The worst part of the modern college experience I think is the fact in many majors, you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the courseload. This obviously sets up a world where more advantaged students who can afford free time to such things continue to hold the best outcomes, despite recent DEI pushes from admin to avoid these things. I’ve heard a professor actually state with pride how the lab classes in their department have not changed in over 40 years, so that grades from 40 years ago could be compared to todays grades, somehow believing that is more useful to employers than getting qualified candidates. Then on the other hand students have to take so many concurrent credit hours in different classes that they will admit to triaging their study time and giving up on certain classes, where they might have succeeded if allowed more time for focus perhaps in one of those month-mester formats, where you can get a semester’s course done in a month or so.
You might not realize this yet, but occasionally overloading students with coursework is actually a positive. I attended an academically rigorous college and as an average student there was just no way I could finish everything on time in a high quality way. This taught me effective time management, ruthless prioritization, and the pointlessness of perfectionism. Those lessons were more valuable than the content of any particular course.
If that’s the case then we shouldn’t be funding them as such. Virtually all the support for public funding of post-secondary education is helping people get good jobs and get upward mobility. This is obvious from listening to how politicians speak about educational funding.
I don’t really think anything in college is particularly helpful for entry level white collar work, it’s just what the employers are asking for.
Of course, long term many of those entry level white-collar jobs are likely to be eliminated altogether by automation and offshoring.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-degree-job-requirement/
That being said, it is going to take more than one year of labor crunch for this to be reflected in the choices of students to go to school for a job years later. And I've heard of employers who have tightened the screws on older employees without credentials.
Mobbed how? I have had students protest their grades - there's a process for that. If the grade is somehow a mistake, or unfair, it gets corrected. If not, and if the grading is demonstrably fair, what are they going to do?
FWIW, although I am a hard grader, the student ratings indicate that they appreciate it.
The best defence against this I suspect is to have a clearly communicated, unambiguous grading scheme, but this can be difficult to do in an even handed way.
I had one undergrad prof whose policy was this: All incorrect answers get 0, no exceptions. Correct answers lose points for all steps not shown the way he had demonstrated.
There wasn't a lot to argue about, but none of us felt his approach was entirely fair.
Still, for what it's worth, have a look: https://www.meinprof.ch/uni/prof/1431
Colleges scoff at the idea of becoming "job training schools," but that is exactly what they need to be. The students are, overwhelming, there to "get a good job after college." Only a fraction of them will continue on to spend their entire career in academia.
If you want to argue that elite schools in particular often over-rotate on the theory and don't do enough to get students hand-on I won't really disagree with you. But there is a distinction from trade schools.
Almost no CS major will get a job that will require them to write their own programming language and compiler from scratch. But having done that, I am way better off than if I spent that semester taking a bootcamp on the latest implementation details of the newest language or framework at the time, which is now obsolete.
The fact is modern companies don't want you to have the ability to acquire a new skill, they want you to have that skill on day one. This is even more true outside the programming realm. It's short sighted and counterproductive long term but when the next quarter's earnings are what matters, long term is but a an abstract concept.
I was expected to learn and become proficient in things like CSS and Javascript and HTML as well despite never taking a class on any of them.
My degree taught me how computing works, from the theory to the logic gates to the math needed to interact with basics in the field.
You know, companies used to spend money "training" their employees to do the things they needed to do. When computers first came around companies had to turn a mountain of secretaries into the very first programmers and computer administrators, and those mostly women bootstrapped the entire information economy. But that investment into human resources could better be spent on the CEOs private plane so they've spent the past 40 years bitching that "waaah waaah higher education doesn't make me cheap little worker bees waaah" as if you are entitled to free labor just because you "run" a business
Straight out of college, the hard truth is that you know virtually nothing, even if it sounds harsh ( and no you’re not a senior engineer after 3 years ). If I find someone who’s really good at c++ out of college, has started learning rust, wants to learn, and has good foundations, I’ll happily hire them.
The only exceptions I can think of are where you're hiring someone specifically to work on language tooling - e.g., to work on the core C++ library team at Google, you probably need some experience with specifically C++ or C and compilers thereof. Those would be very specialized senior roles, though.
For a counterexample, I hired this way for a long time.
Like you said, it works for university students because they don't have experience under their belt yet.
It becomes less effective as you get into more complicated languages/frameworks and you have less time to ramp people up.
In the worst case, we'd invest a lot of time mentoring people in a new language or framework and 6 months later they'd decide they preferred their old language/framework. They'd either leave the company to find a job that fit their preferences, or they'd become disgruntled and spend their days complaining about our language choice or trying to persuade us to rewrite in their preferences.
In other cases, people would try to write everything in the style of their previous language, even if it doesn't match the new language or framework.
