Should we have a socialist grading system in colleges?

[YoshiMoshi]

In college I wasn't as fortunate as wealthier students and actually had to work in college. As a result of having less time study, the wealthy kids generally speaking did better, they had more time to study. Should the students with better grades and 4.0 GPA take away 0.5 from their GPA and spread it amongst the people at the bottom to bring up their GPA? Me and very well off student have equal opportunity, taking the same class, same instructor, same homework problems, etc..

But that is not good enough. We should have equal outcome and all have the same GPA. The students with high GPA may have worked harder then me, or maybe some students just played video games and didn't do any work at all getting really bad grades. But it's only fair the students that worked really hard to get a 4.0 pay for the mistakes of the students with low grades or instead had their time of their life doing very little work, and barely studying.

The people that worked hard should pay for those who perhaps necessarily didn't. That's only fair! After all a student with very low grades may not get a job as a result. So the system is holding them back from going into the profession. So we must ensure everyone gets the same GPA.

Seems the way our country is going with all this student debt cancellation... No longer for equal opportunity, but equal outcome...

If you support student debt cancellation, then how do you not support a socialist GPA system? I can make the same argument for everyone getting the same GPA using the rationale! Millionaires may have a lot of money, but do I not have the same opportunity as them to be a millionaire?

 

[jbunniii]

If you give everyone the same GPA, then why have GPA's at all? They would be of no use to employers who actually do need a way to efficiently distinguish between less promising and more promising fresh-graduate applicants. (Obviously they do this in the interviews as well, but they don't have the capacity to interview everybody who applies.) If the schools were to abandon any kind of meaningful reporting, then employers would have to rely more on standardized testing, perhaps SAT/ACT or even IQ tests.

This is an even worse idea than student debt cancellation.

 

[fresh_42]

This is an even worse idea than student debt cancellation.

No. This assertion does not survive experiments. The grading system has some serious disadvantages, because it measures achievements which are not necessarily in the interest of neither student nor employer, and creates a competition along the wrong values. The experiences of schools which do not give ratings are much better than one might think.

In Finland, the country that remains at the top of benchmarking, students do not take the first mandatory tests until they are 16 years old. Although this does not prove a causal relationship, it does show that schools can be efficient without grading. (2014)

It is by far more complicated than black or white. The only purpose of the grading system is to provide some sort of comparability in order to distribute the rare offers among the many customers. Whether this measure coincides with what are favored values is a completely different question.

 

[russ_watters]

I can't tell if this thread is intended to be serious. It sounds like a snarky complaint. Either way, I don't think the politics of this are something we should discuss here. Thread locked.