> Cohorts for programs with a thousand initial students had less than 10 graduates. This was the norm.

And why is this a flex exactly? Almost sounds like fraud. Get sold on how you'll be taught well and become successful. Pay. Then be sent through an experience that filters so severely, only 1% of people pass. Receive 100% of the blame when you inevitably fail. Repeat for the other 990 students. The "university thanks you for your donation" slogan doesn't sound too hot all of a sudden.

It's like some malicious compliance take on both teaching and studying. Which shouldn't even be surprising, considering the circumstances of the professors e.g. where I studied, as well as the students'.

Mind you, I was (for some classes) tested the same way. People still cheated, and grading stringency varied. People still also forgot everything shortly after wrapping up their finals on the given subjects and moved on. People also memorized questions and compiled a solutions book, and then handed them down to next year's class. Because this method does jack against that on its own. You still need to keep crafting novel questions, vary them more than just by swapping key values, etc.

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an hour ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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musicale an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If teaching is the goal, a 99% failure rate seems counterproductive.

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jmye 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> And why is this a flex exactly? Almost sounds like fraud.

Do you think you're just purchasing a diploma? Or do you think you're purchasing the opportunity to gain an education and potential certification that you received said education?

It's entirely possible that the University stunk at teaching 99% of it's students (about as equally possible that 99% of the students stunk at learning), but "fraud" is absolute nonsense. You're not entitled to a diploma if you fail to learn the material well enough to earn it.

	▲	perching_aix 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think one applies to university to just purchase themselves a diploma, nor that they should be magically absolved of putting in effort to learn the material. What I do think is that the place they describe sounds an awful lot like people being set up for failure though, and so that begged the question as to why that might be. I should probably clarify that I wasn't particularly serious about my fraud suggestion however (was just a bit of a jab rather), as that doesn't seem to have made it through. If teaching was so simple that you could just tell people to go RTFM then recite it from memory, I don't know why people are bothering with pedagogy at all. It'd seem that there's more to teaching and learning than the bare minimum, and that both parties are culpable. Doesn't sound like you disagree on that either. > you're purchasing the opportunity to We can swap out fraud for gambling if you like :) Sounds like an even closer analogy now that you mention! Jokes aside though, isn't it a gamble? You gamble with yourself that you can [grow to] endure and succeed or drop out / something worse. The stake is the tuition, the prize is the diploma. Now of course, tuition is per semester (here at least, dunno elsewhere), so it's reasonable to argue that the financial investment is not quite in such jeopardy as I painted it. Not sure about the emotional investment though. Consider the Chinese Gaokao exam, especially in its infamous historical context between the 70s and 90s. The number of available seats was way lower than the number of applications [0]. The exams grueling. What do you reckon, was it the people's fault for not winning an essentially unspoken lottery? Who do you think received the blame? According to a cursory search, the individual and their families (wasn't there, cannot know) received the blame. And no, I don't think in such a tortured scheme it is the students' fault for not making the bar. If there are fewer seats than what there is demand for, then that's overbooking, and you the test authoring / conducting authority are biased to artificially induce test failures. It is no longer a fair assessment, nor a fair dynamic. Conversely, passing is no longer an honest signal of qualification. Or rather, not passing is no longer an honest signal of unqualification. And this doesn't have to come from a single test, it can be implemented structurally too, so that you shed people along the way. Which is what I'm actually alluding to. [0] ~4.8%, so ~95% of people failed it by design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_of_1977%E2%80%931978_%28...