10 ms·

Grade inflation: What goes up must come down

125 points by signa11 4y ago

light_hue_1 4y ago
You can tell this was written by a student who doesn't really understand grades or what the problem is. > You may have gotten a C in Math 55 but your potential employer could see the average grade was a B+. This never happens. No one cares if you were a C student at Harvard or an A student. All they care about is the degree. With one exception: grad school. Bad grades can shut off doors for more education. From he point of view of people who give grades: 1. High grades are free, low grades are expensive. I can mint as many As as I want. No one will ever complain. Give a student a B or a C? I have had students flip. Their parents can call. They can appeal. Some people just cause endless problems. 2. I don't need people posting hate about me online When you give students good grades they say great things about you on ratemyprofessor and on surveys. When you give bad grades.. they say bad things. No thanks. This has even resulted in lecturers losing their jobs. 3. Cheating distorts grades anyway Can you imagine the disaster when you catch most of a class cheating? In my experience a significant fraction of students cheat. Guess how many hours of your life you will waste if you pursue every clear cheater? With that in mind, if you grade on a curve and set a low average grade, you're just punishing the honest stuents. 4. Who cares!? So what if everyone gets an A? What's the point? Given that no employer cares and that your wealth is largely a function of your parent's wealth, why are we wasting so much time on this. Any reasonable effort should merit an A and then we leave people alone. Students who want to excel will go on to do research, side projects, etc. regardless.
- sn41 4y ago
  You missed one more social aspect: give too many students an F in a course (for example, for cheating), and the instructors in the following year will let you know what they think.
  - toast0 4y ago
    > You missed one more social aspect: give too many students an F in a course (for example, for cheating), and the instructors in the following year will let you know what they think. Give too many Fs and the administration is going to be breathing down your neck. They've got graduation rate targets to hit, not gonna happen if you fail too many people.
    - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
      to quote a professor I had in uni: "if they want me to stop failing students, they should stop assigning me classes and let me do my research"
      - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
        To your professor: If you want to do research then what are you doing at a school?! Take a tip from E.O. Lawrence and get a large funder to fund a research institute for you.
- klodolph 4y ago
  This is spot on. The people who do care are the exchange students, transfer students, and students applying to graduate school, assuming grades transfer (which they often don’t). Schools with unusual grading policies often include a letter alongside transcripts to explain away why a student’s grades may not match what you expect. For example, Wellesley College includes a letter explaining that grades are NOT inflated at Wellesley, so a B in a class at Wellesley corresponds to an A at a more typical school. Evergreen College includes no grades at all and provides a thick packet explaining everything. Maybe Harvard should include a letter in its transcripts explaining that students at Harvard are graded in an extremely lax fashion, and any credits transferred from Harvard should be transferred as if the course were taken pass/fail. (Half joking.)
- NegativeK 4y ago
  Would pass/fail be a better fit?
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  > So what if everyone gets an A? What's the point? What's the point of university then? If "any reasonable effort should merit an A" it seems like there is zero point in university existing. A degree has no signal at that point. And even if it's true that a degree has no signal anymore, you can't operate like that in the real world because a lot of people still operate under the assumption that degrees and GPA do carry signal. You'd most likely end up losing out on a lot of opportunities.
  - upwardbound 4y ago
    Hopefully the point of university is to learn
    - less_less 4y ago
      Agreed. But also, there's no point in giving grades if they don't mean anything. If you expect everyone who puts in nominal effort to get an A, then the class should be pass/fail. I wonder if an explicit policy that grades are for internal purposes only would help. That is, grades are useful feedback on how well you're learning, but they aren't comparable between classes and aren't intended to judge or rate students. So the uni would refuse to calculate GPAs or report grades to outside parties. Maybe they could even give more flexibility on how grades are calculated and reported. Like they could be whatever combination of pass/fail, letters, percents, notes etc that the prof wants, because by policy you're not calculating with them.
      - upwardbound 4y ago
        Yeah, and I also like your idea of every class being pass/fail. I'm sure I've heard of some colleges doing it but I haven't looked into whether it's considered to be an improvement. Also I wonder what the results would be in terms of norm-setting if this was done at Harvard or something next?
    - zzless 4y ago
      You may think so but this would be going against the facts. In reality, there are two major goals each US university has: 1. attracting funds (in the form of tuition, grants, etc) 2. improving educational statistics for the state The second goal is related to the first and, in the case of a public school, dominates. The more diplomas the university awards, the more funding it usually gets (since it improves 'retention'). Universities certainly have great facilities for learning and if a student wants to learn, s*he certainly can but this is irrelevant from the point of view of the administration. Lest you think this is another conspiracy theory, I have heard these two exact statements in every faculty meeting we had at the university level. How can I care about grade inflation (as a faculty) if I am penalized for the excessive number of withdrawals from my classes. Think about it: the students have realized that they were not ready for the class early, and decided to save themselves the headache and take a lower level class. This is counted against the faculty. Now what incentive do I have to give objective grades?
likely_harrison 4y ago
Grade inflation is always and everywhere an admission rate problem. The US college-applying population has grown (a lot). The Harvard class size remains the same. Harvard continues to be a (the?) top tier school. This means that Harvard classes are probably getting better year after year. Even if Harvard is evaluating performance exactly the same (no new cushiness), if the admitted are better, they’ll be getting better grades on average, and those grades will be more compressed.
- w-ll 4y ago
  Legacy grows at least as linear tho.
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  I don't think this tracks; The argument seems to be that there are more and more students, and the number that can go to Harvard is fixed, so Harvard is selecting for the "best and the brightest" which when they were less picky was a smaller percentage of the class but now they only get really bright and talented students. Does that more or less capture it? If so consider that grades are against the class, not the student. If grades did not inflate, and the quality of the students had risen, then the effort to get an A would go up commensurately with the quality of the student and those who weren't up to that standard would continue to get the B's and C's. What the article is saying is that by not grading on a curve (or letting the curve parameters creep up) the median GPA goes up and the standard deviation goes down (compression). Rather than having a consistent distribution with what ever students happen to be admitted currently.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    If exam grades follow some absolute standard, then throwing better students at them would result at more As, up tp only A grades for an entire class. This is without any grade inflation: the absolute level of knowledge to get an A stays the same, but the absolute level of knowledge demonstrated by students goes up. To the contrary, to have any B or C grades in a class full of the brightest students, one needs to either increase the absolute expected level, or to give the class grades relative to its strength, which again means raising the expected level for an A. Exam questions from Harvard can be easily tracked 100+ years back. A researcher who'd give current Harvard graduates some of the older questions could find out if the toughness of the exams went up, down, or stayed.
gnicholas 4y ago
In undergrad, the professor who taught intermediate microeconomics told us about how law and business school admissions officers knew how tough his course was (it was the weeder course), and that doing well would be a feather in our cap. I made the mistake of believing him. The savvy students took intermediate micro at nearby schools and transferred the credit along with a higher grade. Graduate schools will look at rec letters and take the professor's praise into account, but they haven’t the slightest notion of whether a class you took is hard or not. Students who want to optimize their future prospects know this, and select their courses accordingly. Oh, and employers know/care even less than graduate schools.
- tylergetsay 4y ago
  This also applies to high school in my experience. I had a lower GPA but took AP classes, my friends who took easy classes got into better schools.
  - mathattack 4y ago
    Same though I’d say that the group who optimized for grades over challenging themselves in high school didn’t fare so well. Same in college actually. I don’t have much law school data but it seems like the folks afraid of competition when they’re young don’t grow into it when they get older.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    At least with AP classes you get a GPA bump that affects the raw numerical calculation. That way, you can come out ahead if you get A- or better in the AP class. I recall that for some schools/purposes, they just looked at your GPA without weighting, but for most purposes they gave credit for weighted grades. This also applied to class rank, but for me all of this was a couple decades ago.
  - schoolornot 4y ago
    AP classes served only to keep the hoodlums out when I took them. I still don't understand what the point is of them. Not one of them were anything like a real college course. If someone wants to shortcut some credits, I recommend memorizing some flash cards and taking a DSST/CLEP exam.
thebradbain 4y ago
I think the premise of this article is flawed — aside from the (imo very valid) “who cares!” argument with regards to grades not actually mattering for really anything anymore except when it comes to some grad programs, the implicit assumption of this analysis is that the grade system will exist in its current form in the future. I think it’s more likely Harvard does away with the traditional letter system altogether. Aside from the fact Harvard operated just fine without it for the first 2-3 centuries it operated, let’s take a step back and try to remember what the grades were to track in the first place: students’ absorption of the material (i.e. “learning”). This type of grade system is better for measuring things that have right/wrong answers— math, memorization of dates, anything mechanical, etc. Yet with calculators and the internet making things like historical timelines and formulas etc accessible even to payment, graders’ job of even grading these “objective” becomes more subjective— if you arrive to the wrong math question, but did all the right high level steps and made a small but cascading error in the beginning, I’d posit that student likely knows the material well and would avoid that error were it pointed out. But from a grading perspective, what is that? 7/10? Same situation to a history student laying out the historical context leading up to some event and mixing up some dates. Things get even more muddled when it comes to humanities. In fact, off the top of my head, Pomona College and Brown University, both well-regarded schools within academia (and Pomona with I believe the highest undergrad acceptance rate into Harvard grad programs), have the option for every class to be taken as Pass/Fail, except when it comes to later-stage major requirements. Graduation accolades are awarded by professor recommendation, which fosters getting to know your professors out of the classroom better than grades. Anything that needs to be GPA-gated could instead be (likely better) gated by a placement test. Knowledge is not a 0 sum game. Maybe instead of trying to adapt our current education circumstances to to an old grading system, it’s time to think of a new system altogether.
- derbOac 4y ago
  I agree the premise of these sorts of pieces is very flawed, and I'm surprised in these discussions the assumptions are put forth so matter-of-factly. Grades don't necessarily exist to maximize some spread and produce a nice normal distribution. They could be constructed that way, but the way they tend to be used is in communicating level of mastery with material, and if a course is well-constructed, the instructor teaches well, and the students are engaged and learning, they should generally mostly get "good grades." The weird thing is, how do you know that Harvard students aren't basically all understanding the material in their courses well? Wouldn't you expect that? Think about it another way. Let's say universities tried hard to improve their educational effectiveness over decades, and were successful at it. More and more students were understanding the material in courses better. Why shouldn't that be reflected in improved grades? At some level as you point out what really matters is whether or not a student basically grasped the material well enough, and the grading system in some ways punishes risk taking by grappling with difficult material. I was a professor for many years, and there were certain universities that were known to have extremely low GPAs (yes this still happens), so we had to factor that into graduate admissions decisions. It did nothing but hurt applicants. Those students had the benefit of coming from schools that were well-known enough to be on people's radars, and for word-of-mouth to afford admissions committees knowing about grading practices. Students from smaller schools wouldn't be so lucky. On the other hand, GPA might be more predictive of outcomes than standardized tests (https://news.uchicago.edu/story/test-scores-dont-stack-gpas-predicting-college-success https://news.uchicago.edu/story/test-scores-dont-stack-gpas-...) so this discussion might be moot. It doesn't mean that something couldn't be improved about grading but it's odd to level these kinds of critiques at GPA if it's outperforming the biggest alternative available).
har_ry 4y ago
Anecdotally I think some gpa inflation is related to modern course design. What was the design and pedagogy (workload too) for a biology course at harvard in the 1920s versus today? Without this info the graph tells us less than it might. What classes were being offered in 1920s harvard? At my university we dont offer classes that were at one time considered essential Want to learn about virgil? Well, theres the internet
diziet 4y ago
As echoed before in the discussion, I suspect for most jobs the GPA one receives is not relevant not even disclosed in job applications. It might matter for folks going for graduate degrees / law / med though. A 180 on the LSAT or 528 on the MCAT speaks quite a bit, too.
