8 ms·

Roughly 80% of Grades Given at Harvard Are in the 'A' Range

94 points by g42gregory 3y ago

pbj1968 3y ago
“It is not clear how employers would be informed of the narrative-based performance of students in school.” Is an employer demanding to see your GPA such a common thing? I’ve seen it used as a weed out for things like internships but even they will bend the rules if you actually talk to someone behind the curtain.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  I graduated in the aughts, but at that point every single employer asked for the GPA if you were straight out of school. Most places it was just a filter for interviews, so you could back-door in, but in other places it would gate hiring even if you got an interview some other way. One place I got an interview because I knew someone, and after a successful interview, they rejected me once they asked my GPA (their HR form required it to be filled in for anyone coming straight out of college).
  - jghn 3y ago
    In the 90s I found not only would they want to see GPA but often the full transcript. In more than one interview I had people commenting on grades I had for specific classes.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      That place that rejected me on GPA post-interview actually asked for my transcript after hearing my GPA to see if they could justify hiring me based on which classes I passed or failed. I was a rather equal-opportunity poor student, so that was not a success.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      My recollection is that asking for undergrad GPA used to be pretty common--and maybe even transcript (though I don't really remember and certainly don't remember discussions about specific class grades). Though I got a Master's directly after undergrad so I may not have had the standard post-undergrad interview experience.
- taeric 3y ago
  It was very common for on campus recruiting. And, really, there it makes some sense? Even if you disagree with the idea that people can be ranked, at large, if everyone is aware of the ranking and working with it, you are almost certainly best served getting the people that are excelling at what they are trying to get ranked at. As soon as you open up your search to things across rankings, or in areas without rankings, though, I can't but imagine the utility of it drops off?
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Not sure you always want people that are good at ranking. The way we rank software dev could lead to some fun effects.
    - taeric 3y ago
      Oh, for sure. You should continue to do extra searching at that level. But I think it is mostly fair to assume that the high end of one ranking is a safer bet on finding talent than any other location. It feels like the "search where the lamp post is," but I think it is different. It is close to the "we have data, it must be useful."
      - ghaff 3y ago
        And there are plenty of jobs (see IB, consulting, etc. mentioned) that have an endless appetite for young, hard-working bodies that you only really expect some percentage of to work out anyway. If you miss some diamonds in the rough or late bloomers, they probably wouldn't have fit in anyway and you're fine with your simpler heuristic.
- nradov 3y ago
  It is common for employers to use GPA to screen candidates for intern and entry level positions. As a practical matter employers receive so many applications that they just don't have the resources to interview everyone, so they need a quick way of filtering down to a reasonable number. Using a GPA cutoff is unfair and leads to the unintended consequence of students and schools both optimizing for that metric instead of for real learning. But at the same time there doesn't seem to be a good alternative that works better at scale.
- deleted 3y ago
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- nunez 3y ago
  for your first few jobs, yes. i still have it on mine because some more conservative employers _still_ care about it, 15 years later.
verdverm 3y ago
How does the student performance compare to other institutions? If most students learn the material, then they deserve a good mark. Having taught three very different classes, I can tell you there is a bell curve to the per class bell curve. Undergrad intro was a bell curve, CS Grad remediation was tragic, mixed ML was mostly A's, they were very engaged students
- ecshafer 3y ago
  Some schools / departments have a policy of no curves. RIT for example doesn’t curve anything, or at least didn’t 15 years ago.
  - Frost1x 3y ago
    I mean curves apply artificial scaling to data of course how one decides to apply them. In some contexts it means that there's always someone failing because in the pool of data you're fitting to, they performed the worst (relatively speaking) but perhaps only in that pool. Overall the worst performer could be excellent in a bigger/wider context. There's no standard "curving" procedure which leaves a lot of ambiguity and potential variation in the results. Often someone just means fitting it to a normal distribution and scaling accordingly. Not everything makes sense in a normal distribution even though people like to default to it in the absence of a known distribution. This gets even more complicated when you start talking about arbitrarily curving across different work, perhaps different courses, across different semesters and so on. Overall you may end up with some weird weighted distribution of your actual performance that's a bit nonsensical. I'm not here to say tests are great metrics but consistency in metrics is usually a good thing or at least a consistent process for attaining them.
  - verdverm 3y ago
    Curves were per teacher were I was, pretty sure you cannot stop the subtle bumps that happen based on effort
