Everybody gets an A at Yale

In My Humble Opinion
121

I think my issue is that sometimes they are the issue that makes people quit. I have a student right now. I know something is Not Right with her. She’s 17, she works too much, her aunt has custody but she lives with her granny and sometimes her mom stays with them, but other times is “gone”. Mom has at least one baby under two, that I think my student loves very much. Student says she has to work; aunt says she doesn’t. Stories from all of them are slippery, but nothing one can call the cops for. No signs of violence. If I had to guess, I’d say she was just utterly neglected and no one in her life really gives a shit about her, and while they don’t exactly insist she take on an adult responsibilities, she ends up doing it because she can see it needs to be done–that is, no one is making her watch the baby, but everyone else’s idea of watching the baby is leaving it in the crib all day. They don’t think she has to work, but they don’t buy food or diapers like they should, or realize she is. But I’m not sure. There may also be physical or social abuse. I really have no idea, and no way to find out.

We’ve done everything we can do, legally. Had parent conferences. Talked to her individually. Sent her to the counselor and the school psychologist and nurse. Changed her schedule to give her a study hall. Some days, she’s rested and pleasant and tries. But most days, she’s utterly exhausted. Falls asleep almost instantly. Stares at the screen if I force her to stay awake, but won’t write.

She should absolutely have a failing grade in my class. She’s done almost nothing. Ten years ago, I would have failed her. But here’s the deal. I don’t know what she’s dealing with. It’s beyond me to help. But I’ll be damned if I am going to make the problem worse. If I have to stand in front of the Pearly Gates and find I’m going to hell because I let a child in crisis graduate high school despite not “deserving” it, I’ll take that L.

I did fail a kid like this, ten years ago. Turns out, later, that he was experiencing a level of physical abuse that literally turns my stomach to think about. I was mad at this clearly highly intelligent kid for being a lazy little shit in my class, and he was wearing long sleeves to cover a network of scars and bruises. Every time I gave him a bad grade, his dad beat the shit out of it for him. And that’s the one I know about. How many others have their been?

At the end of the day, for a lot of kids, they don’t have a bandwidth to give a shit about my class. When a teenager calmly tells you that their mom kicked them out because the mom thinks her boyfriend is hitting on her, but she’s not sure, but now she’s at her granny’s but it’s over an hour to get to school, you realize that English class is not the main character of their story. I wish the system was different , and that I could objectively rate their work without a cascade of permanent consequences to the trajectory of their life, but it’s not. So you know what? The little girl I have right now is getting an 80 for the semester, and if I could go back in time, I’d lie and give the kid getting physically beaten straight As. And I have kids like that every year. Maybe they aren’t in crisis. Maybe they are just lazy. But I’d rather err on the side of not fucking over somone who is already being fucked over by life.

And even in your case, and the other case of academic bankruptcy mentioned here: why is that only extended for medical reasons? Why isn’t just lack of maturity enough–if a kid flunks, but comes back the next year and repeats all the classes, learns everything, why must they have a permanent stigma? That’s not concerned with what they know, it’s concerned with recording a character flaw. And where is the line between a non-neurotypical kid deserving adjustments, and a lazy little shit? How often is the latter just so good at masking that their processing disorder is not evident, and so they get punished for it? How often does some first gen/low income kid quietly drop out after a semester of illness–mental or physical–because they don’t know anything about “academic bankruptcy”?

The system we have now is deeply, deeply inconsistent and inequitable. I can agree that we need ways to communicate progress and create motivation, but the current system is not it.

122

See to me this sounds like the sort of “academic liberalism” that frustrates many people. Instead of grading people based on what they actually accomplish, awarding bonus points to who has the hardest hard-luck story.

I can understand giving special help to kids who need it or maybe even deferring a class until they are able to devote the necessary time to it. But ultimately if a grade is going to “matter” it needs to be earned.

123

But grades don’t show what a person knows. They are as often a reflection of compliance or parenting as anything. And the system as a whole doesn’t allow people to just defer: if a person is in an impossible situation, they need to get out. Trapping them in a household that can’t afford to keep them, or where they are being abused, for more years is not going to solve anything. If they can get out, they have a chance to get a real job and learn real skills. There’s a high school graduation test, SAT, all that, to show what they know. Way more reliable in any case.

124

I think the purpose of a grade should be to measure the amount of knowledge obtained. A bad grade is not a punishment, it’s just, you haven’t learned this yet.

I actually was going through a complete nightmare my senior year of high school. I was a legally emancipated minor working full time to pay for my expenses while going through the court system. I had to get a police escort just to get my stuff. I was just getting used to being independent when my family disowned me after abuse disclosure to a social worker which prompted her to call social services. My Mom called constantly with abusive threats. I used to sit in the bathrooms at school and cry every day. I got a letter saying they were going to make me repeat the year if I missed another day of school.

