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Otterly Delightful's avatar

I can't express strongly enough how much I wish we had something like the Civilization Conservation Corps today. We really need to let go of college as the North star for every child - the credentialing issue trickles all the way down to elementary school so we have second graders worried about getting Bs. Not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur or an academic! But we've so devalued (literally) manufacturing, public service, farming, etc, it's going to be a tough sell. But like...we'll always need people to fix the roads and grow food and be social workers.

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Mohan's avatar

An underappreciated point about the Oxbridge system is that a student’s class depends mostly on end-of-year exams, and exam scripts are anonymized before being marked. Often the lecturer will not be the person doing the marking, and there are procedures in place to make sure that individual courses are not too easy or too hard (although those procedures are not perfect). So there is no sense in which different professors are competing with each other to give lower/higher grades, which removes much of the pressure for grade inflation.

I was horrified when I learned that in the US it’s normal for students to go to a TA or professor and beg for higher grades on individual pieces of work. That system seems to be open to so much abuse.

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