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Where and when I went to school, there was also a bell-curve to the classes that have a natural semester for students to take them (e.g. if most students take a class in the Fall, the Spring semester class will tend to have poorer students).
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
This isn't surprising. The important selection filter is entirely in getting into Harvard. It's an excellent signal for some critical amount of intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity, where each one can be traded off for some of the others - but only up to a point. What would be really interesting is if the same effects happen at top universities in the East Asian countries. I would be fascinated to know why the divergence if we found that only 20% of students at, say, Seoul National University got top marks in their classes.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Normally the classes have harder tests at more prestigious schools, ensuring that most people doesn't reach an A. I've worked with people from Harvard, they weren't smart enough to consistently get A's in hard classes, so it seems to me like Harvard doesn't grade as harshly or have easier classes than most other prestigious universities. I understand why they do it, they want their students to not have problems due to low grades, but that also means that a Harvard degree isn't as useful as a sorting mechanism because I can't tell the difference between top students and the rest.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    > I understand why they do it, they want their students to not have problems due to low grades, but that also means that a Harvard degree isn't as useful as a sorting mechanism because I can't tell the difference between top students and the rest. They got into Harvard and were subsequently successful there. Do you really benefit from knowing which of two Harvard grads got a few extra questions right in a handful of exams?
    - Jensson 3y ago
      > Do you really benefit from knowing which of two Harvard grads got a few extra questions right in a handful of exams? It isn't just "a few extra questions", when professors makes tests harder they add more interesting questions that requires you to think further rather than just plug-n-chug. The difference between a 4.0 student and a 3.0 student at lets say Caltech is enormous, so yeah I care.
bell-cot 3y ago
Quip: With how much they're paying in tuition, don't they all deserve an 'A+'?
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  A great many of them aren't paying tuition at all. By this point Harvard has an endowment larger than some small nations. And yet, I would imagine a similar, perhaps even stronger, trend towards getting all As in these "free riders".
rainbowzootsuit 3y ago
At Harvard, "A" is for "Average."
polygamous_bat 3y ago
It always surprises me how some people are shocked a plot of P(student learned the class material well) is starkly different from P(student learned the class material well | student was hard-working enough to secure admission through one of the most selective* processes). * Minus the legacies and the atheletic admissions I guess.
- internetter 3y ago
  > * Minus the legacies and the atheletic admissions I guess. Well the other 20% needs to come from somewhere!
fn-mote 3y ago
The information is about the 2020-2021 grades, which is to say the height of Covid in the US. I would not generalize.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Following the opening link to the report it shows the year was not an anomaly in the trend, rather the last (and somewhat naturally the most extreme of the trend) in the dataset.
lefstathiou 3y ago
My brother graduated from MIT 20 years ago and I recall one summer when I stayed there one of his fraternity brothers quipping “the fastest way to get a girl in Boston is to tell her you go to Harvard, and the fastest way to lose her is to tell her you go to MIT, they don’t want nerds”. Amazing how things have changed but even then it was basically an accepted truth that Harvard massively inflated grades. At the time I was told perfect GPAs were basically unheard of at MIT (back then least). Grade inflation is real and I think it leads to significant unintended consequences. I do find myself flip flopping however on whether there should be grades at all. If you’ve read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, you’ll recall there is a powerful case made to eliminate grades at the college level. I still lean toward having them currently.
- lefstathiou 3y ago
  Another fun anecdote about those times and MIT specifically. My brother was arguably the top student to come out of the Atlanta Public School System in 1996. This was a kid used to being the best in everything he did. He starts at MIT and takes the Calc 2 placement exam (he got a 5 of course on the AP BC test) and scores an 11 out of 100. He said the teaching assistant sat him down and told him “we are not in Kansas any more, forget everything you think you know, you are not prepared to be in this class and we will not accept your AP test results.” Unfortunately, I recall in 1996 4 or 5 students committed suicide at MIT due to the academic rigor (which is why the first year was pass fail). I’m not advocating for this system just sharing stories told to me.
  - nunez 3y ago