- deleted 4y ago
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frozenport 4y ago
Article doesn't explain why it "must come down" only offers a few side effects of it being high.
- neltnerb 4y ago
  I mean, they explained why there's a hard cap and that eventually everyone will have a grade within a range of like 3.99 to 4.00 regardless of performance. But yeah, I didn't see anything about why it would necessarily come down. Personally I'd sooner see numerical grades eliminated, but they serve a purpose in making things a little more objective with large numbers of people. I can't really see them coming down unless every university agreed to do it simultaneously, there's too much advantage to be gained by not cooperating.
kart23 4y ago
sooo theres no possibility students are trying harder these days or are just plain better students? The acceptance rate at harvard in 1969 was around 20%, compared with 4.6% today. It kinda makes sense that if you're accepting people who are better students, they're gonna get higher GPAs.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  I mean, that's the argument these schools make.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Even if it were true that everyone is smarter today, it’s not helpful. GPAs are used to compare students if similar cohorts, no one is seriously picking between a 21 year old and a 70 year old based on GPA. There’s no value in reflecting increased cohort ability. Theoretically Roughly you just want a distribution via which good students can be differentiated. In reality Harvard just wants to pretend all it’s students are extraordinarily good so that they can apply for a job with a GPA that looks better than Yale. And Yale returns the favour.
charles_f 4y ago
The GPA system has been a bit of a mystery to me since I discovered its existence. As a European from a country that has no such system, it seems like a bit of a rat race, where people giving grades have bad incentives to pad them. Where I'm from, you graduated from a program or you didn't ; the only distinction was "with merit", or "valedictorian" and that's it. Your distinction comes from the institution you receive the sesame from, and the ranking it receives from random industry rankings and simple reputation. Not a perfected system, but a bit more straight forward. Now in Canada, I receive resumes from new grads who have either >3.8 or no GPA posted. I'm yet to see a correlation between those GPA numbers and superior performance, but the university they come from is a stronger predictor of fit and effectiveness. Therefore I tend to ignore the GPA (or worse, consider the boasting as a negative) and put emphasis on university. I'm dubitative what the value of the score actually is.
- angry_octet 4y ago
  It's certainly no use in recruitment. I would look more at the curriculum content and project work, and use that as a basis to ask interview questions.
- deleted 4y ago
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jeff-davis 4y ago
"Harvard students, who can be very risk-averse and afraid of failure..." An interesting statement, which seems worthy of its own article.
- elefanten 4y ago
  Is it? The coincidence of risk aversion and status grubbing seem quite strong. In many ways, status grubbing is the safest meta strategy in contemporary society. [ascii shrugface]
- ankit219 4y ago
  Not really. The current admission system is such that students with slightly lower grade would likely not make it. So, only those who make it are the ones who haven't taken much risks, focused on their grades, kept taking the subjects where it's comparatively easier to get a higher grade, and then the curriculars which are standard and augment the profile. Tests/SATs are also standard ones, and since top Ivy-leaguers only focus on a handful of things, it's important to maintain high score in that. Many students who experimented with a tough (but interesting) course in high school/undergrad, and got bad grades in 1-2 subjects will likely not make it. This results in a higher proportion of admitted students who are risk-averse and afraid of failure. If that is the input, very improbable that it would be much different with them once they are in college.
godelski 4y ago
I graduated high school in 2009 and the top schools definitely weren't taking in students with a 3.6 GPA. In fact, I'm not aware of any school in the top 50 that asked for anything under a 4.0 (AP/IB programs enable GPAs above 4.0). Right now I see sites saying that the average Harvard GPA is 4.18. Berkeley is lower but I know plenty of people that got rejected with high GPAs (I know two people that had a 4.8 -- the top you could get in my school -- that were rejected from several top schools). I say this because two things. First, it is clear that there are things other than GPA that admissions are accounting for. It is a bit unclear what these things are. It would be nice to know how they are extracting signal from noise (and it is clear that this is a very noisy system, though we often don't admit this). Second, if these are actual averages, there's clearly some other aspects that are heavily weighted in that process. The four that would be the most obvious to me are legacy, affirmative action, sports, and students who don't have access to AP/IB programs. These are clearly not meritocratic aspects (lack of access to better programs like AP/IB would imply that these signals aren't meritocratic because meritocracy isn't exactly equitable in accessibility. Or do all these schools know exactly how good each high school is and their inflation rates and variance rates?). I really think as we're learning more about how people learn that we learn that the signals are extremely noisy and may not even exist. Students from poorer backgrounds may need extra care[0] but they still do pretty well[1]. So how do you measure someone that has potential from a poor school? How does this differentiate from measuring someone that has potential but not the opportunities from median or rich schools? (environment is a big factor in success) I really just have a lot of questions here and I really do think we should be discussing how noisy this system is. A question I want to ask is: if I randomly select a person from the population and give them a Harvard (or top tier) education, will they be more successful than if they went to a college they could have gotten into based on their merits? If the answer is "yes" (and I think there's good reason to believe this is true) then maybe all these measurements don't really mean much and we're just reading tea leaves. (I think there's some signal but I just don't know how much. I'm also not an expert. Thanks for listening to my ted talk) [0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/16/klapper-privileged-poor/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/16/klapper-privil... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
anilgulecha 4y ago
(Giving some context into this as founder in edtech -- running a 4 yr CS undergraduate program at kalvium.com) One reason for grade inflation is that this is currently the only filter provided to the industry, who would like to filter students they review. This has ended up as a perverse incentive, and students and the university want to be above the "cutoff" GPA. One of the solutions we're going with is to provide a 5 point grade per course, and provide this full breadth of data as a filter to the industry during the placements/internships season. Our bet is that the industry will have more diverse options to go by and we end up with better match-making. Another solution is to have publicly verifiable artifacts of coursework (plagiarism is a significant problem in higher education). I'd also like to hear HN's recommendations on this topic.
- roxgib 4y ago
  Perhaps I've misunderstood, but is one advantage of a 5 point system that the resulting point are highly and interpreted favourably by review systems that assume a 4.0 maximum? I'm guessing a lot of them don't bother to read the data you provide.
  - anilgulecha 4y ago
    The big change is a grade per course, with publically available artifacts of project work.
Animats 4y ago
At West Point, until 2020 the big thing was class rank. Graduates could request their three top choices of branch of service (infantry, artillery, logistics, intelligence, etc.). Graduates with the highest class rank got their first choices. (This has changed a bit recently.[1]) So only the order of grades matters, not the values. Especially since everyone takes roughly the same set of courses. [1] https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/09/13/west-point-has-changed-how-cadets-are-assigned-branches-rotc-will-soon-follow/ https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/09/13/west-poi...
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  That's interesting to know. Annapolis got rid of of 'service selection' in favor of 'service assignment' way back in 1995. I don't know what the final straw was in that case, but I can imagine either submarines weren't getting their due, or all lowest grads were unacceptably dead weight and piling up in one undesirable community...
janalsncm 4y ago
My question is, why wouldn’t it be this way? For two equivalent students from equivalently prestigious schools, if one has a 3.5 GPA and the other has a 3.9 due to grade inflation, of course the second student will have more opportunities. And more opportunities means higher pay, and higher pay means more donations back to the school. Goodhart's law and all that. Grade inflation and the grading idiosyncrasies between schools make it such that GPA is fairly meaningless as a metric to me when I’m conducting interviews. I simply don’t care. I worked my butt off in undergrad to barely get a 3.1 at one school, and in grad school it was hard to not get an A in a course. Instead, I care about what you as an interviewee know. Not what school you went to, not what contrived number you scored.
- Cantinflas 4y ago
  Do you also not care if the interviewed didn't go to any school at all/didn't finish?
  - janalsncm 4y ago
    I don’t personally care. I’m not the first filter though, so HR might be rejecting those candidates. That said, if anyone without any degree got to me I’d love to give them a shot. My thought process is, they must be smart as hell to make it this far without the signaling that a degree provides.
thomasahle 4y ago
The obvious choice at this point seems to be just abandoning grades at Harvard. Any reason not to?
- weakfortress 4y ago
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weakfortress 4y ago
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mrexroad 4y ago
Paging George P. Burdell, paging George P. Burdell.
mips_avatar 4y ago
One thing I actually really like about the big tech companies is they will ignore low grades if you interview well. I had a semester where I failed almost every class due to a life event and was too proud to admit to my parents I should probably just withdraw. This dropped my gpa from a 3.3 down to a 2.6. Two years later when I graduated my GPA was still below a 3. I remember I was sitting at an interview with John Deere and they told me that someone with my academic failings probably wouldn’t do well at John Deere. Broad rejections from General Motors, ford, Boeing, many others. But Microsoft and Google did not seem to care at all. I was told I got a solid yes from all my Microsoft interviewers and was actually able to negotiate a level bump up and a larger signing bonus. For me it showed that Microsoft/google are thinking holistically in their HR decisions, and only use GPA as a signal. I hope my success at Microsoft since then is an indication that they made the right call.
- anilakar 4y ago
  > I had a semester where I failed almost every class due to a life event Sadly, that's exactly what the universities here (not US) seem to measure: your ability to cope with an unmanageable mess called life. They overload you with schoolwork and those who are either gifted enough or able to cope with it will graduate.
  - mitthrowaway2 4y ago
    A "life event" sounds something like a death or major illness of a loved one, an unexpected loss of financial support, a health problem, car accident, or some other third-party issue external to one's schoolwork. Penalizing these people doesn't filter for those who can cope; it sorts for those whose "life events" happen to occur after they graduate.
    - cryptonym 4y ago
      Agree. It sounds like that joke where HR randomly put half of applications to the bin because they don't want to hire the unlucky ones.
the_origami_fox 4y ago
I went to a university in South Africa which had the opposite problem, grade deflation. The engineering school was masochistic in its obsession with lowering grades and failing students. Despite working extremely hard I went from 90%s to 60%s. But I was considered lucky because most students failed (and by most I mean +90% of the class) and repeated years. I did not. The lecturers repeatedly blamed the students but if even A students are failing I think it's not the students fault, it's the school's. My university teamed up with an American University, Embray-Riddle, to offer a joint masters. Embray-Riddle required a minimum average grade of 80%; my university came back to them and said no one in the last 10 years qualified for the masters. Eventually they lowered the requirements just so they could have students. Later I did my masters in the Netherlands. The university made me do extra courses to compensate for my low grades. But I ended up doing reasonably well with an 8/10 average and was the top student in a few subjects. Grade inflation sounds bad but I can positively say that grade deflation is worse. It badly demotivates students and robs them of years of their life as they repeat courses.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  > My university teamed up with an American University, Embray-Riddle, to offer a joint masters. Embray-Riddle required a minimum average grade of 80%; my university came back to them and said no one in the last 10 years qualified for the masters. Eventually they lowered the requirements just so they could have students. They just shows the US university has no idea how universities based on the UK system work. At Trinity College Dublin the standard was that 70%+ was a first class honours, the highest rank of degree awarded. Getting 80% would be like getting a started first at Oxford. Most years no one gets one in any partial particular faculty.
- tgv 4y ago
  It's almost as if universities should devise a decent curriculum with the proper goals for the program, then design courses to properly teach those, and then design tests to measure to what degree a student actually meets the curriculum's goal. But hey, who am I kidding?
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  Ugh that's terrible. The College I went to the professors seemed to have the attitude of this program is hard and our students need all the help we can give them. I think half the students dropped out. Grade inflation always seems weird to me since they stamped it out in my program 40 years ago by enforcing grading on a curve and not allowing students to drop out and retake classes after the first two days. Grading on a curve was real. I once got a B with a score of 13/50.
satvikchoudhary 4y ago
