Comment by philipallstar 19 hours ago
> Smith has administered similar exams for almost two decades; he had to grade his most recent exam on a curve to keep students’ marks within a normal range.
This is really silly. Just fail them. They are not customers.
They are paying for the education, but not for the degree, and they’re not paying to get a passing grade even if they do poorly.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree that we should just fail the students, clearly something is going on if the professor has to use a curve unexpectedly, but we shouldn’t just accept this as okay simply because they are paying.
Film studies is kind of well known for being a vanity degree for rich people's kids. At least all the film studies students I know from India who're studying in the US are without exception the kids of super-rich businessmen and politicians.
The serious ones are all either already working in the industry or studying at the super-competitive National School of Drama.
I think we're all in agreement about what should be the case, but in practice I think the majority are buying a degree and don't care about learning beyond the minimum they need in order to earn or fake their way into a job. Look at how people are flocking to AI. The typical person wants a button to press to give them an answer or complete a task. Every day we see headlines about people carelessly accepting laughably wrong LLM output.
Teachers/Professors are some of the biggest oppressors in society. They directly decide who gets to be poor and who gets to be wealthy.
Every negative grade they give is robbery of food out of your children's mouth. There's a reason they get their backs against the walls first during revolutions.
The book that coined the term "Meritocracy" was extremely critical of the concept for a reason. It is bad to try to have one and good to destroy the concept.
They literally are customers. They pay money in exchange for an education and a degree.
You start failing too many students, it becomes a risky place to enroll, enrollment drops, they can't cover their expenses, and they close.
Edit: I'm not defending this, just explaining it. It's inevitable under a private education system, unless you literally legislate and enforce grading on a curve within all private institutions, which doesn't seem to be a popular idea among voters in free democracies either.