    Amazing. If you as an educator did that sit-down at the high school level, you'd be fired or be rubber roomed.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    While there are softer subject escape hatches at a school like MIT (and I've known some very smart people have taken them while remaining in technology-related areas generally), it's hard to avoid math and hard science/engineering topics in general. And there are a lot of straight A students in high school (and most people at MIT were at least close to that) who were fine with memorized plug and chug high school physics suddenly hit stuff they just can't handle and struggle to just pass the class. In my experience, MIT is actually pretty good about wanting to help students work their way through once they've been admitted. But there's definitely a firehose aspect to a lot of it a lot of incoming students aren't prepared for--even leaving aside a lot of the distractions and other elements of suddenly being away at college.
crazygringo 3y ago
This statistic is useless without any comparison to other schools. Maybe this is the same as the average across all of the top 20 schools? It also raises an interesting question: should it be harder to get an A in a class at Harvard than at e.g. a third-tier school? Because the answer to that is not obviously yes. E.g. if you take Calculus 101 and master it to some level of proficiency that is an A- at some third-tier school, should you also get an A- in Calc 101 at Harvard, or should that merely be a C there? (And if you think it should be a C, then why? Isn't calculus just calculus? Either you master the material or you don't. Why should you be graded differently depending on where you learn it?) Because if you think grades should reflect some kind of absolute level of proficiency, then it's not surprising at all that 80% of grades at Harvard would be in the 'A' range, considering how many straight-A applicants Harvard accepts in the first place.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  Should it be harder? No, I don't think so. Ideally the classes at any two schools should be roughly on par with one another. But I would assume that disparities do exist, unfortunately. An anecdote: my father was valedictorian of his podunk high school but nearly flunked out of his first year of college. And he's a smart guy, it was just a mixture of (1) not having study skills, since he'd never really needed to study before and (2) being a little behind on certain subjects (like math) that hadn't been taught well at his high school compared to the schools his peers attended. In a situation like that, I'd assume that an A in a class whose teacher is just phoning it in is not equivalent to an A in a class on the same subject whose teacher is serious about both teaching and grading.
  - riskable 3y ago
    This is why standardized tests exist. They're the same test no matter where you're from. IMHO, standardized tests should always be about mastery and scoring should reflect that rather than having a simple number like 1200 or 1600. Someone could get a 600 on their Math SAT but the parts they got wrong were related to simple fractions or time-based calculations. If the only information you have is, "600 out of 800" you don't have that information. Furthermore they shouldn't even have scores, really. They should be pass/fail based on mastery of required subjects (whatever the test is about). Either you know quadratic equations or you don't. If you got 90% of the quadratic equations correct you know how to deal with quadratic equations... You probably just made a minor mistake somewhere or were running out of time. You still "got the gist of it". It would make a hell of a lot more sense to me if students had to take dozens of standardized tests demonstrating mastery of all facets of the high school curriculum rather than one great big test at the end of their schooling that measures their ability to remember randomly-sampled fractions of that knowledge.
vincent-manis 3y ago
When I was a grad student (back in the Old Stone Age), the minimum passing grade in graduate courses was an A. (This was based upon the theory that we were cherry-picked from the set of applicants.) This may be Harvard's premise (the people I've known who went to Harvard were generally outstanding), or maybe not. I would be interested in seeing the correlation between legacy students (the ones who got in because a parent attended) and grades. In 30 years of teaching first- and second-year computer science courses, I always saw a bimodal distribution, with one mode around a C and the second at a B+/A- level. (In first year, it often was trimodal, with the third mode at an F-, students who gave up early in the course and didn't withdraw). I would be astonished if there were not something like that going on in Harvard's first year CS. Mr Turley quotes William F Buckley on preferring the first 400 names in the Boston phone book to Harvard faculty. I would prefer to listen to a conspiracy theorist explaining why the lepton samurai of Jupiter were about to invade the earth than to listen to Mr Buckley, even if he were still alive.
- nunez 3y ago
  I took CS grad courses at Stevens Tech in Hoboken, NJ during my undergrad. The minimum passing grade to stay in the grad program was a B. Tons of curves were had.
VirusNewbie 3y ago
I don't know anyone in tech who is impressed with traditional IVY schools. It's not a negative signal, but I don't really think they have rigorous CS or EE programs. MIT, Stanford, and CMU do stick out to me as a positive signal but I could care less about anything else, including Harvard.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Aeolun 3y ago
Shouldn’t you want a bigger/more relevant range? They are already in Harvard, now I want to see who is any good at Harvard level.
thelastgallon 3y ago
According to Liz Elting, graduates of the Ivy League had literally peaked in school. They lacked the hunger and ambition she needed in her company. The case against hiring people from Ivy League schools: https://bigthink.com/business/case-against-hiring-ivy-league-schools/ https://bigthink.com/business/case-against-hiring-ivy-league...
- rvba 3y ago
