A lot of the comments I've read seem to be saying the equivalent of "maybe this is happening in those worthless liberal arts, but it's not happening in Engineering (or Computer science or the "hard" sciences)".
But in fact, the author of the Washington Post editorial is a professor of Geology and of Civil and Environmental Engineering (see http://www.env.duke.edu/faculty/bios/rojstaczer.ht ml).
So I would argue that if you accept his argument that grade inflation is occurring, than you have to accept that it's probably happening in all disciplines.
"We know how people act individually, and yet we can't extrapolate the behavior of entire societies from this."
There just happens to be an entire discipline dedicated to exploring the behavior of entire societies. It's called sociology.
Within society, there's an entire sub field that's been studying social networks for years. Things like how information is spread, how people get jobs, how diseases like AIDS spread, all have been explored using social network analysis.
If you want a mathematical description of "tipping points", take a look at Mark Granovetter's work on threshold models of collective behavior. Gladwell's book is based his work (though he only references Granovetter's work on how people get jobs).
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A lot of the comments I've read seem to be saying the equivalent of "maybe this is happening in those worthless liberal arts, but it's not happening in Engineering (or Computer science or the "hard" sciences)".
t ml).
But in fact, the author of the Washington Post editorial is a professor of Geology and of Civil and Environmental Engineering (see http://www.env.duke.edu/faculty/bios/rojstaczer.h
So I would argue that if you accept his argument that grade inflation is occurring, than you have to accept that it's probably happening in all disciplines.
"We know how people act individually, and yet we can't extrapolate the behavior of entire societies from this."
There just happens to be an entire discipline dedicated to exploring the behavior of entire societies. It's called sociology.
Within society, there's an entire sub field that's been studying social networks for years. Things like how information is spread, how people get jobs, how diseases like AIDS spread, all have been explored using social network analysis.
If you want a mathematical description of "tipping points", take a look at Mark Granovetter's work on threshold models of collective behavior. Gladwell's book is based his work (though he only references Granovetter's work on how people get jobs).