> When grades weren’t as inflated, a stray C+ or B- was to be expected. As A-’s become the new default and grades stabilize at the upper end, any lower grade is seen as a failure. Because most students receive consistently high scores, the cost of experimenting with hard classes or new subjects substantially rises. Not if the hard classes or new subjects have the same level of grade inflation. On the contrary, if students have nothing to fear about hard classes messing up with their grades, they are more likely to take them. Most kind of grading schemes are subject to manipulation. Students always find ways to game the system. Teachers are often biased toward giving grades that are correlated with past performance of students. Its better to have harder courses with pass/fail. The top students will have more motivation to pursue subjects they are interested in. Grades are not great motivators for students at the top. Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein (or insert your favorite physicist here) were never motivated by getting grades that look better than their classmates. Only major issue is that how to make the admission process fair when there are no grades. Despite all their downcomings, standardized tests solve this to a large degree. When grades are not standard, students who come out of a fairer grading system suffer compared to the ones with inflation. Good luck trying to explain this to the admission committee or whoever else.
was_a_dev 4y ago
In the UK, at the university level, grade inflation is often related to the high annual cost of tuition. Students are increasingly treating university as a paid service with universities treating students as customers. Failing too many students is a failure in the service provided - bringing the university into some sort of liability. Further, students are working hard for the £50,000+ worth of student debt they accumulate. Which wasn't the case generations prior.
- sideshowb 4y ago
  The main problem isn't liability, it's that failing too many students shows up in the league tables that prospective students use to choose a university.
  - was_a_dev 4y ago
    Also a strong factor. Someone has tried to sue Oxford university for failig to attain a first-class degree. Luckily the courts disagreed https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-42974641 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-42974641
- roxgib 4y ago
  Same problem here in Australia, but honestly I don't blame the students - unis have turned themselves into businesses selling a service, students are just responding to that. And if I'm paying for a course, and I do all the coursework and make a reasonable good faith attempt at the assessment, I think it's reasonable to expect I'll pass. If the content was too hard for a significant portion of students are those student getting anything for their money?
  - was_a_dev 4y ago
    Grade inflation is never the fault of students as they don't set the conditions of the course. They merely participate
    - 4y ago
yodsanklai 4y ago
One question is whether you want to use grades for validating knowledge or for ranking. You can say that A or B means pass (much easier for professors), or that 8/20 means pass and you have the whole spectrum from 0 to 20 to rank candidates if needed. Nowadays, with international recruiting, I think grades becomes insignificant (graduates come from too many institutions, and grades aren't comparable) and companies need their own ranking metrics (hence the infamous leetcode questions).
- roxgib 4y ago
  I think this hits the nail on the head. Education seems to have two aims - educating students, and ranking them. I've always strongly believed that those aims are mutually defeating. I'd rather have external measurements of ability (such as the SATs or technical tests or whatever) and just let schools teach.
DrBazza 4y ago
The UK has grade inflation in secondary schools (11-18yrs) to the point where year-on-year results kept 'improving' (because each year was more intelligent than the last, clearly) then we introduced A* above an A (because too many kids were getting As...), and finally, replaced that with 1-9.
gamesbrainiac 4y ago
Over time, the competition to get into these schools have gotten tougher and competition is now on a global scale for schools such as Harvard. If you don't grade on a curve, would it not be normal to see students do better? There are more past exam papers, more prep before you even join the school and more onus on the students to do well because they attend such a great school.
matsemann 4y ago
At my uni the grade transcript from the university includes the grade distribution for the course next to each grade. So it's easy for a company to see that "a B in this course was comparatively good" for instance. It was almost always a curve. Where about 10% got an A, and the median of course was a C etc. I've always found it so weird how in the US the scale isn't used. By doing all course work you're often assigned enough credits to guarantee a B (the challenge is having enough time to do it all, I guess), and by doing some more you'll get a A- or whatever. I've had friends that wee C/D students here take a year in the US and get straight A's.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  That proves how nonsensical grades are. Your grade is based on what other people in a biased sample do? Grades should be pass only, and be finer-grained than current semester long courses. I don't care what you can't do. I care what you can do.
  - matsemann 4y ago
    I'm not saying they're grading on a curve or adjusting each exam. Just that on average it turns out the average student is a C student. But yeah, the whole point of grades is actually to use them to compare others. So even grading on a curve is better than giving everyone an A.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  I hear this a lot but… I just didn’t see it. Very few students got straight A’s at any of my academic institutions. I would say only 10% or so of students would get majority As. Many classes were easy As for sure, so many students would have several As. But if you looked at things like the honor roll cutoffs (determined by GPA), it would be a selective subset.
codefeenix 4y ago
never had a company look at my highschool grades...
tlb 4y ago
Maybe the problem is the way we average grades to get a GPA. If your course scores were 3.98, 3.99, 3.99, 2.10, the linear average of ~3.5 doesn't capture the obviously high ability. Perhaps taking the average like: 4.01 - exp(avg(log(4.01 - x_i))) would capture high grades without such a heavy penalty for a flubbed course.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  You could just take best 3 out of 5 etc
tester756 4y ago
I've been always talking that grades are irrelevant because there's too much external factors (easy/difficult profs, biases) and standardized tests are the way to go Grades could at best be proxy for effort, but still grades talk about the past, not what's now. If somebody takes grades seriously then for me that's huge red flag and I think that person is naive and focuses on not really important things. I wish there were standardized exams after graduation, so you could compare students from top schools and bottom more easily, that would allow students from bottom schools to bootstrap themselves purely on their skills and knowledge
- derbOac 4y ago
  The problem with standardized tests is that they tend to be very brief slices of time in a very limited format, with no documentation of actual work. They have the advantage of being, well, standardized, but that's also their weakness (think, for example, about the legal requirements that tests be adapted for medical conditions, and then generalize accordingly). You might think actual work shouldn't matter, it's the endpoint, etc. but think about it this way: tests are subject to cheating problems, and randomness in scores. Let's say you have a choice of two surgeons: one who has passed a standardized written test, and one who has been certified by a panel of expert surgeons as reaching a certain level of proficiency by means of graduated practice exercises over the course of a year. Which would you prefer? This is an extreme contrived example, but it illustrates a broader point, which is the reason why traditional grades exist is because they reflect a long-term process and documentation of actual time in activity, which is important to learning.
  - tester756 4y ago
    It's hard for me to talk about med school cuz that's not my world, I'm talking from CS perspective. >tests are subject to cheating problems I think official tests/exams are way, way more cheating resilient than "normal" approach. Think of ceremony similar to school leaving exam
- starky 4y ago
  The problem with standardized tests as they are implemented in nearly every case is that they only test how well the students have been taught the test, not the topic the test is on. This makes them just as pointless as GPA at being an indicator of capability. The real problem is that universities have become degree mills. Pretty much all jobs require a university degree even when the actual degree often only demonstrates that the person can learn an arbitrary set of courses which have zero relevance to the job being performed and all the practical skills are learned on the job.
nmca 4y ago
I've pondered this for a while. One solution would be, imo: 1. Maintain a large set of questions that are mechanically markable (e.g. no room for bias/teacher choice in marking). You can expand this set by a small percentage each year. 2. Randomly assemble each student's exam every year by sampling questions without replacement. 3. Use trueskill to simultaneously estimate question difficulty and student skill. 4. Report skills as the primary metric. I think this would work, although of course writing many questions is challenging.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  What about the 90% of skills that are not testable in multiple-choice form?
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    who said anything about multiple choice?
fedeb95 4y ago
This is a serious problem that I think is more widespread than just Harvard or the US. Schools giving higher votes necessarily compress the variance with mean toward the high bound. The real problem is that everything becomes too much sensible to noise: getting a vote a bit higher or a bit lower than the mean doesn't reflect how much I know more, but may make a significant change in society, i.e. who gets ahead in academics or jobs (thus perpetuating this high grading mechanism, probably).
- fedeb95 4y ago
  What the article doesn't mention, and that I have only anecdotical evidence for, is classes becoming easier. What may cause what is unclear, but probably it's a system so complex that pinpointing a single cause is hard
  - fedeb95 4y ago
    In that case a solution may be dropping grades altogether, exchanging them with some kind of written comment. This way "grades" can't be compared. Ultimately if you think about it, grades imply that knowledge can be measured, which isn't really something proven, and intuitively I'd say that knowledge can't be measured
i_am_proteus 4y ago
Add to this that professors seeking tenure benefit from high enrollment in their classes, and nothing spurs enrollment like the reputation of an easy A. The only solution I can think of to all of this is to maintain a second number along with GPA, which is a weighted average of averages in every class the student took. Earning an A- in a course where the average is a 2.5 becomes more valuable than getting handed an A in a course where the average is a 3.9.
tdhz77 4y ago
Perfect timing, make it harder. I’ve done graduated and moved on from the hustle and bustle.
angry_octet 4y ago
A couple of year ago I applied for a graduate position at a prominent Canadian university, and was accepted, based in numerous factors (like publication history, work experience, and academic program). But a few months later, I got a notification that I had been cut: my GPA was too low. My university in Australia didn't even have GPAs back then 1990s-2000s), and it was a very hard marked program (maybe 5% of the class would get over 90%). H3 was a solid pass. But I was competing with people who had just finished undergraduate and master's studies in North America, all of whom had almost perfect A+ GPAs. The worst part is that it reveals that universities believe their own bullshit. In fact, believing the bs seems to be a strategy for career success.
- dkqmduems 4y ago
  Was this McGill by any chance?
  - angry_octet 4y ago
    It wasn't but they too have a minimum GPA because they insist they only have the top students.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
I've been considering applying for Georgetown/nyu law. What is the acceptance rate like? Do they consider your actual grades or your references or both or neither?
malandrew 4y ago
This also seems like a great way for Harvard to colonize as many institutions with graduates easily. If employers don't know about the compression at the top and they do value GPA and the reputation of the school, it likely creates a situation where a Harvard graduate gets employed at a company even when doing poorly on the interview because "Hey, we'd be stupid to not employ a Harvard graduate with a 3.8 GPA. They're top of their class from a very reputable institution." Over time this puts enough Harvard people in institutions and Harvard people have a reputation for alma mater nepotism (that I've personally observed multiple times). Almost all major US institution from media companies to banks to government have their upper ranks colonized by Harvard grads.
type-r 4y ago
i don't think I've ever understood the point of letter grades and especially of GPA. what is it even meant to measure? clearly not mastery over material since we can see from this article we've seen a steady increase (while i don't think anyone is claiming students have gotten that much better). relative rank, then? again no because of the change over time. i believe we should have two separate measures. one, did you pass the class? and two, what was your percentile within that course? of course percentile isn't necessarily relevant to employers. but then I would argue that should already be the case with GPA. at least the benefit with percentile is it can't experience inflation like this, and gives you a comparable value across colleges. one would be able to make judgements on, would i want a 95th percentile state school candidate or a 5th percentile ivy? with the current system this is impossible.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  I think it transitioned from being targeted at relative rank to being targeted at mastery over the years, just not everyone reviewing resumes has shifted at the same time.
MertsA 4y ago
The one thing that annoys me the most about modern grading is the fact that so many courses heavily weight homework and projects. You can do exceptionally well on tests and quizzes and objectively understand the material in the course but still get a terrible grade not based on knowledge but based on how much busy work you did. Grades are supposed to be just that, grading someone's understanding of the knowledge of the course. That should be the guiding principle for any kind of grading policy and yet it's so rarely the case when courses have 40% of the grade made up of tests and quizzes and then 60% based on homework, reading assignments, group projects, even attendance. I've had courses where a student could get a failing grade on every single test and quiz and still walk out with a B. Effort !== Knowledge and GPA should not just boil down to a measure of participation.
- gameman144 4y ago
  One of my favorite classes back in university had a pretty good take on this: your grade would include two exams, then the higher of your homework scores or another exam. It rewarded hard work, but not at the expense of demonstrating that you'd actually learned things. If you were confident that you understood things, you could skip all the homework and get a perfect score. Likewise, if you'd demonstrated good understanding in the first two exams and were repeating that trend for the third, you could skip that third exam altogether. The grades people got in that class were some of the most reflective of actual understanding within my cohort (admittedly, through my lens as a fellow student)

