Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and modern colleges.

The act of grading itself is what's wrong with colleges. Different people learn at different paces. Forcing everyone to work at the fastest rate and then judging them for not performing is what kills interest in subjects. People should be allowed to write tests when they want to, learn at the pace they want to decide for themselves when it's time to move on, because lets face it, not everyone cares about some prof's pet subject.

The problem is that higher education became something marketable and universities decided to sell diplomas instead of giving people a chance to learn skills they think might help them reach their goals.

It's one solution to a problem. Which is that the results of tests are not strictly measuring how well the students understood the subject matter, but are heavily influenced by the quality of the rest and course as a whole.

That is generally hard to measure and frankly there is little accountability for bad courses. At the worst end you have bad profs who are proud of high failure rates because they don't understand it as a failure to teach but as a seal of quality how rigorous their standards are complex the subject matter is that they are teaching.

Not that grading on a curve solves any of that, but it eases the burden on students.

Depends, is your goal in college to get a high GPA and look good for a job, or to truly learn and master content but not look as attractive on a resume without other projects?

Grading curves aim to mitigate punishment for the latter. It's part of why I could get a 2.5 GPA but still overall succeed in my career.

The foundational purpose of universities is truth-seeking, not job training. There's universities like Bologna, al-Qarawiyyin, Oxford or Cambridge that are more than 1000 years old.

The ultimate goal is knowledge cultivation.

You're more adapt to intellectual work only if you actually cultivate knowledge.

If all this college circus is, farming grades, then universities are ultimately failing at their job.

I don't disagree with you at all. But we both probably know that that isn't the reality as of the last half a century or so.I'd love to properly separate acedemia and create a bolstering apprenticeship/trades programs for several sectors to properly train a workforce, but there's basically zero momentum for that among white collar work.

Also note that GPA isn't just for jobs. Applying for school post bachelor's cares the most about a GPA. So a bad grade but learning a lot on a rigorous course can still male it hard to progress as a researcher or any other kind of specialized knowledge seeker.

Further reason to remove grades in university, if anything.

If job prospects are the focus then we should invest in proper trade schools detached from universities that focus on teaching marketable skills.

This is a thing in countries like Germany. My uncle works in maintenance of nuclear reactors there and he went through a trade school that focused on learning the relevant parts of the job.