A recent article in the Communications of the ACM regarding participation bias in CS education research boldly exposed why higher education is dead. It has to do with the grade distribution of a CS class at a major public university:
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| This Is The "Dumb Bell Curve" |
This is not an atypical distribution for college classes in America and has been since the shift from the "attrition" model where poor performers go elsewhere to the "developmental" model where nearly every student accepted is ultimately awarded a degree. It should come as no surprise that almost no students are assessed as average with a cluster of non-performers at the bottom and everyone else pushed to the top. This situation is much worse than wholesale shifting upward of grades towards A's and B's (the average score shown above is a B- with a median of a B+) and away from C's - this is happening as non-academic factors are being heavily weighted in admissions. High grades are being awarded to students who not only could not have passed under the previous model but who would not have been assessed as college-ready in the first place. And this graph was presented with no apologies, with no shame. This is the way it is.
Colleges and universities are no longer in the education business, they are just in business. They are increasingly open about NOT educating our children.
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