Dave Vanness

Opinion | Universities are sending Trump a dangerous message Higher education is under attack. Drop the appeasement.

Read @arneduncan.bsky.social @ambpressman.bsky.social "When institutional self-preservation replaces moral leadership, universities abandon their core mission. This is a striking abdication of responsibility..from leaders entrusted with educating the next generation of citizens." wapo.st/4qomlXe

Nazi concentration camp prisoner population by year

ICE is currently holding around 80,000 detainees. Nazi Germany didn't reach this number in its formal camp system until 1942, nine years after seizing power and three years into the war.

That's pretty much the opposite of being able to clear his name

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A student in my program submitted an R36 last Spring that went unreviewed because AHRQ didn't have enough staff to convene a review panel. We only learned this after inquiring after the typical review date came and went with no notice.

Thinking about culture, I ask faculty what they think would happen to collegiality if granting tenure were norm-based rather than criterion based - i.e., awarded to the top 20% of assistant professors rather than those who have passed the threshold of excellence in teaching, research and service.

A cursory review of the literature (I am not an expert in this area) suggests norm-based grading contributes to perceptions that grades are based on intrinsic student skill rather than what is learned in a course, causing feelings of reduced agency and subsequent reductions in help-seeking.

As I put it in another thread, norm-based grading in the form proposed by Harvard makes A's an artificially scarce resource -- risking turning classrooms into performative "Hunger Games." It will be more important to outshine one's classmates than to achieve course learning objectives.

Major news outlets: Please consider prominently reporting what this all-star team of researchers has found.
www.nber.org/papers/w34791

"I do not get why this is so controversial."

See discussion beginning here. Norm-based grading has tradeoffs. bsky.app/profile/djva...

4% of $20 billion would generate $800 million in operating funds, which would fund an outlet the size of the Washington Post in perpetuity.

If I were a billionaire (McKenzie Scott, are you listening? ;) ), I would create a public trust media company, with an oversight board comprised of journalism scholars. The board, editors, and journalists would be paid from returns on an endowment invested in trust blinded to the board.

Amazing how Jeffries can pivot from "F* Trump!" to this warm shovel of nothing.

That's the fundamental problem with both social media and ad-revenue-supported news sites - as long as clicks generate more revenue than truth, we'll get this approach. It's a classic market failure, where the private benefit of truthiness exceeds the social benefit of truth.

ICE detainees from Maine being held under ‘inhumane’ conditions in Mass. facility, attorneys say An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson said the allegations of overcrowding and lack of access to lawyers are false.

Concentration camps: stories of as many as 50 people to a cell — men and women in some cases — with no windows and limited airflow, a single camera-monitored toilet, aluminum blankets, no showers and poor quality food.

If they earned an A by mastering the learning objectives of the course according to established criteria, then they wouldn't want a permanent seat in the professor's classroom - they would want to move on to the next level and/or topic.

From the article:

Why do we keep repeating lies before refuting them? www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/word...

A lot of faculty here seem favorable to this proposal. I wonder how they would feel if tenure were granted not on the basis of excellence in teaching, research, and service, but instead only granted to the top 20% of assistant professors? (Maybe that is already what Harvard does, who knows...)

Faculty Committee Proposes Cap on A Grades, New Internal Ranking System | News | The Harvard Crimson A faculty committee proposed a sweeping overhaul of Harvard College grading that would sharply limit A grades and introduce a new internal ranking system — changes that could nearly halve the percenta...

Agreed - this is very reasonable and good pedagogy. But not what Harvard is proposing to do, which is to put a hard cap on the percentage of As in a course, and also to create an internal percentile ranking metric for overall performance: www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

I agree that's reasonable, but it's fundamentally different from norm-based grading, though.

I do appreciate you pushing me on my assertion - it has led me down an interesting rabbit hole!

Other interesting avenues to track down - how students perceive their own performance under competitive norm-based grading (also from Liu, Wong and Hard 2024):

More papers to track down suggesting empirical evidence on competition (from Liu, Wong and Hard 2024):

This is prompting me more to learn about the literature in this area. Norm-based grading (grading according to distributions rather than criteria) affects student perceptions negatively compared to criterion-based grading (Liu, Wong and Hard 2024)

2. Why should a signal on the skill distribution matter more than a signal of individual mastery?

To put the shoe on our foot, how do you think faculty culture would respond if tenure were granted to only 20% of hires, rather granted on intrinsic performance relative to standards of excellence?

1. Not that I can find, but a fair amount of psychological theory (e.g. Kohn 1992, Garcia Tor and Schiff 2013) suggests so. Also, econ theory on forced distribution evaluation suggests that sabotage occurs, despite overall improvements in performance (e.g., Berger, Harbring and Sliwka 2013).

An A is not a "perfect grade" - most US grading scales put it at ~90-92% and above.

"So what I do? Hire based on network, past colleagues, recommendations. All prone to perpetuating biases."

-- as if employers / academic programs won't do that anyway. False dichotomy.

Turning grades into an artificially scarce resource will create harmful competition. Academic hunger games.

Agreed. bsky.app/profile/djva...