alt Hacker NewsHuh, I never considered that grades might be intended to help the person learning. I always assumed they were just intended as a signal to the rest of the world that they had learned something.
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dpkirchner • yesterday at 4:29 PM
For the most part, the only people that see the grades are you, your parents, your teacher, and maybe your friends. Most of the world will just see a pass/fail result (degree or not), unless you also earn special awards.
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morkalork • yesterday at 4:28 PM
Yeah, the students are being graded like meat. It's not for the cow's sake, it's for the consumer. I say this as someone who had to maintain a set gpa through to keep a scholarship.
I think that's possibly one of the main problems with grades and why they inevitably lead to the grade inflation crisis. From the article:
> In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
> At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.