  The blog post seems to say that the Harvard grads couldnt be squeezed out like a lemon with 100h weeks ("balance between hunger and burn out")... As much as I dont like grads from top schools. Here they showed some actual smarts. You dont need to work 100 hour weeks in a sweatshop that tries to "balance you between burned out and hungry". Probably that grad has rich parents too, so they can switch jobs to a boring corporate job. They have a safety net not to be exploited with 100hour per week gruel. Come on? Is that some success story? 100 hour weeks is eithet a sweatshop or shitty work organization. I bet that lady wanted that motived, hard working harvard grad for 15 dollars per hour and also with 50 hours of UNPAID overtime. That's jusr the typical sweatshop approach. Also they should "think big" but not too big like for example "we should pay better in our sweatshop". I looked who she was - and seems her own partners kicked her out from that company that she was supposedly building by exploiting people.
fluxem 3y ago
To get to Harvard, you need to be a valedictorian or close to that. And not every valedictorian gets to go to to Harvard. It’s not a surprise then that Harvard is full of overachievers with straight A’s.
austinl 3y ago
There's been a general trend of grade inflation in U.S. universities, accelerating in the 1960s (during the Vietnam war), and then again in the 1990s [0]. In some sense, this might be because the role of the student shifted more towards that of a consumer purchasing a product. Harvard average GPA was a 3.0 in 1967, now it's a 3.45 [1]. There are some universities that have tried to actively prevent inflation (e.g. Purdue with a 2.73 average in 1986 to 3.09 in 2012 [2]). [0] https://www.gradeinflation.com https://www.gradeinflation.com [1] https://www.gradeinflation.com/Harvard.html https://www.gradeinflation.com/Harvard.html [2] https://www.gradeinflation.com/Purdue.html https://www.gradeinflation.com/Purdue.html
- ghaff 3y ago
  So 15% vs. 13% (albeit from a slightly lower starting point). Not sure that makes a case for a dramatic difference.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Nor is inflation the only possible explanation.
- Spivak 3y ago
  God I hate this take. This mythologizes grades as an end rather than a means. I much prefer the world where tests are written with the expectation that people who've mastered the material get an A rather than the endless hamster wheel where the test gets harder until you get a distribution centered at C. I would have burnt out on my schooling so fast as to make it worthless. How demoralizing it must be when every test is designed so that you won't know all the answers. Why even bother trying? I'm not in school to compete with other students, I'm there to learn.
yCombLinks 3y ago
I'm near finishing my undergrad at Harvard extension school. Many of the courses (especially in CS) are taught alongside traditional Harvard students. Same assignments / tests / lectures, they just have to be physically in the lecture hall. The work is rigorous, and the grading is usually harder than the state school I attended long ago. (I have taken a few non-math / non-CS courses that were easy A's). Maybe grades have inflated, but overall the students are really good. Grading really harshly just to "separate the top" or whatever doesn't make sense. They all mastered the material in "Introduction to Computer Science" in the semester.
- j7ake 3y ago
  It does make sense because grades no longer mean anything if everybody gets the same grade. The most informative grades would be uniformly distributed, it’s an opportunity for the geniuses to shine and give a signal to profs about who to hire for their PhDs.
  - antonyt 3y ago
    Sounds like you are looking for grades to indicate class ranking. Should that be the function of grades?
    - j7ake 3y ago
      Grades are most useful to a professor if it indicates class ranking of who has potential to do research level work. The only function of giving everyone an A is to prevent shattering fragile egos who have never experienced setbacks before. Unfortunately real life is full of set backs, so it’s better to learn to deal with it in a safe environment.
      - antonyt 3y ago
        If PIs or employers want to discriminate based on class ranking, they can ask for it and do exactly that. Why conflate that with grades? A common understanding of a grade is as an indication that the course material has been mastered. Higher grade = more mastery. This is a measure independent of the performance of fellow students.
currymj 3y ago
i think it's fine if universities grade on whatever scale they want, or none, and it's not clear who is hurt by this. I guess if you have to hire Harvard new grads, want to base your decision on their academic performance, and would prefer more fine-grained rankings of performance, this is not in your interest. The very top students may also wish they had more chance to distinguish themselves. However the way it seems to work in many schools with grade inflation is that it's easy to get an A, but still pretty hard to get an A+, so there's still some opportunity here. I'd also add that at Princeton, attempts to combat grade inflation were very unsuccessful and resulted in strange unintended consequences, like students carefully strategizing which sections of courses to take to avoid those believed to have heavy competition.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >I'd also add that at Princeton, attempts to combat grade inflation were very unsuccessful and resulted in strange unintended consequences, like students carefully strategizing which sections of courses to take to avoid those believed to have heavy competition. Certainly, if you're going to major in some quantitative field, you can only avoid so many of the courses in that major. But, if you're really interested in optimizing for GPA, you can often still major in some variant of the major that provides more flexibility and--where you have electives--take classes that are easy (for you).