125 points by signa11 4y ago

You can tell this was written by a student who doesn't really understand grades or what the problem is. > You may have gotten a C in Math 55 but your potential employer could see the average grade was a B+. This never happens. No one cares if you were a C student at Harvard or an A student. All they care about is the degree. With one exception: grad school. Bad grades can shut off doors for more education. From he point of view of people who give grades: 1. High grades are free, low grades are expensive. I can mint as many As as I want. No one will ever complain. Give a student a B or a C? I have had students flip. Their parents can call. They can appeal. Some people just cause endless problems. 2. I don't need people posting hate about me online When you give students good grades they say great things about you on ratemyprofessor and on surveys. When you give bad grades.. they say bad things. No thanks. This has even resulted in lecturers losing their jobs. 3. Cheating distorts grades anyway Can you imagine the disaster when you catch most of a class cheating? In my experience a significant fraction of students cheat. Guess how many hours of your life you will waste if you pursue every clear cheater? With that in mind, if you grade on a curve and set a low average grade, you're just punishing the honest stuents. 4. Who cares!? So what if everyone gets an A? What's the point? Given that no employer cares and that your wealth is largely a function of your parent's wealth, why are we wasting so much time on this. Any reasonable effort should merit an A and then we leave people alone. Students who want to excel will go on to do research, side projects, etc. regardless.

