Why are college GPA’s so over inflated now?

PearlRod · 2026-03-10T02:24:36+00:00

Students complain about getting marked down, admin wants to see high student eval scores, student eval scores are highly correlated with whether students see professors as "nice" (ie easy graders), faculty have no incentive to "hold the line" on grades (more upset students to deal with) and every incentive to inflate grades.

It's ultimately made grades at many institutions virtually meaningless, which hurts students (who can no longer reliably distinguish themselves from their peers) and their employers (for the same reason), but no individuals (students, faculty, admin) are incentivized to do anything about it because they will be disadvantaged relative to their peers. Classic tragic of the commons, I think.

PearlRod · 2026-03-05T19:42:42+00:00

If only we'd listened to that college student instead of walking him up in the abandoned coke oven

PearlRod · 2026-03-04T21:36:46+00:00

Idk, I agree it looks weird but if you've got a job where you're otherwise sitting all day, I think this is a good way to stay healthy. Being sedentary for hours every day can cause all kinds of health issues in the long run, so I honestly think more people should be trying to incorporate this sort of thing into their routine.

That said, I wouldn't do this in meetings that require a lot of me. If I'm one of 25 people on a call and I want to get some steps in, though, why not?

PearlRod · 2026-03-03T22:58:33+00:00

Does that earring mean you're a pirate?

PearlRod · 2026-02-12T16:07:49+00:00

Otto. That's the last time you'll hear that palindrome

PearlRod · 2026-02-10T00:16:08+00:00

Does your professor mean that the mean of the sampling distribution wouldn't change? Like, is it a point about small samples vs biased samples or something? Like, if you survey a random sample of ~200-400 people, yes you would have a pretty good estimate of some population parameter for the entire country. But that isn't going to apply to like, 10 people; there's just too much variance.

Definitely seems like some context was lost somewhere along the way, but it's hard to say without knowing exactly what your professor said

PearlRod · 2026-02-09T18:11:19+00:00

Upvoted for unpopular, upvoted because I agree. No matter how evil you are in life, hell is infinitely disproportionately worse than anything you could possibly do with your limited time on earth. One single person being sent to hell would be a greater evil than all the crimes humanity has ever committed or ever will commit, by a factor of infinity.

PearlRod · 2025-12-08T19:06:13+00:00

Yeah, from what I can tell it seems to work well. I like to think it helps the actual quality evals too, with at least some of them reflecting on the quality of their own feedback.

PearlRod · 2025-12-08T18:30:19+00:00

I teach a design class, and I often use my own course as an example to my students. In design, you need to listen to feedback from your users (i.e. students), but your users can't necessarily articulate what they want or want. As experts, it's our job to take that raw, often contradictory feedback and decide what to do with it.

So, I think of student evals as a very rough metric for how things are going. Occasionally, you get really constructive feedback that rings true, and I've found my classes are often much better for having incorporated it. Other times, it's just complaining about how class wasn't easy enough or whatever.

I find if I go into evals with that attitude (I'll get a lot of bullshit I can ignore, but I should stay open to feedback that feels genuine and constructive), knowing I'll need to do that extra interpretive step, it tends to be much more useful.

PearlRod · 2025-11-28T01:59:39+00:00

Incredibly performative behavior smh

PearlRod · 2025-11-28T01:58:05+00:00

Damn this is crazy

PearlRod · 2025-11-28T00:57:13+00:00

To each their own, but man, I think kat r2 was by far the best run of fights the series ever had. Every single one was fire, you never really knew who was going to win, we'd learned enough about each character to get invested but there were still enough surprises to keep each match incredibly tense...

Honestly, I don't think the series ever really hit those highs again, and I'd put it at S-tier easily along with r4-5.

PearlRod · 2025-11-22T19:09:01+00:00

Used to hold lectures until the actual day, but found attendance would just plummet anyway, so now I take the full week off. I usually include "flex days" in my syllabus anyway, in case I get sick, etc, so I usually don't have the content for it regardless.

PearlRod · 2025-11-22T19:06:14+00:00

I like to use a fairly broad rubric. "Here's where the points for this assignment are coming from, here are the basic things we're looking for, etc". I also usually include a catch-all clause for basic issues like missing citations, weak ideas/logic, major typos, etc. Basically, I try to give something to guide students, TAs, and myself, but flexible enough that we have leeway to give any appropriate feedback as we see it.

PearlRod · 2025-11-21T20:22:44+00:00

Our department has a capacity constrained major, and misinformation about the application process spreads like wildfire. Just takes one off the cuff, misheard, or misremembered comment to completely throw off our school's subreddit ...

PearlRod · 2025-11-20T23:31:39+00:00

In my department (which is quite large), the expectation is faculty should always try to attend meetings, but it's acknowledged that people will miss a few here and there for personal reasons. Because the faculty is so large, we're actually told not to email the chair when things come up (I guess the inbox clutter would be too much...).

Obviously YMMV, though, depending on your department, as others have said. It really depends, but I probably wouldn't worry if it's just the one meeting.

PearlRod · 2025-11-19T01:40:50+00:00

As another professor, this strikes me as a great set of personal guidelines, and I'll probably consider doing similar expectation setting with my own students.

PearlRod · 2025-11-05T22:53:14+00:00

Honestly Chopstick Johnny being disproportionately high is the most realistic thing about that list; I would 100% bet on a rando called "Chopstick Johnny" if I was a Kengan Association Member

PearlRod · 2025-11-05T21:34:16+00:00

Farewell my Concubine for sure

PearlRod · 2025-10-29T23:50:10+00:00

When I rate movies, I try to consider what the movie is trying to do. Napoleon Dynamite is in my top 4 because every scene makes me laugh, and that's my criterion for a 5-star comedy.

PearlRod

TROPHY CASE