> So what if everyone gets an A? What's the point?
What's the point of university then? If "any reasonable effort should merit an A" it seems like there is zero point in university existing. A degree has no signal at that point.
And even if it's true that a degree has no signal anymore, you can't operate like that in the real world because a lot of people still operate under the assumption that degrees and GPA do carry signal. You'd most likely end up losing out on a lot of opportunities.
You may think so but this would be going against the facts. In reality, there are two major goals each US university has:
1. attracting funds (in the form of tuition, grants, etc)
2. improving educational statistics for the state
The second goal is related to the first and, in the case of a public school, dominates. The more diplomas the university awards, the more funding it usually gets (since it improves 'retention').
Universities certainly have great facilities for learning and if a student wants to learn, s*he certainly can but this is irrelevant from the point of view of the administration.
Lest you think this is another conspiracy theory, I have heard these two exact statements in every faculty meeting we had at the university level. How can I care about grade inflation (as a faculty) if I am penalized for the excessive number of withdrawals from my classes. Think about it: the students have realized that they were not ready for the class early, and decided to save themselves the headache and take a lower level class. This is counted against the faculty. Now what incentive do I have to give objective grades?
Agreed. But also, there's no point in giving grades if they don't mean anything. If you expect everyone who puts in nominal effort to get an A, then the class should be pass/fail.
I wonder if an explicit policy that grades are for internal purposes only would help. That is, grades are useful feedback on how well you're learning, but they aren't comparable between classes and aren't intended to judge or rate students. So the uni would refuse to calculate GPAs or report grades to outside parties.
Maybe they could even give more flexibility on how grades are calculated and reported. Like they could be whatever combination of pass/fail, letters, percents, notes etc that the prof wants, because by policy you're not calculating with them.
Yeah, and I also like your idea of every class being pass/fail. I'm sure I've heard of some colleges doing it but I haven't looked into whether it's considered to be an improvement. Also I wonder what the results would be in terms of norm-setting if this was done at Harvard or something next?
What's the point of university then? If "any reasonable effort should merit an A" it seems like there is zero point in university existing. A degree has no signal at that point.
And even if it's true that a degree has no signal anymore, you can't operate like that in the real world because a lot of people still operate under the assumption that degrees and GPA do carry signal. You'd most likely end up losing out on a lot of opportunities.