My brilliant granddaughter (yeah, I'm biased, but she is objectively exceptional) didn't even consider applying to Harvard or Yale. And I'm glad. She was accepted to her first-choice school with a full ride, 4-year scholarship. Would she have gotten that from Harvard or Yale? Who knows. I'm just glad that she didn't even consider them. They represent all that is wrong with academia today and are bastions of left-wing politics. The world would be better off if they both closed down.
My youngest is in college and also exceptionally bright (it’s not his parents, our other kids aren’t like this… it’s all him). Would never have considered an Ivy except maybe MIT (is that an ivy?). He’s exactly where God thought he needed to be and it’s been a terrific education.
Make Blue Books Great Again! No laptops, no smartphones, just a pencil and a blue book. Good luck kids! And who cares if the TAs grading those blue books will be annoyed, that’s just a bonus!
I’ve had this same thought many times. No more papers, everything has to be done by hand in class. Don’t like it? Too bad, it’s the only way we know if you understand the material.
That’s also a travesty. We switched our youngest kid to private school after 3rd grade and had to teach him cursive because all assignments were to be done in cursive at the private school and cursive wasn’t even taught at Publix anymore. I guess they needed more class time for lectures about climate change. 🙄
As a person who went through many semesters of student evaluations, no professor takes those evaluations seriously. What they are really for is administrators to determine faculty salary increases. As far as I know, students think they are stupid and not worth doing.
Professors may not take them seriously, but the kids sure do. Every student I know checks Rate My Professor before they schedule their classes for the semester.
So professors don't concern themselves with evaluations which are used to determine salary increases? That is really surprising. Does that include non-tenured professors?
I reread my comment and should have been clearer. So, it's not the students doing the evaluations that bother faculty. The students don't take them seriously and the questions are really vapid. But and on the other hand, faculty are aware just how important these evaluations are to administrators since students are now seen as (and even called) "customers" in the Admissions Departments. Smart faculty know they have to find other means of convincing administrators that they're doing the work that is demanded of them: attending conferences, writing papers that actually get published, committee work, etc. Now, all of those can be and often are meaningless exercises. In the end, it's all paper-thin evidence in decisions over raises based on merit. Merit has very little to do with anything in colleges anymore. To answer your second question, it does include non-tenured professors. In fact, they are the most vulnerable.
I was--ever so briefly--an assistant professor back when personal computers were just coming on the scene and Just Everything had to be Computed, don-t-ya-know. My "genius" dept. chair set himself the task of programming a "ranking" process for computing the averages of all student evaluations to determine "merit", numerically. I, who thought the only thing I could actually _do_ well was teach, came out poorly. I asked if he'd redd the comments for context. "No," he said, "I cut those off first thing. The numbers tell the story." And he coincidentally destroyed the evidence contradicting that opinion. One of my students had rated me "Average"--in everything!--but his comment redd "I rated Dr. Nelson 'Average' because d*mm*t THIS level of teaching SHOULD be the Average, Everywhere on This Campus!" If I'd known C*rr*l the *rseh*le chair was going to DESTROY that paper, I'd have Reserved it--and it would be on my wall now.
Another professor who became a good friend, but who was on the Asperger's scale somewhere, was truly perplexed by one of his reviewers' comments: "This professor is one of the Worst to have Ever Slimed the Face of this Planet!!" He calmed down when I explained how he had probably been confused with someone else.
Capping grades is a typical liberal low intelligence answer to a problem. It’s like raising taxes to solve your deficit instead of doing hard work and cutting spending. The easy way doesn’t cause the tenured aristocracy of professors any hardships, like having to create tougher curriculum and grade honesty. At the end of the day, a Harvard Ivy League education won’t mean much, and it will be their own fault.
I live near a town called Harvard. Shopped now and then in small town Princeton and in early marriage bought liquor at an Iowa state liquor store in Oxford junction and my hometown county courthouse was in Cambridge. I’m a genius!
Or, David, has it ever occurred to you that, in marriage, you should be scoring the "game" differently, like, for an example, "winning" is "taking one for the team." A lot. And the more you don't talk about the score (how you're "crushing it" as the poster reads)--the more you don't even think about it--the closer to All-Star status you approach.
And like any other game, having a bad performance one day, does not imprint "LOSER!" on your character. The very next day, you get another chance to show off your championship capability.
That sounds like the orientation presenter at Harvard who, when asked what the drop-out rate was freshman year replied, "Harvard doesn't make that kind of mistake." Yeah. Right.
