Pressure to pass mediocre students forced me out of academia

This is happening in UK HE as well. Grade inflation is rampant in the UK at all educational levels. Grades and degree classifications are now pretty much meaningless to employers as they do not denote capability nor knowledge anymore. UK universities do this to attract more students by dishing out more 1st class degrees at the expense of diluting academic rigour and quality standards. It's all about what undergraduates want and their 'uni experience' ala Disneyland approach to HE. Pretty pathetic state of affairs really.

Lowering of standards is not only happening in private universities. As deheuty has commented, grade inflation in the UK is widespread: for example, the proportion of firsts awarded on the specialist economics degree at my institution has risen from 10-15% to close to 50% over the past 20 years - a change not unrelated to financial incentives. And I recall an Australian university introducing different marking criteria for overseas students 20 years ago in order to reduce failure rates.

A very sensible recommendation viz private universities. We have to recognise that they are differently motivated and act.

A very sensible recommendation viz private universities. We have to recognise that they are differently motivated and act.

I find that that newly created 12 months long MSc courses are pretty bad. They have students from such a diverse backgrounds (degrees from different disciplines and usually from lower ranked universities) such that the common ground in the cohort is very basic. The outcome we can achieve is very low, lower than a BSc level. Many of these students would not pass on the equivalent integrated masters programme (even with grade inflation), yet everybody seem to graduate. The admission process is non-existent, there is no filtering by ability, it is first come first served.

Agree with the comments above but here is an alternative view. It may actually be a good thing that grades become meaningless - In the job market, caveat emptor will apply. Recruiters will improve their methods to separate the wheat from the chaff (not that they dont do it now, most good rectuiters do it). Examinations and ever more complicated methods of assessment as the only way of measuring performance will disappear. A good analogy is a traffic light. Better no traffic light than an unreliable one. Academics can use the easing of workload to focus on improving their research and teaching. Teaching quality will actually improve as academics can teach new, exiciting, advanced and challenging material without worrying about grade distributions and pass percentages etc. We might actually get to see research led teaching.

It's been going on for years. Back in the 1990s I was an external examiner at an African university where one of the Lecturers with a doctorate from a UK university had written a marking scheme that was not factually accurate. I could not fault the students who had written the wrong answers because the lecturer had taught the wrong things!

The lowering of standards is profound in the online schooling communities. When you can quite literally have all the "cheat" materials you need to take your test for your online class where no one can see you, it is solely up to the students morality if they choose to cheat or not.

This problem is not confined to private universities. I quit my tenure track job for very similar reasons (amongst other) from a relatively big (10,000 students) state university. Over the years I felt more like a sales man at a commercial enterprise, and we had to keep the students happy by all means.

When standards are lowered, cheating becomes rampant because as students progress, they don't have the background knowledge they need for upper level courses. It becomes impossible for most of them to pass legitimately, so you give easier exams which you grade more liniently and you overlook cheating. It's extremely demoralizing.

Educators are service providers, not gatekeepers or managers. Their role is to teach, their craft is to engage students' minds and interests. Students pay dearly for teachers' services and the only meaningful return is a passing grade and a degree. Withholding those returns makes the transaction fail of its essential purpose. And for what? Self-gratification of teachers who misperceive their roles? Employers don't care how applicants scored at their "non-elite" colleges. Licensing agencies don't rely on educators' assessments in admitting practitioners. The memorable teachers in my long educational experience were the ones who engaged and inspired me. Not the few who thought they were protecting society by harshly grading.