It’s been forty years since I came out of college, harried and undistinguished. A number of Cs – yay, Calculus! – and maybe even by the skin of my teeth.
But, according to Yascha Mounk, maybe it’s different now, if you avoid STEM, and this is problematic if you ask him:
Now that the most common grade at most four-year colleges is an A, the stakes for each individual course are much higher. Since there is no way for students to distinguish themselves by doing exceptional work, a single negative outlier takes on outsized weight. To get a stellar GPA, a student doesn’t have to be exceptionally good at any one thing; they have to manage risk in every single course they take over the course of four years.4 As a result, today’s grading system has come to express a perverse set of institutional values: “We care much more about your ability to jump through any hoop we put in your path than about your ability to excel in your strongest subject or about your intellectual curiosity for challenging fields outside your main focus.”
I suspect very little effort would lead to the idea that education is a private sector endeavour, and how this has bled, if inadvertently, into even public universities as the source of these problems, as I’ve outlined elsewhere. It’ll be vital to return education to a place in society where it is responsible for teaching, with its own metrics, and not for selling education.
Incidentally, for the last twenty years I’ve detested grading on a curve, particularly those curves derived from those being tested. As an engineer, I want to see standards that don’t just float relative, relative to what is not apparent, but are anchored in reality. If everyone gets a 95% on a test and the bar for an A is 90%, then everyone gets an A. It should indicate mastery of the material, and if everyone getting an A raises suspicions, fine. Adjust the test material.
But grading on a curve is precisely Mounk’s solution. I personally don’t agree, but the recognition of a problem doesn’t mean the answer is obvious. Sometimes more subtlety is necessary.