I got straight As. I graduated second in my class. I remember whether or not I graduated Salutatorian depended on a single math test. I studied like crazy for that test despite everything else going on and I got my A. I got a full ride scholarship to my dream college.

Not everyone can be me. I get that. But if you care a whole lot about school, it can be a strong motivator for success. At that point, it was all I had, and I naively believed if I could get to college everything would be fine, that I could put it all behind me. That belief, however naive, got me through high school.

I just think of how I’ve seen people get massive amounts of accomodations to get them through school and then they end up with a degree in a field they have no competency in. Just completely unable to do the work. Then they have crippling anxiety and depression and a complete sense of failure that might have been prevented if someone had said back in college, “Hey, maybe if you need all these accomodations it’s not the best time to be in school.” It doesn’t do people any favors to pass them into a career they can’t succeed in.

125

So do you think I should fail the little girl I described? I’ve done everything else. If she fails my class and US History, that’s two graduation requirements, making the chances of her graduating high school significantly lower. She’s also likely to be kicked out of our academic magnet, if I can’t stop it, which means she’ll be a huge school with no one watching her.

Maybe the purpose of a grade should be to measure knowledge, But that’s NOT how they are used now, especially K-12. It’s just not. They measure compliance and work ethic as much as everything, and are universally regarded as indicative of character and intelligence. College may be a little different, but in K-12 it’s all about deciding who the “good kids” are.

I hear you on supports, but half those “supports” are kluges designed to fix a broken system. Like, we use artificial time limits on tests so we can get a nice pretty bell curve, and then we try to decide who should get extra time. We make a grade dependent more on “time management” skills than what a kid knows, and then we decide which kids have a medical reason that makes it so they shouldn’t be held accountable for lapses in time management. The vast majority of accommodations students are given have nothing to do with what they have or haven’t learned, because the majority of grades aren’t about that.

The whole thing is rotten, through and through. I’ll take your “gotten supports” kids and match them with “cheated their asses off, never learned a thing, and took opportunities from non-cheating students”.

126

I agree with this, at least in High School. I got a “C” in second year French I didn’t earn, except by good behavior and having a good reputation as a student. I couldn’t deal with French for some reason, and eventually gave up. It was my only C in high school, and I survived it, but anything lower would have probably raised red flags with admissions officers.

127

The problem is that what you have to do is different for each child we’ve described. It’s necessary to learn all about the circumstances for each such child. You then have to treat them in the proper way. Is this incredibly difficult? Yes, it certainly is, and yet it’s necessary. Everybody has their own story.

Let me tell you about someone I know who did the most astonishing job of succeeding despite a terrible childhood. He has no idea who his father was. His mother didn’t even put his father’s name on his birth certificate. His mother didn’t do a good job of taking care of him, so when he was ten years old he moved into a state home for children who couldn’t live with their families. Despite this, he got pretty good grades. He was on the school wrestling team and was fifth in the state in his weight class. He didn’t attend classes most days in his last three years of high school because he was working full-time at a job. He studied on his own and came in when necessary to take tests and turn in homework. When he graduated, he joined the army. He took online classes while in the army and got both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree while in the army. He married a woman whose childhood hadn’t been quite as bad. Her parents hadn’t married, but at least she knew who her father was. They have two children. He left the army and started work with a contractor to the Defense Department. He did so well at that that he is now got a great job working with a company that does research for the Defense Department.

128

The older I get, the less concerned I am with this being a problem. Or maybe it’s just the less impressed I have become with the “truly exceptional” and the more I have come to think of the “good” as being good enough in most circumstances.

But I’ll readily admit this might be my own version of becoming an aging curmudgeon.

129

I think there are always going to be exceptions where accommodations must be made. In a perfect world there would be a school policy specifically for dealing with such exceptions. The kid should have a say in how much they feel they can focus on academics right now. Maybe they can take the class pass/fail. But they need to make some kind of commitment when possible. Doing so might actually give them a greater sense of agency and mastery over incredibly difficult circumstances. That was the case for me.

I just don’t think the existence of exceptions is sufficient justification for wiping out an entire grading system.

130

In software it makes a hige difference. There is about a 10X to 100X difference in productivity between the best and the worst. On the pther hand I’m not convinced that grades can give you the info you need to spot them.

When I was interviewing, I paid a lot of attention to what people did for fun. If you were looking for a software job and your hobbies were “going for walks, riding my bike, watching TV, skiing” I wouldn’t be interested no matter how good your grades were. I needed to see that software was a passion, not just something you decided to do for a buck.

