WHY SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE COLLEGE GRADUATES ARE DUMBER THAN A SACK OF HAMMERS

If you ever needed more proof that a college education has become a virtual joke, check out the chart below. Higher Education should be renamed Lower Education, since the standards of excellence have been lowered so far, any moron can get a degree. With a large distribution of students, grades should resemble a bell curve. I learned that in my college Stat class. That would mean approximately 15% to 20% A’s. 

Shockingly, back in the 1960s & 1970s about 15% to 20% of students got As. Did college students suddenly get super smart over the last 15 years? Based on the chart, we’ve got some real Einsteins out there. The number of A grades has skyrocketed from 30% to 45% in the last fifteen years.

This is a fucking joke. This is the same time period in which every moron who can spell CAT has been able to matriculate into college with the trillions in student loan debt being peddled by Obama and his minions. We know for a fact, based on SAT scores, that at least 50% of kids in college aren’t intellectually capable of succeeding.

So the solution is to dumb down the curriculum and inflate grades because it is only about the money. Kids who flunk out don’t pay tuition. Our entire educational edifice of idiocy is a disaster. Kids graduating with 3.5 GPAs today aren’t half as smart as the kids graduating with 3.5 GPAs in 1980. The lack of intelligence and common sense is evident everywhere you look. The special snowflakes can be coddled and given A’s for doing C work, but that doesn’t make them prepared for the real world.

This country is so screwed and there is no way to unscrew it.

It’s never been easier to get an A in a college class (or more expensive)

DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images
College students are more likely to get an A than in the past.

Add this to the list of consequences of rising college tuition: Students getting better grades than they deserve.

A’s were the most common grade on college campuses in 2013, accounting for 45% of grades awarded to students, according to an analysis of grade data at more than 80 schools by Stuart Rojstaczer, an independent researcher, and Chris Healy, a computer science professor at Furman University. By contrast, college students were most likely to get C’s leading up to the Vietnam War, accounting for about 35% of grades awarded. The two researchers have been collecting and reporting on grade data for years. Monday’s release marks the latest version of their analysis.

Stuart Rojstaczer and Chris Healy

The researchers’ data shows how A’s have become the most common grade awarded at colleges.

So how did we get here? There were two distinct periods of grade inflation, according to Rojstaczer. The first began during the Vietnam era, when many professors began elevating grades in part to keep male students from flunking out and being forced into the draft. But flagship public colleges and private schools inflated grades beyond what was required to keep students from going to war.

Their rationale, Rojstaczer said, was to start awarding grades that were based more on a national average, so instead of comparing students with each other, they compared them to students at other schools. That meant that for example, fewer students got C’s because while they might have been doing average work on their campuses, their work wasn’t average compared with students at regional schools, the teachers reasoned.

The second, modern era of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s, has more to do with money than shifting academic standards. As college tuition rose, eating an ever larger chunk of families’ income, university leaders and parents and students began to see college as more of a commodity, said Rojstaczer. That mindset fueled a desire among administrators to keep families happy.

“If you’re going to treat a student as a customer, the customer is always right,” said Rojstaczer, who is a former Duke University professor and novelist. “You want to please them and how do you please them? You give them the grades they want instead of the grades they deserve.”

Some have argued that the higher grades reflect a higher caliber of student. While Rojstaczer and Healy acknowledge that may be true at some universities, they say there hasn’t been a significant enough change in the quality of students since the 1980s to account for the uptick in grades during that period.

Though students may like getting more A’s, grade inflation can dilute the quality of their education, Rojstaczer said. “It reduces the energy level in the classroom when a student walks in knowing that simply by showing up they can get a B+ or better,” he said. “Not all of them, but a significant percentage of them are simply going to show up.”

Some colleges have taken stabs at clamping down on grade inflation. Princeton University enacted and then ultimately abandoned a policy that banned any department from awarding more than 35% A grades. Wellesley College, the all women’s school in Massachusetts, is known for its policy that requires the mean grade in introductory level courses with 10 students or more not exceed a B+.

While these kinds of policies are successful at the university level, Rojstaczer said he’d like to see a more coordinated national effort by university leaders to make sure students get the grades they deserve. “This is in a sense nothing new, the intensity and quality of the educational experience at universities has waxed and waned for hundreds of years and we’re in an era where it’s on the downside,” he said.

 

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overthecliff

Is it possible that grade inflation is related to keeping kids in school and the money coming in? Surely not in the hallowed halls of academia..

Tucci78

Hm. I graduated during Johnson’s War on the Asian Land Mass with a gentleman’s 2.9 GPA and entered a U.S. medical school the next year. Considering what I’ve encountered in the way of medical students as preceptor and professor in the decades since, I’d had no reason to suspect that there’d been a “dumbing down” among those who’ve taking their degrees in the STEM disciplines, but the non-STEM types were obviously flakes, fruits, nuts and idiots even back in the ’60s (when it was accepted among those of us in the “hard” sciences that one could stand at a window in the third-floor analytical chem lab and piss out onto the Education majors milling in the quadrangle below and they’d be incapable of telling that they were getting wet).

