No that's the actual reason. During the Vietnam war you would get drafted unless you were in college, which means that anyone who failed out of college was basically put on the next plane to the jungle to get killed. Since most of the faculty were anti-war (or at least relatively liberal) most colleges either dropped the grading system entirely or else made grading significantly easier.
- Grades don't mean anything, so there's no reason to give people bad grades. I know I quote this all the time on HN, but only because it's accurate: "A grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material."
- Despite the fact that grades don't predict workplace performance at all, companies still use them to hire people. (Basically because it's a legal way to keep out black people.) Because of this, schools can boost their US News & World Report rank by giving people better grades, since starting salary factors into the rankings in many years.
- Schools are basically run as businesses these days, and that's what the customers want. Asking why schools keep inflating grades is kind of like asking why McDonald's keeps making their chicken nuggets taste so fucking delicious.
-I don't know about you, but if I had to hire between 50 A students and 50 D students, I'd hire the A students.
-Schools in Africa grade students, who are they trying to keep out?
-Some schools might be run as a business; I think most aren't (they're subpar and inefficient). If they are, they're run as a mom and pop. If San Francisco schools were businesses, they'd have gone bankrupt and displaced a while ago.
There are only a handful of studies because it's considered kind of a dumb question to ask. But Alfie Kohn references some of them in his books, I think in What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated? But the ones that exist consistently show the same thing.
This includes the huge internal study that Google HR did:
"Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people."
"When all this was completed, Dr. Carlisle set about analyzing the two million data points the survey collected. Among the first results was confirmation that Google’s obsession with academic performance was not always correlated with success at the company."
The article you link to and quote, while saying grades are less important than Google thought, goes on to say that progressive Google after doing this study and at least partially implementing its new system "Last week...hired 6 people who had a below 3.0 GPA." 6 out of an estimated 200 weekly hires. That's a far far cry from D student = A student and nobody can tell the difference. Also, all of the direct quotations from Google people in the article talk about years spent in academia, degrees like doctorates, and interviews being the poor predictors. Some of the best programmers I know dropped out of high school. Doesn't mean I couldn't tell apart a room of A students from D students or that I couldn't use the A students better for many jobs I might need to fill.
Any citations for this? I can buy that this is the case for some jobs, from some school districts, for many students, across a certain distribution of grades, some number of years after graduation. I have a hard time believing that a D student who barely passed college will do just as well in a new consulting job as an A student, simply because the A student probably has actually learned a hell of a lot more useful information.
I think that's a reasonable principle to apply, but at least as stated by the Wiki article it refers to avoiding "attributing irrationality, logical fallacies or falsehoods to the others' statements, when a coherent, rational interpretation of the statements is available."
Now if law schools have a rational argument for why they still use grades to determine who gets into law school even though it has been shown that GPA has zero correlation with ability as a lawyer, and that its main effect is to keep black people out of law school, then I'd love to hear it. But note that they would need a rational reason for doing this, not just any reason.
...even though it has been shown that GPA has zero correlation with ability as a lawyer...
A charitable interpretation of the actions of law school admissions departments would simply be that they don't believe this "fact" (a citation for which is desperately needed).
Further, you are attributing anti-black racism to a group of people (law school admins/profs) who routinely engage in pro-black racism (see, e.g., Grutter v. Bollinger). It doesn't even make sense.
"Finally, the "draft fear" explanation cannot explain why a very similar pattern of grade inflation has occurred over the decades in Canadian universities which were spared the tumult of the Vietnam protest era and student fears that they might be drafted and sent overseas to fight and die."