But grades are still useful.

131

After 20 years in the classroom, I’ve decided there is far more need for exceptions, far more inaccuracies, and far more corruption in the system than people realize-and far less benefit. I feel like there have to be better ways to motivate and encourage than a system that does so much collateral damage and is so easily abused.

132

Except even that is misleading. Your “10x to 100x” typically isn’t that much more productive because they can code 100x as fast as the average engineer. They are that much more productive because their presence enhances the entire team through their leadership and influence. Other developers become 2x to 10x more productive just by working with them.

So maybe one might look for hobbies outside of being an obsessive coder that demonstrate leadership and influence.

But again, much like @MandaJo, this gets into a subjective interpretation of whether a person should succeed based on one’s assessment of activities and circumstances. And as such, they are subject to the educator or hiring manager’s personal bias. So instead of basing decisions on objective measurements of ability or knowledge retained, they are based on how the evaluator feels about the subject’s home life, whether or not they played lacrosse with their fellow Kappa Sigs, or their own feelings on the fairness of the measurements themselves.

133

People can be a 10X or 100X developer for many reasons, and in my experience the truly exceptional developers may not be leaders at all. Often they hate management and just want to be left alone to code.

The reason some developers are 100X more productive than others include the ability to grind through a problem instead of going into analysis paralysis, consistently delivering hard coding tasks on time, having the confidence to push back on bad requirements or bad architecture, etc.

In the meantime, the worst developers can be much worse than useless. They code buggy software that costs many multiples of effort to find than to write, they miss deadlines and hold back the entire team, they confuse and pollute meetings with silly questions, they lean on better developers and distract them from their work, etc.

The 100X developer is the person you call when the team has been tearing its hair out with issues, and the project is stalling. They come in, focus like a laser on the issue, write a weekend full of code, and get everything moving again. Or they are the person who takes the task no one wants because it’s wicked hard, and knock it out of the park.

134

Which I think just proves the point that it’s very difficult to predict what will make someone an exceptional employee. Just in this discussion you have two very different perspectives on what “high performing” looks like, just in one profession.

Grades and schools and certifications and other credentials matter because they are the shorthand that gets you in the door. But once you are in, you still need to prove your worth with your individual skills and talents.

135

Credentials probably matter less in software than in most other fields, because it’s relatively easy to test for ability. And that’s why many companies have dropped degree requirements for developers. Well, that and the fact that you can graduate with a degree in comp sci from many places while being a useless developer.

And the decline of standards, even in Engineering, has pushed more and more companies to accepting only co-op engineering students. Then the companies get to evaluate them for a few months. If they are exceptional, they’ll be told a job is waiting for them after graduation.

Given the declining signal value of a degree, other alternatives emerge.

136

Developers are also often treated like a commodity resource. That’s why companies like Cognizant and Wipro exist.

Most companies can’t simply “accept only co-op engineering students” and then hope they will develop into seasoned engineers over years. And if they are exceptional, chances are they will leave in a few years to work for Meta or Google or whoever.

In fact, working for those companies (and others) often ARE the credentials. I always see people on Linkedin who put “ex-Facebook”, “ex-Big-4”, “ex-whatever” on their headline. I get it. They are well known and prestigious companies. But I mean really, if you were so impressed by them and they by you, why are you “ex”?

137

The problem is that the exceptional are so common among the students admitted to top universities like Yale that they are the vast majority of them. 80% of them are exceptional (to use the statistics given in the OP). They will get an A or an A- in most of their courses. The other 20% will get grades less than that much of the time. That’s how good the students admitted to top universities are these days (and it’s much better on average than it used to be). It’s all right to use grades to separate out the exceptional students from the merely good ones in universities that don’t get as good applicants as other ones. What do you expect top universities to do, give a D or an F to 10% of the students in every course because a community college will give at least that large a proportion to their students?

138

The thing is, the Pareto distribution contains Pareto distributions. The top 20% may capture 80% of the value, but within that top 20% there is a top 20%. So we should expect Harvard students to still fall on a curve - just one that skews to the high end of ability compared to the general population.

But it’s still useful to find out who the top 20% are at Harvard, and within that group who are the top 20%, or the top 4% at Harvard.

If everyone gets an A, how does an employer or a grad school distinguish between them based on transcript?

139

How often do employers choose between applicants by looking at their grades? Is that a thing that happens?

140

They don’t. They interview them. They give them graduate SAT tests. They get recommendations from their teachers. They ask to see any papers they have published in refereed journals (and some have published there). They ask them what specific topics in their field they want to study. They ask them which professors they want to be their advisors.