Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

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>The grade is assigned by the lecturer of a course, as a confirmation that the student knows a thing or two about certain fixed topics.

That's an idea of what grades are and what they're for. It's not the idea. I would call this an ideal, often fallen short of, and often misguided.

In practice, grades are used in all sorts of ways for all sort of reasons. Many times, they are used for no good reason.

The idea that tests are impartial accreditation is abstract. It rarely plays in reality. There's a place for GMEDs, bar exams, TOEFLS and whatnot... but it's limited.

>It is extremely important to intellectual freedom that the time and place where some knowledge or skills were attained is considered immaterial.

> The idea of someone not getting accreditation in a course because they already knew the material beforehand and so didn't learn anything is completely wrongheaded and abhorrent

It's abhorrent only within the accreditation framework of ideals. This just isn't reality. That objectivity ideal for education is always betrayed because it doesn't work.

People don't value exam results, in their own right, because they're not that valuable in their own right. A course's job irl is to educate, not accredit.

> That's an idea of what grades are and what they're for. It's not the idea.

Can't see how there can be any other idea for grades as long as they're being used as a measuring stick for completing a class, and if they aren't something else will just using another name. You need to be able to know enough about a topic to pass a class, and there needs to be a way to measure that, sure the measuring can be often flawed but unless the class itself if a "learning to learn" class you can't have the goal to be maximize how much you learned about a topic, instead of if you know the topic presented.

> People don't value exam results, in their own right, because they're not that valuable in their own right. A course's job irl is to educate, not accredit.

I agree that the commoditization of higher education is horrible and leading to a decline in something that should be about curiosity and not as a -now, often needlessly mandatory- career stepping stone, but the "free" curiosity part of it should be open classes and such, even in this kind of more relaxed regime you still have limited resources from labs and such that need to thin out their option for candidates and accreditation will come into play sooner or later for those that wish to follow into serious research, particularly in areas where you actually need access to tools that realistically only research labs have. This isn't a huge problem in maths or computer ""science"" but most hard science fields you just can't do advanced research without specialized stuff.

If tests are to qualify class completion, why do people care about good grades, and why aren't they graded to pass/fail.

Tests have different reasons, good and bad. Feedback for teachers, students and parents. Discipline. To force/encourage students to study. To report to school boards.

Tests are often a trap because people grab onto objective measures, no matter how flawed. It's like a measurable goal or performance criteria in business. People quickly forget that the KPI is not what the business is producing.

>A course's job irl is to educate, not accredit

But a course is part of a larger system which is built on accreditation. Universities no longer have a monopoly on information/education so accreditation is really the main value they hold. Erode that and there’s not much vocational reason to go to college (we could argue about the role of higher education, but it’s been more vocationally focused than civically focused going back to the Morrill act in the mid 1800s)

>Universities no longer have a monopoly on information/education so accreditation is really the main value they hold. Erode that and there’s not much vocational reason to go to college.

Again, I think this is idealistic thinking... and doesn't have much to do with universities irl.

Whether or not an MIT degree is an accreditation, it is not an objective, grades based accreditation. It never was. There has never been a world where your bar exam results matter, and no one cares about where you went to law school.

An MIT degree does not mean "passed the MIT exams."

Universities never really had monopoly over knowledge. Every university teaches the same accounting courses. They're also online. There is even a well respected 3rd party accreditation. People still care about where they, their employees or their accountants were educated.

We can debate why this is the case. We can't ignore that it is the case. The university matters, almost always, to the people involved... Accreditation matters sometimes, but usually only as a minimum bar. Neither education nor accreditation guarantee ability.

I think you may be extrapolating my point beyond its intent.

To a certain extent, bar exam results do matter. If you disagree, try practicing law without passing the bar. What I’m not saying is that degrees of passing matter. But the results absolutely do. (Same goes for medicine, engineering and other professions). The way the system currently measures it is via grades. Going to pass/fail will relieve stress and help some, but it will also create an incentive to do the bare minimum for others.

I personally think this move is, in part, also a reaction to the rampant cheating that occurs when people mistake the measure (exams) for the target (ensuring a base level of knowledge). I think schools are struggling with how to manage cheating, especially as online courses expand. The article quotes a student whose grades faltered because they couldn’t manage juggling the rest of adult responsibilities. The “un-grading” idea seems like it’s just trying to remove a barrier and extending adolescence rather than creating resilient adults. And I’m not sure that’s a college’s job.

We can probably agree that accreditation doesn’t “guarantee” competence. But neither does any other license or certification. It’s an imperfect measure, but it’s largely the measure that society has settled upon (for now). Just because a manufactured part comes from an ISO 9001 certified factory doesn’t mean it won’t fail. But it does increase confidence and lower the probability of failure. It’s the same for hiring. HR is more concerned with minimizing false positives than false negatives (ie they care less about missing the best candidates than ensuring bad candidates don’t get through) and accreditation helps them in that regard.

And, of course, was never an absolute monopoly on education but there was enough friction in the system to make it a practical monopoly. What’s changed is that a lot of that friction is gone, eroding that monopoly. It’s pretty easy to learn all the material you’d get from an MIT degree (they even tell you what you need to know through ABET standards and offer MOOCs) and that was my point. That point won’t matter as much when you’re competing for a job with someone who actually has that MIT degree. Until that changes, accreditation matters.

The point I was reacting to was "tests = accredited proof of knowledge" and that any other use of testing is corrupt.

MIT's accreditation is based on MIT's reputation, not tests. They can do tests however they want.

I think there’s a couple misunderstandings here.

The article is about course grades, not tests.

Also, accreditation is not based on reputation. MIT (and most other reputable colleges) are accredited by outside organizations, not via something fickle and subjective like reputation. E.g., an MIT engineering degree is accredited because it is vetted by ABET, not because of MITs reputation. Whether or not they meet ABET requirements lends itself to their reputation, not the other way around. (You can see this when colleges lose accreditation and their reputation suffers)

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