Grade inflation is definitely happening too - grades have improved with basically no correlate to determinants of student or school performance, and don't seem to track any real improvement in learning www.nber.org/papers/w28710 - ThreadSky

maiamindel.bsky.social • 5 days ago

Grade inflation is definitely happening too - grades have improved with basically no correlate to determinants of student or school performance, and don't seem to track any real improvement in learning

https://www.nber.org/papers/w28710

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maiamindel.bsky.social•5 days ago

It's usually turned into a coddling of the woke mind story but it's clearly structural - on the supply side, schools are more sensitive to metrics like enrollment and satisfaction, and professors are very precariously employed, so they have to pander a lot more

https://newrepublic.com/article/178657/grade-inflation-college-not-wokeism

maiamindel.bsky.social•5 days ago

And on the demand side, there's probably a "sensitivity" type issue, but it's mostly also that grades are very important and both parents and students know they have market power - if kids don't want to take hard courses, they'll take an easy one, and this matters to schools!

winterreisende.bsky.social•5 days ago

Parents can easily email professors and demand a higher grade with veiled threats

tobellz.bsky.social•5 days ago

But this is not new. And it's not an "AI" story.

Boiling down education to a number and then comparatively evaluating all students using that number has led students to game the system that assigns the number rather than work to get a better education.

pompoustakes.bsky.social•5 days ago

US young ppl seem obsessed with the idea college admission primarily conveys to them 'prestige' & that is a function of the name of the institution. Apart from a few (eg specific engineering) the course seems unimportant.
Firmly attaching 'prestige' to course difficulty might be the only way out.

raymondnimitz.bsky.social•5 days ago

📌

jaxzanproditor.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think the fact that the essays LLMs can produce are closer to B range today but would have merited a C or worse in the past has contributed to the problem.

Maybe I’m just warped by my perspective. I never cheated on any essays, but I never felt the classes I took challenged my writing skills.

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