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Comment by noobiemcfoob | Hacker News Reader

There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed. Students today are faced with an ever ballooning bulk of knowledge with which they are supposed to find the boundaries and gain control of enough interconnected parts to become a useful contributor to society. There's a lot of noise in the system, but the system is growing larger and larger. There's more footwork that could be done.

Is it so hard to believe that more students are performing at a close enough level to their forbears to deserve the honor?

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I spent several years out of the school system after finishing high school, and while I had a lot of great offers from schools, I wanted to go into a trade.

Several years later I began work as a developer because I had always programmed, and had come to the conclusion that it was something I really loved and wanted to spend my life doing.

Fast-forward, I'm a mid-20's senior in Computer Science, and you're absolutely correct about the VAST amount of information that is required to learn to be successful.

So here is my take:

1) There is a lot of sink or swim, at least in the program I'm in. And if you learn to swim, then your GPA balloons because you learn how to handle this vast amount of information thrown on you -- useful or not, it is the professors discretion -- which I think is one of the points of school to begin with.

2) Those who sink, end up going to departments with maybe less expectations, where they end up succeeding after having to deal with the previously higher expectations.

It's interesting.

With that said -- I grew up with a lot of GPA chasers, who I wouldn't trust with anything I personally needed done. But what they've done throughout their lives is signal that they can get whatever task you give them done, not necessarily come up with what task should be done, or how to interconnect subjects outside of an exam, or what was previously derived for them.

Learning how to bridge the gap between subjects is also another point of school. It's interesting because those lines everyday seem to be blurred more and more, especially with advancement of computing, so it's kind of hard I think for a lot of students to make that jump, to bridge. And also the stigma of Liberal Arts -- that many STEM kids subscribe to -- has lessened the ability of many students to be life-long students.

I have a few friends in grad school, who really, really struggle with that particular advancement. For example, one is in a neuro-lab and while they did have experience in FMRIs, they had never really invested in either math or computing. Now they're completely lost doing FICA and the like with MATLAB, and absolutely hate the work. They've called me to ask me about everything from what is an eigenvalue, to how to split a 3D Matrix into 4 based upon a fix set of indices. It's a shame because they are really smart, and passionate about the subject.

Sorry that was a bit of a ramble.

>There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed.

As someone who has been in academia for several decades I can tell you, without a doubt, the opposite is true. Academic standards are vastly lower than they were just a couple of decades ago. Many incoming freshman lack even basic literacy skills. Much of the "core" curriculum is now comprised of remedial work that should have been mastered in high school (or middle school!). Basic reading comprehension, the ability to write papers and express complex thoughts coherently and the capability to think critically and engage in substantive debate are all severely lacking - virtually across the board. Society may be growing more complex, but the educational system in this country, on every level, is decaying rapidly.

While my statement will be rejected by many young people who view it as an attack on their intelligence, it is beyond dispute. I welcome anyone interested in disputing my assertions to look at the reading list and curriculum of any college class offered before 1990, and compare that to the reading list and curriculum of the same class today. I challenge you to read papers written by students from 30 years ago (before they had easy access to information from the internet, no less), and compare them to the papers written by students of the same year today. There is no comparison - none.

Yeah, it is. Grade inflation is a well known, documented phenomena. Unfortunately I have no time to link the papers on this subject, but if you search, they are there.

Have school grades ever deflated? Or undergone some sort of correction? No citation needed, anecdotes are fine.

One of the Cal Polys has an engineering program which curves the average grade to a C+ which automatically disqualifies the average from many engineering jobs.

That's similar to Georgia Tech. Undergrad Eng courses are curved to a C+. With the average GPA being a bit below a 3.0.

We used to joke at all the pre med students as to why they chose Georgia Tech as just about every other school had gpa inflation. And grad schools don't take Tech's lower grades into account.

Which was totally fair given how the HOPE scholarship works. Not that I am bitter.

Except now STEM courses are weighted as of 2017 in all GA university system schools:

Effective fall 2017, when calculating the HOPE and Zell Miller Scholarship postsecondary Grade Point Average (GPA), an additional weight of 0.5 will be added to grades of B, C, and D for approved degree level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses

I think it's good since it doesn't affect their Institute GPA but can help them keep the scholarship. I knew a lot of people who lost HOPE/Zell and the increased financial burden made keeping their grades up that much harder.

That's still stupid. The freshman writing courses at GT are harder than graduate CS at UGA or Valdosta.

Edit: Valdosta doesn't offer graduate CS. But imagine that it did.

A curve distorts grades: they tell you how the person performed relative to their peers not relative to their mastery of the material.

This really depends on how difficult the tests in the course are.

I don't think it is uncommon for tests to be written such that with a student a strong command of the material will not score 100%.

Well it tells you how well they did to the rest of the cohort grade inflation means you cant easily compare candidates across time.