You are right about the 30 years ago remark; it was at least 20 years ago that the president of Mercyhurst College made his remark about grades to the faculty. The entire meritocracy began to collapse once critical theory and DEI made their appearance back in the 60s with men like Herbert Marcuse. We just didn't know or see that it would become so widespread.
The problem is that every child in every school system has been led to believe that the only way to make it in life is to get a degree and the colleges have made $$$$$ on this. Every Child Left Behind and Race to the Bottom with the mantra of "college and career ready" (from kindergarten!) created this mess. And what a mess it is!
Mic drop!! Dropping truth bombs like the US is dropping bombs on Iran, but instead of deception, death, and destruction, we are served with logic, laughter, and love.
This latest move shows the true colors of all of these Ivy league schools. Ostensibly based on merit, but actually based in fraud and deception. It's just another institution that has been corrupted by the kakistocracy that we find ourselves living in today.
Come to think of it, this nonsensical idea about scarcity is coming from the same playbook by the powers that shouldn't be. There is plenty in this world for everyone but the parasites up top want you to think there isn't so that we fight over resources. It's bananas that they are using the same playbook for school grades 🤣🤣🤣
As much as I have a hard time caring about California’s issues from yesterday, Hahvahd and the other Ivy’s can go suck an egg. If Pete Hegseth announced that campuses would be used for training pilots for bombing missions I’d be more inclined to start a Give Send Go for extra fuel and munitions than to sign a petition to stop it.
The hardest part of these elite colleges is getting in. Once you’re in, you can pretty much coast. It’s all about the connections you make while you are there. I live very close to Wellesley College and their graduates can go anywhere in the world and connect with a fellow graduate and get some kind of assistance whether it’s getting a job or an accommodation. I know a lot of Wellesley grads. It’s a weird system and yet not necessarily a bad thing. I’d still recommend going into the trades. We need plumbers and electricians and carpenters. They provide a good service and can make a substantial living.
Ginny, BRILLIANT! In fact too brilliant for me, sending me to AI for the reference which I post here for the other dumb guy reading this:
[grok]
"Harrison Bergeron is the main character in Kurt Vonnegut’s famous 1961 dystopian short story "Harrison Bergeron. Harrison is a 14-year-old boy in the year 2081.
In this future America, the government has enforced absolute equality through the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution.
Anyone with above-average intelligence, strength, beauty, or talent is forced to wear handicaps (physical and mental restraints) to bring them down to the average level:
Intelligent people wear ear radios that blast loud noises every 20 seconds to disrupt their thoughts.
Strong people carry heavy weights.
Beautiful people wear masks or disfiguring items.
Harrison is extraordinarily intelligent, tall, strong, and handsome."
[/grok]
...what Harvard might call "a triple loser." After reading this, I remember that I read the story, but I'm putting this here because, having forgotten once, I'm likely to forget again.
OMG - We were required to read this in 1970s middle school! That and "The Button" and "The Lottery." Scarred for life!! And this was a Catholic school!
There's three things going on here. (Isn't that always the way?)
Harvard's "Excellence!" product is primarily destined for Employers of Harvard graduates. #sowhocares
Harvard's "grades cap" is not about bringing reality back into grading; it's about setting up a straw man to take the heat for individual professors too spineless to write down "not the best work I've ever seen." #ourhandsourtied (If they really cared about grade inflation, they'd be sitting the professors down for a serious time-out, but tenure being what it is, that's a D.O.A. approach.)
Harvard must be like Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, "where all the children are above-average"--on steroids--where all the children are above-above-average.
My old department head, the finest of heads of electrical engineering departments who ever drew breath, Dr. Russell H. Seacat (RIP), ordered me to, "Teach to the C students, the average students. They are the largest group and they do the lion's share of work in the world. You 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 teach them, and if you do, the As and Bs will do fine on their own." He went on to say that "An A student will never miss an opportunity to demonstrate that they deserve an A," and then, as an afterthought, he added, "The same goes for F students..." Another time he commented that, "If you have a tough problem, assign it to an engineer who was a C student because A students are prone to prove it cannot be solved while every problem every C student ever faced in his education looked impossible, but he didn't give up." I was one of those A students. Dr. Seacat loved me, but like him, I came to love the C students who just slogged away; THEIR successes were real, and hard-fought. An institution that makes clear their disdain for "average" people subconsciously exposes a disdain for hard work. (Incidentally C students were outstanding in the labs, where practical ability shone.)
