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Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7 (A-) GPA

262 points by universityguys 4y ago

madengr 4y ago
mbrodersen 4y ago
I got my MSc in Computer Science from a top University in Europe. 50% of students at the University dropped out within 6 months because of how hard it was. The University didn’t care because it wasn’t paid per student. It set a high bar and if you couldn’t handle it too bad for you. A few friends from my University studied computer science at MIT for a year. They reported back that MIT was way easier than our University. So I concluded that at least some prestigious well known Universities are simply better at marketing themselves than others :) And hey my University degree was free. Which was nice. It probably also explains the high bar: No pressure to make sure everybody graduates. If you can’t handle the heat then you are out.
known 4y ago
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MetroWind 4y ago
Yes. That's what happens if you tell every child they are the best through their childhood. Now suddenly nobody want their bubble burst. The other side of the same coin is this: I TA'ed college physics (more like high school physics) when I was working on my PhD. The school was not the best, but it was like top-10 in medical and pharmacy. And a lot of my students were from these departments. We had to give them a pre-test before final. The final would reuse the same problems. And there were people failing the tests. I didn't understand why; I still don't. I mean it's an A for free, why not take it? Why fail...? I guess you could say that's because it's not their major, so they don't pay attention. But it's still a required course. They had to retake it and pay real money for it. I also knew for a fact that they did care. Some of them cried when we told them we would not give them "bonus credits".
strikelaserclaw 4y ago
If so many teachers feel that there is grade inflation, why don't they mark their students harder or give tougher exams?
- Invictus0 4y ago
  They don't really care. A professors first priority is to do research, second priority is to teach, and last priority is to catch cheaters.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >A professors first priority is to do research, second priority is to teach, and last priority is to catch cheaters. 1. Make a reputation 2. Make Money (more reputation more money) 3. Teach (if they have to)
  - verst 4y ago
    At research universities perhaps, but at liberal arts colleges (not a liberal arts program within a big university - that's different) professors actually are there for the teaching.
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  It's a collective action problem
- JPKab 4y ago
  The modern Ivy League campus is a popularity contest amongst professors. Universities are filled with a growing cadre of administrators, and the administrators focus on appeasing student complaints, always taking the side of students against faculty. Professors are afraid of upsetting students, or being called bigots if a person in some protected identity group gets a bad grade and complains about bias. This is an inevitable consequence of campus culture having a strong belief in guilt-by-accusation.
  - ouid 4y ago
    This is absolutely not why. There is no incentive for universities to tell employers what they think of the students attending them, and the intercollegiate talent transfer is 99% recommendations and research experience. Students don't want it, professors don't care, and the general public doesn't pay them to. Universities make their money from students and research, not from employers hoping for them to report statistics on the people attending. It is only their accreditation process which cares, and it doesn't care very much. I think you just want your story to be true, honestly.
teagee 4y ago
> Ten percent of respondents who reported having a 4.0 said they had cheated in an academic context while at Harvard. Imagine how many cheated and didn't admit it! A very sad state of affairs...
- bombcar 4y ago
  Though this implies that 10% of the 4.0s don't deserve it, it's not proof; a single cheat may or may not have affected the grade.
  - clankyclanker 4y ago
    When that single cheat might have resulted in expulsion if it were caught, it implies a pretty significant effect on the grade. It wouldn’t actually change the result of the metric (because survivorship bias: you don’t count students who never graduated in the graduated student population), but it changes the believability of and the ethic behind the metric. Now we can say that at least 10% of the folks who graduated didn’t earn their grades, and the school’s reputation is less for it.
- oxff 4y ago
  Cheating is probably the best thing to do. It's a zero sum world.
  - engineer_22 4y ago
    Sure, if you're satisfied with rampant corruption and dysfunctional institutions. Let's embrace dishonesty and underachievement.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Cheating may be a rational thing to do, on an individual level, if we ignore ethics. Outside of that it breaks down. I wouldn't say "best" without a lot of qualifiers.
- blagie 4y ago
  My experience is that in recent years, cheating is ubiquitous in many elite schools. This goes all the way to the top. Fake research data. Self-enriching financial schemes by faculty. Conflicts-of-interest. Etc.
LargeWu 4y ago
My uncle taught some classes at Princeton while doing his graduate studies. He wasn't allowed to give anything lower than a C. This was in the 80's.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  tbf in gradschool a C is basically an F. In my program you could get 2 Cs before you were kicked out on your third. Anything lower than a C was basically a huge red flag and would warrant a meeting about the future of the student in the department.
  - LargeWu 4y ago
    Just to be clear, he was teaching undergraduates in survey-level courses.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      Ah I see.
  - hardware2win 4y ago
    Is this even relevant? What matters is effort/knowledge for given grade
  - zcw100 4y ago
    My experience as well. It was pretty stupid since it was basically pass+/pass/fail. On the flip side of that red flag is when the midterm average was a 20% which means whoever taught the class didn’t do their job, didn’t care and definitely wasn’t going to take shit for it so everyone passed.
- suture 4y ago
  At the Ivy League schools these used to be called “gentleman C’s”.
- shankr 4y ago
  In the department, at an Indian university where I studied, the professor wouldn't even give anyone A grade even if the whole class struggled. It was supposed to be a relative grading. You had to score certain minimum percent of score. Our whole department's median grade was C.
cebert 4y ago
After you land your first job, does your GPA even matter? In every recent promotion opportunity for me or potential new position at another employer, what my college GPA was has never been relevant. What seems to be much more relevant is my experience, accomplishments, and whether I am a good fit for the position.
- trauco 4y ago
  It does to go to grad school, and to get fellowships.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    It matters for grad school and for teaching jobs (transcripts are part of the application packet for K-12 and post-secondary teaching positions), but otherwise it doesn't matter.
    - trauco 4y ago
      Well, doctors and lawyers, as in some of the most powerful people in the country (supreme court justices, etc) have to get graduate degrees. Maybe it doesn't matter for software engineers, but it matters a lot for the power structure of our society.
- 0xffff2 4y ago
  For engineers, if you have a good internship or two under your belt when you graduate, I'm not sure your GPA really matters even for your first job. But, GPA definitely matters for what internships you can even apply for. So having a good GPA certainly makes it easier to get a good internship, and having a good internship on your resume makes it easier to get a good first full time job, which make it easier to get your second job, etc.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    No. My GPA didn’t matter when I got my internships or got my job, because esp. in CS, GPA doesn’t measure motivation, curiosity and eagerness to try. I always failed math classes, but I transform to something different if I have to apply that math. I get a +3 modifier instantly. Same in programming. I can tackle much harder problems than my peers, but my grades didn’t show that. Result? I got my Ph.D., work at a reputable institution, and I’m happy. I’m also continuing a side academic gig. I personally don’t care about GPAs of people I interview too.
trauco 4y ago
"Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." ~ Garrison Keillor
NonNefarious 4y ago
Grade inflation, review inflation. It's rampant. No wonder people graduate and then have a meltdown when their poor or mediocre performance on the job gets called out. People are too dumb to understand what "excellent" means, now. Why should I feel like an asshole if I don't give EVERY Lyft driver FIVE STARS, BEST EVAR!!!111!!!
- woodruffw 4y ago
  At least in the context of Lyft, the problem is that The Algorithm (tm) punishes drivers disproportionately: a handful of bad reviews (which could amount to a couple of passengers in bad moods on a single day) might mean being permanently banned from your source of income. (The entire idea of "reviewing" a rideshare is ridiculous to begin with: you can't select the driver you're matched with, so the it's not as much a "review" as it is a way to algorithmically punish non-employees.)
- bombcar 4y ago
  Amusingly enough, in a mass-review situation like with the Lyft driver, there really are only two options, 5 star or 0 star (or whatever the lowest is) - as everything else is sub-optimal in actually affecting the rating. They should switch to a "would you ride again y/n" instead.
Metacelsus 4y ago
In spring 2020 I was a Harvard TA for organic chemistry lab (well, actually "teaching fellow" because Harvard is pretentious). The grading was extremely lenient, basically everyone got >90%. (Although in this case it didn't affect GPA because everyone got "emergency satisfactory" grades . . .)
jonahbenton 4y ago
All the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
My current university has a different problem, namely that there is no grade curving even though they are supposed to curve and adjust the distributions. The grades get mapped to ECTS, but the ECTS distribution does not match the actual distribution of the courses. I have a 'D' that's in the 80th percentile, and a B that is in the 95th percentile.
- kurupt213 4y ago
  That’s not useful either
MafellUser 4y ago
At Columbia you can score an A+ which corresponds to a 4.33. So you can graduate with a 4.33/4.0 GPA [1]. Comparing GPAs across Universities is just pointless. [1] https://www.registrar.columbia.edu/content/grade-point-average https://www.registrar.columbia.edu/content/grade-point-avera...
- medvezhenok 4y ago
  And at MIT the maximum grade is a 5.0 (A=5, B=4, C=3... etc)
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  Wouldn't that just be 4.33/4.33? My university has a similar system, with A=4 and A+=4.3, it's just that it's written as out of 4.3
  - MafellUser 4y ago
    Nope, on the transcript it's /4.0. It's absurd I know.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Same with high schools: some weight an A+ in an AP class as a 5.0, which means HS GPA needs to be normalized by each university's admissions committee.
  - lupire 4y ago
    6.0 even! ---- [REBECCA] You were close, but no match schoolastically Nohow, no way I put the "O.G." in "5.0 G.P.A." [AUDRA] Well, speaking of which, are you A.P. graded? 'Cause these days you look a bit heavily weighted
- tricolon 4y ago
  And each department (and sometimes class or professor) has their own policy about whether they ever grant an A+.
jimbob45 4y ago
It's Harvard. They go way out of their way to ensure that they only select students who will succeed at their school. Perhaps it's not grade inflation that's the issue. Perhaps it's time to set aside the outdated ideology that grades must always adhere to a bell curve where some percentage of the class must be failed and some percentage must be passed even if the class is comprised of 35 perfect clones of Albert Einstein. Even further, what an asinine system to begin with. What good does a grading system based on the success of one's immediate peers do anyone? What information does that offer anyone? Maybe I got a 4.0 from Harvard but, if we using a bell curve system of grading, that may tell you that I was in a particularly weak class or that I actually was the strongest student in Harvard history. You'll never know.
- kurupt213 4y ago
  You don’t have to fail with a curve. You can set it so only outliers fail or get an A. That means most people will be getting a B, but it is still more useful.
  - yCombLinks 4y ago
    More useful for what? The goal isn't necessarily to identify the strongest student. The goal is to teach them material. The grade should represent mastery of the material. Some material can be mastered by every student.
    - kurupt213 4y ago
      More useful for the instructors. If they can’t separate the outliers and stratify the student results they might want to look at how they are testing.
      - yCombLinks 4y ago
        Some subjects should be masterable by any student that gets accepted to Harvard. IE everyone should get an A in certain courses.
- deleted 4y ago
duxup 4y ago
I'm a college drop out and such so maybe I don't know. But I've never been in a situation where anyone asked / cared about someone else's college grades. IF they graduated or not they cared about... but that's it. Is anyone asked this / had experience where it mattered?
- dhosek 4y ago
  Even the if they graduated didn't really matter. My last semester of college I could have failed every class except a survey of American lit and still graduated. I failed the survey of American lit¹ (didn't finish the final paper). For the next three years, I circumlocuted my way around the fact that I didn't actually graduate² until I finally got credit for that last class and got my diploma through an independent study with my academic advisor. Nobody actually checked to see if I graduated and the presence or absence of a BA wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't gone to grad school. ⸻ 1. I was working full time while taking classes full time which is not a recipe for academic success. I passed the other classes I was taking, at least. 2. For the record, this was my second of four droppings out of college in my checkered academic career.
ejb999 4y ago
"We won't rest until every student graduates with an above average GPA".
somethoughts 4y ago
Tangentially related and for sure I'm not always a Malcolm Gladwell fan but this one seemed interesting. Why You Shouldn't Go to Harvard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo&t=12s Acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell has some advice for teenagers looking into college. "If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard," he says. Harvard is filled with the smartest people in the world, and perversely that makes it a dispiriting place to go to school. At Harvard, the lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. However, the lower tier students get just as discouraged at Harvard as the lower tier students at an average school. The result: They don't get their degrees in math or science. The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree. This is crazy, because as Gladwell points out, a science and math degree is the "most valuable commodity any graduate can have in today's economy." He says that "as as a rule of thumb, your odds of successfully getting a math degree fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers." So, if you're a kid and you have a choice between, Harvard and the University of Maryland, go with Maryland because its SAT scores are 150 points lower on average. That means you have a 30% better chance at getting your degree. However, most people will still choose Harvard, even knowing this, says Gladwell. Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.
- havblue 4y ago
  Is this more about ivy league schools being the most prestigious or is it about finance and law fields causing a brain drain of the smartest people in the country?
- legalcorrection 4y ago
  This is awful advice. Go to the highest ranked university[1] you can get into and afford because for the rest of your life, people will assume a lot about you based on that choice. It will open more doors than you expect. Your friends will be smarter and more successful too. [1] Not literally THE highest ranked. There’s reasons to go to UPenn instead of Harvard, but if you get into Harvard and go to a state school instead, you might be screwing up.
lordleft 4y ago
Is Grade Inflation really a problem at a top school? Why is it surprising that driven students at an elite institution are probably going to do well most of the time? I'd take this over moronic experiments like grade deflation at Princeton -- imagine being mandated to give only a small proportion of your students an A in, say, a Calc I class. I'm slightly annoyed at this discourse because I went to Columbia, an institution that seemed hellbent at enforcing some vague sense of rigor at the expense of the sanity of most of its students. I certainly want to be challenged, and don't want top Universities to be glorified country clubs masquerading as academic environments, but I also think that what a defines substantive and rigorous eduction is at the highest level is actually quite hard to pin down.
- kurupt213 4y ago
