That’s how most med schools grade as well. It’s a you can or you cannot system, and I think it suits better than backstabbing for a few extra percentage points. I had a couple classes in college that graded on a curve, which resulted in students refusing to help each other or even actively sabotaging others so they wouldn’t “blow the curve.” I seriously hated that system.
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Yeah, that’s traditional law school in a nutshell. Luckily, I’m in a part time program and even though everything is still graded on a curve, the students are all slightly to significantly older than traditional students, we all have jobs and families, and no one has time for the backstabbing nonsense, so I didn’t have to deal with that. Grading on a curve still sucks, though.
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Maybe, but that I suspect that would work differently at different ones. At those where many of the students have working class backgrounds, they’re working a job or two or three while attending, and they’re there to get a degree/credential so they can have a “career” for life instead of a “job.” I think few such students would benefit in terms of learning from a system that lets them do as little as possible to squeak by and get that degree.
And really, in the increasingly corporatized, credential-stamping university, “the point” is less and less “to educate people,” and more and more to get their tuition dollars and herd them through the credentializing process as cheaply as possible.
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I don’t think I agree that a pass/fail grading system is the same thing as letting “them do as little as possible to squeak by and get that degree.” It comes across as a little patronizing, too, to me. And if that is all they’re interested in, I don’t think they’d be motivated to push for an A in a traditional grading system anyway.
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And they whinge about grade inflation at public unis…
Nah, I ain’t mad… that’s probably a good idea in fact. Rather than treating education as some kind of fucking competition, treat it like the important process of learning that it is…
Agreed, and the way to deal with that is to talk with the students and do what you can to help them in those circumstances. Far too many profs will just let those students sink rather than try and help them navigate such difficulties. I try hard to give work some leeway into the class (giving some free drops into their homework, offering alternatives when they need it, etc).
Yes, and that’s a fait accompli at this point in most public universities.
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Having worked with people who did exactly that - and attempted to do the same thing on the job - is what makes me hesitant. What method would then be used to identify who passed and excels vs. someone who passed but barely?
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Coming soon to the whole country if Trump wins… certainly to be rolled out to varying degrees in red states, either way.
But honestly, it’s not like this is entirely new, either. Yes, it’s reached a whole new level down in FL, but the far right has been pushing these kinds of things for years, and they’ve been trying to undermine what they see as radical education for years. And many of the major organizations that represent professors in general or in specific fields have done nothing about it… You can very much see the adjunctification of academia as part of this. It’s harder to fight for something when you’re overworked and barely hanging on, and treated like your a disposable cog. That makes it trivially easy to gut a university and especially gut the humanities…
We really need to understand in this country why the humanities matter and why open inquiry matters. Or they’ll have won.
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On the topic of grades, I actually like them, just like I love a good rubric. I like knowing what I need to achieve to “pass,” but I also like the feedback (like getting an A) of knowing I went above and beyond the required minimum. But grading on a curve is BS, and I don’t think you or anyone else here is saying otherwise. It should never be about how one does in comparison to others, but rather how one does in comparison to the instructionally significant materials.
And regarding the diploma mills many institutes have become, (and @Mindysan33) I hear you. A friend teaches at community college and she is under extreme pressure to pass students who clearly should not pass. I’ve seen some of the essays and it’s as if chat GPT took a qualude or something.
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Well…I don’t know that you need to. But, let’s say you do. Some of my law school classes now are pass/fail. The skills classes like Advanced Negotiation and Persuasion & Advocacy are pass/fail. But there are actually 3 possible grades in the class. High pass, low pass, and fail. High pass and low pass has no impact on your GPA, because it’s a pass/fail course, but the ‘high pass’ or ‘low pass’ will still appear on your transcript.
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I cannot get details about complaints against the doctors in this case out of my mind after catching people trying to find tech solutions online because they didn’t have the skills to do the job:
Maybe that’s why there are grades and other means of ranking used in review sites for professionals in a variety of fields and industries, too.
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Rudy Giuliani graduated cum laude from NYU Law and was editor of their Law Review. Good grades and competence are not a 1:1 correlation.
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Unfortunately, ability to perform on tests is a very poor indicator of ability to perform in real life. Actual human beings are not multiple-choice questions, have not read the books on what their symptoms “ought” to be, and lie to you about what is actually happening. The ability to cope with incomplete, conflicting and just plain erroneous data is what makes a good doc. Some of the most gifted test-takers in my class were the most horrific docs, because they could not generalize, could not figure out what was relevant and what was not, could not empathize with frightened, confused patients. And doing so with parents is even worse. It’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where some pieces are missing, there are pieces from other puzzles mixed in and the picture on the box bears no relation to the puzzle. IOW, it’s a load of fun! 
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Yeah, it especially strikes me that some people might just do okay in law school, but might turn out to be great in a courtroom…
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I hope so… 
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It’s been frustrating at times. I was always a straight A student, but my 50+ year old brain just can’t do that anymore, apparently. I’ve been a mostly straight B law school student. Still, in a couple of years, no one will care.
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It does strike me as a profession that people can and do improve at once they’re out working… I know that what you guys learn in school matters and is important, but it seems like practice matters a bit more than just book knowledge? I could be wrong, of course, but, I’m just guessing…
But yeah, I’m on my downward slope of my 40s, and I know I’m probably not as sharp as I was in my 20s and early 30s… good thing I’m not starting grad school now!
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It may also be that the stuff you were studying before was easier to get a good grade in. Lower standards, simpler subject matter, who knows?
My BS and MS were in Aerospace Engineering.
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