HumblyTossed 3y ago
What should the average be? A 'C'? I doubt it. Let's assume most of the people at Harvard wanted to be there. Wouldn't they work hard to get there and thus once there do their best to succeed?
- c-linkage 3y ago
  A 'C' grade is supposed to be 'average'. If you're already in the top 10% of all students in the USA, you can still be average in comparison to your peers. A 'C' grade at Harvard should still be pretty good in the job space because: 1) you were good enough to be admitted to Harvard, and 2) you are representative of an average student at Harvard.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    > A 'C' grade is supposed to be 'average'. I've never heard that before, and it certainly hasn't been in any class I've ever been in. And Wikipedia says nothing of the sort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United... To the contrary, C is generally the lowest grade that is considered to be a satisfactory passing grade.
  - Avamander 3y ago
    > A 'C' grade is supposed to be 'average'. Says who? I find mastery-based grading much more logical. Take the Finnish or Estonian school system, it's very rarely curved like in the States. If you master the material you get a good grade. PISA results seem to indicate that works well.
itslennysfault 3y ago
That's been the running joke an University of Chicago forever. If I wanted an A I would've gone to Harvard.
bradwschiller 3y ago
Grade inflation is an obvious problem. It does a disservice to students, making them believe they are exceptional at something they are actually mediocre at. Some rants related to this and how awful grade inflation is for students and the world. AP score data is especially indicative of this. In AP classes, most high school students earn As from their teachers (I estimate around ~60%). Yet, when you look at the AP scores, few get 5s on exams (the equivalent of an A). For example, 5-10% get 5's on AP English and Science-related exams. Scores are a bit higher on Social Sciences (10-15% 5s) and math/CS (~25%). But only ~50% of students even get above a 3 on the exam (the equivalent of a C). So there are people who essentially get a D by the standard (a 2) that are getting an A in their high school class. I could go on with countless examples of how students aren't nearly as capable as their grades would indicate. At McKinsey, I interviewed over 100 people from top schools with high GPAs. Many couldn't solve simple math problems when given the problem in the context of a real-world case. At out top institutions with our top students, we should be pushing them extremely hard and measuring them against a higher bar. I find it disappointing that they are being measured against the same (or even a lower bar) than students at other institutions. It's so bad that it seems clear that a Harvard Education isn't any better than a Penn State, Nebraska, or even UC Riverside education. The only difference is having the Harvard brand and network. It's an embarrassment. And it's not just a problem at Harvard. It's a problem at every top institution. Grade-motivated students don't put in the extra work when little effort still earns them As. One example stands out. I run an edtech company, and in our early days, we ran an experiment at doesmyessaysuck.com. You could submit your essay, get a score, and 2 pieces of feedback on how to improve the content and structure of your writing. We did about a thousand essays before abandoning it. I always think about one student. He submitted an essay we generously gave a C (it was really bad). It was incoherent, poorly structure, didn't answer the prompt, and lacked sound logical reasoning. He responded we were wrong because he had gotten a 93% on it. Also – https://www.gradeinflation.com/ https://www.gradeinflation.com/ is a good read. It's out-of-date data. But it proves the point even further than this article. Note: There is some research out there that claims grade inflation is false and that more students actually have learned more than in previous years (i.e., the academic bar hasn't changed, but more students are above it). However, this research is unconvincing (and ripe with errors). There's essentially been zero improvement (and even a decline) in basic math and literacy skills over the past couple of decades (as measured by standardized tests). Yet grades are much higher. And high school and college graduation rates are up by about 10 percentage points since the early 2000s. As it turns out, when your only measure of success is graduation rate, you end up with more graduates – even if those graduates don't have any skills.
karmakaze 3y ago
Why does this even matter? In the end as long as you pass the required courses, you'll get a degree. Who checks grades? Most don't even check that a claim of degree is true. The only loss would be that of the student not actually the learning material due to lenient grading. Q: What do you call a doctor who graduated at the bottom of their class? A: "Doctor"
- chankstein38 3y ago
  I think the point is that there could be some meddling to make sure people pass. I am not purporting that's the case I just think that's why it's mentioned. I went to a school that was nowhere near Harvard level and saw it regularly, people sleeping in class or who didn't do a single assignment who still graduated with me. I think it was a money thing. Still not saying that's happening at Harvard just that it wouldn't be the most shocking thing. That said, I agree with other commenters that you set this situation up with the rigorous acceptance criteria. You're testing the people who got into one of the best schools so presumably if your selection criteria works they should all excel at the courses.