  Because there should still be a natural distribution. Even if you are evaluating the cream of the crop.
  - neaden 4y ago
    This all depends on if you think a grade at school A should be directly comparable to school B.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    > Because there should still be a natural distribution. Even if you are evaluating the cream of the crop. Why should there be? Let's say all students in the class are A students, and would get an A in any other class, then some now get a B or C just because their classmates happen to be even better? It seems to me that doesn't really reflect student ability very accurately.
    - ip26 4y ago
      just because their classmates happen to be even better? In theory, getting top marks at a top school means you are the best of the best, in a literal sense. Or in different terms, is a "B" at MIT better than an "A" at a third tier?
wodenokoto 4y ago
It's not Dilbert, but one of those 90's geeky newspaper comic strips had a gag about this, where the guided tour of Harvard takes them to the class room where the last B was given.
- dhosek 4y ago
  Weird coincidence: The first time I saw a Dilbert comic strip was when I was teaching a LaTeX class at Harvard in 1989.
albntomat0 4y ago
The game theory around grades is interesting. I went to a well regarded US CS school for a masters, and we were told essentially that "Being good enough to get in here means you're smart and capable, and being middle of the pack here is still doing very well. In order to communicate that to companies doing hiring, the minimum allowed average is a B". I don't know for sure, but I expect most of my decent, but not truly exceptional cohort had GPAs much above a B. There were a couple courses that bucked the trend. Which ones theses were was well known, and many folks, looking to work at FAANG, dodged them because of it. I already had employment figured out, and optimized for things besides GPA. I was a bit too ambitious, receiving a number of Bs, but also learned a ton. Maybe that will bit me if someone cares to look back 5+ years at my grades, but that's a separate problem. If you're a professor assigning grades, with little ability to communicate the intricacies of your grades to those looking at them, what do you do? Accurately assigning grades hurts your students, and getting everyone to change is a collective action problem.
- runnerup 4y ago
  After even 2 years post-graduation those grades will only be inspected for McKinsey/Bain/BCG consulting positions and maybe some corporate executive-track / future C-suite-potential type roles. Almost no one will ever use them for hiring decisions. But also curious how much of the grade inflation is driven by increasing selection bias. With the bar to get into top schools is raised higher and higher, maybe most of the students really are earning their inflated grades?
- chernevik 4y ago
  It's very easy for the school to fix this. - The average grade is a B, class grades will not be accepted until compliant. - Publish this policy so employers know this. For a school like Harvard they'll trouble themselves to find out. Employers will quickly learn that a B, or even a C, still indicates a pretty capable person.
  - ceras 4y ago
    Princeton tried exactly this while I went there ("grade deflation"), and it didn't go well. They sent a letter to places like med school admissions alongside transcripts, but it wasn't enough. Ultimately, they abandoned the practice in 2014: employers, law schools, med schools often have minimum GPA requirements that are not school specific. Students also didn't like it because they felt it made the environment more competitive and less collaborative than at other schools, because an A for your peer means one less A for you. Somewhere else in this comment section someone mentioned how going to Princeton during grade deflation era stopped them from becoming a doctor, and I'd say that's accurate.
lordnacho 4y ago
There's no way to know what a grade average means anyway, eg if you're employing someone. You don't know if they took easy courses or hard courses, you don't know if they were ill or if they cheated. All you can actually do is bring them in for interview and see if they can do a reasonable chat about why they want to work for you. Someone who has gotten into Harvard has already bagged a rather big prize, but the signalling can't be much more informative than that.
dqpb 4y ago
Nobody has ever asked me what my GPA was.
Cshelton 4y ago
Some schools, like The University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business, have taken aggressive measures in the past to fight grade inflation. They implemented a "hard average" at each grade level. So freshmen business course, the average had to be a C-. Soph: C, Jr: C+, Sr: B-. It certainly achieved the goal for the school, as a whole, to fight grade inflation... but.. For students, it was very important to be above the mean... otherwise your grade would typically get moved down. Which isn't the worst, since they compared it to competition in the job world... but hard to say that when students are paying an obscene amount of money to attend. The other challenge was the smaller courses, with ~10-15 students... very difficult to get an A+ in those courses as you had to be the top 1-3 in the class. I think they have since abandoned this grade inflation policy.. But yes, GPA is basically irrelevant now in comparing across schools...
- anm89 4y ago
  Yeah, I would actively avoid going to a school like this. This sounds like a race to the bottom. Or at least like a race to a C-
mywittyname 4y ago
The population in general continues to grow much faster than the number of people admitted to Ivy League schools. So it stands to reason that the few who manage to get in are going to uncharacteristically intelligent and driven, even compared to previous Ivy League cohorts. Which will drive up GPAs. Honestly, if the median GPA at Harvard was less than a 3.5, then that would raise questions. Because it means that either grading is unfair -- i.e., grading on a curve, rather than on an understanding of the material -- or that students aren't as capable as the school's reputation implies.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  > uncharacteristically intelligent and driven Or they had the right skin color [1]. [1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/16/admissions-suit-arguments/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/16/admissions-suit...
- carabiner 4y ago
  Harvard students of today are enormously more effective and likely intelligent than those of before. Some of that is due to technology making schoolwork easier, but also because of population growth like you said. In the 1950s, you could get into Harvard with one AP course scoring a 3: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/29Rparenting..html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2... Today you might have 5's on a dozen AP courses and be fully rejected (not waitlisted).
robotburrito 4y ago
A friend who got his MS at Penn State then went to get his PHD at American University was told by his boss when grading students, that he had to give "Genteleman's Cs" to people because their "parents paid a ton of $ to get them here." He/She was used to giving out real grades at state schools.
kashunstva 4y ago
My wife was an undergrad at MIT (course 5.) When she went to apply to med school she had a ton of explaining to do because MIT in those days - maybe now too I don’t know - graded on a curve. Not in some verkakte inflate-everyone mode but fitting everyone to a desired distribution. Every other university was already inflating grades.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
While the college admissions process is by no means a perfect system, if you're accepted to Harvard, you're probably a pretty darn good student. If Harvard graded on a curve, such that half of their students—who presumably got straight A's in high school—received a C or below, would that be more fair? Would it be a better representation of student performance? I suppose the answer depends on the purpose of giving grades. If the goal is to see who outperformed who, Harvard's average GPA is a major problem. If the goal is to see who learned the material, then Harvard is providing an excellent education.
- bradstewart 4y ago
  This is always a fun question, and a lot of it depends on the material/subject matter, but why not both? For things like math, science, and engineering--where the possible depth of knowledge and understanding far exceeds what could be learned in a semester course--I personally think exam grades should center around 50. If you've got 100 points to play with, why not use them? A lot of my classes did, and I always found the challenge exciting: what stuff did I not learn about this subject? This also gives you the ability to differentiate student performance, should that be of importance. At the end of the semester, things were usually (non-linearly) curved up to average around B. The instructors (well, most of them) knew what "absolute score" represented enough understanding to move on, and anything below that would not get curved into a passing grade.
  - markusde 4y ago
    This is totally right. There are two kinds of classes: those with a specific set of learning outcomes to meet (eg. a prerequisite course) and those where by the end the in-scope knowledge is essentially unlimited (eg. courses where it's not unreasonable to prove named theorems on homework or exams). The former should be graded with 100% being all the knowledge, the latter in a way that gives a fair distribution and then scales. Of course, my fellow university students always push back on me when I support the latter :) At the risk of armchair psychoanalyzing, I think a lot of them don't want to reckon with the fact that there's such an overwhelming amount of information out there and so many perspectives to explore it from that "100%" in say introductory topology is almost completely meaningless as a measure of how much topology one actually knows.
havblue 4y ago
I will note that Harvard extension school weeds out prospective students based on whether they get a 3.0, and they will kick you out if you fail to maintain that gpa. So at least part of the university's grades have a hard floor that prevents people with poor grades from getting accepted or graduating.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
LatteLazy 4y ago
Non American here. Are GPAs meant to be comparable between institutions?
- pas 4y ago
  they're not even comparable between years
JauntTrooper 4y ago
When I was at Princeton they had strict anti-grade inflation policy, with no more than 35% of students getting an A per department. It was really demoralizing, and to be honest it's had a negative impact on my life. My public high school didn't have a great math and science program so I started behind my classmates freshman year. It felt like the As basically went to the kids who had covered the material before in AP classes. By junior year I was hovering around a 3.0, and I made the gut-wrenching decision that I couldn't go to medical school or pursue a PhD in biology because my grades weren't high enough. I decided I needed to set my sights lower. Even law school was out, basically business school was the only graduate school that would take me. I switched my major to economics. It was devastating to give up on my dream, and I have to admit it still stings 20 years later. I adore biochemistry and would have loved to pursue research as a profession. My main problem is I didn't know how to effectively study in college. I cruised through high school without ever really needing to learn from a book. I didn't really learn how to study correctly until a year or two after college, when I took the CFA exams. Let me tell you, learning how to study (at 24) was an eye-opener for me, and it still feels like a superpower. I ended up becoming the valedictorian of my business school class a few years later. I've had a very successful career as an investment banker, so I ended up fine. But I do think these grade deflation policies can be really harmful to the psyche of young students. Sure, there are benefits to getting humbled, hitting a wall and needing to grind it out, but students come into school with all sorts of different levels of preparation and there's a big risk that some will flounder. I don't like relative grading. I think there should be objective standards of what you should know, and if you meet those standards you get an A. As long as you make those standards sufficiently rigorous, it shouldn't matter whether 30% or 80% of the class gets an A. Relative grading pits students against each other and creates an unhealthy learning environment.
- eatbitseveryday 4y ago
  If you are lucky enough to be in a financially sound situation, why not consider a career change and try to pursue that which you've wanted? My wife retook foundational courses for med school -- physics, biology, chemistry, etc. to pass the prerequisites, and then the MCAT. You can take classes at (any?) university, telling them they are "non-degree credits" which makes it easier for you to enroll. For a PhD you're never too old. For medical school, likely as a "non-traditional" student, you'd have better luck at gaining admissions to a DO school than an MD school, despite the latter claiming they adore that class of student.
antisthenes 4y ago
Well, obviously. How else would you "hire only the best" otherwise?
supernova87a 4y ago
I have a related observation from the perspective of graduate programs in the US. One surprising, and sensible thing, that I noticed in working in the UK was that PhD defenses of students were conducted by professors from other universities. In that sense, there was an external standard that prevented simply passing students for "sentimental" reasons or lowering the bar unilaterally by the student's own department. And I certainly knew of cases in the US in my department where people got passed much more leniently, and it's hard for your own professor to tell you that you're not fit for a PhD. (ironically (?) when it does happen, it seems the bad news comes at the last step, rather than along the way, much to the publicized and frustrating feedback about grad programs that appears in discussion often). Of course in the US there is no way that you could coordinate, or have universities be incentivized, to have external examiners evaluate and pass/fail their students. It probably all relates (in some tangential way) to the waning desire to engage in standards-setting for admission or graduation.
- pmyteh 4y ago
  UK universities also have 'external examiners', who are academics from the same subject area in other universities. They're tasked with providing moderation feedback to try to keep standards for each (taught) degree classification roughly comparable between institutions. (They also provide input into course design, warn university highers-up if the programme is going off the rails, and other things). It's far from perfect, and standards do vary from course to course and institution to institution, but it's better than nothing. And not all in one direction, either: after the first year of the MSc programme I (later) took, the external examiners' report said that our department had marked very harshly, and several excellent students deserving of distinctions (and who would have got them in other universities) had been denied. The recommendation was to actually award the highest marks in the future. I'm directing my own new MA programme next year, and I'm curious to see what feedback I get. Marking, where there's no established disciplinary body of knowledge to get through and assess, is decidedly non-trivial to get right.
photochemsyn 4y ago
If you are a professor at an Ivy League school, your life will be much easier if you go along with grade inflation - i.e. don't create tests and assignments that are too difficult or challenging. Otherwise it'll be a constant battle over points on assignments and tests. The kids going to such elite institutions (similar to the British public school program for the posh) probably mostly came out of private high schools that also inflated grades, and if SATs are used, they probably had SAT tutors - so they're going to be used to getting top scores on everything, and will complain mightily if that changes. I don't really think the point of those schools is to really get a top-notch education, anyway - as with the British system, the point is to network with other children from wealthy elite families, which is a launchpad into the upper circles of government, business and media. The Atlantic spelled it out recently: The answer lies in the specific nature of Ivy League elitism, which is an aristocracy of networks. Ivy League graduates make up 0.4 percent of the country. They are significantly overrepresented in Fortune 500 C-suites, in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, in academia, and in the media. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/ivy-league-apologists-january-6-gop-elitism-populsim/621153/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/ivy-league... As far as anyone who wants a useful education in technology/science/math/engineering, you really want to go to a research-centric school that's small enough to allow you a chance to work directly with active research groups - even in a menial position. If you want to go onto graduate school, that experience is more valuable than anything else. Grades and GRE scores also matter, and will help with things like paid fellowships, but not nearly as much as hands-on experience with a real research group. Also, always take the harder series - a C grade in an advanced physics course for physics majors will mean more than an A grade in the softer version for non-majors, for example.
