> 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.

I do not! A situation where roughly 1% of the class is passing suggests that some part of the student group is failing, and also that there is likely a class design issue or a failure to appropriately vet incoming students for preparedness (among, probably, numerous other things I'm not smart enough to come up with).

And I did take issue with the "fraud" framing; apologies for not catching your tone! I think there is a chronic issue of students thinking they deserve good grades, or deserve a diploma simply for showing up, in social media and I probably read that into your comment where I shouldn't have.

> Jokes aside though, isn't it a gamble?

Not at all. If you learn the material, you pass and get a diploma. This is no more a gamble than your paycheck. However, I think that also presumes that the university accepts only students it believes are capable of passing it's courses. If you believe universities are over-accepting students (and I think the evidence says they frequently are not, in an effort to look like luxury brands, though I don't have a cite at hand), then I can see thinking the gambling analogy is correct.

> I think there is a chronic issue of students thinking they deserve good grades, or deserve a diploma simply for showing up, in social media and I probably read that into your comment where I shouldn't have.

Yeah, that's fine, I can definitely appreciate that angle too.

As you can probably surmise, I've had quite some struggles during my college years specifically, hence my angle of concern. It used to be the other way around, I was doing very well prior to college, and would always find people's complaints to be just excuses. But then stuff happened, and I was never really the same. The rest followed.

My personal sob story aside, what I've come to find is that while yes, a lot of the things slackers say are cheap excuses or appeals to fringe edge-cases, some are surprisingly valid. For example, if this aforementioned 99% attrition rate is real, that is very very suspect. Worse still though, I'd find things that people weren't talking about, but were even more problematic. I'll have to unfortunately keep that to myself though for privacy reasons [0].

Regarding grading, I find grade inflation very concerning, and I don't really see a way out. What affects me at this point though is certifications, and the same issue is kind of present there as well. I have a few colleagues who are AWS Certified xyz Engineers for example, but would stare at the AWS Management Console like a deer in the headlights, and would ask exceedingly stupid questions. The "tuition fee extraction" pipeline wouldn't be too unfamiliar for the certification industry either - although that one doesn't bother me much, since I don't have to pay for these out of my own pocket, thankfully.

> If you learn the material, you pass and get a diploma. This is no more a gamble than your paycheck

I'd like to push back on this just a little bit. I'm sure it depends on where one lives, but here you either get your diploma or tough luck. There are no partial credentials. So while you can drop out (or just temporarily suspend your studies) at the end of semester, there's still stuff on the line. Not so much with a paycheck. I guess maybe a promotion is a closer analog, depending on how a given company does it (vibes vs something structured). This is further compounded by the social narrative, that if you don't get a degree then xyz, which is also not present for one's next monthly paycheck.

[0] What I guess I can mention, is that I generally found the usual cycle of study season -> exam season to be very counter-productive. In general, all these "building up hype and then releasing it all at once" type situations were extremely taxing, and not for the right reasons. I think it's fairly agreeable these do not result in good knowledge retention, do not inspire healthy student engagement, nor are actually necessary.