highfrequency 3y ago
Probably a positive trend if college students end up worrying less about their GPA and spending more time learning things they are interested in / trying out different careers / making friends and memories. From my experience, college students worry enough about grades without forcing the curve to be harsher than it currently is.
nunez 3y ago
Interestingly this is also a problem at the (expensive) private schools that feed students into these elite colleges. You can give out super hard exams and make them sweat/cry/worry, but you'll be given tons of shit if you actually fail them, especially if their parents are large donors. Only exceptions here are for students that failed so badly they're no way they can pass, even if you apply a crazy curve on top. now many (most?) of those students are extremely talented and deserve the grades they get, but it's still a bullshit system that encourages failing upwards.
elashri 3y ago
This is my personal experience with the grading systems and how I find (personal opinion) assigning grades as a very hard problem. I did my undergrad outside the US but in a university that follows American system. My department culture was that you don't expect curves and grades are based on what you get. So if we are all getting F then that is F for all people. No one passes a course just for the sake of passing. While these extreme cases never happened (at least when I was there). if it happens then this tells about quality of the course itself not only students effort and performance. I took a general relativity class during my undergrad. I like this field and topic. And while I am currently doing particle physics but I always liked GR. I was doing well regarding the topics but never got good grades. I struggled with its exams in particular with this particular professor. I got C although I managed not only to have a good grasp of the subject but went so far as to work on specific problem and expanded it into a paper, participated in a conference and got it published later into a peer-reviewed Journal. While when I moved for a graduate school is the US. Things is very different. Many of the undergraduate I teach were always expecting high grades anyway. curving is very much the norm and the negotiations is about how much to curve. The normal distribution of the grades is a religious belief to some people in the universities administration. And I understand it is hard to assist professors teaching and some use this as an evaluation metric but it I feel like it doesn't addressa core thing. Some people will pass even with high grades and they did not get the core of the subject. This is not about they deserve more than me or not. There is a fundamental question of are we grading on effort to learn or actually what people learned. The grading criteria will differ much based on our answer to this. In your profession effort to learn new thing is the most important thing. But with the degrees that assumes that you are ready if you have it is that the expectation or your effort and ability to learn. But how can wr measure that specially on scale. During my graduate courses I took a QFT class taught by condensed matter physicist and was focused on his area of research. I wasn't interested and it was very tough. I don't feel I understood most of the things and I struggled to the point I did not submit the final exam (take home). And to my surprise I got an A because I was the highest grade in my class (we were few anyway). I learned a lot of QFT later on my own but I am giving this example on two completely different personal experiences that hopefully deliver the idea. It is hard to design a grading system on a scale that will try to measure different things. and the universities marketing for degrees is doing much harm ( for financial reasons). And also graduate schools and companies don't usually want or sometimes doesn't have resources to look into details about applicants institutions even if they have information about what their grading works. Hell I don't even think it is possible to have one unified system per university (Is it even good thing to do?).
naveen99 3y ago
90% of employees in a 10% stack ranking environment get an “A”. USMLE has a 90+ % pass rate. 1% of the population dies every year. unemployment + inflation is between 5 and 15%, a state of permanent misery index range. in the steady state, it’s enough creative destruction.
oldbbsnickname 3y ago
Grade inflation is a many decades-old, settled topic. It's mostly a stochastic process of opportunity rather than a grand conspiracy. Hell, Stanford expressly forbids exam proctors in its university's charter. But what dull woodshed implement believes certain political figures or 50%+ of legacy admissions did their own homework or took their own tests? Hell, one of my ex gf's sold homework to legacy rubes because she was an ultra-proficient and diligent with discretion and flexible, creative ethics. If a prospective student wanted a masochistic, meritocratic challenge (in undergrad), they should consider IIT[0] (and JEE) or a lesser-known US public research university in the top 50-100 range striving to increase its ranking without hiking tuition by focusing on fundamentals. They're ambivalent if any particular student passes or fails, and have less motivation to pad grading. As a first project for an intro network course in 2001, we had to write a forking, forward caching HTTP/1.0 proxy in *nix/POSIX C89. 0. https://iitsystem.ac.in https://iitsystem.ac.in
uslic001 3y ago
Same thing at Duke back in the 1990's. The professors say you paid a lot of money to attend so you should get A's.