- universityguys 4y ago
  most students at harvard and other elite universities come from american public schools, for the record. very high concentration of rich preppy private school kids, yes, but majority is still public.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    How many of those public school students are coming from exclusive suburban districts that may as well be private given the cost of living within the district's boundaries? I would guess the majority. Sure the random star from small-town Illinois will get in alongside 20 kids from a Chicago suburban high school.
supernova87a 4y ago
I read actually here on HN some years back (or was is Slashdot?), a good explanation of how Japanese undergrad programs have a similar problem about inflation, manifested by contrast in why they are very focused on taking attendance at college courses. Anyone who gets into a top Japanese university by definition has done well up to that point. And the university has an obvious interest in maintaining (or making it seem to outsiders / employers / future students) that their graduates are top ranked. So it would not be good to be having 1/2 your class "underperforming". Therefore grades are inflated and as a result students often just phone it in. (also knowing that their careers ahead are mostly set if they minimally apply themselves and show up) So at that point, all they can do is mostly grade people on the small differences in performance, monitor their attendance to catch and flunk out the worst behaviors (completely skipping class), and live with the system they have. I would be glad to find/read that post again but I think I've lost where it came from...
- howenterprisey 4y ago
  The year is 20XX...
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Honestly, I can't blame 'em. Expecting full effort always is re-testing the students you already know to be smart over and over so the bean-counters know how to rank them. Once you have your certification of "in the top of the smart bucket", classes should mostly be pass/fail past that point instead of monitoring for minute differences in behavior.
bigbacaloa 4y ago
This based on a highly biased self-reported sample.
anm89 4y ago
I mean don't they get 10000 applications already from a preselected group of mostly very good and smart students and then filter for the top 3 percent? Most of those kids are going to show up to class and do the work. I'm not saying that there is no grade inflation going on but they have created a system designed to select academic freaks(yeah I know, and a bunch of rich kids) who value grades above all else.
hintymad 4y ago
This is not just Harvard, right? Elite schools, especially the so called ivy schools, have been inflating GPAs for years. In the meantime, they have been putting more weight on "holistic" admission over academic performance. So the US has been so advanced that academic performance is of secondary importance? Leadership is what matters most? Do I understand it correctly?
- universityguys 4y ago
  Most of the students admitted have top percentile grades/test scores as well. But the competition at the very top is based in leadership rather than minuscule differences in testing, yes.
bitL 4y ago
Is Stanford different? I've heard that in this year's NLP class (CS224N), 93% was only good for B+ which doesn't sound like grade inflation at all.
- universityguys 4y ago
  Stanford has grade inflation, but not at the level at Harvard. Faculty senate said median GPA is 3.69 (so less than 50% have at least a 3.7, despite being just as selective as Harvard). And this is after taking into account that Stanford A+ is 4.3.
booboofixer 4y ago
Shocking. Here's something to compare it to. It is rumored that engineering courses at University of Toronto never have an average above 70, and if they do everybody gets curved down. Confirmed by my probability professor who showed us the effects of the curve on everyone's grades. A 70 corresponds to 2.7 GPA: https://undergrad.engineering.utoronto.ca/calculate-gpa/ https://undergrad.engineering.utoronto.ca/calculate-gpa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UofT/comments/672fj3/what_is_the_average_gpa_at_u_of_t/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UofT/comments/672fj3/what_is_the_av...
- universityguys 4y ago
  To be fair, U of Toronto is nowhere near selective as Harvard.
  - booboofixer 4y ago
    Im not sure how that impacts the small/large difference in students GPAs.
antoinebalaine 4y ago
I reckon grades inflation is going to keep following tuition inflation. Can't blame Harvard for this one, most schools have to balance the financial impact that academic exigence has on families. Going to study in Boston requires enormous effort - time-wise and financially. Given the amount of sacrifice required to get there in the first place (in my case, I got half-tuition scholarship to a Boston school after a three-year prep, my parents sold their appartment to help me pay, I took a loan on top of that and still ran out of money mid-undergrad), tough-grading and failing assignments can definitely put a lower-income student at risk of failing to graduate. If professors start playing tough-graders and put a student a risk, the school will appear as extorting money tuition while failing to keep its promise of providing an education and a future to the kid. I definitely had some heated discussions with older generation liberal arts professors who couldn't understand why it wasn't OK to "F" me for some stupid petty deadline. They couldn't fathom that from a student's perspective, the money at stake increases over the duration of the degree, in turn growing the potential cost of academic failure (or under-performance). Harvard is also subject to the problem, it just seems to deal with it in its usual magazine-cover-first-in-class-student way.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
You get what you pay for!
chernevik 4y ago
Harvard admits a lot of people not actually capable of doing the work. Rigorous grades would expose those people. The patterns among those people would embarrass the policies driving those admissions, and expose the school to criticisms, probably unfair, that it prefers to avoid. Better to give everyone an A and avoid all the controversy. This is almost certainly deteriorating the overall quality of the education available at Harvard -- why kill yourself to get the same A as everyone else? Even if professors want to encourage excellence, how can they signal it? When I graduated in the mid-80s, Ivy League grads were distinctly more capable than those from my pretty good school. From what I see this is no longer the case.
Sparkyte 4y ago
In order to maintain an exclusive and elite image it has to surpress skills and talent to only promote its top performers, even in a place where its top performers out pace the brightest of a normal college. Elitism at its finest. We could get so many amazing people if Harvard didn't cut people short.
- pas 4y ago
  wat? we already have a myriad of amazing people everywhere, and these elite certificate mills are largely irrelevant for making the world better anyway.
bo1024 4y ago
As a professor, I'll put out there how I'm currently thinking about grade inflation in my case. Classes of let's say "Type 1" have lots of students and very specific learning objectives. I need to make sure everyone who passes the class is proficient in those objectives. So I focus on teaching the baseline expectations. I give assessments where, if you understand the material, you get it right. Therefore, most students who have the prereqs and try hard get A's. The median grade is pretty high along with a tail of people who mostly aren't trying that hard. But you don't need special aptitude to get an A. Unfortunately that can make the class pretty easy for top students, and I'm working on ways to challenge them. But I don't need to knock the whole class down to a B just to challenge top students. The other "type 2" classes are upper level where people are there to learn hard material and are self motivated. Here students may face tougher challenges and experience more failure even when they put in lots of time and effort. But I usually give As pretty easily. The fact that they're trying hard in a difficult upper level class already shows they're ahead of 95% of their classmates, why would I punish their GPA for that? And most of these students don't need the threat of a bad grade to motivate them, they put in the effort because they're interested. Of course some students will get bad grades in the class but the median is again usually pretty high. So I find myself a contributor to grade inflation. Employers, look less at GPA and more at what courses a person challenged themselves with!
- jseliger 4y ago
  I have taught at non-elite schools and have observed that, particularly in classes without objective tests, there is a strong incentive for the professors to grade up: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/ https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess... Unhappiness about grades can also be transmuted into complaints and eventually investigations about other matters—a thing I've seen happen. There is something to the "They pretend to learn, and we pretend to teach" line, in many situations. (That I am observing this situation doesn't mean I approve of it.)
  - bo1024 4y ago
    Thanks for the link. There's a great point in there about how adjuncts are under much more pressure here than tenure-track.
pcurve 4y ago
only 8.9% has GPA of 3.5? At Cornell, getting GPA of 3.2 got you on Dean's List for engineering school.
throwaway004455 4y ago
As a recent college graduate (I graduated last year), I can tell that you part of this is definitely due the easiness of cheating on exams after school started remote classes cuz of Covid. Every class i took in my senior year, there was at least one discord group that would share answers during exams. Answers to assignments were also frequently shared. I was part of it and I don’t feel no regrets because college sucks and 90% of my engineering knowledge is from me doing my personal hobby projects or working in industry.
- spacemanmatt 4y ago
  sometimes i cross paths with engineers from those channels, who haven't failed upward into management yet, and i show them no mercy
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30944836 4y ago
I don't see where this statistic controls for people who didn't graduate or for people who didn't take classes for which they would not be successful. This average GPA could represent grade inflation. Or it could represent increased information symmetry between the difficulty of classes and the students themselves, paired with the students' interests, determination, and aptitude. TL;DR: Grade inflation or survivorship bias?
drewcoo 4y ago
Related? https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure My anecdotal experience is that "top" students seemed to be the ones obsessed with GPA, often instead of with learning broadly and deeply. I would not be surprised if "top" schools were like that, too. I did a state school, so I wouldn't know first hand.
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Aaronstotle 4y ago
At Berkeley, I always heard that other schools (including Ivy Leagues) had grade inflation, nice to have data to back that up.
janejeon 4y ago
Funny thing: in many of the Ivy's, it's well known that the "A"s in Harvard are not the same as the "A"s in the other Ivy's, so we joke that if you want to get an A, you should go to Harvard.
- jwilber 4y ago
  It’s well-known everywhere. http://www.whatwouldmyharvardgrade.be/ http://www.whatwouldmyharvardgrade.be/ isn’t live anymore, but it was for years. (It just showed a giant “A”).
dan-robertson 4y ago
I didn’t go to Harvard. I studied maths at Cambridge in the U.K. and grade inflation was definitely a topic there. The university felt that their purpose was to produce good researchers and grades (in the U.K. you get a ‘class’ for your degree – 1, 2:1, 2:2, or 3 – rather than a GPA/transcript) at the end of undergraduate degrees reflected how good a researcher the university thought you might make. In maths they would give about 30% of people a first (it was important to control this number as it roughly corresponded to the cutoff for doing the fourth year masters degree which was, of course, called part III), about 30% a 2:2 or 3rd (mostly 2:2s), and the rest a 2:1. In humanities subjects a far higher proportion would receive a 2:1 with a smaller percentage receiving firsts and a select few receiving ‘starred firsts’. The issue was basically that the university did not want to do grade inflation and students felt that they were ignoring the fact the the grades they chose had a large influence on the lives of the majority of students who did not go on to become researchers. Students felt disadvantaged compared to their peers at other universities where they felt they would more easily get higher grades (either due to a higher proportion set by the university or some sense of superior ability). I guess one big reason for feeling disadvantaged is not really knowing how employers work (or, more importantly, how good employers work). Lots of common seeming options claimed to be ‘institution blind’ in hiring new graduates which meant that they would look at the degree class and assume that a 1st class degree meant the same at any university and that a 2:1 was the minimum standard. This also meant totally absurd recruiting pipelines (because you can’t easily filter out applicants based on their CVs you need to add bullshit tests like ‘how many times can you click your mouse in a minute’ to reduce the size of the pool before interviewing). Obviously the trick would be to find the places that knew more about the system at Cambridge and not tipex that name off your CV, or especially those who would consider it a stronger signal than it should have been. But this also has disadvantages; it seems not great to end up at a company working with many people with a similar background. The other main point of contention I remember was whether it was easier to get more alphas (or good marks) by studying pure maths or applied maths. Perhaps a good thing about the system was that grades were not really assessed per-course and homework was not assessed so it was mostly designed to be pedagogical rather than doable without much imagination.
WorldMaker 4y ago
The term "grade inflation" includes an underlying presumption that GPAs are fungible and as a gentle reminder: they are not. You can't directly compare the GPAs between schools or between course loads. Like so many other metrics in our lives, just because you can get a numerical output doesn't mean the metric is universally applicable or "objectively quantifiable" or "objectively comparable".
wedn3sday 4y ago
I just finished a Masters program at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), where this is very much not the case! Unlike the American system (Im from the US), at TCD a 70% is considered "First Class Honors" i.e. the highest grade possible. Getting a 80% in any of the classes I took (a MSc in High Performance Computing) was very nearly impossible, the grading for assignments and exams is very harsh (but fair I think!).
jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago
If I was an employer, I would only hire people with demonstrated skills in the thing I was hiring them for. No piece of paper would ever convince me otherwise.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
I guess professors just want their students to succeed after graduating and award everyone straight A's. Especially because assignments in senior years are fuzzier, not like "you solved 4 out of 5 equations, here's B for you" in a junior year.
olliej 4y ago
Maybe they're just all /really/ smart? edit: actually as an addendum to this (don't want to hide dumb statements). I realize my problem is not the high proportion of high grades, or the high average GPA, however you look at it. If you have a group of student who for various reasons are very capable - there's lots of nonsense with Ivy's, but they do have entry grade filtering - you should expect more of them to get higher grades. The problem is, I don't think there's alternate evidence that each year is inherently more capable than the prior year. Assuming same entry restrictions, and so presumable capability, you should expect on the whole the average GPA to hover at a consistent level, sometimes going a little up, sometimes a little down, but generally hovering around the same place. In that situation it would still be completely possible for one school to have a significantly higher average GPA than a /different/ school. The idea of grade is to measure capability, and for the sake of argument lets pretend every university/college used the same end of year tests for math, physics, law, whathaveyou. In such a case if you compared the average GPA from two schools where one was a community college in a remote rural america, and the other was something like MIT, an Ivy, ICs, etc you would absolutely expect a significant gap in those averages. So the problem isn't what the average is, its that the average is moving in a consistent direction year after year, and that is an indication of grade inflation. Growing up in NZ the national standardized tests, and university courses, had this concept called "scaling". The goal of scaling was to recognize than from year to year there may simply be unintentional variations in assessment difficulty. So what happened is at the end of a year/course, the average % score of the students is calculated, and compared to the prior, if the difference is significant every % grade is essentially scaled by some factor of the difference. That has the effect of pulling this years average grade closer to prior years, and ideally compensating for assessment variation.