It happened enough times that I now prefer candidates who already have proven experience in the language we're using. I won't exclude candidates who don't have experience in it yet, but it's rare that I'll pick a decades-long Python programmer for a Rust position, no matter how much of a Python wizard they are, as long as we have good Rust candidates in the pipeline.
Hiring for theoretical knowledge, hiring for abstract-reasoning skills, and then training ... sounds good in marketing collateral, but only the Googles of the world can afford to do it, and even Google may be changing their tune. (Of course, R1 faculty have never looked for an industry job in their lives.)
If you don't believe me, look at some job listings.
And it hasn't been my experience at all. But code camps are always an option.
This is the kind of thing that sounds great within the purely abstract world of an academic bubble, but falls apart at first contact with reality.
It's important to learn the foundations, but that shouldn't be treated as mutually exclusive with learning practical skills.
The skills you actually need are manuscript writing. Being able to read a dozen scientific articles a day and gleam what they are saying accurately. Being able to convert that into presentations for other people. Using existing knowledge to develop a research proposal that’s actually topical or relevant to the field today.
People don’t get that experience, at most a training wheels on sort of manuscript project in undergrad where you cite 5 things and only your TA is reading it, not peer review. As such for most people, the first few years of PhD are basically spent spinning your wheels in the mud until you gather enough of these untaught soft skills to actually produce work.
So if you consider the whole undergrad plus these first few years lost in the wilderness in gradschool, its like 7 of your best years gone down the drain because the training system for decades has been “figure it out.” Even as bad as today is, its still a little bit better than a few decades ago when people were spending even longer faffing about in PhD programs on average.
I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had.
Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn’t have the luxury of studying as much as others did.
All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
Not sure about that. Don't know any faang companies that care about your grade.
Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to know whether you have a degree and your work experience. Grades certainly matter when first starting out however.
Pretty much anything above a 3.0 for a STEM degree is just a measure of how much you cared, or how much free time you had anyway.
Not really, even half a year of internship in a average software shop/your own software project/working experience in any software position is enough to win over a great student with 0 experience to score you a chance of interview. And the interview experience is the same for everyone.
The school experience frankly doesn't account for anything except whether the candidate has the fortitute. You learn on the job anyway. It's like how they use leetcode where they just want to see how hard you want the job.
Source: I am in faang.
The high tier companies told everyone before they stood on line that unless you have a minimum of 3.0, you were better off going somewhere else.
IIRC he was above average at Caltech, but GPA was abysmally low compared to applicants from Stanford, Harvard, Pomona, and other egregiously inflating schools.
From a distance, I think highly of Harvey Mudd, but I don't know their grading policies. I doubt they grade harder than Caltech, since HMC's branding is all about "we want to help you succeed" and Caltech is more of "we're going to beat you up [intellectually]."
However the graduation rate tells perhaps a (slightly) more nuanced story about rigor. HMC, despite beimg more expensive to attend than Caltech, had a lower 2023 graduation rate of 91.5% vs Caltech at 93.7%
it's not that different, and probably you can construct error bars that enclose both of these bounds within plausible parameters, but it suggests that there is a somewhat higher premium for failure of those actually accepted at HMC than even the mighty Caltech, and a greater willingness to uphold standards at the expense of angering (relatively) wealthy parents.
You're in the very small minority. Virtually every professor I had in college employed scale adjustments to grades based on class averages.
Of course, sometimes 50% of a class fails because the teaching is shoddy, or the grading is unfair, or the prerequisites weren't properly set or enforced. It isn't always a failure on the part of the students. Failing grades are inherently a failure of the system to prepare and guide a student through material. A common symptom of that systemic failure? Lazy, unmotivated students.
This was not my experience in a large public US research university for undergrad and masters in math and CS. So many of my STEM classes had exams that were not calibrated at all to any "bar" of minimum expectations. Often the median grade for exams (out of 100) was 30-60. So the prof fit it to a normal distribution and then put arbitrary cutoffs for what counted as an A, B, C, D, and F.
Social science and humanities was often very different grading. I had a humanities prof tell me exactly what you said when I asked about the curve: there is no curve, I do not compare you to other students, I compare you to my own standards.
The other was a more open ended set of problems. That was graded on a curve, and was a lot of fun.
But yeah, every other CS class I took was on a curve.
The only one of my humanities classes that had a curve was the "Introduction to logic" (which was offered by the philosophy department). It was a rather gentle curve, but the tests were also open-book.
Undergrads on the other hand, a bad grade means screened out of interviews.
I've definitely encountered some professors are just terrible educators that take pride in failing as many students as possible... Not that I'd claim this is the case for you, but I always wonder when people bring up these massive rates of failure.