94 points by g42gregory 3y ago

pbj1968 3y ago

“It is not clear how employers would be informed of the narrative-based performance of students in school.” Is an employer demanding to see your GPA such a common thing? I’ve seen it used as a weed out for things like internships but even they will bend the rules if you actually talk to someone behind the curtain.

aidenn0 3y ago
I graduated in the aughts, but at that point every single employer asked for the GPA if you were straight out of school. Most places it was just a filter for interviews, so you could back-door in, but in other places it would gate hiring even if you got an interview some other way. One place I got an interview because I knew someone, and after a successful interview, they rejected me once they asked my GPA (their HR form required it to be filled in for anyone coming straight out of college).
- jghn 3y ago
  In the 90s I found not only would they want to see GPA but often the full transcript. In more than one interview I had people commenting on grades I had for specific classes.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    That place that rejected me on GPA post-interview actually asked for my transcript after hearing my GPA to see if they could justify hiring me based on which classes I passed or failed. I was a rather equal-opportunity poor student, so that was not a success.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    My recollection is that asking for undergrad GPA used to be pretty common--and maybe even transcript (though I don't really remember and certainly don't remember discussions about specific class grades). Though I got a Master's directly after undergrad so I may not have had the standard post-undergrad interview experience.
taeric 3y ago
It was very common for on campus recruiting. And, really, there it makes some sense? Even if you disagree with the idea that people can be ranked, at large, if everyone is aware of the ranking and working with it, you are almost certainly best served getting the people that are excelling at what they are trying to get ranked at. As soon as you open up your search to things across rankings, or in areas without rankings, though, I can't but imagine the utility of it drops off?
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Not sure you always want people that are good at ranking. The way we rank software dev could lead to some fun effects.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Oh, for sure. You should continue to do extra searching at that level. But I think it is mostly fair to assume that the high end of one ranking is a safer bet on finding talent than any other location. It feels like the "search where the lamp post is," but I think it is different. It is close to the "we have data, it must be useful."
    - ghaff 3y ago
      And there are plenty of jobs (see IB, consulting, etc. mentioned) that have an endless appetite for young, hard-working bodies that you only really expect some percentage of to work out anyway. If you miss some diamonds in the rough or late bloomers, they probably wouldn't have fit in anyway and you're fine with your simpler heuristic.
nradov 3y ago
It is common for employers to use GPA to screen candidates for intern and entry level positions. As a practical matter employers receive so many applications that they just don't have the resources to interview everyone, so they need a quick way of filtering down to a reasonable number. Using a GPA cutoff is unfair and leads to the unintended consequence of students and schools both optimizing for that metric instead of for real learning. But at the same time there doesn't seem to be a good alternative that works better at scale.
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nunez 3y ago
for your first few jobs, yes. i still have it on mine because some more conservative employers _still_ care about it, 15 years later.