At the high school I worked at some years ago we pushed the margins for letter grades up a little. For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100%. Whether or not that affected the overall GPA distribution I could not say.

> For example, where a C used to be 70-80% it became 72-82%, up to A which is 93-100%

That sounds something like an older system. I don't remember it entirely, but IIRC, very early in my school career, an A was 93-100% and an F was anything less than 70%.

My grades underwent a correction or two back in the day :)

Yes. At my school we had a real curve. If we all got perfect scores, that's a C for everyone. (More often we all got 15s and they became C's). Teachers who gave too many A's would be benched. We laughed at Ivy League 4.0s which just require a phone call from a parent.

This is standard practice at a lot of universities. At my university results were scaled based on the class performance in that exam and the performance of everyone in other exams. So if you're all 4.0 students, but the exam is horrendous and everyone only gets 20%, you'll probably end up with a good grade still.

I studied physics. It was possible to game the system to a certain extent. If you took the (subjectively) hardest modules like gauge theory, you could get a high grade even if you only answered half the paper. So if you were smart, but not top of your class, you'd be better off taking the hard subjects because every mark you got was effectively worth more. If you took the easy and popular modules, every mark would count and it might even be normalised down.

Of course this only works until everyone becomes wise to it. Then you're worse off where you started.

That's true, but unlikely. These are not particularly large or popular courses (15/70 people was common). It's not a tactic that would work for everyone, but it would potentially useful if you're a good student, but at a borderline grade.

The reason I liked it was because I hated having to cram for easy subjects because the class average would be so high. I would rather put the same amount of effort in to learn concepts (and have to remember less in the exam) than rote facts.

MIT?

My wife went there, and while most STEM grad schools understood that grades at MIT were not inflated, medical schools did not seem to care. One of her friends had to first get inflated grades doing a STEM masters degree before she could get into med school due to her uninflated MIT undergrad grades.

GT. I heard you all got to play with kittens freshman year. In response, GT professors replaced 20% more lectures with exams.

Almost no one at GT does true curves anymore. Just like stack ranking, trying to implement true curves with a non random distribution is a fool's errand and poor knowledge of statistics.

To hell with Georgia!

Is it possible that grade inflation has grown in pace to the expanding web of knowledge?

Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge.

So, it's possible there's an incidental correlation but there's no causation if the phenomena is real.

If you've seen how the average kid uses the internet, it's a rather laughable suggestion... there is little overlap between social media entertainment sites and the web of knowledge. The biggest contributor to higher grades are the book summary and answer-key sharing sites.

Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge.

If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance.

If the institutions have to stay relevant, they'll have to make sure the grades are correlated to successful people in some way even if it means handing out grade A to any student!

>> Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge.

> If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful business people then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance.

What you describe is grade inflation.

Grades aren't meant to be predictors of career success, they're meant to be indicators of past academic performance. My understanding is that once upon a time, a "C" grade meant your work was average or typical, which was perfectly respectable. An "A" or "B" mean your academic work was above the norm or outstanding. People could get C's and go on to have successful, non-academic careers (such as in business) with little comment.

With grade inflation, when "average" is an A or B, it's much harder to distinguish the truly academically talented based on their grades, since they're grouped into the same category as average performers.

> Grades aren't meant to be predictors of career success, they're meant to be indicators of past academic performance.

Isn't it both? If we had figured out the perfect academic program for all time, then it could be just a reflection of performance compared to all prior students in the program. Since we haven't, we update the programs and that might mean some aspects become easier and some harder. Or maybe overall easier, if career demands have generally gone down (which, imo, is a much more interesting discussion than whether an 'A' is really an 'A').

I don't see what being a successful business person would have to do with learning the material in a course, such as calculus or physics.

That's not what happens. If A meant success at X, like running a mile in X time meant you could outrun a bear, no matter the percentage of people, it would be great.

What's happened is parents pressured schools to get their kids A's to get into college, then colleges set the minimum bar at A+ instead of A, then at A+ and a random selection of thousands of students, all with A+'s. We are at the point where a single A- will drop you 50 slots in class rank. This is like judging the difference between Olympic sprinters instead of seeing the real spread among students.

That's why I think the universities should be holding high school exams. More generally, students/pupils should be judged by the institutions they're about to enter, rather than the ones they're leaving.

Grading guidelines differ. Where I went, C was considered a good grade - more or less defined as the average among the students who didn't fail. Even an E means you got at least 40% of the points on the test.

This is so ignorant to the advancements in pedagogy over the past several decades as to be insulting. Part of, if maybe not the biggest or only factor, the increase in grades is we are just hugely better at teaching than we were 30 or 40 years ago. Teaching for mastery, the idea of reversing the role of homework vs tests (in terms of relative difficulty and exposure to new information) to better facilitate self learning, formalized programs to act as tutoring and support systems, all of these are increasing student performance by design.