When our oldest was in public school in second grade, I took her with me to meet a fellow young assistant professor, Dr. Lilly (RIP), for lunch. During lunch John asked her about school and she brightly started chirping about how much she liked reading, so John asked for details. She said she was in the Bluebirds, and on further encouragement, added that their were Rose and Buttercup groups too. John looked at me, and said, "I really like that they are putting the kids into groups with neutral-sounding names; when I was in school they had 'Regular', 'Advanced' and 'Slow' groups and I hated that." At that point, my daughter piped up to help John out, "Yes, Buttercups is the slow readers."
Second-graders have a lesson to offer the "geniuses" at Harvard--if they can but stoop to learn: "It's POSSIBLE the only people being fooled are Yourselves." (It may be that the "slow readers" these days are in the group called "Harvard Administration.")
Not really. I loved the part about teaching to the C students, since an honest bell-curve of achievement does indicate that it would represent the bulk of your students.
But given that Harvard et al have skewed enrollment to deny whites and Asians in favor of blacks, who then require remedial courses because they can’t handle actual college-level classes, I tend to dismiss any discussion of “grades at Harvard” since it’s all fake. The 60% stat bears that out.
College is a waste of money for most young people. I hope the marketplace for jobs recognizes that college makes people dumber and more ideological. Having said that, my kids are going to college, because they need to get out of my house (God's design is so perfect...making teenagers intolerable).
My brilliant granddaughter (yeah, I'm biased, but she is objectively exceptional) didn't even consider applying to Harvard or Yale. And I'm glad. She was accepted to her first-choice school with a full ride, 4-year scholarship. Would she have gotten that from Harvard or Yale? Who knows. I'm just glad that she didn't even consider them. They represent all that is wrong with academia today and are bastions of left-wing politics. The world would be better off if they both closed down.
That's really something to absolutely brag about Suzanne! Congratulations to your granddaughter!
My youngest is in college and also exceptionally bright (it’s not his parents, our other kids aren’t like this… it’s all him). Would never have considered an Ivy except maybe MIT (is that an ivy?). He’s exactly where God thought he needed to be and it’s been a terrific education.
Make Blue Books Great Again! No laptops, no smartphones, just a pencil and a blue book. Good luck kids! And who cares if the TAs grading those blue books will be annoyed, that’s just a bonus!
I’ve had this same thought many times. No more papers, everything has to be done by hand in class. Don’t like it? Too bad, it’s the only way we know if you understand the material.
Students no longer have the ability to write long hand or cursive. I think they need to be graded entirely on their penmanship. Sorry, penpersonship.
That’s also a travesty. We switched our youngest kid to private school after 3rd grade and had to teach him cursive because all assignments were to be done in cursive at the private school and cursive wasn’t even taught at Publix anymore. I guess they needed more class time for lectures about climate change. 🙄
I wonder how closely the rise in A grades correlates with the rise in students evaluating professors.
As a person who went through many semesters of student evaluations, no professor takes those evaluations seriously. What they are really for is administrators to determine faculty salary increases. As far as I know, students think they are stupid and not worth doing.
Professors may not take them seriously, but the kids sure do. Every student I know checks Rate My Professor before they schedule their classes for the semester.
So professors don't concern themselves with evaluations which are used to determine salary increases? That is really surprising. Does that include non-tenured professors?
I reread my comment and should have been clearer. So, it's not the students doing the evaluations that bother faculty. The students don't take them seriously and the questions are really vapid. But and on the other hand, faculty are aware just how important these evaluations are to administrators since students are now seen as (and even called) "customers" in the Admissions Departments. Smart faculty know they have to find other means of convincing administrators that they're doing the work that is demanded of them: attending conferences, writing papers that actually get published, committee work, etc. Now, all of those can be and often are meaningless exercises. In the end, it's all paper-thin evidence in decisions over raises based on merit. Merit has very little to do with anything in colleges anymore. To answer your second question, it does include non-tenured professors. In fact, they are the most vulnerable.
I was--ever so briefly--an assistant professor back when personal computers were just coming on the scene and Just Everything had to be Computed, don-t-ya-know. My "genius" dept. chair set himself the task of programming a "ranking" process for computing the averages of all student evaluations to determine "merit", numerically. I, who thought the only thing I could actually _do_ well was teach, came out poorly. I asked if he'd redd the comments for context. "No," he said, "I cut those off first thing. The numbers tell the story." And he coincidentally destroyed the evidence contradicting that opinion. One of my students had rated me "Average"--in everything!--but his comment redd "I rated Dr. Nelson 'Average' because d*mm*t THIS level of teaching SHOULD be the Average, Everywhere on This Campus!" If I'd known C*rr*l the *rseh*le chair was going to DESTROY that paper, I'd have Reserved it--and it would be on my wall now.
