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Update on grade strike

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Re: Update on grade strike

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The former system is ideal.

Could you elaborate that?

Grads don’t provide meaningful feedback for how a student can grow or the challenges they’re facing. As soon as you introduce grades they become the sole metric to be gamed.

I understand there’s real issues with scaling, but national tests seem to resolve that. At most a pass, high pass or fail system would be best. Letter +/- grades are just silly when you step back and think about the goal of education.

Re: Update on grade strike

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate that?

Grads don’t provide meaningful feedback for how a student can grow or the challenges they’re facing. As soon as you introduce grades they become the sole metric to be gamed. I understand there’s real issues with scaling, but national tests seem to resolve that. At most a pass, high pass or fail system would be best. Letter +/- grades are just silly when you step back and think about the goal of education.

To be fair, the written feedback varied greatly.

Some literally just put down my scores on tests/papers. Some just copy-pasted the class description and then gave the grade I got.

Others wrote pages of feedback, not all of which was useful. My name is common enough that I was confused with another student once, including with my grade, so that was fun.

In large 500+ person intro classes, the feedback could never have been meaningful due to class size. In other 10 person classes, the feedback was generally pretty good. Upper division classes were better in term of feedback, broadly.

In practice, it's a bit of a mixed bag and each professor was different and themselves differed over time. Generally it's great though, even years after the events.

When I send in my transcripts, I vainly go over them again, and it's always a welcome exercise. Seeing my growth (good and bad) is so incredibly rewarding. It's very rare to get to be assessed like that in such pivotal years.

Some of those forms are the last communications I will ever have with those people as they have since died. Even if those forms are generally bland, I treasure them, as those people helped me so very much and were generally kind to me. I'm tearing up right now thinking about one professor I never got to say goodbye to (Dearest Reader: this is the universe telling you to email that person you've been meaning to email, FYI).

One last thing: if you are a person that designs websites that happen to accept transcripts, please bump the file limit up from ~25mb. Mine is ~200mb as the official download from the school and I always have to go in an scale down the .pdf to the varying mb limit that the website accepts, none of which are the same limit. Also, it always looks terrible after I scale it back.

Re: Update on grade strike

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article may help you understand the whole grad student racket better. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...

Thanks. Makes things clear what's going on. Does this have a HN discussion thread?

Not that I'm aware of. Most of the time when I talk about this topic it gets downvoted pretty hard. Part of the program not covered in the article was to train the population that anyone questioning those policies is the usual litany of bad words. I was very careful this time not to even hint at the content of the article. That seems to have helped.

Re: Update on grade strike

#54
When I was represented by a graduate student union, our department actually tried to raise wages. This was opposed by the union (solidarity!), and the result was that the department essentially invented fake courses to pad the hours of the grad students; the union didn't care because we were "working more" rather than getting "paid more"

This led me to believe that grad student unions were not a particularly useful way of dealing with issues affecting graduate students.

Re: Update on grade strike

#55
post #7

One of the better ways that occurred to me when we Cal grad students were protesting a couple of decades ago was, rather than withhold the grades, simply to give everyone an 'A'. That form of protest most directly targeted the institution since it simply affected its reputation. The students were not hurt, the grad students could comply with their obligations and move on. I am surprised that such an approach never to…

How are the students not hurt if the reputation of their university is damaged? Especially if you are a good student. Graduate admissions are aware of this kind of stuff, and it will screw over real A students royally.

Harvard awards nearly all A's and their reputation hasn't suffered for it:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/...

I suspect it would take a lot more than one "A strike" to substantially impact a school's reputation.

Re: Update on grade strike

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are the students not hurt if the reputation of their university is damaged? Especially if you are a good student. Graduate admissions are aware of this kind of stuff, and it will screw over real A students royally.

Harvard awards nearly all A's and their reputation hasn't suffered for it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/... I suspect it would take a lot more than one "A strike" to substantially impact a school's reputation.

I can tell you with 100% confidence that grade inflation is taken into account in grad admission. Been there, done that. Same as arbitrary scale changes (Let's give A+...). But it will be a long time until this impacts Harvard. OTOH, it seems Princeton steered back.
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