The standardized tests are useful. In high school, look at the students who got the '5' on the AP exam, not the students who got a '3' or below.
If you are looking for honest class grading look at 'filter classes' - the classes used by demanding majors to filter out students who are not prepared for and/or capable of handling the material in the major: Calculus for science and engineering majors, Organic Chemistry - for science and biomedical majors, Physics for science and engineering majors, Economics for Economics and finance majors, ..... Departments offer 'baby' courses for non majors, but the filter classes are intended to drop students who are not prepared. And they do. Graduate departments have filter classes as well to eliminate the students who leaked though the filters and tests.
Trace, I've been a fan since Blocked and Reported, I care a lot about education, and I was one of your first subscribers for CEP, but I'm not going to stick around for an AI content farming site. It's three strikes already. You let these people post post one more of these LLM slop pieces and I'm out.
I hear you, and so does the team who have been handling our articles. At least the great majority of this article was written and edited by humans. We're serious about ensuring our articles respect reader time and attention, and I've made the standard clear. It takes time to get the kinks worked out in a publication that solicits many guest posts as we deal with new technology changing the landscape of writing, but we're committed to keeping the quality bar high.
I do still wonder about the exact timing of these changes though, I don't think it was always like this... I'm from outside Atlanta and went to college on a HOPE scholarship, graduated high school in 2003 and college in 2007. Everyone knew their parents would be livid if they dropped below eligibility, teachers didn't seem to bear any part of that burden at all, I also lost eligibility temporarily during college and never even considered badgering a professor to make it go away??
One incentive for grade inflation that you didn’t mention is the pressure that schools are under to have high graduation rates while also providing rigorous and challenging instruction. These two goals are irreconcilable. We should be suspicious of schools who have high graduation rates, especially if their test scores are flat, rather than celebrating them. We should demand accountability for high graduation rates
The standardized tests are useful. In high school, look at the students who got the '5' on the AP exam, not the students who got a '3' or below.
If you are looking for honest class grading look at 'filter classes' - the classes used by demanding majors to filter out students who are not prepared for and/or capable of handling the material in the major: Calculus for science and engineering majors, Organic Chemistry - for science and biomedical majors, Physics for science and engineering majors, Economics for Economics and finance majors, ..... Departments offer 'baby' courses for non majors, but the filter classes are intended to drop students who are not prepared. And they do. Graduate departments have filter classes as well to eliminate the students who leaked though the filters and tests.
Trace, I've been a fan since Blocked and Reported, I care a lot about education, and I was one of your first subscribers for CEP, but I'm not going to stick around for an AI content farming site. It's three strikes already. You let these people post post one more of these LLM slop pieces and I'm out.
I hear you, and so does the team who have been handling our articles. At least the great majority of this article was written and edited by humans. We're serious about ensuring our articles respect reader time and attention, and I've made the standard clear. It takes time to get the kinks worked out in a publication that solicits many guest posts as we deal with new technology changing the landscape of writing, but we're committed to keeping the quality bar high.
Thanks for pushing us on that front.
I do still wonder about the exact timing of these changes though, I don't think it was always like this... I'm from outside Atlanta and went to college on a HOPE scholarship, graduated high school in 2003 and college in 2007. Everyone knew their parents would be livid if they dropped below eligibility, teachers didn't seem to bear any part of that burden at all, I also lost eligibility temporarily during college and never even considered badgering a professor to make it go away??
One incentive for grade inflation that you didn’t mention is the pressure that schools are under to have high graduation rates while also providing rigorous and challenging instruction. These two goals are irreconcilable. We should be suspicious of schools who have high graduation rates, especially if their test scores are flat, rather than celebrating them. We should demand accountability for high graduation rates
Taxpayer funded education is nothing more than a shell game at this point.