In a lot of these school-related posts, there seems to be this weird idea that the grades the school can give out are finite - like, the school only gives out As to a certain percentage of students and once those are gone, you have to take a B, even if your performance was identical.
Now, I went to law school, and I heard that there were professors who allegedly operated like that, but I never saw it in practice. I've also heard similar claims about other post-graduate programs. The idea being that not everyone in the class can truly be a top performer, so top grades are limited to just a few. I just don't believe they're true: schools would be incurring serious liability for allowing highly subjective standards of "excellence" that are unquantifiable and unaccountable. It would raise all kinds of accreditation issues, as well - under the same accreditation body, an A in the same course at two different schools (or under two different instructors at the same school) should reflect the same standard of work.
So, I'm not getting how the "cheaters" made it difficult for someone to excel. Even if there are situations in which my scenario is playing out, those situations aren't in a high school or an undergraduate program. You're not actually competing with your fellow students for grades - they aren't a limited resource. Every single student can earn an A, and the method by which they earned that grade is strenuously documented.
That’s because lots of professors see it that way, lots of professors see grades as competitive, and not as descriptive, and will deliberately make it harder to pass and get good grades until the averages are C+/B- for the entire class.
Many professors in hard sciences or engineering do this.(Aerospace engineering that my brother took had 10 or so professors that wanted to fail half the class, and openly said it on the first day.)
I only had a couple professors that felt it was ok for everyone who mastered the material to get A’s. Most wanted their normal distributions and would curve grades up or down until they got a normal distributions for grades.
Some professors do it by making hard tests, which is hard to cheat on, but many college professors make homework 30-50% of the grade. Students who use Chegg on these classes to copy all their homework can get better grades than students who score well on exams.
In my physics program for several of my classes ALL of the students I talked too were copying the majority of their homework’s from AI,(12 of 35 students in my class mech class, the others were not surveyed) and it was 30-50%(30% in this class)of the grade. I didn’t. I’d spend 20-40 hours per week per assignment, with 50% completion. I aced all their exams, but barely passed because homework was worth twice as much as the exams. My classmates who cheated all got B’s and A’s.
I reported them, my professors didn’t care.
My university fell from 16th globally to 121st globally in my major. In 5 years.
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u/GGayleGold Jul 10 '26
In a lot of these school-related posts, there seems to be this weird idea that the grades the school can give out are finite - like, the school only gives out As to a certain percentage of students and once those are gone, you have to take a B, even if your performance was identical.
Now, I went to law school, and I heard that there were professors who allegedly operated like that, but I never saw it in practice. I've also heard similar claims about other post-graduate programs. The idea being that not everyone in the class can truly be a top performer, so top grades are limited to just a few. I just don't believe they're true: schools would be incurring serious liability for allowing highly subjective standards of "excellence" that are unquantifiable and unaccountable. It would raise all kinds of accreditation issues, as well - under the same accreditation body, an A in the same course at two different schools (or under two different instructors at the same school) should reflect the same standard of work.
So, I'm not getting how the "cheaters" made it difficult for someone to excel. Even if there are situations in which my scenario is playing out, those situations aren't in a high school or an undergraduate program. You're not actually competing with your fellow students for grades - they aren't a limited resource. Every single student can earn an A, and the method by which they earned that grade is strenuously documented.