I got my MSc in Computer Science from a top University in Europe. 50% of students at the University dropped out within 6 months because of how hard it was. The University didn’t care because it wasn’t paid per student. It set a high bar and if you couldn’t handle it too bad for you. A few friends from my University studied computer science at MIT for a year. They reported back that MIT was way easier than our University. So I concluded that at least some prestigious well known Universities are simply better at marketing themselves than others :) And hey my University degree was free. Which was nice. It probably also explains the high bar: No pressure to make sure everybody graduates. If you can’t handle the heat then you are out.

known 4y ago

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MetroWind 4y ago

Yes. That's what happens if you tell every child they are the best through their childhood. Now suddenly nobody want their bubble burst. The other side of the same coin is this: I TA'ed college physics (more like high school physics) when I was working on my PhD. The school was not the best, but it was like top-10 in medical and pharmacy. And a lot of my students were from these departments. We had to give them a pre-test before final. The final would reuse the same problems. And there were people failing the tests. I didn't understand why; I still don't. I mean it's an A for free, why not take it? Why fail...? I guess you could say that's because it's not their major, so they don't pay attention. But it's still a required course. They had to retake it and pay real money for it. I also knew for a fact that they did care. Some of them cried when we told them we would not give them "bonus credits".

strikelaserclaw 4y ago

If so many teachers feel that there is grade inflation, why don't they mark their students harder or give tougher exams?