Another professor who became a good friend, but who was on the Asperger's scale somewhere, was truly perplexed by one of his reviewers' comments: "This professor is one of the Worst to have Ever Slimed the Face of this Planet!!" He calmed down when I explained how he had probably been confused with someone else.
Capping grades is a typical liberal low intelligence answer to a problem. It’s like raising taxes to solve your deficit instead of doing hard work and cutting spending. The easy way doesn’t cause the tenured aristocracy of professors any hardships, like having to create tougher curriculum and grade honesty. At the end of the day, a Harvard Ivy League education won’t mean much, and it will be their own fault.
I live near a town called Harvard. Shopped now and then in small town Princeton and in early marriage bought liquor at an Iowa state liquor store in Oxford junction and my hometown county courthouse was in Cambridge. I’m a genius!
Marriage is definitely one situation in which you should NOT keep score!
Or, consider: Marriage is definitely one situation where scores should be kept secret.
Or, David, has it ever occurred to you that, in marriage, you should be scoring the "game" differently, like, for an example, "winning" is "taking one for the team." A lot. And the more you don't talk about the score (how you're "crushing it" as the poster reads)--the more you don't even think about it--the closer to All-Star status you approach.
And like any other game, having a bad performance one day, does not imprint "LOSER!" on your character. The very next day, you get another chance to show off your championship capability.
David, are you saying "happy wife, happy life"? 😆
I suppose I am, Mary Ann, although for me it is still a theoretical. "Happy Mom" was reached early on and is quite a solid, carrying a lot of water.
If you want your marriage to last.... do NOT announce the score!
Since Harvard is now teaching remedial math, methinks something wrong in the Admissions Office. Zero colleges should be teaching remedial math.
In local news, there is a Catholic college in Erie whose president informed the faculty that "There are no C students at Mercyhurst."
That sounds like the orientation presenter at Harvard who, when asked what the drop-out rate was freshman year replied, "Harvard doesn't make that kind of mistake." Yeah. Right.
I wonder if it's possible for these elite idiots and the colleges they have ruined to ever recover their reputations.
Hard to say, May Ann - that orientation remark happened about 30 years ago. Doesn't seem to have made much of a dent until recently . . .
You are right about the 30 years ago remark; it was at least 20 years ago that the president of Mercyhurst College made his remark about grades to the faculty. The entire meritocracy began to collapse once critical theory and DEI made their appearance back in the 60s with men like Herbert Marcuse. We just didn't know or see that it would become so widespread.
The problem is that every child in every school system has been led to believe that the only way to make it in life is to get a degree and the colleges have made $$$$$ on this. Every Child Left Behind and Race to the Bottom with the mantra of "college and career ready" (from kindergarten!) created this mess. And what a mess it is!
Mike Rowe for Secretary of Education would be an interesting change-of-pace.
Mic drop!! Dropping truth bombs like the US is dropping bombs on Iran, but instead of deception, death, and destruction, we are served with logic, laughter, and love.
This latest move shows the true colors of all of these Ivy league schools. Ostensibly based on merit, but actually based in fraud and deception. It's just another institution that has been corrupted by the kakistocracy that we find ourselves living in today.
Come to think of it, this nonsensical idea about scarcity is coming from the same playbook by the powers that shouldn't be. There is plenty in this world for everyone but the parasites up top want you to think there isn't so that we fight over resources. It's bananas that they are using the same playbook for school grades 🤣🤣🤣
A meritocracy is so Trump. Harvard can’t have that.
As much as I have a hard time caring about California’s issues from yesterday, Hahvahd and the other Ivy’s can go suck an egg. If Pete Hegseth announced that campuses would be used for training pilots for bombing missions I’d be more inclined to start a Give Send Go for extra fuel and munitions than to sign a petition to stop it.
The hardest part of these elite colleges is getting in. Once you’re in, you can pretty much coast. It’s all about the connections you make while you are there. I live very close to Wellesley College and their graduates can go anywhere in the world and connect with a fellow graduate and get some kind of assistance whether it’s getting a job or an accommodation. I know a lot of Wellesley grads. It’s a weird system and yet not necessarily a bad thing. I’d still recommend going into the trades. We need plumbers and electricians and carpenters. They provide a good service and can make a substantial living.