But. then, Education majors have always been as the beasts that perish….

JIMSKI
JIMSKI

At least a bag of hammers are useful…………

Anonymous
Anonymous

Overthecliff,

Keeps them out of the workforce and unemployment figures too.

Stucky

Grade inflation has been an issue since at least the early 1980’s.

I took a part-time job at a local technical college — Ivy Tech, in Ft Wayne IN — I taught “Intro to computers” and a COBOL programming class.

I lasted three semesters. Just before the third semester ended I was called into the office. The conversation sorta went like this; “Stucky, last semester you failed two students. It’s YOUR fault for making the class too difficult. We don’t like to fail students at Ivy Tech!” I may have responded with “even if they’re fucking dumb-asses??”

Anyway, the semester ended. I “failed” another student, or two, iirc. And, then I quit.

bb

Isn’t this a reflection of the corruption that has taken place among the adults ( most leftists progressives administers )on college campuses? The adults know these young people don’t have the intellectual ability to do real university level work but they admit them anyway out of greed or some perverse idea of equality.Kinda like affirmative action . Look at the numbers of blacks admitted . Next look at drop out rates.

susanna

We were taking a major science exam. V. difficult. We were

encouraged to review the multiple pages to make sure the test

was intact. So I’m doing that, and half way through a student

heads down to the instructors. Uh oh, she found an error.

Nope, she was finished…and she got an A. Always. Me too.

But imagine, done in ten minutes? Some people are smarter.

More than 10-15% A scores? I don’t think so.

College, for the most part, is worthless and useless.

Tucci78

When told “We don’t like to fail students at Ivy Tech!” Stucky hazards that he “…may have responded with ‘even if they’re fucking dumb-asses??’”

Having only had grading responsibility for medical students, I’ve never been in a situation where the assessment of intelligence figured into the job of providing feedback. if the kids weren’t bright as hell, how could they have survived the first two years of med school and gotten into the clinical training I was supervising? What I was obliged to rely upon was my best perception of each student’s diligence in getting and using the information necessary to assess and treat the patient, and I figure that’s the model I’d have to use if I were charged with teaching in an undergraduate classroom.

I conceive of my job as an instructor to be that of making the subject matter apprehensible to anyone who’s willing to pay attention and otherwise put in the effort. I’m pretty well convinced that one could take the average U.S. Marine fresh out of Recruit Training and in six years – maybe five – make him capable of entering a residency match in any specialty you’d care to name, and the kid would succeed as a medical doctor. This stuff is voluminous as all hell, and complicated, too, but it ain’t exactly what you’d call rocket science.

Had I a student who was mensurably mentally impaired and therefore intrinsically incapable of higher ratiocinative function, I’d have to down-check him and get him out of any field of work where nitpickery is key, but the Stanford-Binet average scorer? Yeah, if I take on the job of getting stuff across to him, it’s my responsibility to find a way to do it – or make one.

You don’t blame a corked but capacious jug for the fact that you can’t get the stopper out.

Big Ben
Big Ben

I have a front row seat for the proceedings, teaching at the community college level. At that level, approximately two-thirds of the students are remedial (they need to bring their English, Reading and/or Math skills up to college level before they can proceed).

Back in the day (1990’s), two-thirds of the student body could be made fit to fight for what lied ahead at the University level. Today, it is closer to one-third (not necessarily the same one-third that need remediation).

What separates the pretenders from the contenders (in my opinion)? Habits.

The proliferation of social network, gaming, streaming (you fill in the blank), has sucked the majority of college age students dry of the habits they need to succeed.

Online classes further rob the student of the habits required.

Student X can’t pass college level reading, let’s give him/her a book and send them home to teach themselves.

Students need the structure of in-class instruction to form the habits that K-12 has robbed them of.

Perhaps, 25% of jobs require a University degree. Many students will financially injure themselves in the college boom (as many did during the housing boom).

With raises scarce, Administration yields to faculty in many areas (such as this).

Percentile grading “could” make a dent in the problem. Let the student confront their relative worth, before they spend all of that money.

Stucky

“Back in the day (1990’s), two-thirds of the student body could be made fit to fight for what lied ahead at the University level. ” ————– Big Ben

I suppose that’s true. But, I don’t know how!

I mean … if the student couldn’t master BASIC English or Maf in 12 friggin years of high school, then how in the hell do they get caught up in one or two remedial classes in college?? It seems to be an almost impossible challenge.

Stucky

goddammit!!! …. I meant 12 years of schooling …. not 12 years of high school! (Although, it took me almost that long.)

Big Ben
Big Ben

(Note to Stucky): Back in the day, the need for remedial education was much less (K-12 did a much better job).