I think "only a poor teacher blames their students" is a pretty tempting companion to "only a poor craftsman blames their tools," but, at least from my motivated thinking as a teacher, I don't find it completely true.
The structuring of universities as businesses means that there's a strong, if seldom explicitly acknowledged, tendency to view a degree as something that is purchased, rather than earned. This means that there is a lot of pressure from administration to make sure that a large proportion of an increasingly large population of students—students whom the faculty had no voice in choosing—eventually get their way to a degree. The students who are interested in their education still work sincerely towards that goal, but the ones who view a degree as a credential they are purchasing can fall, intentionally or unintentionally, into the trap of relying on this institutional pressure to shepherd them through as long as they play the system correctly. And then, as a teacher, your choice is to connive at this "go along to get along" mentality, or to be stuck in a situation where there is no reasonable way to get students who came to you unprepared—for societal and educational reasons—to a point where one can honestly say that they have mastered this course's material and are ready for the next.
I attended my public school just as CS was becoming a hot subject. My entering class had 300 CS students; by the time I graduated there were 900 incoming students into CS and many more clamoring to get in, and the program was struggling with such a fast expansion; but telling voters that we are expanding CS education sells well. On top of that the university had also been decreasing the amount of remedial core classes for students struggling as well.
University must not be easy for slackers. Slackers must fail in class, or they will not learn the real-world lesson that underlies it all.
As an undergrad, I was a keen student. I listened, learned, and put hours into my homework to really make sure I learned it. I took three courses where around 75% of the class failed or dropped out. I learned an incredible amount of material in those classes, and I aced each of them. I observed my classmates treating the classes like any other, phoning in the homework and getting slaughtered in exams. Each instructor had a prepared speech for day 1 setting expectations for the difficulty of the course.
You get out what you put in. Yes, bad and ineffective teachers exist, but in my experience those teachers are the most generous with grades. The tough ones, willing to fail anybody who doesn't know the material, have the highest standards for themselves as well as the students.
If you really want to know how effective a teacher is, you can't just look at the grades in their class. You also need to track their students to the classes which depend on that material.
That tracks with both my personal experience as an undergrad at a major state university, and my wife's experience with her colleagues teaching at a smaller state college.
As an administrator for an Extension school (at a major university), I inherited a set of Accounting instructors who failed most of their students in intro courses, and took pride in doing so! In their view, they bore no responsibility for their students' success, or lack thereof. The students needed to work harder.
I replaced all of them with instructors (men and women) who had much better professional credentials ... whose students earned mostly A's and B's. There's no evidence that the second set of instructors lowered the standard in any way - their students continued to do well in the program. The new instructors just taught better, and cared more.
Unless admissions massively screwed up and people who can't do algebra are suddenly taking quantum physics, it's almost always the instructor's fault. But being an instructor (in US HCOL areas) is such a poorly paid and ill-respected profession, it often doesn't attract the best and brightest.
When I was a student, the old "the university is not a school" culture was still strong in my university. The idea was that universities were places of learning, not teaching. Formal teaching was a supporting activity rather than a core part of education. The university made a honest effort to support you to the extent its resources allowed, but the responsibility to learn was 100% yours. If you failed a mandatory exam because the university could not offer the corresponding class that year, it was your fault.
While we are bringing up this point, it doesn't have to be quantum mechanics. The invention of algebra based physics classes (which is Mechanics and EM) without calculus is the same thing. Instructors mostly are teaching trust me these are the formulas to use them and this how to use them.
That's an extraordinary rise in grades. It seems like part of the conscientious discharge of your job would be to compile the evidence that these instructors did _not_.
The prerequisite courses are grade inflated so the incoming students lack fundamentals. The only way you can then run the course is to either grade inflate as well and pass students who don't have a clue about the topic or you fail like 3/4 of the class.
If the prerequisite courses weren't grade inflated and the incoming students actually knew what their grades says they should know then it wouldn't be a problem.
Part of the issue with poor grades in this remedial class is a failure by students to take it seriously. They're incredulous that they need to take it; after all, they got all As and Bs in high school, and completed through calculus! One would think that bombing the placement exam and failing the first exam in the remedial class would be a wake-up call, but apparently not.
So, yes, actual grade inflation must be a problem, at least some of the time.
The difference between an A and an A- is not one of mastery but of minor errors and lapses in focus.
Teachers don’t have the ability to meaningfully measure top performance. Imo grading should have a lower ceiling for an A but no curve.
So much anxiety would be lost if everyone just chilled out and said, look, if you generally understand all the material, you get the top mark.
Intro to Stats: it's vastly vastly more likely that the 0-5% failure professor is not doing their job and is just passing every student regardless of the quality of their work.
As a potential employer, I would prefer to know where the student landed relative to their peers rather than an absolute score.
