Comment by RoastBeats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RoastBeats | Hacker News Reader

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Have to agree with Neutronicus here. The prevailing example would be the "But I'll never get into med school/law school if you don't raise my B+ to an A-" argument which I hear at least three times a semester.

This gives us two solutions. First, is to convince naive kids that it's OK to be something other than a lawyer or doctor. Seriously, any students reading this comment, pay attention: There are plenty of other wonderful (and lucrative) professions in the world. If you genuinely care about medicine or law, you should certainly pursue those degrees. But if you're only concerned with career earnings and/or prestige, well, I have plenty of out-of-work lawyer friends.

Second, the academic industry (and it is an industry) needs to place less emphasis on grading and more on education.

I can hear the objections now: "Wait... you mean schools don't emphasize education?" Sigh... we'll save that for another discussion.

The problem is that assessment is a very valuable function of universities. Industry relies on them as a filter. I don't actually believe that industry values the training universities provide as much as it values the assessment it doesn't have to do because of universities.

The universities are thus in sort of a bind. They do an enormous amount of assessment, but the people who benefit the most from accurate assessment, namely industry, don't bear the costs of it. Their actual customers, the students who are ostensibly paying for an education, in essence demand an inaccurately positive assessment instead, because it achieves what an education achieves (get far enough in the door at a corporation that it would be a pain to fire you) with less labor input from the students.

The universities can't just stop focusing on assessment - like I said, I think it's actually more valuable than education. They need to be replaced by some industry-funded institution whose sole incentive is to provide accurate assessment.

Industry doesn't rely on GPA as a filter. They rely on interviews, past projects and work experience. Anything above a 3.0 (which is pretty low) and no need to worry.

The problem is with law school, medical school, and so forth. That is where GPA is seen as the ultimate-judge-of-worth rather than a mildly-interesting-but-completely-insignificant-number like it should be.

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