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James_Miller comments on Rationality Quotes Thread February 2016 - Less Wrong
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Comments (92)
Scott Adams
Does this fit with your experience? As a cynical economist, I'm pleasantly surprised at how non-corrupt grading is at U.S. colleges.
Does that include the grade inflation at major universities or the universities with specific classes that have their difficultly increased and grading deflated so that they fail out students at a more regular rate? (I know some universities do the second type on the introductory science courses while others do it at 3rd year courses.) Or were you referring to something else like bribes?
Bribes.
I feel I should point out that corrupt grading is easily detectable - one can often see it by looking at a corruptly graded paper, or by interviewing a candidate who got a high grade and finding that he does not know the subject. And thus, it is not covered by the Adams quote.
Moreover, universities have a strong incentive to not be corrupt in their grading - if they let people slip through without learning the work, employers will start to notice and discount qualifications from that institution, and then prospective students will hear of this and go to other institutions instead, and then the entire institution will collapse. (It's not immediate, or perfect, and quick action at the start of the process can save the institution, but it is a consideration).
Except who sees a paper except the grader and the student who wrote it?
Empirically this incentive wasn't strong enough.
Agreed.
You do have a recognizable style, y'know...
External examiners?
Very rare for undergrads.
In the UK it is standard - my institution has blind marking, double marking and scrutiny by external examiners for all undergraduate exams. Blind marking: we only have a candidate number and not a student's name. Second marking: someone else evaluates the marks (grades) I give - in some cases independently; external examiner: someone from another institution checks that the marking criteria is being followed.
Blind marking could be circumvented in various ways, but doing so would be risky as the exams will be seen by others. Second marking and external examining are a huge time burden but achieve some degree of quality control, especially important as students don't get to see their exam papers again (perhaps the biggest surprise to staff and students who come here from the US and are used to post-exam argumentation as a form of "quality control").
This screams "corruption". Knowing that students will be looking at how you grade their paper, and will be comparing how you grade them with how you grade others provides professors with some incentives to be honest and careful in grading.
I'm surprised students put up with it, but they don't know anything different. They hear about US students who argue every single grade but I don't think they realise such students actually exist.
However I'm really happy to be away from my first (US) academic post where I constantly faced pressure from an athletic department to "relax" on grades or overlook "minor problems" from athlete-students. Post exam argumentation from individual students is easy enough to deal with reasonably and honestly, institutional forces are another beast entirely.
The fact that few employers request transcripts and fewer distinguish between "barely passing" and "summa cum laude" (maybe apart from recent graduates?) seems like pretty strong evidence about caring about grading corruption. You really need to corrupt your school's degree award process (like a diploma mill) before anyone will care about it.
Also, as Old_Gold suggests, if you count grade inflation as corruption of grading, empirically this incentive wasn't strong enough. We also note that across-the-board corruption of this type undermines incentives. If someone comes up with a better signal, the entire institution of universities would collapse, but most people have seemed to accept rampant grade inflation with a shrug rather than mostly ignoring degrees. It may eventually collapse, but on a time scale where it seems difficult to believe "this was due to grade inflation starting 50 years ago."
Yes, that's true. The incentive works on grading corruption at the level of "this guy should have scored 10%, how did he pass?". It has no effect on grading corruption on the level of "this guy should have barely passed, how did he get a distinction?"
That sounds like a hell of an understatement to me.
It does somewhat understate the situation, yes.
I suspect the answer is that grading at U.S. colleges just isn't that important.
It is for many students at good colleges if they want to, say, get a job at an investment bank or a place at a top law school.
Granted. The top hires from the top. This leads to two questions: * Do we see corruption in those grades? If that is where it matters, that is where we would expect to see it. Say, does admittance into and top grades at Harvard Law depend mostly on academics or is class rank better predicted by other factors, from social class to blatant bribery you mention above? * Once you are below the tournament economy, do we see any corruption? I work for a state government. "Do you have a relevant degree?" is the question, not how good your university was or what your class rank was. Barring extremes (obvious diploma mill, top tier graduate from top tier university), grading just isn't that important.
At good schools nearly everyone graduates in four years, but at lower level schools lots of students don't finish at all or take more than 4 years in part because they fail (or never finish the work) in classes. Given the importance of getting a degree, and the cost of taking more than 4 years to do so, grading is also important for students "at the bottom" of the college world.
Good point, thank you. I was focusing on the top half of the distribution, when there is also a cutoff in the bottom half.
No.
At least, not here in England. I do a lot of hiring for posts that are well paid with a lot of scope for "professional independence". There is scope for these being sinecures, at least in the short or medium term. I have never once been offered a bribe or any hint of anything like corruption. I have never once been asked for a bribe by any public official. I have never once been offered one or anything like one when acting as a voluntary public official. I would be genuinely shocked if those ever happened. I do not believe my experience is unusual in this country.
I believe there are other places where this would be unusual.