Andrzej Pownuk wrote: } Then the degrees at school/university are random? } Well, I always suspected that :)
In fact, they are to a large degree. I have for several years been interested in modeling academic advising using Bayes nets. In the US universities, students have choices; in large universities, the number of options can be overwhelming, albeit there are constraints imposed by university and department requirements, and (possibly soft) constraints imposed by the student's goals and preferences. However, there is also the imprecision that comes from varying perspectives. My understanding of what it means for a student to do well is that they are earning As or Bs in their classes. (Our university offers undergraduates 5 grades, A through E, with E being a failing grade. Because of grade inflation, Cs are considered bad and Ds quite bad.) I have talked to students who perceive that they are doing well if they are passing their classes with Cs and Ds. I have also learned that advisors modulate their advice. For the good students (B-average and better), they tend to recommend classes in order to maximize the expected grades. For weaker students, they tend to recommend classes that the student is likely to pass. (Some informal comparisons show that these two strategies lead to different recommendations.) So university degrees here are random in two ways: in the actual classes the students take to fulfill the requirements, and in the performance the students show in those classes. One might argue that the actual grading is also random, dependent on both the congruence of grading criteria and student skills, and on the professor's mood. But I won't go there.
