworker said, "dang, I wish I was good at math."

Somewhere out there Terence Tao is saying he's alright at math but he has nothing on that Euler fellow.

[skeletal88]

I also agree. Doing university sudies in stem fiels is just.. doing the work, grinding until you get it. I was not very good at maths but i managed to pass the courses that I had. Most of my fellow students didnt.

It is what differentiates stem fields fron liberal arts, in my biased view. You are either talented at maths, physics, chemistry or you just grind, study with thr books snd exercises, until you know enough to pass the exams.

Coming from gymnasium/high schoolit is very different. There the teachers tell you what to do, at uni you have to figure out yourself how you need to study to get the results.

US universities have been known in Europe for being a childs play, if you were any good at all in stem fields

[jmspring]

Yes.

[jmspring]

I think it is a matter of focus and aptitude. It also depends on instruction and approach. I took more math than I care to remember in college. Physics made calculus click. Upper division physics classes made some transform math confusing. David Huffman (yes, that one) taught a class in the CS department covering the same thing - from first principles - it made sense.

When the kiddo was dealing with common core stuff, I threw up my hands ... the approach made no sense, but sold text books.

[remarkEon]

This is not true. Math aptitude is not evenly distributed.

[badosu]

Good education, where one is imbued with motivation to learn and develop knowledge. That's not evenly distributed.

Anybody can learn math.

[remarkEon]

>Anybody can learn math.

I'm actually surprised that sentiments like this still exist. We work in technology, we've had enough contact with enough people to know that there is a difference between motivation to learn a hard technical field and the aptitude to actually do that field. "Anybody can learn basic addition" is mostly true. "Anybody can learn linear algebra" is not.

[badosu]

Well, I don't believe that's a fair conclusion based just on the fact we observe most people are "innumerate" and "hate maths".

Most people also never had the fortune of having someone describe why resolving quadratic equations is meaningful or how it developed.

An example of a somewhat dense but very approachable topic with good motivation is this book: https://web.osu.cz/~Zusmanovich/teach/books/visual-group-the...

You could say that not every adult, 2 deviations from the IQ median for the sake of rigor (we lose 2.5% of the population under), capable of reading might be able to follow it, and I would accept the argument. At the same time almost every adult was also indoctrinated in such a way they "hate maths", even though their only experience is dealing with numbers, operations and memorizing formulas that might eventually be useful.

I'm not sure this translates well, but the best allegory I could make to illustrate my point is "the fish does not think about the water".

[strken]

Great, I'll get on the phone to the local special school and let them know their non-verbal autistic students with IQs in the 50 to 60 range are to be enrolled in manifold theory next semester, and if they can't do it then badosu says it's all their fault because anybody can learn maths.

[badosu]

You are being disingenuous. Of course people with disabilities or severely deficient in cognition have innate difficulties that might hamper or completely preclude the development of mathematical skills.

The main point is that the educational environment most people have to deal with: public school in most countries, focused on rote memorization of formulas for passing tests, is the main factor on the incredibly inefficient and adversarial perception of most students and adults.

If you are able to understand something as "basic" as higher order effects in economics and societies, accrued from an understanding of rates of change from calculus, you are of course extremely privileged. On the other hand you are not some gifted unicorn with a special brain, you are just lucky (exceptions exist, but even they have to be somewhat lucky).

[Edit: grammar, ambiguity]

[quadrifoliate]

Does EU dual citizenship help with university if you are not currently a resident of the EU?

I always thought the low EU-local fees for European universities were based on EU residency, not citizenship.

[luckystarr]

In most of Germany neither is required (Baden Württemberg requires non-EU citizens to pay 1.5k€ per semester). Commonly though you have to pay from 200 to 300€ administrative fees.

The harder problem is to enter Germany, but as you have EU citizenship, that's not a problem for you.

[andai]

What is EU deal?

[sillysaurusx]

EU dual citizenship

Edit: if anyone’s confused, there was a typo in the original post. I corrected it.

[canyp]

It's the new deal.

[drnick1]

> I can’t help comparing this to the system I grew up in (Italy), which is vastly different and it seemingly produces very good graduates.

That's funny because Italians seem to seize every opportunity available to study abroad, particularly in the USA, and especially at the graduate level.

[jimbokun]

What about the demands on the time of professors from students who repeatedly try and fail the exams? Seems like that could get expensive for taxpayers.

Maybe it doesn’t happen much in practice?

[ziofill]

It did happen quite often to have to retake a few exams. Some students could never clear some particularly hard ones. But I have never heard any professor ever complain about it. Nobody wants a struggling student to finally succeed more than the professor who has to keep failing them.

[shimman]

Probably less expensive than paying for an imperial war machine if I had to guess.

[bawolff]

I can't imagine marking the exams was a significant part of the professors time. Especially because its probably the sort of thing they could get an assistant to do.

[prerok]

Indeed, evaluating an exam does not take that much time that it would be considered expensive.

That said, in my country (in EU), it's not indefinite tries. The fourth and later attempts (up to 8, I think) have oral exams in front of a panel of professors so that they can evaluate if there is actual lack of knowledge or if there is some sort of problem between the student and the professor. The student must by then pay for the attempt to pass the exam. It's not expensive, though, it's just another incentive to make the student really be sure to be prepared.

[fastasucan]

No, professors mark their own exams.

[prerok]

I've known this to differ between professors as well as exams. Lower levels and higher volume ones were almost always marked by assistants. The oral exam was always done by professors, though.

[SkiFire13]

This doesn't reflect my experience.

You still pay for university depending on your income (technically what's called ISEE), although this is usually capped at around ~3k€/year

There are still tests for enrolling in STEM degrees, most notably the TOLC-I test, especially for those degrees with limited numbers.

I have also never seen beer or wine taps in my university.

It is true however that some exams are generally hard and a lot of people fail them. Some are for good reasons, others because the professor is a dickhead. As always there is a lot of variability.

[stellalo]

Oral exams, what an experience

[trimethylpurine]

> "(Italy) seemingly produces very good graduates"

Last I looked, China and the US account for 18/20 major contributions to chemistry annually in the last 8+ years and the US was leading for a decade before 2018.

IUPAC works to keep exams international so you can't just say Americans are dumb. They are taking the same exams and the failing is permanent, not forgiven. So it's even harder to succeed in the US compared with Italy, based on your description.

[prerok]

I believe they meant on average.