Not only that but as far as higher education goes how are you even trying to compare to "what used to be B or C knowledge"? What in the 70s was graduate level transistor research is basic undergrad course studies, for example. Introduction to programming would have been on punch cards in the 80s, today's students are using python. Are you surprised that they do better given the advances in tooling?

The "kids these days" argument is so, so tired and honestly every time I see it Im not surprised so many of the old guard (rich off of just being in the industry during the dot com boom) think they're being targeted for "age discrimination".

I used that argument back in 4th grade to my parents: “Math is harder for me since there have been more advancements since you were kids”.

I can only speak for electrical engineering, but the basics have not changed in 100 years. Crack open a text book from 100 years ago and you’ll find the same control theory, circuit analysis, electromagnetics, etc. The difference may be vacuum tubes vs. transistors, but the analysis is them same. Many things are a lot easier to do now with computers, and I’ll wager a student of 100 years ago had better analytical skills.

It’s not just grade inflation either, but degree inflation. The PhD is the new MS, etc down the line.

That's patently false, and your example is a straw man. Sure your grade school arithmetic hasn't increased much, but I'd assure you university maths have.

As far as EE goes, I mean sure macro-electronic theory is pretty much the same, but micro-electronics didn't even exist 100 years ago. This is now a standard required class. Digital signal processing again, didn't even exist 100 years ago, now we teach it to sophomores. The foundations that were the same have persisted and the field has done nothing but expand; this trend is replicated across most disciplines.

The data doesn't support your assessment of declining analytical skills. The ability for abstract thought has been monotonically increasing for the past 100 years.[0] I understand the appeal, oh kids these days aren't disrupting anything, my job is safe. The issue is, there's not much data to support the platitude. Globalization means you're competing with billions more people, education achievement has to increase to match; or be left behind.

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_...

Interestingly enough, IQs are now decreasing in the western world and have been since around the mid 90s. There were numerous studies showing this quite clearly in 2013 (when that talk was given) but now it seems every study is corroborating it. Perhaps we can assume he simply felt it required more research as an explanation for why he would give such an ostensibly misleading talk.

Linking to another comment chain here [1] on this topic as this is something multiple people have also brought up as an argument against grade inflation. Unfortunately, it makes the inflation look even more absurd.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17447692

I think maths is relatively unique in that it is a really old subject that mostly doesn't depend on hardware. Sure computers have moved maths forward, but there's a lot you can do without.

High school maths is pretty much Antiquity level, though much more formal. First couple of uni years are mostly 17-18th centuries maths. Last 2 undergraduate years is 19th and early 20th centuries.

A few areas have changed though, particularly statistics I think, also computer science if you consider it part of mathematics, but have a look at a textbook from a 100 year ago, and you'll feel right at home except for the style.

Thank you for saving me from needing to write the exact same thing!

I think you're assuming those advances in theory are universally available in practice.

They are not. My experience as a public school student was far worse than when my parents went to school - double or worse class sizes, no teaching assistants, and occasionally the same textbooks my parents used. "Experienced" teachers were the worst - it often seemed like the only thing they changed over the years was to stop corporal punishment.

My parents required unreasonable numbers of As, so I regularly got undeserved grades just by acting like I'd make a big deal about it... teachers were too overwhelmed to pay attention even if they cared. Some of my peers had helicopter parents that called in arguing their kid deserved an A simply for studying all night, even though that "sudying" was often was just online RPGs.

The trend followed in college for non-major classes. Professors simply didn't care unless a student would be advancing to another class in their department - then they cared enough to fail students, but the grade curve was still logistic. Not the expected "C = passing knowledge".

Even then, I still never saw pedagogical advances outside of brand new assistant professors in liberal arts classes.

I mean YMMV applies, instruction quality is certainly going to be dependent on the institution; but that's certainly the opposite of my experience at a public (though well ranked) public university.

Grade inflation is also related to money pressure; more students getting diplomas means more money, so there is a perverse incentive to lower the levels.

Is it possible (wink wink) that our ability to distribute and search information has far surpassed the pace of the expanding web of knowledge?

>There is much weight to the argument that the requirements to be a successful student have gone down, I'm inclined to believe that the requirements have skyrocketed.

I'm not so sure you are talking about the same thing as grade inflation. For a particular course, in most fields, the content has not changed in 20-30 years.

Most of my undergrad engineering classes have not changed in 20-30 years (with the exception of the software ones). I'm pretty sure if I look at the curriculum of, say, a circuits/EM/communications course today it will be the same as it was 2 decades ago. Math courses definitely have not changed much.

I agree with you about the ballooning bulk of knowledge to be successful, but not to get a better grade for a given course.

I don't think the point is how their performance compares to their forebears so much as how do they compare to their peers. If you compare today's students to those of 50 or 100 years ago of course they have more information and advanced skills to master. It's apples and oranges. These honors really only have meaning when comparing within the same cohort.

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