Invictus0 4y ago
They don't really care. A professors first priority is to do research, second priority is to teach, and last priority is to catch cheaters.
- nix23 4y ago
  >A professors first priority is to do research, second priority is to teach, and last priority is to catch cheaters. 1. Make a reputation 2. Make Money (more reputation more money) 3. Teach (if they have to)
- verst 4y ago
  At research universities perhaps, but at liberal arts colleges (not a liberal arts program within a big university - that's different) professors actually are there for the teaching.
MengerSponge 4y ago
It's a collective action problem
JPKab 4y ago
The modern Ivy League campus is a popularity contest amongst professors. Universities are filled with a growing cadre of administrators, and the administrators focus on appeasing student complaints, always taking the side of students against faculty. Professors are afraid of upsetting students, or being called bigots if a person in some protected identity group gets a bad grade and complains about bias. This is an inevitable consequence of campus culture having a strong belief in guilt-by-accusation.
- ouid 4y ago
  This is absolutely not why. There is no incentive for universities to tell employers what they think of the students attending them, and the intercollegiate talent transfer is 99% recommendations and research experience. Students don't want it, professors don't care, and the general public doesn't pay them to. Universities make their money from students and research, not from employers hoping for them to report statistics on the people attending. It is only their accreditation process which cares, and it doesn't care very much. I think you just want your story to be true, honestly.

teagee 4y ago

> Ten percent of respondents who reported having a 4.0 said they had cheated in an academic context while at Harvard. Imagine how many cheated and didn't admit it! A very sad state of affairs...

bombcar 4y ago
Though this implies that 10% of the 4.0s don't deserve it, it's not proof; a single cheat may or may not have affected the grade.
- clankyclanker 4y ago
  When that single cheat might have resulted in expulsion if it were caught, it implies a pretty significant effect on the grade. It wouldn’t actually change the result of the metric (because survivorship bias: you don’t count students who never graduated in the graduated student population), but it changes the believability of and the ethic behind the metric. Now we can say that at least 10% of the folks who graduated didn’t earn their grades, and the school’s reputation is less for it.
oxff 4y ago
Cheating is probably the best thing to do. It's a zero sum world.
- engineer_22 4y ago
  Sure, if you're satisfied with rampant corruption and dysfunctional institutions. Let's embrace dishonesty and underachievement.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Cheating may be a rational thing to do, on an individual level, if we ignore ethics. Outside of that it breaks down. I wouldn't say "best" without a lot of qualifiers.
blagie 4y ago
My experience is that in recent years, cheating is ubiquitous in many elite schools. This goes all the way to the top. Fake research data. Self-enriching financial schemes by faculty. Conflicts-of-interest. Etc.

LargeWu 4y ago

My uncle taught some classes at Princeton while doing his graduate studies. He wasn't allowed to give anything lower than a C. This was in the 80's.

ModernMech 4y ago
tbf in gradschool a C is basically an F. In my program you could get 2 Cs before you were kicked out on your third. Anything lower than a C was basically a huge red flag and would warrant a meeting about the future of the student in the department.
- LargeWu 4y ago
  Just to be clear, he was teaching undergraduates in survey-level courses.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Ah I see.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Is this even relevant? What matters is effort/knowledge for given grade
- zcw100 4y ago
  My experience as well. It was pretty stupid since it was basically pass+/pass/fail. On the flip side of that red flag is when the midterm average was a 20% which means whoever taught the class didn’t do their job, didn’t care and definitely wasn’t going to take shit for it so everyone passed.
suture 4y ago
At the Ivy League schools these used to be called “gentleman C’s”.
shankr 4y ago
In the department, at an Indian university where I studied, the professor wouldn't even give anyone A grade even if the whole class struggled. It was supposed to be a relative grading. You had to score certain minimum percent of score. Our whole department's median grade was C.

cebert 4y ago

After you land your first job, does your GPA even matter? In every recent promotion opportunity for me or potential new position at another employer, what my college GPA was has never been relevant. What seems to be much more relevant is my experience, accomplishments, and whether I am a good fit for the position.

trauco 4y ago
It does to go to grad school, and to get fellowships.
- dhosek 4y ago
  It matters for grad school and for teaching jobs (transcripts are part of the application packet for K-12 and post-secondary teaching positions), but otherwise it doesn't matter.
  - trauco 4y ago
    Well, doctors and lawyers, as in some of the most powerful people in the country (supreme court justices, etc) have to get graduate degrees. Maybe it doesn't matter for software engineers, but it matters a lot for the power structure of our society.
0xffff2 4y ago
For engineers, if you have a good internship or two under your belt when you graduate, I'm not sure your GPA really matters even for your first job. But, GPA definitely matters for what internships you can even apply for. So having a good GPA certainly makes it easier to get a good internship, and having a good internship on your resume makes it easier to get a good first full time job, which make it easier to get your second job, etc.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  No. My GPA didn’t matter when I got my internships or got my job, because esp. in CS, GPA doesn’t measure motivation, curiosity and eagerness to try. I always failed math classes, but I transform to something different if I have to apply that math. I get a +3 modifier instantly. Same in programming. I can tackle much harder problems than my peers, but my grades didn’t show that. Result? I got my Ph.D., work at a reputable institution, and I’m happy. I’m also continuing a side academic gig. I personally don’t care about GPAs of people I interview too.

trauco 4y ago

"Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." ~ Garrison Keillor

NonNefarious 4y ago

Grade inflation, review inflation. It's rampant. No wonder people graduate and then have a meltdown when their poor or mediocre performance on the job gets called out. People are too dumb to understand what "excellent" means, now. Why should I feel like an asshole if I don't give EVERY Lyft driver FIVE STARS, BEST EVAR!!!111!!!

woodruffw 4y ago
At least in the context of Lyft, the problem is that The Algorithm (tm) punishes drivers disproportionately: a handful of bad reviews (which could amount to a couple of passengers in bad moods on a single day) might mean being permanently banned from your source of income. (The entire idea of "reviewing" a rideshare is ridiculous to begin with: you can't select the driver you're matched with, so the it's not as much a "review" as it is a way to algorithmically punish non-employees.)
bombcar 4y ago
Amusingly enough, in a mass-review situation like with the Lyft driver, there really are only two options, 5 star or 0 star (or whatever the lowest is) - as everything else is sub-optimal in actually affecting the rating. They should switch to a "would you ride again y/n" instead.

Metacelsus 4y ago

In spring 2020 I was a Harvard TA for organic chemistry lab (well, actually "teaching fellow" because Harvard is pretentious). The grading was extremely lenient, basically everyone got >90%. (Although in this case it didn't affect GPA because everyone got "emergency satisfactory" grades . . .)

jonahbenton 4y ago

All the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

My current university has a different problem, namely that there is no grade curving even though they are supposed to curve and adjust the distributions. The grades get mapped to ECTS, but the ECTS distribution does not match the actual distribution of the courses. I have a 'D' that's in the 80th percentile, and a B that is in the 95th percentile.

kurupt213 4y ago
That’s not useful either

MafellUser 4y ago

At Columbia you can score an A+ which corresponds to a 4.33. So you can graduate with a 4.33/4.0 GPA [1]. Comparing GPAs across Universities is just pointless. [1] https://www.registrar.columbia.edu/content/grade-point-average https://www.registrar.columbia.edu/content/grade-point-avera...

medvezhenok 4y ago
And at MIT the maximum grade is a 5.0 (A=5, B=4, C=3... etc)
sudosysgen 4y ago
Wouldn't that just be 4.33/4.33? My university has a similar system, with A=4 and A+=4.3, it's just that it's written as out of 4.3
- MafellUser 4y ago
  Nope, on the transcript it's /4.0. It's absurd I know.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Same with high schools: some weight an A+ in an AP class as a 5.0, which means HS GPA needs to be normalized by each university's admissions committee.
- lupire 4y ago
  6.0 even! ---- [REBECCA] You were close, but no match schoolastically Nohow, no way I put the "O.G." in "5.0 G.P.A." [AUDRA] Well, speaking of which, are you A.P. graded? 'Cause these days you look a bit heavily weighted
tricolon 4y ago
And each department (and sometimes class or professor) has their own policy about whether they ever grant an A+.

jimbob45 4y ago

It's Harvard. They go way out of their way to ensure that they only select students who will succeed at their school. Perhaps it's not grade inflation that's the issue. Perhaps it's time to set aside the outdated ideology that grades must always adhere to a bell curve where some percentage of the class must be failed and some percentage must be passed even if the class is comprised of 35 perfect clones of Albert Einstein. Even further, what an asinine system to begin with. What good does a grading system based on the success of one's immediate peers do anyone? What information does that offer anyone? Maybe I got a 4.0 from Harvard but, if we using a bell curve system of grading, that may tell you that I was in a particularly weak class or that I actually was the strongest student in Harvard history. You'll never know.