Getting some serious Harrison Bergeron vibes from Harvard here. 😯
Thanks for keeping me informed and smiling.
This is bad ass just like you. 🤬🍑😘
Ginny, BRILLIANT! In fact too brilliant for me, sending me to AI for the reference which I post here for the other dumb guy reading this:
[grok]
"Harrison Bergeron is the main character in Kurt Vonnegut’s famous 1961 dystopian short story "Harrison Bergeron. Harrison is a 14-year-old boy in the year 2081.
In this future America, the government has enforced absolute equality through the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution.
Anyone with above-average intelligence, strength, beauty, or talent is forced to wear handicaps (physical and mental restraints) to bring them down to the average level:
Intelligent people wear ear radios that blast loud noises every 20 seconds to disrupt their thoughts.
Strong people carry heavy weights.
Beautiful people wear masks or disfiguring items.
Harrison is extraordinarily intelligent, tall, strong, and handsome."
[/grok]
...what Harvard might call "a triple loser." After reading this, I remember that I read the story, but I'm putting this here because, having forgotten once, I'm likely to forget again.
OMG - We were required to read this in 1970s middle school! That and "The Button" and "The Lottery." Scarred for life!! And this was a Catholic school!
There's three things going on here. (Isn't that always the way?)
Harvard's "Excellence!" product is primarily destined for Employers of Harvard graduates. #sowhocares
Harvard's "grades cap" is not about bringing reality back into grading; it's about setting up a straw man to take the heat for individual professors too spineless to write down "not the best work I've ever seen." #ourhandsourtied (If they really cared about grade inflation, they'd be sitting the professors down for a serious time-out, but tenure being what it is, that's a D.O.A. approach.)
Harvard must be like Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, "where all the children are above-average"--on steroids--where all the children are above-above-average.
My old department head, the finest of heads of electrical engineering departments who ever drew breath, Dr. Russell H. Seacat (RIP), ordered me to, "Teach to the C students, the average students. They are the largest group and they do the lion's share of work in the world. You 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 teach them, and if you do, the As and Bs will do fine on their own." He went on to say that "An A student will never miss an opportunity to demonstrate that they deserve an A," and then, as an afterthought, he added, "The same goes for F students..." Another time he commented that, "If you have a tough problem, assign it to an engineer who was a C student because A students are prone to prove it cannot be solved while every problem every C student ever faced in his education looked impossible, but he didn't give up." I was one of those A students. Dr. Seacat loved me, but like him, I came to love the C students who just slogged away; THEIR successes were real, and hard-fought. An institution that makes clear their disdain for "average" people subconsciously exposes a disdain for hard work. (Incidentally C students were outstanding in the labs, where practical ability shone.)
When our oldest was in public school in second grade, I took her with me to meet a fellow young assistant professor, Dr. Lilly (RIP), for lunch. During lunch John asked her about school and she brightly started chirping about how much she liked reading, so John asked for details. She said she was in the Bluebirds, and on further encouragement, added that their were Rose and Buttercup groups too. John looked at me, and said, "I really like that they are putting the kids into groups with neutral-sounding names; when I was in school they had 'Regular', 'Advanced' and 'Slow' groups and I hated that." At that point, my daughter piped up to help John out, "Yes, Buttercups is the slow readers."
Second-graders have a lesson to offer the "geniuses" at Harvard--if they can but stoop to learn: "It's POSSIBLE the only people being fooled are Yourselves." (It may be that the "slow readers" these days are in the group called "Harvard Administration.")
Who is this “sow ho” who cares? Sounds like you’re picking on frisky chubby girls now.
Underscore lives matter.
THAT's what you got out of that? #whydoibother ;^)
Not really. I loved the part about teaching to the C students, since an honest bell-curve of achievement does indicate that it would represent the bulk of your students.
But given that Harvard et al have skewed enrollment to deny whites and Asians in favor of blacks, who then require remedial courses because they can’t handle actual college-level classes, I tend to dismiss any discussion of “grades at Harvard” since it’s all fake. The 60% stat bears that out.
But I do love buttercups if that helps.
For sale:
Former college campus.
Land, vehicles, all equipment and supplies.
20% of assessed values, firm.
College is a waste of money for most young people. I hope the marketplace for jobs recognizes that college makes people dumber and more ideological. Having said that, my kids are going to college, because they need to get out of my house (God's design is so perfect...making teenagers intolerable).