I think the argument sounds good, but for example, does it hold up to Pontet Canet banning several big critics?
From my own perspective, Pontet-Canet looked embarrassing for doing that, and I guess once it becomes multiple bans, I’m much less likely to view the critics themselves as the problem… a bit like the volume of bans Squires indulged in, pretty clearly indicated that he was the issue on ebob, more than those he banned.
Who all got banned?
believe NM and WK did?
#troublemakers 
The tasting note is of more importance IMO. The scores are definitely higher than they should be as a 100 point scoring column should see 80-89 and 70-79 point scores given. Wines can’t all be 90+ (A grade wines).
If you recall, there was a time when Olympic scoring for events like figure skating and gymnastics had run up against the top of their range, such that they could hardly differentiate one top competitor from the other, and so they reset the scales for harder scoring and that allowed some way to differentiate one great performance from an even greater one.
But they had just one group of scorers, and control over that. In something like wine criticism, there is no realistic collective action to reset the scale so you can allow better use of it to communicate about wines.
Grade inflation is happening everywhere in life. I read that the average GPA at Yale is now over 3.8, and I think other peers of theirs are similar. It went from 3.4 in 2002-2003 to over 3.8 in 2020-2021.
They say “well all the students are so good now,” but even if that’s true (which it probably isn’t), the whole point of grades is to differentiate between students who did okay, did well, did great, or were truly exceptional. To provide incentive and reward for those who do great or exceptional work. If all of those get an A, then you might as well not have grading. It serves hardly any purpose if you’re going to give 85% of every class an A and the other 15% a B.
If you actually believe “everyone who gets into [highly rated university] is someone who will deserve As for all their college work,” then just get rid of the grades entirely.
3 Likes
I do agree that it is valuable to know, but with a finite amount of reviews, there are so many producers and wines that deserve the attention and publicity.
I would say the major difference between movie and wine is the visibility. If you make a negative review about wine, it will almost never be seen. Retailers are where most people see scores, and they only post the highest score. While even for those like us who subscribe, I would assume we aren’t searching the lowest scores of a report as often as we are searching for the highest. The small percentage of views, then comes down to when we look up that particular wine.
There is a good book from 2018 called The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan, where he talks about the inefficiency of our education system, upper level education in particular. Worth a read if you are interested in that realm. I disagree with many things that he writes, but there are a ton of really valid and important things in that book imo.
1 Like
The educator in me cringes at this statement, but I do know that this sentiment is widely held.
1 Like
What would you suggest instead? This seems to be happening in education anyways.
My daughter’s school doesn’t even give prizes for field day anymore, you just get a t-shirt for showing up. I guess it’s
all part of our national slide towards mediocrity.
2 Likes
Grades have two audiences. One is the outside world, and for that audience, Chris is right. And that audience is the one that causes grade inflation. I don’t know how many times in my career, I had a student come in to protest his or her grade because they needed a higher one to get into Med school or Law school. And I had a canned answer: write a better paper, bet a better grade. If you think if have not understood or misinterpreted what you did write, tell me how and why the paper is better than I thought it was, not what grade you think you “need.”
This leads to the second audience, which is the student. A grade should tell them how they are doing relative to the standards for this kind of work. It is only valuable with detailed comments about how to improve. Indeed, for this audience, Chris’ supposed ad absurdum suggestion not to give grades is absolutely right. It is the comments praising achievement and critiquing fallings short that matter.
3 Likes
In my view, grades should be a reporting tool that reflect to what degree a student has mastered the learning objectives for a particular unit of study. Letter grades are a particularly blunt way of reporting these results, but they are familiar to parents, so they are useful. If a group of students have all demonstrated mastery of the learning objectives, I see no problem in reporting that progress by awarding them all A’s.
6 Likes
I believe this is absolutely true. The only excuse for grading on the curve is for certain disciplines (math being the obvious one) in which the only accurate test is one that finds the limits of a student’s abilities and thus exams are designed that are impossible to answer every question perfectly. In this situation, how well students do must be measured against each other because that relative performance is the information one is seeking. For Chris’ statement about first audience grading, what Charles says is true: the point is informing that audience of how well the student masters the material. And it is theoretically possible that all students will pass or that all students will fail. Theprobability of either situation being the case, though, is sufficiently unlikely of that being the case is such that if it happens to you more than very rarely, it is probably time to reflect on your standards.
A useful excerpt here. Even as grades get increasingly inflated, students are doing less and less work. Which seems to undercut @Charles_Perry ’s hope that the high grades are deserved, but it doesn’t actually disprove it.
Last winter, in a survey of four-year-college students, 64 percent said they put “a lot of effort” into school. Yet even among these self-described hard workers, less than a third said they devote even two hours a day to studying. In 2010, economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks calculated that in 1961 the average full-time student at a four-year college studied about 24 hours per week; by 2003, that was down to 14 hours. We’ve normalized a college culture in which students believe that 20 or 25 hours of class and study time combined constitutes a full week.
And yet, while workloads are down, grades are way up. Although the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson has fretted that Harvard’s students are subject to the “absurd expectation of constant productivity,” grade inflation has been pervasive at selective colleges in recent decades. (Harvard’s average GPA climbed from 3.0 in 1967 to 3.8 in 2022). And elite college students know that, once admitted, they needn’t worry about earning a diploma—since their institutions brag about their 96 percent completion rates.
I think decreasing actual academic demands are one big item in the race to attract students and dollars, along with sports experience, student facilities and amenities, Greek life, etc. It’s a feature, not a bug.
I think a much better case can be made that wine score inflation is supported by rising average quality in premium wines, than that school grade inflation is supported by ever higher-achieving students.
2 Likes
Wouldn’t it depend on sample size and selection if any.
Our double maths sixth form class of just three people all got As. I think that would be the expected result. But across a large population or smaller random sample you’d expect a spread of results.
This is probably true, although I do find wine scores sillier than school grades. Wine scores seem to be as much (if not more) about the scorer than the actual wine.
1 Like
At least until my retirement in 2015, one of the premier elements of a University’s attractiveness for eliciting admissions was its standing in the annual rankings in the US News and World Reports annual listings. The rankings there were to a great part determined by their evaluation of academic quality (we will, for the moment, just stipulate that those rankings were accurate). The higher you were, the better your chance of getting a larger pool of admissions applications. Thus the very highest ranked universities had the ability to be most selective in their admission. Try getting into Harvard, Princeton or Yale, as opposed to even really excellent places like Amherst, Williams, Reed, etc. etc. There are a lot of causes for the decline in student abilities, many of them having to do with the decline in high school curricula for numerous reasons. And that declined quality does force changes to expectations in university courses. But that decline is a bug, not a feature. Having the reputation as a party school is not great for seeking admissions applications.
Not sure ‘academic quality’ is really the precise thing being measured by the rankings. They have no data on the syllabi or what actually occurs in the classrooms.
They do have data on graduation rates, retention rates and employment post graduation, which are all boosted by higher grades. I think this has gotten even more intense at the private schools where the student-as-customer-to-be-satisfied framework has come to the fore in recent years.
Obviously lots of variation across all sorts of dimensions.
Being a party school can absolutely boost applications and thereby shrink the admissions rates. Very few schools are playing the Ivy + game.
2 Likes