kurupt213 4y ago
You don’t have to fail with a curve. You can set it so only outliers fail or get an A. That means most people will be getting a B, but it is still more useful.
- yCombLinks 4y ago
  More useful for what? The goal isn't necessarily to identify the strongest student. The goal is to teach them material. The grade should represent mastery of the material. Some material can be mastered by every student.
  - kurupt213 4y ago
    More useful for the instructors. If they can’t separate the outliers and stratify the student results they might want to look at how they are testing.
    - yCombLinks 4y ago
      Some subjects should be masterable by any student that gets accepted to Harvard. IE everyone should get an A in certain courses.
deleted 4y ago

duxup 4y ago

I'm a college drop out and such so maybe I don't know. But I've never been in a situation where anyone asked / cared about someone else's college grades. IF they graduated or not they cared about... but that's it. Is anyone asked this / had experience where it mattered?

dhosek 4y ago
Even the if they graduated didn't really matter. My last semester of college I could have failed every class except a survey of American lit and still graduated. I failed the survey of American lit¹ (didn't finish the final paper). For the next three years, I circumlocuted my way around the fact that I didn't actually graduate² until I finally got credit for that last class and got my diploma through an independent study with my academic advisor. Nobody actually checked to see if I graduated and the presence or absence of a BA wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't gone to grad school. ⸻ 1. I was working full time while taking classes full time which is not a recipe for academic success. I passed the other classes I was taking, at least. 2. For the record, this was my second of four droppings out of college in my checkered academic career.

ejb999 4y ago

"We won't rest until every student graduates with an above average GPA".

somethoughts 4y ago

Tangentially related and for sure I'm not always a Malcolm Gladwell fan but this one seemed interesting. Why You Shouldn't Go to Harvard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo&t=12s Acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell has some advice for teenagers looking into college. "If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard," he says. Harvard is filled with the smartest people in the world, and perversely that makes it a dispiriting place to go to school. At Harvard, the lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. However, the lower tier students get just as discouraged at Harvard as the lower tier students at an average school. The result: They don't get their degrees in math or science. The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree. This is crazy, because as Gladwell points out, a science and math degree is the "most valuable commodity any graduate can have in today's economy." He says that "as as a rule of thumb, your odds of successfully getting a math degree fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers." So, if you're a kid and you have a choice between, Harvard and the University of Maryland, go with Maryland because its SAT scores are 150 points lower on average. That means you have a 30% better chance at getting your degree. However, most people will still choose Harvard, even knowing this, says Gladwell. Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.

havblue 4y ago
Is this more about ivy league schools being the most prestigious or is it about finance and law fields causing a brain drain of the smartest people in the country?
legalcorrection 4y ago
This is awful advice. Go to the highest ranked university[1] you can get into and afford because for the rest of your life, people will assume a lot about you based on that choice. It will open more doors than you expect. Your friends will be smarter and more successful too. [1] Not literally THE highest ranked. There’s reasons to go to UPenn instead of Harvard, but if you get into Harvard and go to a state school instead, you might be screwing up.

lordleft 4y ago

Is Grade Inflation really a problem at a top school? Why is it surprising that driven students at an elite institution are probably going to do well most of the time? I'd take this over moronic experiments like grade deflation at Princeton -- imagine being mandated to give only a small proportion of your students an A in, say, a Calc I class. I'm slightly annoyed at this discourse because I went to Columbia, an institution that seemed hellbent at enforcing some vague sense of rigor at the expense of the sanity of most of its students. I certainly want to be challenged, and don't want top Universities to be glorified country clubs masquerading as academic environments, but I also think that what a defines substantive and rigorous eduction is at the highest level is actually quite hard to pin down.

kurupt213 4y ago
Because there should still be a natural distribution. Even if you are evaluating the cream of the crop.
- neaden 4y ago
  This all depends on if you think a grade at school A should be directly comparable to school B.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  > Because there should still be a natural distribution. Even if you are evaluating the cream of the crop. Why should there be? Let's say all students in the class are A students, and would get an A in any other class, then some now get a B or C just because their classmates happen to be even better? It seems to me that doesn't really reflect student ability very accurately.
  - ip26 4y ago
    just because their classmates happen to be even better? In theory, getting top marks at a top school means you are the best of the best, in a literal sense. Or in different terms, is a "B" at MIT better than an "A" at a third tier?

wodenokoto 4y ago

It's not Dilbert, but one of those 90's geeky newspaper comic strips had a gag about this, where the guided tour of Harvard takes them to the class room where the last B was given.

dhosek 4y ago
Weird coincidence: The first time I saw a Dilbert comic strip was when I was teaching a LaTeX class at Harvard in 1989.

albntomat0 4y ago

The game theory around grades is interesting. I went to a well regarded US CS school for a masters, and we were told essentially that "Being good enough to get in here means you're smart and capable, and being middle of the pack here is still doing very well. In order to communicate that to companies doing hiring, the minimum allowed average is a B". I don't know for sure, but I expect most of my decent, but not truly exceptional cohort had GPAs much above a B. There were a couple courses that bucked the trend. Which ones theses were was well known, and many folks, looking to work at FAANG, dodged them because of it. I already had employment figured out, and optimized for things besides GPA. I was a bit too ambitious, receiving a number of Bs, but also learned a ton. Maybe that will bit me if someone cares to look back 5+ years at my grades, but that's a separate problem. If you're a professor assigning grades, with little ability to communicate the intricacies of your grades to those looking at them, what do you do? Accurately assigning grades hurts your students, and getting everyone to change is a collective action problem.

runnerup 4y ago
After even 2 years post-graduation those grades will only be inspected for McKinsey/Bain/BCG consulting positions and maybe some corporate executive-track / future C-suite-potential type roles. Almost no one will ever use them for hiring decisions. But also curious how much of the grade inflation is driven by increasing selection bias. With the bar to get into top schools is raised higher and higher, maybe most of the students really are earning their inflated grades?
chernevik 4y ago
It's very easy for the school to fix this. - The average grade is a B, class grades will not be accepted until compliant. - Publish this policy so employers know this. For a school like Harvard they'll trouble themselves to find out. Employers will quickly learn that a B, or even a C, still indicates a pretty capable person.
- ceras 4y ago
  Princeton tried exactly this while I went there ("grade deflation"), and it didn't go well. They sent a letter to places like med school admissions alongside transcripts, but it wasn't enough. Ultimately, they abandoned the practice in 2014: employers, law schools, med schools often have minimum GPA requirements that are not school specific. Students also didn't like it because they felt it made the environment more competitive and less collaborative than at other schools, because an A for your peer means one less A for you. Somewhere else in this comment section someone mentioned how going to Princeton during grade deflation era stopped them from becoming a doctor, and I'd say that's accurate.

lordnacho 4y ago

There's no way to know what a grade average means anyway, eg if you're employing someone. You don't know if they took easy courses or hard courses, you don't know if they were ill or if they cheated. All you can actually do is bring them in for interview and see if they can do a reasonable chat about why they want to work for you. Someone who has gotten into Harvard has already bagged a rather big prize, but the signalling can't be much more informative than that.

dqpb 4y ago

Nobody has ever asked me what my GPA was.

Cshelton 4y ago

Some schools, like The University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business, have taken aggressive measures in the past to fight grade inflation. They implemented a "hard average" at each grade level. So freshmen business course, the average had to be a C-. Soph: C, Jr: C+, Sr: B-. It certainly achieved the goal for the school, as a whole, to fight grade inflation... but.. For students, it was very important to be above the mean... otherwise your grade would typically get moved down. Which isn't the worst, since they compared it to competition in the job world... but hard to say that when students are paying an obscene amount of money to attend. The other challenge was the smaller courses, with ~10-15 students... very difficult to get an A+ in those courses as you had to be the top 1-3 in the class. I think they have since abandoned this grade inflation policy.. But yes, GPA is basically irrelevant now in comparing across schools...

anm89 4y ago
Yeah, I would actively avoid going to a school like this. This sounds like a race to the bottom. Or at least like a race to a C-

mywittyname 4y ago

The population in general continues to grow much faster than the number of people admitted to Ivy League schools. So it stands to reason that the few who manage to get in are going to uncharacteristically intelligent and driven, even compared to previous Ivy League cohorts. Which will drive up GPAs. Honestly, if the median GPA at Harvard was less than a 3.5, then that would raise questions. Because it means that either grading is unfair -- i.e., grading on a curve, rather than on an understanding of the material -- or that students aren't as capable as the school's reputation implies.

ceeplusplus 4y ago
> uncharacteristically intelligent and driven Or they had the right skin color [1]. [1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/16/admissions-suit-arguments/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/16/admissions-suit...
carabiner 4y ago
Harvard students of today are enormously more effective and likely intelligent than those of before. Some of that is due to technology making schoolwork easier, but also because of population growth like you said. In the 1950s, you could get into Harvard with one AP course scoring a 3: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/29Rparenting..html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2... Today you might have 5's on a dozen AP courses and be fully rejected (not waitlisted).

robotburrito 4y ago

A friend who got his MS at Penn State then went to get his PHD at American University was told by his boss when grading students, that he had to give "Genteleman's Cs" to people because their "parents paid a ton of $ to get them here." He/She was used to giving out real grades at state schools.

kashunstva 4y ago

My wife was an undergrad at MIT (course 5.) When she went to apply to med school she had a ton of explaining to do because MIT in those days - maybe now too I don’t know - graded on a curve. Not in some verkakte inflate-everyone mode but fitting everyone to a desired distribution. Every other university was already inflating grades.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

While the college admissions process is by no means a perfect system, if you're accepted to Harvard, you're probably a pretty darn good student. If Harvard graded on a curve, such that half of their students—who presumably got straight A's in high school—received a C or below, would that be more fair? Would it be a better representation of student performance? I suppose the answer depends on the purpose of giving grades. If the goal is to see who outperformed who, Harvard's average GPA is a major problem. If the goal is to see who learned the material, then Harvard is providing an excellent education.

