That’s called lowering your standards. It punishes the third who would have made it under the old system. Better to have a test. Doesn’t waste a year of the lives of the two thirds who drop out.

Me learning doesn't hurt you.

But lowering the standards does. And that’s the only way you’re going from a pass rate of a third to 100%. You might be able to double pass rates to two thirds by putting many more resources into teaching but that costs money or comes out of research time/teacher satisfaction. You learning does hurt the top of the class if you’re a marginal student. Students on the verge of failure take up a lot more instructional and administrative time than the top third who were going to get through anyway.

Ha, my school straight up bell curved the grades for most classes at the TA level so that a certain number of kids were always going to get a D/F both of which are not passing grades and thus requiring the student to either retake it or switch majors. I myself had to retake 3 classes to get through it and I have had to explain it to one of my parents clients whose son is in the program and has now retaken his 4th class as a junior.

It was pretty brutal but also highly effective at getting me to really study the material to stay above the curve and pass.

If they were going to get through anyway, then where's the harm in then diverting some attention to bring others along too?

Also, from the context given here it's not as black and white as pass vs non-pass or "lowering standards" - it's about a rolling cut off on the amount of students they can take.

What's wrong with spending more time on helping struggling students?

That it inevitably means dropping the most challenging i.e. most valuable parts of the course? Not only are resources not infinite; if you make them accessible to worse students, that necessarily means removing the parts which are inaccessible.

To play devils advocate its not free and by default the cost accrues to the more successful students who may not have the financial resources to pay the additional funds and may opt not to attend despite being quite qualified. In some cases you may be trading more qualified graduates for less.

For some the truth may be that their lack of success may be external issues that can't be resolved by an additional investment of staff resources or just unsuitability for the program that can't be resolved other than by picking a more suitable major.

There is of course in the context of US education which wastes massive amounts of money so the actual answer is to stop wasting money on sports and invest that money in students but in all cases resources remain finite and some failure rate is inevitable.

In the context of the US, the lack of proper financial support coupled with the lack of a proper vocational education system means that a lot of people go to college when they will not succeed.

In the case of struggling students. I think it's hard to dismiss a person because they struggle in a single course. I failed calculus 2 and now I'm about to finish a PhD doing statistics and machine learning. Should I have been "let go" so to speak upon that failure?

Failures matter when they are cumulative not singular. This is why early warning systems in education fail so much. They rarely have enough information to provide a warning that is actually early.

Good point

It does though. If a teacher has to teach 50 students instead of 17, that is a huge difference in the amount of attention any given student will have for help. Teachers scale better than some things, but not infinitely.

The most important benefit of a university degree is the credential itself, indicating personal characteristics of the graduate. Lowering standards directly hurts the value of said credential. Learning is a side-effect of the process.

You are correct but isn't that strange and defective?

If you're not making into year 2 (or year 3), you can repeat ad vitam aeternam.

Now the school has a bad reputation, and students who spent four years of time and tuition have a diploma worth nothing?

Students are only occasionally actually kicked out. Much more common is that they struggle with the coursework, decide it isn't for them, and pick a different direction.

How many years of time do you think it is humane to provide to a student before suggesting somehow that they might consider an alternate use of their time?

Where I went, there was a hierarchy of lesser degrees to pick from.