Avraham Rosenblum
Avraham Rosenblum

STEM students that I was with were very smart. That was both at Polytechnic in NY and in Hebrew University in Israel. I do not think there has been any lowering of standards in Stem fields.

Ed
Ed

“These kids would perform better in school; their reading and math abilities would be vastly superior than otherwise. ”

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they’d catch a beat down from their peers for “actin’ white”.

James the Wanderer

Freshman engineering class in 1978 was trivial and basic: how to use a calculator (with a bonus chapter on how to use a slide rule!), conversion of units of measurement (Fahrenheit – Celsius & etc.), basic chain calculations (ft/min * min/hr *hrs / day = ft / day), and similar things you should have picked up earlier. Not a big problem for this small-town high school graduate; easy three hours in first quarter of freshman year.

It came time for the final, a couple hundred of us from several sections all together in the auditorium, three seats apart, heads down and scribbling. From the next row back and six seats down came a BOOM! Racked in frustration, the guy took his mechanical pencil and SLAMMED it INTO the fold-over desk surface; pieces of mechanical pencil went everywhere and a piece was embedded upright into the wood-like desktop. He stood up, muttering, grabbed his bag and handed in the paper, left without another word. Never saw him before or since.

In those days, some people would figure out they weren’t cut out for a life of endless numbers and computation mixed with exotic knowledge of materials, chemicals, electricity, physics, ….. and weed themselves out to another career. Nowadays they stick around until graduation, and get a degree in SOMETHING, whether they like it, have talent for it or not, and then go out and try to do it. Their professors are complicit in letting and aiding them to do so, while most must be shuddering inwardly at what the future holds.

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/TNBhistory/Machine/machine3.htm

rhs jr
rhs jr

For crying out loud, what a bunch of Liberal PC crap explanations. I was called in so many times like Stucky described that I took a better job too. Look at the chart esp 1965-70. The Warren Court’s unanimous (9–0) decision on May 17, 1954, stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and unConstitutional. About 1964, huge quotas were given to schools and employers for inferior Blacks and Federal money arrived at schools to build sports facilities and programs. Teachers had to give the Black students and athletes passing grades. To do that, the curves had to be Liberally adjusted and minorities given A’s whenever possible to average the D’s they earned. White students could engage in more drinking, sex, drugs, protests and sloppy work and still make A’s. Their learning went down another notch and grades went up another notch. Every high standard in America has been destroyed by the unConstitutional Quotas which are a violation of the 14th Amendment’s “Equal under the Law”. America is now a Spoils System, not a Meritocracy.

ThePessimisticChemist

@rhs jr – I’m not disagreeing with you, but I just want to point out that its gotten markedly worse in the last 20 years.

Hell, even in the last 8 years.

I taught college chemistry for awhile, a variety of courses, both under and graduate level. The decreasing quality in instruction that is required by the administration is jaw dropping.

Rather than forcing students to get better or pack it up and go home, the administrators are chasing those state dollars and force instructors to lower their grade requirements or look for employment elsewhere.

Our educational system is a pale shadow of what it was, and a cruel mockery of what it should be.

Rise Up

It starts at the high school level where lots of kids get passed just so the teachers don’t have to deal with them again. So they aren’t prepared for college-level academics. Plus there’s the money aspect for the colleges–enrollment drops if the institution is known for flunking out students and they lose prospective applicants.

Suzanna
Suzanna

Let’s face it, it is all a scam.

$$$…isn’t there any other motivator anymore?

My friend teaches in a Catholic college (pricey)

in their Nursing program. I have seen the “essays”

that have been turned in. Grammar, punctuation, sentence

structure, spelling, essential content (compare and contrast)…

all missing. Gibberish. The college gets extra money for their

“outreach program” in nursing…GED accepted. The students

don’t pay but the college gets paid.

Brian
Brian

Admin, checkout the stupidity going on here in Oregon. People pay for this shit?

http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2016/03/whiteness_history_month_begins.html

Hershel Pasternak
Hershel Pasternak

Its unfair to employers to give graduates qualifications when they are not really qualified. Govt depts and govt funded services dont matter, they are already useless. But business is forced to put people on trial with pay to see if they are wirth hiring or have hope of being taught.

Another problem is students grading teachers in university courses. Any negative ones come in and the teachers job is at stake so they just pass everyone even if they cant speak english. But at least they all get a good education in being PC so they can at least get paid to protest.

Bob
Bob

What Jimski said. And some of the people are more like a box of rocks!

We have a few PH. D.s here at work. They are not authorities in their respective fields. While they speak well and write well, they do not seem to reason on a higher plane. I have concluded that their doctorates are barely equivalent to what a Master’s degree was back in the day And while they can talk academically, their real world understanding and impact doesn’t appear proportionate.

The educational system has been watered down considerably, as many have commented. Good thing STEM subjects are resistant to such treatment!

Spinolator
Spinolator

Mo’ students, mo’ money… standards? what standards?

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