bradstewart 4y ago
This is always a fun question, and a lot of it depends on the material/subject matter, but why not both? For things like math, science, and engineering--where the possible depth of knowledge and understanding far exceeds what could be learned in a semester course--I personally think exam grades should center around 50. If you've got 100 points to play with, why not use them? A lot of my classes did, and I always found the challenge exciting: what stuff did I not learn about this subject? This also gives you the ability to differentiate student performance, should that be of importance. At the end of the semester, things were usually (non-linearly) curved up to average around B. The instructors (well, most of them) knew what "absolute score" represented enough understanding to move on, and anything below that would not get curved into a passing grade.
- markusde 4y ago
  This is totally right. There are two kinds of classes: those with a specific set of learning outcomes to meet (eg. a prerequisite course) and those where by the end the in-scope knowledge is essentially unlimited (eg. courses where it's not unreasonable to prove named theorems on homework or exams). The former should be graded with 100% being all the knowledge, the latter in a way that gives a fair distribution and then scales. Of course, my fellow university students always push back on me when I support the latter :) At the risk of armchair psychoanalyzing, I think a lot of them don't want to reckon with the fact that there's such an overwhelming amount of information out there and so many perspectives to explore it from that "100%" in say introductory topology is almost completely meaningless as a measure of how much topology one actually knows.

havblue 4y ago

I will note that Harvard extension school weeds out prospective students based on whether they get a 3.0, and they will kick you out if you fail to maintain that gpa. So at least part of the university's grades have a hard floor that prevents people with poor grades from getting accepted or graduating.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

LatteLazy 4y ago

Non American here. Are GPAs meant to be comparable between institutions?

pas 4y ago
they're not even comparable between years

JauntTrooper 4y ago

When I was at Princeton they had strict anti-grade inflation policy, with no more than 35% of students getting an A per department. It was really demoralizing, and to be honest it's had a negative impact on my life. My public high school didn't have a great math and science program so I started behind my classmates freshman year. It felt like the As basically went to the kids who had covered the material before in AP classes. By junior year I was hovering around a 3.0, and I made the gut-wrenching decision that I couldn't go to medical school or pursue a PhD in biology because my grades weren't high enough. I decided I needed to set my sights lower. Even law school was out, basically business school was the only graduate school that would take me. I switched my major to economics. It was devastating to give up on my dream, and I have to admit it still stings 20 years later. I adore biochemistry and would have loved to pursue research as a profession. My main problem is I didn't know how to effectively study in college. I cruised through high school without ever really needing to learn from a book. I didn't really learn how to study correctly until a year or two after college, when I took the CFA exams. Let me tell you, learning how to study (at 24) was an eye-opener for me, and it still feels like a superpower. I ended up becoming the valedictorian of my business school class a few years later. I've had a very successful career as an investment banker, so I ended up fine. But I do think these grade deflation policies can be really harmful to the psyche of young students. Sure, there are benefits to getting humbled, hitting a wall and needing to grind it out, but students come into school with all sorts of different levels of preparation and there's a big risk that some will flounder. I don't like relative grading. I think there should be objective standards of what you should know, and if you meet those standards you get an A. As long as you make those standards sufficiently rigorous, it shouldn't matter whether 30% or 80% of the class gets an A. Relative grading pits students against each other and creates an unhealthy learning environment.

eatbitseveryday 4y ago
If you are lucky enough to be in a financially sound situation, why not consider a career change and try to pursue that which you've wanted? My wife retook foundational courses for med school -- physics, biology, chemistry, etc. to pass the prerequisites, and then the MCAT. You can take classes at (any?) university, telling them they are "non-degree credits" which makes it easier for you to enroll. For a PhD you're never too old. For medical school, likely as a "non-traditional" student, you'd have better luck at gaining admissions to a DO school than an MD school, despite the latter claiming they adore that class of student.

antisthenes 4y ago

Well, obviously. How else would you "hire only the best" otherwise?

supernova87a 4y ago

I have a related observation from the perspective of graduate programs in the US. One surprising, and sensible thing, that I noticed in working in the UK was that PhD defenses of students were conducted by professors from other universities. In that sense, there was an external standard that prevented simply passing students for "sentimental" reasons or lowering the bar unilaterally by the student's own department. And I certainly knew of cases in the US in my department where people got passed much more leniently, and it's hard for your own professor to tell you that you're not fit for a PhD. (ironically (?) when it does happen, it seems the bad news comes at the last step, rather than along the way, much to the publicized and frustrating feedback about grad programs that appears in discussion often). Of course in the US there is no way that you could coordinate, or have universities be incentivized, to have external examiners evaluate and pass/fail their students. It probably all relates (in some tangential way) to the waning desire to engage in standards-setting for admission or graduation.

pmyteh 4y ago
UK universities also have 'external examiners', who are academics from the same subject area in other universities. They're tasked with providing moderation feedback to try to keep standards for each (taught) degree classification roughly comparable between institutions. (They also provide input into course design, warn university highers-up if the programme is going off the rails, and other things). It's far from perfect, and standards do vary from course to course and institution to institution, but it's better than nothing. And not all in one direction, either: after the first year of the MSc programme I (later) took, the external examiners' report said that our department had marked very harshly, and several excellent students deserving of distinctions (and who would have got them in other universities) had been denied. The recommendation was to actually award the highest marks in the future. I'm directing my own new MA programme next year, and I'm curious to see what feedback I get. Marking, where there's no established disciplinary body of knowledge to get through and assess, is decidedly non-trivial to get right.

photochemsyn 4y ago

If you are a professor at an Ivy League school, your life will be much easier if you go along with grade inflation - i.e. don't create tests and assignments that are too difficult or challenging. Otherwise it'll be a constant battle over points on assignments and tests. The kids going to such elite institutions (similar to the British public school program for the posh) probably mostly came out of private high schools that also inflated grades, and if SATs are used, they probably had SAT tutors - so they're going to be used to getting top scores on everything, and will complain mightily if that changes. I don't really think the point of those schools is to really get a top-notch education, anyway - as with the British system, the point is to network with other children from wealthy elite families, which is a launchpad into the upper circles of government, business and media. The Atlantic spelled it out recently: The answer lies in the specific nature of Ivy League elitism, which is an aristocracy of networks. Ivy League graduates make up 0.4 percent of the country. They are significantly overrepresented in Fortune 500 C-suites, in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, in academia, and in the media. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/ivy-league-apologists-january-6-gop-elitism-populsim/621153/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/ivy-league... As far as anyone who wants a useful education in technology/science/math/engineering, you really want to go to a research-centric school that's small enough to allow you a chance to work directly with active research groups - even in a menial position. If you want to go onto graduate school, that experience is more valuable than anything else. Grades and GRE scores also matter, and will help with things like paid fellowships, but not nearly as much as hands-on experience with a real research group. Also, always take the harder series - a C grade in an advanced physics course for physics majors will mean more than an A grade in the softer version for non-majors, for example.

universityguys 4y ago
most students at harvard and other elite universities come from american public schools, for the record. very high concentration of rich preppy private school kids, yes, but majority is still public.
- brewdad 4y ago
  How many of those public school students are coming from exclusive suburban districts that may as well be private given the cost of living within the district's boundaries? I would guess the majority. Sure the random star from small-town Illinois will get in alongside 20 kids from a Chicago suburban high school.

supernova87a 4y ago

I read actually here on HN some years back (or was is Slashdot?), a good explanation of how Japanese undergrad programs have a similar problem about inflation, manifested by contrast in why they are very focused on taking attendance at college courses. Anyone who gets into a top Japanese university by definition has done well up to that point. And the university has an obvious interest in maintaining (or making it seem to outsiders / employers / future students) that their graduates are top ranked. So it would not be good to be having 1/2 your class "underperforming". Therefore grades are inflated and as a result students often just phone it in. (also knowing that their careers ahead are mostly set if they minimally apply themselves and show up) So at that point, all they can do is mostly grade people on the small differences in performance, monitor their attendance to catch and flunk out the worst behaviors (completely skipping class), and live with the system they have. I would be glad to find/read that post again but I think I've lost where it came from...

howenterprisey 4y ago
The year is 20XX...
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Honestly, I can't blame 'em. Expecting full effort always is re-testing the students you already know to be smart over and over so the bean-counters know how to rank them. Once you have your certification of "in the top of the smart bucket", classes should mostly be pass/fail past that point instead of monitoring for minute differences in behavior.

bigbacaloa 4y ago

This based on a highly biased self-reported sample.

anm89 4y ago

I mean don't they get 10000 applications already from a preselected group of mostly very good and smart students and then filter for the top 3 percent? Most of those kids are going to show up to class and do the work. I'm not saying that there is no grade inflation going on but they have created a system designed to select academic freaks(yeah I know, and a bunch of rich kids) who value grades above all else.

hintymad 4y ago

This is not just Harvard, right? Elite schools, especially the so called ivy schools, have been inflating GPAs for years. In the meantime, they have been putting more weight on "holistic" admission over academic performance. So the US has been so advanced that academic performance is of secondary importance? Leadership is what matters most? Do I understand it correctly?

universityguys 4y ago
Most of the students admitted have top percentile grades/test scores as well. But the competition at the very top is based in leadership rather than minuscule differences in testing, yes.

bitL 4y ago

Is Stanford different? I've heard that in this year's NLP class (CS224N), 93% was only good for B+ which doesn't sound like grade inflation at all.

universityguys 4y ago
Stanford has grade inflation, but not at the level at Harvard. Faculty senate said median GPA is 3.69 (so less than 50% have at least a 3.7, despite being just as selective as Harvard). And this is after taking into account that Stanford A+ is 4.3.

booboofixer 4y ago

Shocking. Here's something to compare it to. It is rumored that engineering courses at University of Toronto never have an average above 70, and if they do everybody gets curved down. Confirmed by my probability professor who showed us the effects of the curve on everyone's grades. A 70 corresponds to 2.7 GPA: https://undergrad.engineering.utoronto.ca/calculate-gpa/ https://undergrad.engineering.utoronto.ca/calculate-gpa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UofT/comments/672fj3/what_is_the_average_gpa_at_u_of_t/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UofT/comments/672fj3/what_is_the_av...

universityguys 4y ago
To be fair, U of Toronto is nowhere near selective as Harvard.
- booboofixer 4y ago
  Im not sure how that impacts the small/large difference in students GPAs.