sn41 4y ago
You missed one more social aspect: give too many students an F in a course (for example, for cheating), and the instructors in the following year will let you know what they think.
- toast0 4y ago
  > You missed one more social aspect: give too many students an F in a course (for example, for cheating), and the instructors in the following year will let you know what they think. Give too many Fs and the administration is going to be breathing down your neck. They've got graduation rate targets to hit, not gonna happen if you fail too many people.
  - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    to quote a professor I had in uni: "if they want me to stop failing students, they should stop assigning me classes and let me do my research"
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      To your professor: If you want to do research then what are you doing at a school?! Take a tip from E.O. Lawrence and get a large funder to fund a research institute for you.
klodolph 4y ago
This is spot on. The people who do care are the exchange students, transfer students, and students applying to graduate school, assuming grades transfer (which they often don’t). Schools with unusual grading policies often include a letter alongside transcripts to explain away why a student’s grades may not match what you expect. For example, Wellesley College includes a letter explaining that grades are NOT inflated at Wellesley, so a B in a class at Wellesley corresponds to an A at a more typical school. Evergreen College includes no grades at all and provides a thick packet explaining everything. Maybe Harvard should include a letter in its transcripts explaining that students at Harvard are graded in an extremely lax fashion, and any credits transferred from Harvard should be transferred as if the course were taken pass/fail. (Half joking.)
NegativeK 4y ago
Would pass/fail be a better fit?
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
> So what if everyone gets an A? What's the point? What's the point of university then? If "any reasonable effort should merit an A" it seems like there is zero point in university existing. A degree has no signal at that point. And even if it's true that a degree has no signal anymore, you can't operate like that in the real world because a lot of people still operate under the assumption that degrees and GPA do carry signal. You'd most likely end up losing out on a lot of opportunities.
- upwardbound 4y ago
  Hopefully the point of university is to learn
  - less_less 4y ago
    Agreed. But also, there's no point in giving grades if they don't mean anything. If you expect everyone who puts in nominal effort to get an A, then the class should be pass/fail. I wonder if an explicit policy that grades are for internal purposes only would help. That is, grades are useful feedback on how well you're learning, but they aren't comparable between classes and aren't intended to judge or rate students. So the uni would refuse to calculate GPAs or report grades to outside parties. Maybe they could even give more flexibility on how grades are calculated and reported. Like they could be whatever combination of pass/fail, letters, percents, notes etc that the prof wants, because by policy you're not calculating with them.
    - upwardbound 4y ago
      Yeah, and I also like your idea of every class being pass/fail. I'm sure I've heard of some colleges doing it but I haven't looked into whether it's considered to be an improvement. Also I wonder what the results would be in terms of norm-setting if this was done at Harvard or something next?
  - zzless 4y ago
    You may think so but this would be going against the facts. In reality, there are two major goals each US university has: 1. attracting funds (in the form of tuition, grants, etc) 2. improving educational statistics for the state The second goal is related to the first and, in the case of a public school, dominates. The more diplomas the university awards, the more funding it usually gets (since it improves 'retention'). Universities certainly have great facilities for learning and if a student wants to learn, s*he certainly can but this is irrelevant from the point of view of the administration. Lest you think this is another conspiracy theory, I have heard these two exact statements in every faculty meeting we had at the university level. How can I care about grade inflation (as a faculty) if I am penalized for the excessive number of withdrawals from my classes. Think about it: the students have realized that they were not ready for the class early, and decided to save themselves the headache and take a lower level class. This is counted against the faculty. Now what incentive do I have to give objective grades?

likely_harrison 4y ago

Grade inflation is always and everywhere an admission rate problem. The US college-applying population has grown (a lot). The Harvard class size remains the same. Harvard continues to be a (the?) top tier school. This means that Harvard classes are probably getting better year after year. Even if Harvard is evaluating performance exactly the same (no new cushiness), if the admitted are better, they’ll be getting better grades on average, and those grades will be more compressed.

w-ll 4y ago
Legacy grows at least as linear tho.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
I don't think this tracks; The argument seems to be that there are more and more students, and the number that can go to Harvard is fixed, so Harvard is selecting for the "best and the brightest" which when they were less picky was a smaller percentage of the class but now they only get really bright and talented students. Does that more or less capture it? If so consider that grades are against the class, not the student. If grades did not inflate, and the quality of the students had risen, then the effort to get an A would go up commensurately with the quality of the student and those who weren't up to that standard would continue to get the B's and C's. What the article is saying is that by not grading on a curve (or letting the curve parameters creep up) the median GPA goes up and the standard deviation goes down (compression). Rather than having a consistent distribution with what ever students happen to be admitted currently.
- nine_k 4y ago
  If exam grades follow some absolute standard, then throwing better students at them would result at more As, up tp only A grades for an entire class. This is without any grade inflation: the absolute level of knowledge to get an A stays the same, but the absolute level of knowledge demonstrated by students goes up. To the contrary, to have any B or C grades in a class full of the brightest students, one needs to either increase the absolute expected level, or to give the class grades relative to its strength, which again means raising the expected level for an A. Exam questions from Harvard can be easily tracked 100+ years back. A researcher who'd give current Harvard graduates some of the older questions could find out if the toughness of the exams went up, down, or stayed.

gnicholas 4y ago

In undergrad, the professor who taught intermediate microeconomics told us about how law and business school admissions officers knew how tough his course was (it was the weeder course), and that doing well would be a feather in our cap. I made the mistake of believing him. The savvy students took intermediate micro at nearby schools and transferred the credit along with a higher grade. Graduate schools will look at rec letters and take the professor's praise into account, but they haven’t the slightest notion of whether a class you took is hard or not. Students who want to optimize their future prospects know this, and select their courses accordingly. Oh, and employers know/care even less than graduate schools.

tylergetsay 4y ago
This also applies to high school in my experience. I had a lower GPA but took AP classes, my friends who took easy classes got into better schools.
- mathattack 4y ago
  Same though I’d say that the group who optimized for grades over challenging themselves in high school didn’t fare so well. Same in college actually. I don’t have much law school data but it seems like the folks afraid of competition when they’re young don’t grow into it when they get older.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  At least with AP classes you get a GPA bump that affects the raw numerical calculation. That way, you can come out ahead if you get A- or better in the AP class. I recall that for some schools/purposes, they just looked at your GPA without weighting, but for most purposes they gave credit for weighted grades. This also applied to class rank, but for me all of this was a couple decades ago.
- schoolornot 4y ago
  AP classes served only to keep the hoodlums out when I took them. I still don't understand what the point is of them. Not one of them were anything like a real college course. If someone wants to shortcut some credits, I recommend memorizing some flash cards and taking a DSST/CLEP exam.

thebradbain 4y ago

I think the premise of this article is flawed — aside from the (imo very valid) “who cares!” argument with regards to grades not actually mattering for really anything anymore except when it comes to some grad programs, the implicit assumption of this analysis is that the grade system will exist in its current form in the future. I think it’s more likely Harvard does away with the traditional letter system altogether. Aside from the fact Harvard operated just fine without it for the first 2-3 centuries it operated, let’s take a step back and try to remember what the grades were to track in the first place: students’ absorption of the material (i.e. “learning”). This type of grade system is better for measuring things that have right/wrong answers— math, memorization of dates, anything mechanical, etc. Yet with calculators and the internet making things like historical timelines and formulas etc accessible even to payment, graders’ job of even grading these “objective” becomes more subjective— if you arrive to the wrong math question, but did all the right high level steps and made a small but cascading error in the beginning, I’d posit that student likely knows the material well and would avoid that error were it pointed out. But from a grading perspective, what is that? 7/10? Same situation to a history student laying out the historical context leading up to some event and mixing up some dates. Things get even more muddled when it comes to humanities. In fact, off the top of my head, Pomona College and Brown University, both well-regarded schools within academia (and Pomona with I believe the highest undergrad acceptance rate into Harvard grad programs), have the option for every class to be taken as Pass/Fail, except when it comes to later-stage major requirements. Graduation accolades are awarded by professor recommendation, which fosters getting to know your professors out of the classroom better than grades. Anything that needs to be GPA-gated could instead be (likely better) gated by a placement test. Knowledge is not a 0 sum game. Maybe instead of trying to adapt our current education circumstances to to an old grading system, it’s time to think of a new system altogether.

