I hate fucking grade grubbers.
They tell me a story. I feel sad for them and then get infuriated about the fact that they made me feel sad. Combiine all that with my anxiety and I end up with a panic attack. Shakes just coming to an end now.
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I mean yeah it sucks balls that you need all A’s and B’s to get into a school and I’m the lone C.
But I mean it’s the grade you earned. And honestly, my class is as easy as fuck. I make no effort to try to make my class especially difficult. All you have to do is complete the work and you’re locked in with an A or B. Getting lower normally means that you missed an assignment which was the case here and no effort was made to make it up or any of the sort.
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Yeah I had lots of them but also some major curveballs. Once had a guy come to me with the standard “sorry I missed the Friday deadline for the assignment but…” intro that you get from most people with a “family emergency” or “illness” (that is definitely a hangover and not the flu), but this one hit hard when he said “…my girlfriend was raped.” Like, damn, I’m always believing that on that spot because it would take a complete psychopath to make that up. And sure enough I read about it in the newspaper the next day.
I can’t find it now, but yesterday the colleges released their graduation information. Those who are talking about “don’t get an art degree, go in STEM” got what they wanted because the entirety of the growth in degrees in the last 10 years are in STEM and healthcare related fields. The humanities have flatlined over the last 10 years, and taken a huge hit during the pandemic with philosophy being the only degree that’s caught up to it pre-pandemic levels.
This was the totally shocking update that may actually be a dagger:
According to the police, candidates paid between $4,000 to $20,000 to get a member of the online cheating syndicate to take the test for them. In some cases, they were able to achieve scores as high as 780, a result that would put the candidate into the top 1% of GMAT test-takers in the world.
The idea that this was isolated to just 130 people is laughable, but that isn’t even the main issue. It’s that cheaters are highly over-represented in top scores, and it lead to a rat race of impossible score escalations. Total racket but people are onto it:
GMAT TEST-TAKING NUMBERS COLLAPSE
The GMAT has been under siege for years. In January, Poets&Quants reported that the number of GMAT tests taken in the U.S. plunged to a new low, falling to just 38,509 in testing year 2021 — a number that includes test takers who sat for the exam multiple times in a year when many B-schools were experiencing a boom in applications for their MBA programs. Overall, test volume declined 47.7% from the pre-pandemic testing year of 2018, when 73,556 exams were administered in the U.S. — and by 67%, or two-thirds, from 117,511 in GMAT’s record year of 2012.
Over the past three months, Rest of World spoke to more than a dozen people offering cheating services, and their student clients.
To pass spoken tests, some imposters, dubbed “teachers,” even appear on camera dressed up as their student clients.
The lucrative business has grown into what some test-prep professionals say is a multimillion-dollar industry specializing in baofen , meaning “guaranteed scores” in Chinese.
More than 10 thousand people may have cheated on international tests during the pandemic, two managers from cheating businesses told Rest of World . For some Toefl sessions, they could even obtain test materials, dubbed jijing in Chinese, in advance, the cheating professionals say.
Lol this article is amazing. ChEaTiNg IsN’t WiDeSpReAd tho.
Yeah TOEFL is obvious joke
Cheating aside, standardized tests just aren’t very good at identifying top performers. I aced both sections of the GRE that mattered, but I was probably in the bottom quartile of my grad school classmates in terms of talent.
I would guess the same is true in other fields.
What’s better?
Nothing else is very good at identifying top performers either though. Nothing easy to measure across a bunch of candidates anyway.
Not forcing people to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for something they’ll be cheated at just to get into college.
The Sklansky Fallacy
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I guess we could just lottery off the spots. Or nerf the good schools so it doesn’t matter.
Is it possible that pretty much everyone in your class aced them? GRE isn’t that hard to beat straight up.
Quite likely. My point is that the GRE has too low of a ceiling for competitive programs.
You’ll have to be more specific.
I guess I’m just not seeing the problem here. Maybe it couldn’t tell the difference between your classmates, but the real problem would be if your school took people who shouldn’t be there and/or left out people who should. And even then because of the subjectivity involved in admissions, they would have to be pretty big mistakes before I’d go blaming the GRE (for that reason).