Andrew Ng 公開反對大學高分限制比例政策

國立臺灣大學

最近哈佛有感學生成績逐年提高, 經教授投票決定之後要提出限制 A 只能給出 20% 的政策, 引發學生強烈反彈之外, Stanford 教授和 AI 的知名教育者 Andrew Ng 也公開反對此項防止成績通膨的政策. 原文複製貼上: ’‘’ Harvard University just voted to limit the number of A grades given in undergraduate classes to about 20% of the class. I’m not in favor of this. It deeply runs counter to how I believe education should be. We should hold a high bar, but also work mightily to support the success of 100% of learners, rather than a fraction. Harvard’s administration took this step — over the objections of a large fraction of the student body — to counter grade inflation. Grade inflation is real: Many universities have been awarding A and B grades to ever larger fractions of students, and this has caused grade point averages (GPAs) to become less useful as signals of student skill. At the same time, we want students to succeed. The heart of the question is the role of educational institutions. Should our goal be: - To help students succeed? - To judge students? Both of these have value. But my focus when working in education is almost entirely helping students succeed. To me, it is clear that many people want to learn, to be empowered, to build skills that let them do new things! This is what we focus on at DeepLearningAI. This philosophy is also why my online courses (going back to my early online Stanford courses on Coursera) permitted an unlimited number of retries for graded assignments. I believe in letting — and even encouraging — someone to redo something until they succeed. This is as opposed to standing in judgement of the fact they didn’t get it right the first time. Further, I want homework assignments to be designed primarily to help people practice and learn, rather than to judge their skill level. This is why I prefer to create “Practice Problems” and “Practice Labs” — questions that, when you think through them, help you to gain practice and reinforce what you know. As opposed to “Assessment Problems” designed primarily to judge skill. But won’t Harvard’s move make GPAs more meaningful and help prospective employers identify strong candidates? Having hired a large number of people from Harvard and other institutions, I can say confidently that GPA is not an important signal. We have screening and interviewing processes that give far more accurate ways to figure out if someone is truly skilled. I do not need a wider spread in applicant GPA scores to figure out who's really good! To be clear, there is also value in assessment. Even though standardized testing is much hated, high-quality tests like the SAT, ACT, GRE, TOEFL, etc. provide objective measures of ability in a domain. I find that most people want to learn and succeed. There are also people who want rigorous assessment (for example, to apply for school admissions), but this is a lesser need, and is not my focus when building educational products. Harvard is often described as an “elite” educational institution. There are two ways to be elite: One option involves limiting enrollments, and then even among admitted students, cap the number of people that do well at 20%. I would rather pursue a different path: Set a high bar and teach elite, cutting-edge skills, but strive relentlessly to help everyone succeed. This way, eliteness is defined not by excluding people but by helping as many people as possible to be excellent. [Original text: The Batch newsletter] ‘’‘ NTU 點: - 台大也有成績通膨的問題, 也是由老師主導推動限制高分成績. 這是少數教授、教育者公開反對高分限制政策 - Andrew Ng 來過台大演講大爆滿, 比起學生自己抗議可能稍微多一點公信力個人想法: - 我遇到許多老師似乎都更在意成績是用來 judge students, 可能是以前都卷哥卷姐有因此得利吧 - 現在資訊發達, 個人更認同 AI 時代更不需要用 GPA 來區分學生好壞, 有太多好的方式和資訊讓工作崗位或研究所去篩選好的學生 - 現在申請國外研究所特別是 PhD, GPA 頂多不扣分, 從來不會是什麼加分項吧