derbOac 4y ago
I agree the premise of these sorts of pieces is very flawed, and I'm surprised in these discussions the assumptions are put forth so matter-of-factly. Grades don't necessarily exist to maximize some spread and produce a nice normal distribution. They could be constructed that way, but the way they tend to be used is in communicating level of mastery with material, and if a course is well-constructed, the instructor teaches well, and the students are engaged and learning, they should generally mostly get "good grades." The weird thing is, how do you know that Harvard students aren't basically all understanding the material in their courses well? Wouldn't you expect that? Think about it another way. Let's say universities tried hard to improve their educational effectiveness over decades, and were successful at it. More and more students were understanding the material in courses better. Why shouldn't that be reflected in improved grades? At some level as you point out what really matters is whether or not a student basically grasped the material well enough, and the grading system in some ways punishes risk taking by grappling with difficult material. I was a professor for many years, and there were certain universities that were known to have extremely low GPAs (yes this still happens), so we had to factor that into graduate admissions decisions. It did nothing but hurt applicants. Those students had the benefit of coming from schools that were well-known enough to be on people's radars, and for word-of-mouth to afford admissions committees knowing about grading practices. Students from smaller schools wouldn't be so lucky. On the other hand, GPA might be more predictive of outcomes than standardized tests (https://news.uchicago.edu/story/test-scores-dont-stack-gpas-predicting-college-success https://news.uchicago.edu/story/test-scores-dont-stack-gpas-...) so this discussion might be moot. It doesn't mean that something couldn't be improved about grading but it's odd to level these kinds of critiques at GPA if it's outperforming the biggest alternative available).

har_ry 4y ago

Anecdotally I think some gpa inflation is related to modern course design. What was the design and pedagogy (workload too) for a biology course at harvard in the 1920s versus today? Without this info the graph tells us less than it might. What classes were being offered in 1920s harvard? At my university we dont offer classes that were at one time considered essential Want to learn about virgil? Well, theres the internet

diziet 4y ago

As echoed before in the discussion, I suspect for most jobs the GPA one receives is not relevant not even disclosed in job applications. It might matter for folks going for graduate degrees / law / med though. A 180 on the LSAT or 528 on the MCAT speaks quite a bit, too.

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frozenport 4y ago

Article doesn't explain why it "must come down" only offers a few side effects of it being high.

neltnerb 4y ago
I mean, they explained why there's a hard cap and that eventually everyone will have a grade within a range of like 3.99 to 4.00 regardless of performance. But yeah, I didn't see anything about why it would necessarily come down. Personally I'd sooner see numerical grades eliminated, but they serve a purpose in making things a little more objective with large numbers of people. I can't really see them coming down unless every university agreed to do it simultaneously, there's too much advantage to be gained by not cooperating.

kart23 4y ago

sooo theres no possibility students are trying harder these days or are just plain better students? The acceptance rate at harvard in 1969 was around 20%, compared with 4.6% today. It kinda makes sense that if you're accepting people who are better students, they're gonna get higher GPAs.

Mikeb85 4y ago
I mean, that's the argument these schools make.
SilverBirch 4y ago
Even if it were true that everyone is smarter today, it’s not helpful. GPAs are used to compare students if similar cohorts, no one is seriously picking between a 21 year old and a 70 year old based on GPA. There’s no value in reflecting increased cohort ability. Theoretically Roughly you just want a distribution via which good students can be differentiated. In reality Harvard just wants to pretend all it’s students are extraordinarily good so that they can apply for a job with a GPA that looks better than Yale. And Yale returns the favour.

charles_f 4y ago

The GPA system has been a bit of a mystery to me since I discovered its existence. As a European from a country that has no such system, it seems like a bit of a rat race, where people giving grades have bad incentives to pad them. Where I'm from, you graduated from a program or you didn't ; the only distinction was "with merit", or "valedictorian" and that's it. Your distinction comes from the institution you receive the sesame from, and the ranking it receives from random industry rankings and simple reputation. Not a perfected system, but a bit more straight forward. Now in Canada, I receive resumes from new grads who have either >3.8 or no GPA posted. I'm yet to see a correlation between those GPA numbers and superior performance, but the university they come from is a stronger predictor of fit and effectiveness. Therefore I tend to ignore the GPA (or worse, consider the boasting as a negative) and put emphasis on university. I'm dubitative what the value of the score actually is.

angry_octet 4y ago
It's certainly no use in recruitment. I would look more at the curriculum content and project work, and use that as a basis to ask interview questions.
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jeff-davis 4y ago

"Harvard students, who can be very risk-averse and afraid of failure..." An interesting statement, which seems worthy of its own article.

elefanten 4y ago
Is it? The coincidence of risk aversion and status grubbing seem quite strong. In many ways, status grubbing is the safest meta strategy in contemporary society. [ascii shrugface]
ankit219 4y ago
Not really. The current admission system is such that students with slightly lower grade would likely not make it. So, only those who make it are the ones who haven't taken much risks, focused on their grades, kept taking the subjects where it's comparatively easier to get a higher grade, and then the curriculars which are standard and augment the profile. Tests/SATs are also standard ones, and since top Ivy-leaguers only focus on a handful of things, it's important to maintain high score in that. Many students who experimented with a tough (but interesting) course in high school/undergrad, and got bad grades in 1-2 subjects will likely not make it. This results in a higher proportion of admitted students who are risk-averse and afraid of failure. If that is the input, very improbable that it would be much different with them once they are in college.

godelski 4y ago

I graduated high school in 2009 and the top schools definitely weren't taking in students with a 3.6 GPA. In fact, I'm not aware of any school in the top 50 that asked for anything under a 4.0 (AP/IB programs enable GPAs above 4.0). Right now I see sites saying that the average Harvard GPA is 4.18. Berkeley is lower but I know plenty of people that got rejected with high GPAs (I know two people that had a 4.8 -- the top you could get in my school -- that were rejected from several top schools). I say this because two things. First, it is clear that there are things other than GPA that admissions are accounting for. It is a bit unclear what these things are. It would be nice to know how they are extracting signal from noise (and it is clear that this is a very noisy system, though we often don't admit this). Second, if these are actual averages, there's clearly some other aspects that are heavily weighted in that process. The four that would be the most obvious to me are legacy, affirmative action, sports, and students who don't have access to AP/IB programs. These are clearly not meritocratic aspects (lack of access to better programs like AP/IB would imply that these signals aren't meritocratic because meritocracy isn't exactly equitable in accessibility. Or do all these schools know exactly how good each high school is and their inflation rates and variance rates?). I really think as we're learning more about how people learn that we learn that the signals are extremely noisy and may not even exist. Students from poorer backgrounds may need extra care[0] but they still do pretty well[1]. So how do you measure someone that has potential from a poor school? How does this differentiate from measuring someone that has potential but not the opportunities from median or rich schools? (environment is a big factor in success) I really just have a lot of questions here and I really do think we should be discussing how noisy this system is. A question I want to ask is: if I randomly select a person from the population and give them a Harvard (or top tier) education, will they be more successful than if they went to a college they could have gotten into based on their merits? If the answer is "yes" (and I think there's good reason to believe this is true) then maybe all these measurements don't really mean much and we're just reading tea leaves. (I think there's some signal but I just don't know how much. I'm also not an expert. Thanks for listening to my ted talk) [0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/16/klapper-privileged-poor/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/16/klapper-privil... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

anilgulecha 4y ago

(Giving some context into this as founder in edtech -- running a 4 yr CS undergraduate program at kalvium.com) One reason for grade inflation is that this is currently the only filter provided to the industry, who would like to filter students they review. This has ended up as a perverse incentive, and students and the university want to be above the "cutoff" GPA. One of the solutions we're going with is to provide a 5 point grade per course, and provide this full breadth of data as a filter to the industry during the placements/internships season. Our bet is that the industry will have more diverse options to go by and we end up with better match-making. Another solution is to have publicly verifiable artifacts of coursework (plagiarism is a significant problem in higher education). I'd also like to hear HN's recommendations on this topic.

roxgib 4y ago
Perhaps I've misunderstood, but is one advantage of a 5 point system that the resulting point are highly and interpreted favourably by review systems that assume a 4.0 maximum? I'm guessing a lot of them don't bother to read the data you provide.
- anilgulecha 4y ago
  The big change is a grade per course, with publically available artifacts of project work.

