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<p>You would have still had a degree. Plenty of employers just want a degree, without regard for what type of degree or what grades you obtained. Granted, those employers don’t offer great jobs, but hey, in this economy, at least it’s a job. </p>
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<p>And that is in itself highly arbitrary. American Studies could decide today to vastly increase the difficulty of the major by simply deciding that a few smaller percentage of its students will actually graduate. After all, that is what American Studies PhD programs presumably do: only a tiny few people in the world are qualified for that PhD. </p>
<p>Hence, you seem only to be reinforcing what I said: academic standards are arbitrary. </p>
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<p>But that doesn’t speak to the issue that just because an activity is subjective doesn’t mean that we can’t judge it. For you to say that good and bad movies exist is to concede that there is such a concept in movie-making as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and that we can actually ascertain between the two. </p>
<p>Like I said, not every movie receives an Academy Award. Some movies will receive Razzies. So why is it then so controversial to lower the grades of the ‘bad’ humanities students? After all, movie critics are merciless in lambasting ‘bad’ movies. Nobody is proposing to give a Best Picture Oscar to Vampires Suck. </p>
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<p>Maybe it has to do with instructional quality. Maybe it has to do with the difficulty of whatever the exam questions are. Maybe it has to do with the incompetence of the students. It doesn’t matter. The upshot is that engineering grades, by themselves, tells you little about the absolute level of somebody’s actual engineering knowledge. Does an A mean that he knew 30% of the material on his exams, or 90%? Who knows? Grading is arbitrary. </p>
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<p>And maybe that’s where the exam averages should be for other majors as well? If not, then why not? After all, if it works so well for engineering, why not others? </p>
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<p>I was simply talking about the notion of stores providing onsite show models.</p>
<p>Now to your story, well, frankly, your customer should have had recourse. Otherwise, it seems to me that you’re simply interested in propagating injustice: just because one car customer got screwed, engineering students should be likewise screwed. </p>
<p>And even if you do believe that engineering students should be screwed, fine, then I don’t know why you’re not interested in applying the same philosophy to other majors. If engineering should fail out plenty of students, then so should the other majors. </p>
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<p>Do you have any alternatives? </p>
<p><a href=“1”>quote</a> I have no stake in making engineering a better gateway for non-engineering careers, and while I AM interested in getting more good engineers, I don’t see how grade inflation gets us there. I also see no merit in feeding more engineers to the Marshall committee when the number of engineers with GPA’s in the appropriate already far exceeds the number of prestige fellowships available, especially when compensation and funding in graduate education already substantially favors STEM fields.</p>
<p>(2) Even if they did not raise a formal cutoff, I would expect to see little change. Just as major graduate programs often list an official minimum, there is still often a preliminary step where some relatively junior staff member culls the group for the top X%, generally based on relatively arbitrary criteria. Or do you see many 3.5 GPA admits for MIT grad programs?
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<p>Your points (1) and (2) actually contradict each other. If raising engineering grades would result in little change anyway (because HR departments and grad-school adcoms will “rationally” raise their GPA requirements), then there is no reason not to do it. After all, “incompetent” engineering students will continue to not be hired or enter grad school anyway. So what’s the harm? At least they will be able to find other jobs in other fields that simply require some college degree - the same jobs that those American Studies 2.1 GPA students find. </p>
<p>It seems to me that what you’re actually afraid of is that HR departments are not rational - that they will not raise their GPA screens and hence some ‘incompetent’ engineers will now be hired. But that would necessitate conceding that firms do not always behave rationally. </p>
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<p>I have no problem in having all of failing irrelevant grades being excluded. </p>
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<p>But we do have cause. Obama and Romney - the putative Presidential nominees - have both publicly stated that the nation faces a challenge in producing sufficient engineers to meeting the threat from Asia. Hence, this seems to be an area of bipartisan concern.</p>