As a university professor, I honestly don't understand the point of grading. Who will look at and care about grades? Likely company HR. But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free? Also, grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

> But then why should we (professors) do the screening for companies for free?

Corporations were able to convince future employees to pay for their job training (i.e school). Getting professors to do the screening is not much.

Wow. Do you care at all about the reputation of your university?

I worked briefly in post-secondary CS education a long time ago, before academia turned into the ideological warzone it is today, and if I said such a thing, I would've probably lost my job.

Also, grades have long been inflated

Then stop inflating them. This is also what standardised testing is good for --- but no surprise, so many are against it because it would just show how terrible they actually are.

"The fish rots from the head."

During my bachelor I remember getting a distinction for an assignment that I put a shit ton of effort into and being elated. And then finding out that my tutor had taken it to the board trying to make the case for a high distinction, and narrowly failing, but it then being archived as an example of the output that the class wanted anyway.

That bowled me over when I was young and still sort of working out effort/reward sort of stuff. I had put a lot of work into a lot of subjects where I wasnt very naturally talented and got a lot of mediocre results, but seeing that if I put the effort in continually I could make stuff thats worthy of recognition was amazing.

Meanwhile, my (now) wife was completing a diploma subject at the same institution and they were handing out pass/fail only. You could see a lot of people really confused about that. The quality of work that fit into "pass" ran a very large gamut.

If I'm studying something, it's nice to get an external assessment of how well I'm doing, so i don't fall victim to over-confidence or imposter syndrome. When you're dealing with new material it's hard to be truly objective about your own project level.

Grading is to provide your students with a goal, one that isn't so high-minded as "the goal is education". The human mind uses a "reward system", within a feedback cycle. If you want to do away with that, just because it's what you prefer, then you're ignoring the reality of being human.

I think the point is that your college/university want the earned credential to mean something.

Presumably you need some way to gauge the quality of your graduates

It saddens me to see how creativity seems to "peak" at "let's go back to how we did it in 20th century" instead of asking the better questions like you did.

Let's play this out further. How about high school, should there be grades there? Tests at all levels also typically involve a grade / metric -- are those included too?

>grades have long been inflated to a point we might as well just give everyone an A and let companies figure out how to select people.

Between this and a decline in junior hiring, this is sorting itself out in the form of sharply declining CS enrollment. Which is fine, except for anyone with an interest in keeping enrollment high.

You should know full well you need some method of determining if a student is competent enough to move on to the next class in whatever sequence. Perhaps universities are slacking on this front, but at a minimum a student who doesn't understand the basics of Calc I should not go take Calc II

During my undergraduate university, the best scores had priority when choosing the limited slot numbers, including the time slots and sometimes which professor we were to attend. e.g. I would pick Calculus MWF mornings, group two because professor XxXx was in charge; lower grade students who polled agaisnt me would be bumped to a different group, or to a different time slot, or not making it to the lowest grade cut