It would be weirder if it never happened.

> If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail, that sounds like a dysfunctional system. Maybe the course prerequisites were poorly designed. How do you determine with such certainty that it was the student's fault? Do you ever look at those stats and consider whether you're actually doing a good job at teaching?

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.

One approach to requiring prerequisites is to give a test on the prerequisite content on the first or second day of class, with the test scored quickly, and the results worth 20% of the final course grade. Students who do well on the test know the prerequisites, and those who bomb the test have time to drop the course and enroll in one of the prerequisite courses - or to stubbornly struggle with the higher-level material and earn a B grade. It takes some cooperation among the faculty to pull off, but can be effective.

One interesting point is that public universities are sometimes used as dumping grounds for people who could not get into private universities, and politicians also often want to expand classes for political reasons. Sometimes this can result in wholly unprepared people going to courses they will not pass, which does a disservice to the students, the professors and the university.

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.

> If your job is to educate and 3/4ths of the students fail, that sounds like a dysfunctional system

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.

> Yes, bad and ineffective teachers exist, but in my experience those teachers are the most generous with grades.

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.

Everything you say is true.

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.

There are different university cultures around the world. Because Americans don't do PhDs as often as people in other developed countries, US universities import a lot of faculty from other cultures. And when cultures meet, locals often also adopt ideas from the foreign cultures.

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.

> Unless admissions massively screwed up and people who can't do algebra are suddenly taking quantum physics

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.

> There's no evidence that the second set of instructors lowered the standard in any way

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_.

> Maybe the course prerequisites were poorly designed

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.

That's my wife's experience, teaching at a smaller state college. They offer a math course so remedial that it's not allowed to count as hours toward graduation (it does of course count toward full-time status). There's a placement test that determines if it's needed. A serious percentage of the class fails, and these are engineering hopefuls. They had one professor who had a much higher pass rate from this remedial course, but that professor's students invariably did objectively worse by several standard deviations than students who had passed the remedial class at any grade ("Ds get degrees") with any other professor.

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.