Maybe in addition to the absolute score we could know the students percentile score in the class.
It's not impressive to get an A at Harvard, all that says is they aren't in the bottom 21% of the class. Being in the top 10% of the class is impressive.
New topics are added, new teachers, new academic plans defining which courses are required and when. New initiatives, programs, and policies are created all the time that change how people move through the education system. Even someone teaching the same course for 30 years is going to experience their own ups and downs that they may, inadvertently, project onto their students in different ways at different times.
I'm not saying you should hand out undeserved grades. I agree with your perspective that grades have to mean something and high grades need to be earned. My personal take is that as a society we just need to get comfortable with C's, because that's where the average should be. (Sure, who wants to hire a Writer who's only average at writing? But by letting them know they are only average in writing you can now give them opportunities to _measurably_ improve, or highlight that they are above average in math and might be more successful there.)
But if 3/4 of the class failed then _something went wrong_, and I would hope that our educators are able to reflect on that a little more then, "because they deserved to."
The only thing those students got out of that class was an F. And the one thing the school administration has got right is that giving out F's is a failure of the institution. The problem is that right now their incentives are to reduce the number of F's rather than improve the teaching and learning. If those students had learned something or got your wake up-call, they would have done better.
I'm not blaming you. There's a whole institution behind you, and several more over a student's education, with all sorts of problems and not enough of them having anything to do with actually educating people.
But solutions have to start somewhere, so I would still look to you to talk to your fellow faculty and leadership; tell them that 3/4 of your class couldn't even hit average marks compared to every other time you've taught the course, and that we have got to do better to prepare incoming students for the material they are about to learn.
Education isn't about regurgitating the same things over and over and keeping up the same bell curve until you retire. It's about teaching and learning and creating new opportunities for people to grow. That won't always work for everyone. You'll have to give out a an F here and there. But just like high grades should mean something, low grades should too. A student putting in low effort but grokking the material should be getting a C. An F is an indicator that something is wrong and the student isn't where they need to be.
The answer is obvious to any student but eludes employed academics - the schooling system from the 1950's does not solve 2020's problems. Educational orgs were founded by motivated people with specific vision that fit their time. Those people are long gone and now they are grand beiracraucies that have tried and failed to systemize knowledge and responsibilities. They are endlessly trying to recapture magic because the orgs evolve into many non cohesive groups.
Grand systems with many abstractions work when an org is for profit and owns enough fundamental intellectual property and market share that their relevance is by market force. If they didn't have that then a startup could replace them tomorrow.
Education on the other hand is propped up by welfare. It is effecticely the law that only accredited institutions can be "education". Yet we know for a fact that a 10 minute YouTube video has significantly better effects on learning than a semester of classes.
The market of education needs to be disrupted in order for students to succeed.
If an instructor plays a video in class, it doesn't work well. "Why are we here again?".
If the video is assigned, then its ignored because students have to pay on the private loans that pay you. They have to optimize their life because late stage capitalism and government obesity is squeezing the life out of the younger generation. It's human nature but it's often ignored in favor of easy explanations. If you disagree then simply listen to the conversations students have when they think nobody is listening.
The solution, which can be gained by asking any successfully educator (rarely professors), is this - you are a content creator. If you don't know how to play that role, then you can't educate well.
The whole purpose of an instructor is to take difficult concepts and make them easier for the human ape brain to understand. We do this by leveraging visual recognition, memory, and social behaviors.
For example an instructor that presents good information with a poor performance will result in poor communication of that information. This is so common I could walk into a classroom and example it right now.
The problem can only be solved by competition with the existing orgs. There are far better methods, and you can find them if you search.
Citation needed. As somebody who just wasn’t compatible with the school and academic system, eventually dropping out because it took a mental toll on me, doing engineering research in the industry nowadays and considered to be a high performer at work, I’m lucky my employer didn’t care about my grades but looked at my private projects instead.
Everything about going to college is to a stamp of approval that you are “better” than others. Better than people from other schools and better than people within your class.
The entire academic system is also “stack ranked”. Promotions depend on getting published in journals, winning awards, and getting grants that others cannot get.
Giving out unjustifiably high grades devalues them. Why should a top student apply themselves, if everyone is going to get an 'A'? A student putting in low effort needs to get a wake-up call by failing exams or assignments.
Grades tell the school how a student is doing, and may serve as a basis for admission to particular courses or projects. Grades tell the student how they are doing, and where they need to invest more effort. Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.
Ok, stepping back: one possible reason for undeserved high grades can be found in the school administration. Students who fail too many courses must leave the school, and that costs the school money. Administrators tend to think of this year's finances, and don't care a whole lot about long-term reputation. Professors and instructors have to push back, have to insist on maintaining a level of quality. No one wants to teach for a diploma mill.