Animats 4y ago

At West Point, until 2020 the big thing was class rank. Graduates could request their three top choices of branch of service (infantry, artillery, logistics, intelligence, etc.). Graduates with the highest class rank got their first choices. (This has changed a bit recently.[1]) So only the order of grades matters, not the values. Especially since everyone takes roughly the same set of courses. [1] https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/09/13/west-point-has-changed-how-cadets-are-assigned-branches-rotc-will-soon-follow/ https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/09/13/west-poi...

QuarterReptile 4y ago
That's interesting to know. Annapolis got rid of of 'service selection' in favor of 'service assignment' way back in 1995. I don't know what the final straw was in that case, but I can imagine either submarines weren't getting their due, or all lowest grads were unacceptably dead weight and piling up in one undesirable community...

janalsncm 4y ago

My question is, why wouldn’t it be this way? For two equivalent students from equivalently prestigious schools, if one has a 3.5 GPA and the other has a 3.9 due to grade inflation, of course the second student will have more opportunities. And more opportunities means higher pay, and higher pay means more donations back to the school. Goodhart's law and all that. Grade inflation and the grading idiosyncrasies between schools make it such that GPA is fairly meaningless as a metric to me when I’m conducting interviews. I simply don’t care. I worked my butt off in undergrad to barely get a 3.1 at one school, and in grad school it was hard to not get an A in a course. Instead, I care about what you as an interviewee know. Not what school you went to, not what contrived number you scored.

Cantinflas 4y ago
Do you also not care if the interviewed didn't go to any school at all/didn't finish?
- janalsncm 4y ago
  I don’t personally care. I’m not the first filter though, so HR might be rejecting those candidates. That said, if anyone without any degree got to me I’d love to give them a shot. My thought process is, they must be smart as hell to make it this far without the signaling that a degree provides.

thomasahle 4y ago

The obvious choice at this point seems to be just abandoning grades at Harvard. Any reason not to?

weakfortress 4y ago
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weakfortress 4y ago

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mrexroad 4y ago

Paging George P. Burdell, paging George P. Burdell.

mips_avatar 4y ago

One thing I actually really like about the big tech companies is they will ignore low grades if you interview well. I had a semester where I failed almost every class due to a life event and was too proud to admit to my parents I should probably just withdraw. This dropped my gpa from a 3.3 down to a 2.6. Two years later when I graduated my GPA was still below a 3. I remember I was sitting at an interview with John Deere and they told me that someone with my academic failings probably wouldn’t do well at John Deere. Broad rejections from General Motors, ford, Boeing, many others. But Microsoft and Google did not seem to care at all. I was told I got a solid yes from all my Microsoft interviewers and was actually able to negotiate a level bump up and a larger signing bonus. For me it showed that Microsoft/google are thinking holistically in their HR decisions, and only use GPA as a signal. I hope my success at Microsoft since then is an indication that they made the right call.

anilakar 4y ago
> I had a semester where I failed almost every class due to a life event Sadly, that's exactly what the universities here (not US) seem to measure: your ability to cope with an unmanageable mess called life. They overload you with schoolwork and those who are either gifted enough or able to cope with it will graduate.
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  A "life event" sounds something like a death or major illness of a loved one, an unexpected loss of financial support, a health problem, car accident, or some other third-party issue external to one's schoolwork. Penalizing these people doesn't filter for those who can cope; it sorts for those whose "life events" happen to occur after they graduate.
  - cryptonym 4y ago
    Agree. It sounds like that joke where HR randomly put half of applications to the bin because they don't want to hire the unlucky ones.

the_origami_fox 4y ago

I went to a university in South Africa which had the opposite problem, grade deflation. The engineering school was masochistic in its obsession with lowering grades and failing students. Despite working extremely hard I went from 90%s to 60%s. But I was considered lucky because most students failed (and by most I mean +90% of the class) and repeated years. I did not. The lecturers repeatedly blamed the students but if even A students are failing I think it's not the students fault, it's the school's. My university teamed up with an American University, Embray-Riddle, to offer a joint masters. Embray-Riddle required a minimum average grade of 80%; my university came back to them and said no one in the last 10 years qualified for the masters. Eventually they lowered the requirements just so they could have students. Later I did my masters in the Netherlands. The university made me do extra courses to compensate for my low grades. But I ended up doing reasonably well with an 8/10 average and was the top student in a few subjects. Grade inflation sounds bad but I can positively say that grade deflation is worse. It badly demotivates students and robs them of years of their life as they repeat courses.

barry-cotter 4y ago
> My university teamed up with an American University, Embray-Riddle, to offer a joint masters. Embray-Riddle required a minimum average grade of 80%; my university came back to them and said no one in the last 10 years qualified for the masters. Eventually they lowered the requirements just so they could have students. They just shows the US university has no idea how universities based on the UK system work. At Trinity College Dublin the standard was that 70%+ was a first class honours, the highest rank of degree awarded. Getting 80% would be like getting a started first at Oxford. Most years no one gets one in any partial particular faculty.
tgv 4y ago
It's almost as if universities should devise a decent curriculum with the proper goals for the program, then design courses to properly teach those, and then design tests to measure to what degree a student actually meets the curriculum's goal. But hey, who am I kidding?
Gibbon1 4y ago
Ugh that's terrible. The College I went to the professors seemed to have the attitude of this program is hard and our students need all the help we can give them. I think half the students dropped out. Grade inflation always seems weird to me since they stamped it out in my program 40 years ago by enforcing grading on a curve and not allowing students to drop out and retake classes after the first two days. Grading on a curve was real. I once got a B with a score of 13/50.

satvikchoudhary 4y ago

> When grades weren’t as inflated, a stray C+ or B- was to be expected. As A-’s become the new default and grades stabilize at the upper end, any lower grade is seen as a failure. Because most students receive consistently high scores, the cost of experimenting with hard classes or new subjects substantially rises. Not if the hard classes or new subjects have the same level of grade inflation. On the contrary, if students have nothing to fear about hard classes messing up with their grades, they are more likely to take them. Most kind of grading schemes are subject to manipulation. Students always find ways to game the system. Teachers are often biased toward giving grades that are correlated with past performance of students. Its better to have harder courses with pass/fail. The top students will have more motivation to pursue subjects they are interested in. Grades are not great motivators for students at the top. Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein (or insert your favorite physicist here) were never motivated by getting grades that look better than their classmates. Only major issue is that how to make the admission process fair when there are no grades. Despite all their downcomings, standardized tests solve this to a large degree. When grades are not standard, students who come out of a fairer grading system suffer compared to the ones with inflation. Good luck trying to explain this to the admission committee or whoever else.

was_a_dev 4y ago

In the UK, at the university level, grade inflation is often related to the high annual cost of tuition. Students are increasingly treating university as a paid service with universities treating students as customers. Failing too many students is a failure in the service provided - bringing the university into some sort of liability. Further, students are working hard for the £50,000+ worth of student debt they accumulate. Which wasn't the case generations prior.

sideshowb 4y ago
The main problem isn't liability, it's that failing too many students shows up in the league tables that prospective students use to choose a university.
- was_a_dev 4y ago
  Also a strong factor. Someone has tried to sue Oxford university for failig to attain a first-class degree. Luckily the courts disagreed https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-42974641 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-42974641
roxgib 4y ago
Same problem here in Australia, but honestly I don't blame the students - unis have turned themselves into businesses selling a service, students are just responding to that. And if I'm paying for a course, and I do all the coursework and make a reasonable good faith attempt at the assessment, I think it's reasonable to expect I'll pass. If the content was too hard for a significant portion of students are those student getting anything for their money?
- was_a_dev 4y ago
  Grade inflation is never the fault of students as they don't set the conditions of the course. They merely participate
  - 4y ago

yodsanklai 4y ago

One question is whether you want to use grades for validating knowledge or for ranking. You can say that A or B means pass (much easier for professors), or that 8/20 means pass and you have the whole spectrum from 0 to 20 to rank candidates if needed. Nowadays, with international recruiting, I think grades becomes insignificant (graduates come from too many institutions, and grades aren't comparable) and companies need their own ranking metrics (hence the infamous leetcode questions).

roxgib 4y ago
I think this hits the nail on the head. Education seems to have two aims - educating students, and ranking them. I've always strongly believed that those aims are mutually defeating. I'd rather have external measurements of ability (such as the SATs or technical tests or whatever) and just let schools teach.

