Quotulatiousness

April 5, 2014

Grade inflation at US universities

Filed under: Business, Education, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:42

Stu Burguiere looks at the remarkable increase in higher grades handed out at US universities:

I never went to college so I missed out on all the keg parties and, apparently, a surplus of good grades.

Contrary to the concept of school as you knew it growing up, A’s are pretty easy to come by these days. In fact the only thing you have to work really hard to get are D’s and F’s. In college today, an A is over four times as common as a D or an F combined.

It’s a drastic change from the 15% of students who received A’s in 1960.

The pool is a little higher today. Ok, it’s a lot higher. If you look at this chart you’ll see that 43% of all letter grades given today are A’s.

US university grades 1960-2008

And this sort of makes sense if you think about it. No one wants to pay $40,000 a year to hear that they’re dumb.

College is one of the rare businesses in which you pay them and at the end of the experience they tell you how well they did. If you’re a parent and you send your kids to school and they get A’s you feel good about the purchase. But if your kids get F’s you feel like they wasted your money.

And amazingly these institutions of higher learning, that do little other than indoctrinate kids against the evils of capitalism, sure do understand incentives.

“They, and they alone, will decide who the Racists are”

Ace on racism and the unofficial deciders on who is a racist and who is not:

Karl Lueger was the mayor of Vienna at the turn of the century, whose populist politics were often riven with anti-semtism — so much so that he was cited as an inspiration by none other than Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.

However, there’s a debate about how anti-semitic he actually was, and how much of an anti-semite he pretended to be for the sake of political positioning.

Lueger is famous for an answer he once gave on this issue. He was asked how he squared that fact that many of his policies were anti-semitic, while he counted many Jews among his close friends.

I decide who is a Jew,” he said, apparently creating his own definition of Judaism.

This flexible opinion on “who is a Jew” permitted him to both debase himself (and Vienna) with populist politics of hatred while simultaneously carving out a space for himself to consort with the Hated Other, as he might choose.

Similarly, today, White “liberals” have decided to sell out liberalism to the leftist, totalitarian goons of the Progressive Speech Police. They’ll join the Progressives’ hate campaigns against free speech and free thought — but only when those campaigns are directed towards non-liberals.

Playing to the Progressive mobs just like Luegar played to the Vienna ones, White Liberals reserve themselves the power to both traffic in hateful intolerance, and except themselves and their friends from the claims they otherwise inflict on others.

They, and they alone, will decide who the Racists are.

In the case of the campaign to get Dan Snyder to rename the Washington Redskins (because it’s an offensive, racist epithet), Ace points out that some racist terms are more equal than others:

Obviously no one names a sports club after something they think is substandard, or shoddy, or weak, or useless. People always object to the Redskins name by using the same example — “Well, what would you say if someone named his baseball team the New York N*****s, huh?”

But that’s stupid. No one does that. No one would do that. Because “N****r” is inherently a demeaning term, and a hateful one, and no one — no one — names their sports clubs after things they hate.

They name them after things they respect, or wish to emulate, or wish to associate themselves with. Thus the large number of teams named after great cats, and bears, and stallions, and even the gee-whiz technology of the 50s (jets, rockets).

And as for clubs named after types of people, all those people have a positive association; in football, especially, a martial-themed sport if there ever was one, those positive associations all have to do with virility and deadliness in battle:

Vikings.

Raiders.

Buccaneers.

Warriors.

Fighting Irish.

Spartans.

You do not see “The San Francisco Coolie Laborers” in the lists of any sports teams, nor the “Boston Drunken Irish Wife-Batterers.” All team names are tributes to the group in the nickname.

Some team names implicitly specify a race/ethnicity — Vikings, Fighting Irish. There is no commotion over this — people understand that when someone names a team the “Vikings,” they mean it a positive way. They are speaking of the fury of the Northmen — and not, for example, their propensity to rape and reduce much of Europe to a constant Twilight in which civilization could never advance too far before being pillaged and raped into rubble.

Nor does anyone seriously think “the Fighting Irish” is really about the Irish’s well-known tendency to over-indulge in alcohol and then get their Irish up. (Oh, what a giveaway.) And that one really does actually step right on up to the line of being a slur against the Irish — but we understand the intent behind it is playful, and positive. (Mostly.)

In fact, White Liberals currently on their jihad against the name “Redskins” make an exception for other teams with Indian nicknames — Braves, Chiefs, Indians, all okay. Not racist, the White Liberals have decided, although it’s unclear how they’ve come to this conclusion.

All three names, after all, do reference a specific race — Native Americans — just as surely as “Redskins” does, and for the exact same reasons.

But White Liberals know the difference. White Liberals can tell you who the Racists are.

Chris Kluwe’s suggestions for more constructive NFLPA texts-to-players

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

When they’re not on the playing field or otherwise engaged in preparing for the games, NFL and other high-profile sports players lead normal-ish lives. Most of them manage to blend in to the local community, but some achieve notoriety for their off-the-field antics. Chris Kluwe is still a member of the NFLPA (the union for NFL players), so he gets their occasional communications to the membership like this text message:

Mindful of the opportunity to help out some of those players whose off-the-field activities might get them into trouble, he has a few suggestions:

Tired of wine snobbery? Now trending – beer snobbery

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

In the Wall Street Journal, William Bostwick looks at a new aspect of the craft beer world — age-worthy beers and ales:

Still, you can’t buy just anything and lay it down to age. Not all beers get better with time. Hop-driven IPAs lose their kick quickly as light, heat and oxygen degrade the flavorful flowers’ acids and oils. Stone Brewing Co.’s Enjoy By IPA touts its bottled-on date as a badge, and the brewery’s cicerone [the beer version of a sommelier], Bill Sysak, recommends immediate consumption. Instead, Mr. Sysak stocks his personal cellar — 2,800 bottles and counting — with strong, dark and bottle-conditioned beers. The sometimes overpowering fusel alcohol notes of stronger beers, 8% ABV (alcohol by volume) and up, mellow over time; living yeast in bottle-conditioned beers adds character as it continues to ferment residual sugars.

Aging beers truly is an adventure. Sweet, bottle-conditioned Belgians dry out; fiery barley wines turn smooth and caramelly. Stone’s Imperial Russian Stout, Mr. Sysak said, “might be astringent, fresh, like espresso. But aged, it’s a delicious chocolate-coffee dessert.” One of the oldest he’s tried, a 1968 Thomas Hardy’s Ale, “was like an Oloroso Sherry: nuts, toffee, leather and smoke.”

The beers may be strong, but they must be aged gently. Aim for 54 degrees Fahrenheit — a mini-fridge with a temperature control is nice, but a dark interior closet works too. Mr. Sysak found a sweet spot in his guest bathroom. “People would open the cupboard and find all these rare bottles,” he said. Above all, you want consistency. Temperature fluctuations will age beer prematurely and might throw its proteins out of solution, turning the brew hazy.

He also provides a short list of age-worthy beers to start with, but (of course) none of them are generally available in Ontario.

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