Its all Goodhart's law problem, but we are missing the forest for the trees talking about grades and tests when what we want is people to be educated, and critical thinkers and competent in their area and due to a comprehensive way to evaluate that we end up talking about grade inflation or how Yale vs Berkeley gives letters at the end of a semester
No one is intentionally lowering the quality of instruction or trying to trip students up. They are trying to get them to pass the same bar that generations of students before them passed fine...
>Intentionally lowering the quality of instruction, as well as deliberately trying to trip students up on exams
I was happy with the quality of the instruction, and I didn't feel I was being "tripped up" on exams.
It's not about "hunger games", it's about challenging students to learn a lot of material and learn it well. Again, if that's not what you want, just don't attend.
The number of places where this environment exists is getting smaller every year: https://xcancel.com/CJHandmer/status/2060144837157118307#m
I'm glad the professors at Cal are working to preserve it there.
Maybe we can use AI to create new exams that grade people on professional capability, and then gate entry into other professional degrees?
Hmm, Where would the teachers come from, and how good would the education actually be?
Universities exist as gatekeepers and credentialing bodies. Their purpose is to certify that a person has studied some topic in depth and is an expert in it. They promote education indirectly, by giving people an incentive to study.
A good university is one where anyone with a degree is guaranteed to be highly knowledgeable in their field of study. This makes it easier for anyone who might want to employ or do research with graduates, as there is no need to test their knowledge.
By this metric, universities have failed spectacularly. This is particularly obvious in computer science. Employers routinely ask CS graduates to solve data structure/algorithm problems in interviews, because a degree is not enough to prove that somebody knows this stuff.
You see this with Physics all the time. Even the people who are sufficiently motivated to try and teach themselves tend to neglect foundational knowledge (especially mathematics, but even stuff like Mechanics and E&M), try to jump into the advanced material (Quantum Quantum Strings Quantum Black Holes Quantum), and then fall into two camps: They either complain about how Physics using too much "jargon", or they read a bunch of "qualitative" pop-sci descriptions of the topic and then think they have an understanding of it.
At least with software, you can get pretty far just learning whatever tool is immediately useful to you, but fully self-taught developers still often end up with random holes in their knowledge.