DrBazza 4y ago

The UK has grade inflation in secondary schools (11-18yrs) to the point where year-on-year results kept 'improving' (because each year was more intelligent than the last, clearly) then we introduced A* above an A (because too many kids were getting As...), and finally, replaced that with 1-9.

gamesbrainiac 4y ago

Over time, the competition to get into these schools have gotten tougher and competition is now on a global scale for schools such as Harvard. If you don't grade on a curve, would it not be normal to see students do better? There are more past exam papers, more prep before you even join the school and more onus on the students to do well because they attend such a great school.

matsemann 4y ago

At my uni the grade transcript from the university includes the grade distribution for the course next to each grade. So it's easy for a company to see that "a B in this course was comparatively good" for instance. It was almost always a curve. Where about 10% got an A, and the median of course was a C etc. I've always found it so weird how in the US the scale isn't used. By doing all course work you're often assigned enough credits to guarantee a B (the challenge is having enough time to do it all, I guess), and by doing some more you'll get a A- or whatever. I've had friends that wee C/D students here take a year in the US and get straight A's.

hgsgm 4y ago
That proves how nonsensical grades are. Your grade is based on what other people in a biased sample do? Grades should be pass only, and be finer-grained than current semester long courses. I don't care what you can't do. I care what you can do.
- matsemann 4y ago
  I'm not saying they're grading on a curve or adjusting each exam. Just that on average it turns out the average student is a C student. But yeah, the whole point of grades is actually to use them to compare others. So even grading on a curve is better than giving everyone an A.
oneoff786 4y ago
I hear this a lot but… I just didn’t see it. Very few students got straight A’s at any of my academic institutions. I would say only 10% or so of students would get majority As. Many classes were easy As for sure, so many students would have several As. But if you looked at things like the honor roll cutoffs (determined by GPA), it would be a selective subset.

codefeenix 4y ago

never had a company look at my highschool grades...

tlb 4y ago

Maybe the problem is the way we average grades to get a GPA. If your course scores were 3.98, 3.99, 3.99, 2.10, the linear average of ~3.5 doesn't capture the obviously high ability. Perhaps taking the average like: 4.01 - exp(avg(log(4.01 - x_i))) would capture high grades without such a heavy penalty for a flubbed course.

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cuteboy19 4y ago
You could just take best 3 out of 5 etc

tester756 4y ago

I've been always talking that grades are irrelevant because there's too much external factors (easy/difficult profs, biases) and standardized tests are the way to go Grades could at best be proxy for effort, but still grades talk about the past, not what's now. If somebody takes grades seriously then for me that's huge red flag and I think that person is naive and focuses on not really important things. I wish there were standardized exams after graduation, so you could compare students from top schools and bottom more easily, that would allow students from bottom schools to bootstrap themselves purely on their skills and knowledge

derbOac 4y ago
The problem with standardized tests is that they tend to be very brief slices of time in a very limited format, with no documentation of actual work. They have the advantage of being, well, standardized, but that's also their weakness (think, for example, about the legal requirements that tests be adapted for medical conditions, and then generalize accordingly). You might think actual work shouldn't matter, it's the endpoint, etc. but think about it this way: tests are subject to cheating problems, and randomness in scores. Let's say you have a choice of two surgeons: one who has passed a standardized written test, and one who has been certified by a panel of expert surgeons as reaching a certain level of proficiency by means of graduated practice exercises over the course of a year. Which would you prefer? This is an extreme contrived example, but it illustrates a broader point, which is the reason why traditional grades exist is because they reflect a long-term process and documentation of actual time in activity, which is important to learning.
- tester756 4y ago
  It's hard for me to talk about med school cuz that's not my world, I'm talking from CS perspective. >tests are subject to cheating problems I think official tests/exams are way, way more cheating resilient than "normal" approach. Think of ceremony similar to school leaving exam
starky 4y ago
The problem with standardized tests as they are implemented in nearly every case is that they only test how well the students have been taught the test, not the topic the test is on. This makes them just as pointless as GPA at being an indicator of capability. The real problem is that universities have become degree mills. Pretty much all jobs require a university degree even when the actual degree often only demonstrates that the person can learn an arbitrary set of courses which have zero relevance to the job being performed and all the practical skills are learned on the job.

nmca 4y ago

I've pondered this for a while. One solution would be, imo: 1. Maintain a large set of questions that are mechanically markable (e.g. no room for bias/teacher choice in marking). You can expand this set by a small percentage each year. 2. Randomly assemble each student's exam every year by sampling questions without replacement. 3. Use trueskill to simultaneously estimate question difficulty and student skill. 4. Report skills as the primary metric. I think this would work, although of course writing many questions is challenging.

hgsgm 4y ago
What about the 90% of skills that are not testable in multiple-choice form?
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  who said anything about multiple choice?

fedeb95 4y ago

This is a serious problem that I think is more widespread than just Harvard or the US. Schools giving higher votes necessarily compress the variance with mean toward the high bound. The real problem is that everything becomes too much sensible to noise: getting a vote a bit higher or a bit lower than the mean doesn't reflect how much I know more, but may make a significant change in society, i.e. who gets ahead in academics or jobs (thus perpetuating this high grading mechanism, probably).

fedeb95 4y ago
What the article doesn't mention, and that I have only anecdotical evidence for, is classes becoming easier. What may cause what is unclear, but probably it's a system so complex that pinpointing a single cause is hard
- fedeb95 4y ago
  In that case a solution may be dropping grades altogether, exchanging them with some kind of written comment. This way "grades" can't be compared. Ultimately if you think about it, grades imply that knowledge can be measured, which isn't really something proven, and intuitively I'd say that knowledge can't be measured

i_am_proteus 4y ago

Add to this that professors seeking tenure benefit from high enrollment in their classes, and nothing spurs enrollment like the reputation of an easy A. The only solution I can think of to all of this is to maintain a second number along with GPA, which is a weighted average of averages in every class the student took. Earning an A- in a course where the average is a 2.5 becomes more valuable than getting handed an A in a course where the average is a 3.9.

tdhz77 4y ago

Perfect timing, make it harder. I’ve done graduated and moved on from the hustle and bustle.

angry_octet 4y ago

A couple of year ago I applied for a graduate position at a prominent Canadian university, and was accepted, based in numerous factors (like publication history, work experience, and academic program). But a few months later, I got a notification that I had been cut: my GPA was too low. My university in Australia didn't even have GPAs back then 1990s-2000s), and it was a very hard marked program (maybe 5% of the class would get over 90%). H3 was a solid pass. But I was competing with people who had just finished undergraduate and master's studies in North America, all of whom had almost perfect A+ GPAs. The worst part is that it reveals that universities believe their own bullshit. In fact, believing the bs seems to be a strategy for career success.

dkqmduems 4y ago
Was this McGill by any chance?
- angry_octet 4y ago
  It wasn't but they too have a minimum GPA because they insist they only have the top students.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

I've been considering applying for Georgetown/nyu law. What is the acceptance rate like? Do they consider your actual grades or your references or both or neither?

malandrew 4y ago

This also seems like a great way for Harvard to colonize as many institutions with graduates easily. If employers don't know about the compression at the top and they do value GPA and the reputation of the school, it likely creates a situation where a Harvard graduate gets employed at a company even when doing poorly on the interview because "Hey, we'd be stupid to not employ a Harvard graduate with a 3.8 GPA. They're top of their class from a very reputable institution." Over time this puts enough Harvard people in institutions and Harvard people have a reputation for alma mater nepotism (that I've personally observed multiple times). Almost all major US institution from media companies to banks to government have their upper ranks colonized by Harvard grads.

type-r 4y ago

i don't think I've ever understood the point of letter grades and especially of GPA. what is it even meant to measure? clearly not mastery over material since we can see from this article we've seen a steady increase (while i don't think anyone is claiming students have gotten that much better). relative rank, then? again no because of the change over time. i believe we should have two separate measures. one, did you pass the class? and two, what was your percentile within that course? of course percentile isn't necessarily relevant to employers. but then I would argue that should already be the case with GPA. at least the benefit with percentile is it can't experience inflation like this, and gives you a comparable value across colleges. one would be able to make judgements on, would i want a 95th percentile state school candidate or a 5th percentile ivy? with the current system this is impossible.

zamadatix 4y ago
I think it transitioned from being targeted at relative rank to being targeted at mastery over the years, just not everyone reviewing resumes has shifted at the same time.

MertsA 4y ago

The one thing that annoys me the most about modern grading is the fact that so many courses heavily weight homework and projects. You can do exceptionally well on tests and quizzes and objectively understand the material in the course but still get a terrible grade not based on knowledge but based on how much busy work you did. Grades are supposed to be just that, grading someone's understanding of the knowledge of the course. That should be the guiding principle for any kind of grading policy and yet it's so rarely the case when courses have 40% of the grade made up of tests and quizzes and then 60% based on homework, reading assignments, group projects, even attendance. I've had courses where a student could get a failing grade on every single test and quiz and still walk out with a B. Effort !== Knowledge and GPA should not just boil down to a measure of participation.

gameman144 4y ago
One of my favorite classes back in university had a pretty good take on this: your grade would include two exams, then the higher of your homework scores or another exam. It rewarded hard work, but not at the expense of demonstrating that you'd actually learned things. If you were confident that you understood things, you could skip all the homework and get a perfect score. Likewise, if you'd demonstrated good understanding in the first two exams and were repeating that trend for the third, you could skip that third exam altogether. The grades people got in that class were some of the most reflective of actual understanding within my cohort (admittedly, through my lens as a fellow student)