Incoming links: Normal distribution
This is likely a joke binet, but the idea is epic: its members would in principle take the hardest courses and purposefully get bad grades on them to improve the grades of others, as grades are always normalized to a Normal distribution.
The goal of our broken educational system is not to teach.
It is simply a test of who can learn the most in the least amount of time.
What is being learnt is of little importance. it doesn't matter if it is useful or beautiful things.
The useless exams are set exactly at a difficulty level that produces a Normal distribution of grades:The difficulty is just set for your particular group of students.
- too hard and everyone gets 0, so you can't split people well
- too easy and everyone gets 100, so you can't split them well either
University should focus on inspiring and not on evaluating Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
As of 2020s and much earlier, Ciro Santilli believes that undergrad studies were fundamentally broken (considering the Information Age which completely changed what would be possible) because university had only two goals, with the exception of a few enlightened professors:As a result, most students, who would not go on to do a PhD essentially do a simple trade: all their time, and possibly some money, in exchange for embuing themselves with the incredible name of a respected institution so they can get better jobs later on.
- rank students from worse to best so they can get into PhD programs.For regular jobs grades didn't even matter as much compared the prestige of your university (and therefore, university entry exam grades) and your ability to stand the stress of exams to get minimal passing grade.In particular, being able to rank requires setting the difficulty level at a point where you can see a Normal distribution in grades, and not have everyone at either 0 nor 100%.Also, this split could be caused by either shitty learning materials/conditions, or by mere volume. It doesn't matter.
- get money from the students. Of course, in countries where university is "free", this means reporting how many students you had to some government office so they can give you a corresponding budget. But you still have an incentive to enroll as many as possible.
Beauty, deep understanding, and learning awesome things comes basically as a second thought.