antoinebalaine 4y ago

I reckon grades inflation is going to keep following tuition inflation. Can't blame Harvard for this one, most schools have to balance the financial impact that academic exigence has on families. Going to study in Boston requires enormous effort - time-wise and financially. Given the amount of sacrifice required to get there in the first place (in my case, I got half-tuition scholarship to a Boston school after a three-year prep, my parents sold their appartment to help me pay, I took a loan on top of that and still ran out of money mid-undergrad), tough-grading and failing assignments can definitely put a lower-income student at risk of failing to graduate. If professors start playing tough-graders and put a student a risk, the school will appear as extorting money tuition while failing to keep its promise of providing an education and a future to the kid. I definitely had some heated discussions with older generation liberal arts professors who couldn't understand why it wasn't OK to "F" me for some stupid petty deadline. They couldn't fathom that from a student's perspective, the money at stake increases over the duration of the degree, in turn growing the potential cost of academic failure (or under-performance). Harvard is also subject to the problem, it just seems to deal with it in its usual magazine-cover-first-in-class-student way.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

You get what you pay for!

chernevik 4y ago

Harvard admits a lot of people not actually capable of doing the work. Rigorous grades would expose those people. The patterns among those people would embarrass the policies driving those admissions, and expose the school to criticisms, probably unfair, that it prefers to avoid. Better to give everyone an A and avoid all the controversy. This is almost certainly deteriorating the overall quality of the education available at Harvard -- why kill yourself to get the same A as everyone else? Even if professors want to encourage excellence, how can they signal it? When I graduated in the mid-80s, Ivy League grads were distinctly more capable than those from my pretty good school. From what I see this is no longer the case.

Sparkyte 4y ago

In order to maintain an exclusive and elite image it has to surpress skills and talent to only promote its top performers, even in a place where its top performers out pace the brightest of a normal college. Elitism at its finest. We could get so many amazing people if Harvard didn't cut people short.

pas 4y ago
wat? we already have a myriad of amazing people everywhere, and these elite certificate mills are largely irrelevant for making the world better anyway.

bo1024 4y ago

As a professor, I'll put out there how I'm currently thinking about grade inflation in my case. Classes of let's say "Type 1" have lots of students and very specific learning objectives. I need to make sure everyone who passes the class is proficient in those objectives. So I focus on teaching the baseline expectations. I give assessments where, if you understand the material, you get it right. Therefore, most students who have the prereqs and try hard get A's. The median grade is pretty high along with a tail of people who mostly aren't trying that hard. But you don't need special aptitude to get an A. Unfortunately that can make the class pretty easy for top students, and I'm working on ways to challenge them. But I don't need to knock the whole class down to a B just to challenge top students. The other "type 2" classes are upper level where people are there to learn hard material and are self motivated. Here students may face tougher challenges and experience more failure even when they put in lots of time and effort. But I usually give As pretty easily. The fact that they're trying hard in a difficult upper level class already shows they're ahead of 95% of their classmates, why would I punish their GPA for that? And most of these students don't need the threat of a bad grade to motivate them, they put in the effort because they're interested. Of course some students will get bad grades in the class but the median is again usually pretty high. So I find myself a contributor to grade inflation. Employers, look less at GPA and more at what courses a person challenged themselves with!

jseliger 4y ago
I have taught at non-elite schools and have observed that, particularly in classes without objective tests, there is a strong incentive for the professors to grade up: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/ https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess... Unhappiness about grades can also be transmuted into complaints and eventually investigations about other matters—a thing I've seen happen. There is something to the "They pretend to learn, and we pretend to teach" line, in many situations. (That I am observing this situation doesn't mean I approve of it.)
- bo1024 4y ago
  Thanks for the link. There's a great point in there about how adjuncts are under much more pressure here than tenure-track.

pcurve 4y ago

only 8.9% has GPA of 3.5? At Cornell, getting GPA of 3.2 got you on Dean's List for engineering school.

throwaway004455 4y ago

As a recent college graduate (I graduated last year), I can tell that you part of this is definitely due the easiness of cheating on exams after school started remote classes cuz of Covid. Every class i took in my senior year, there was at least one discord group that would share answers during exams. Answers to assignments were also frequently shared. I was part of it and I don’t feel no regrets because college sucks and 90% of my engineering knowledge is from me doing my personal hobby projects or working in industry.

spacemanmatt 4y ago
sometimes i cross paths with engineers from those channels, who haven't failed upward into management yet, and i show them no mercy

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

30944836 4y ago

I don't see where this statistic controls for people who didn't graduate or for people who didn't take classes for which they would not be successful. This average GPA could represent grade inflation. Or it could represent increased information symmetry between the difficulty of classes and the students themselves, paired with the students' interests, determination, and aptitude. TL;DR: Grade inflation or survivorship bias?

drewcoo 4y ago

Related? https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure My anecdotal experience is that "top" students seemed to be the ones obsessed with GPA, often instead of with learning broadly and deeply. I would not be surprised if "top" schools were like that, too. I did a state school, so I wouldn't know first hand.

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Aaronstotle 4y ago

At Berkeley, I always heard that other schools (including Ivy Leagues) had grade inflation, nice to have data to back that up.

janejeon 4y ago

Funny thing: in many of the Ivy's, it's well known that the "A"s in Harvard are not the same as the "A"s in the other Ivy's, so we joke that if you want to get an A, you should go to Harvard.

jwilber 4y ago
It’s well-known everywhere. http://www.whatwouldmyharvardgrade.be/ http://www.whatwouldmyharvardgrade.be/ isn’t live anymore, but it was for years. (It just showed a giant “A”).

dan-robertson 4y ago

I didn’t go to Harvard. I studied maths at Cambridge in the U.K. and grade inflation was definitely a topic there. The university felt that their purpose was to produce good researchers and grades (in the U.K. you get a ‘class’ for your degree – 1, 2:1, 2:2, or 3 – rather than a GPA/transcript) at the end of undergraduate degrees reflected how good a researcher the university thought you might make. In maths they would give about 30% of people a first (it was important to control this number as it roughly corresponded to the cutoff for doing the fourth year masters degree which was, of course, called part III), about 30% a 2:2 or 3rd (mostly 2:2s), and the rest a 2:1. In humanities subjects a far higher proportion would receive a 2:1 with a smaller percentage receiving firsts and a select few receiving ‘starred firsts’. The issue was basically that the university did not want to do grade inflation and students felt that they were ignoring the fact the the grades they chose had a large influence on the lives of the majority of students who did not go on to become researchers. Students felt disadvantaged compared to their peers at other universities where they felt they would more easily get higher grades (either due to a higher proportion set by the university or some sense of superior ability). I guess one big reason for feeling disadvantaged is not really knowing how employers work (or, more importantly, how good employers work). Lots of common seeming options claimed to be ‘institution blind’ in hiring new graduates which meant that they would look at the degree class and assume that a 1st class degree meant the same at any university and that a 2:1 was the minimum standard. This also meant totally absurd recruiting pipelines (because you can’t easily filter out applicants based on their CVs you need to add bullshit tests like ‘how many times can you click your mouse in a minute’ to reduce the size of the pool before interviewing). Obviously the trick would be to find the places that knew more about the system at Cambridge and not tipex that name off your CV, or especially those who would consider it a stronger signal than it should have been. But this also has disadvantages; it seems not great to end up at a company working with many people with a similar background. The other main point of contention I remember was whether it was easier to get more alphas (or good marks) by studying pure maths or applied maths. Perhaps a good thing about the system was that grades were not really assessed per-course and homework was not assessed so it was mostly designed to be pedagogical rather than doable without much imagination.

WorldMaker 4y ago

The term "grade inflation" includes an underlying presumption that GPAs are fungible and as a gentle reminder: they are not. You can't directly compare the GPAs between schools or between course loads. Like so many other metrics in our lives, just because you can get a numerical output doesn't mean the metric is universally applicable or "objectively quantifiable" or "objectively comparable".

wedn3sday 4y ago

I just finished a Masters program at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), where this is very much not the case! Unlike the American system (Im from the US), at TCD a 70% is considered "First Class Honors" i.e. the highest grade possible. Getting a 80% in any of the classes I took (a MSc in High Performance Computing) was very nearly impossible, the grading for assignments and exams is very harsh (but fair I think!).

jsiaajdsdaa 4y ago

If I was an employer, I would only hire people with demonstrated skills in the thing I was hiring them for. No piece of paper would ever convince me otherwise.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

I guess professors just want their students to succeed after graduating and award everyone straight A's. Especially because assignments in senior years are fuzzier, not like "you solved 4 out of 5 equations, here's B for you" in a junior year.

olliej 4y ago

Maybe they're just all /really/ smart? edit: actually as an addendum to this (don't want to hide dumb statements). I realize my problem is not the high proportion of high grades, or the high average GPA, however you look at it. If you have a group of student who for various reasons are very capable - there's lots of nonsense with Ivy's, but they do have entry grade filtering - you should expect more of them to get higher grades. The problem is, I don't think there's alternate evidence that each year is inherently more capable than the prior year. Assuming same entry restrictions, and so presumable capability, you should expect on the whole the average GPA to hover at a consistent level, sometimes going a little up, sometimes a little down, but generally hovering around the same place. In that situation it would still be completely possible for one school to have a significantly higher average GPA than a /different/ school. The idea of grade is to measure capability, and for the sake of argument lets pretend every university/college used the same end of year tests for math, physics, law, whathaveyou. In such a case if you compared the average GPA from two schools where one was a community college in a remote rural america, and the other was something like MIT, an Ivy, ICs, etc you would absolutely expect a significant gap in those averages. So the problem isn't what the average is, its that the average is moving in a consistent direction year after year, and that is an indication of grade inflation. Growing up in NZ the national standardized tests, and university courses, had this concept called "scaling". The goal of scaling was to recognize than from year to year there may simply be unintentional variations in assessment difficulty. So what happened is at the end of a year/course, the average % score of the students is calculated, and compared to the prior, if the difference is significant every % grade is essentially scaled by some factor of the difference. That has the effect of pulling this years average grade closer to prior years, and ideally compensating for assessment variation.