verdverm 3y ago

How does the student performance compare to other institutions? If most students learn the material, then they deserve a good mark. Having taught three very different classes, I can tell you there is a bell curve to the per class bell curve. Undergrad intro was a bell curve, CS Grad remediation was tragic, mixed ML was mostly A's, they were very engaged students

ecshafer 3y ago
Some schools / departments have a policy of no curves. RIT for example doesn’t curve anything, or at least didn’t 15 years ago.
- Frost1x 3y ago
  I mean curves apply artificial scaling to data of course how one decides to apply them. In some contexts it means that there's always someone failing because in the pool of data you're fitting to, they performed the worst (relatively speaking) but perhaps only in that pool. Overall the worst performer could be excellent in a bigger/wider context. There's no standard "curving" procedure which leaves a lot of ambiguity and potential variation in the results. Often someone just means fitting it to a normal distribution and scaling accordingly. Not everything makes sense in a normal distribution even though people like to default to it in the absence of a known distribution. This gets even more complicated when you start talking about arbitrarily curving across different work, perhaps different courses, across different semesters and so on. Overall you may end up with some weird weighted distribution of your actual performance that's a bit nonsensical. I'm not here to say tests are great metrics but consistency in metrics is usually a good thing or at least a consistent process for attaining them.
- verdverm 3y ago
  Curves were per teacher were I was, pretty sure you cannot stop the subtle bumps that happen based on effort
aidenn0 3y ago
Where and when I went to school, there was also a bell-curve to the classes that have a natural semester for students to take them (e.g. if most students take a class in the Fall, the Spring semester class will tend to have poorer students).

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

This isn't surprising. The important selection filter is entirely in getting into Harvard. It's an excellent signal for some critical amount of intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity, where each one can be traded off for some of the others - but only up to a point. What would be really interesting is if the same effects happen at top universities in the East Asian countries. I would be fascinated to know why the divergence if we found that only 20% of students at, say, Seoul National University got top marks in their classes.

Jensson 3y ago
Normally the classes have harder tests at more prestigious schools, ensuring that most people doesn't reach an A. I've worked with people from Harvard, they weren't smart enough to consistently get A's in hard classes, so it seems to me like Harvard doesn't grade as harshly or have easier classes than most other prestigious universities. I understand why they do it, they want their students to not have problems due to low grades, but that also means that a Harvard degree isn't as useful as a sorting mechanism because I can't tell the difference between top students and the rest.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > I understand why they do it, they want their students to not have problems due to low grades, but that also means that a Harvard degree isn't as useful as a sorting mechanism because I can't tell the difference between top students and the rest. They got into Harvard and were subsequently successful there. Do you really benefit from knowing which of two Harvard grads got a few extra questions right in a handful of exams?
  - Jensson 3y ago
    > Do you really benefit from knowing which of two Harvard grads got a few extra questions right in a handful of exams? It isn't just "a few extra questions", when professors makes tests harder they add more interesting questions that requires you to think further rather than just plug-n-chug. The difference between a 4.0 student and a 3.0 student at lets say Caltech is enormous, so yeah I care.

bell-cot 3y ago

Quip: With how much they're paying in tuition, don't they all deserve an 'A+'?

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
A great many of them aren't paying tuition at all. By this point Harvard has an endowment larger than some small nations. And yet, I would imagine a similar, perhaps even stronger, trend towards getting all As in these "free riders".

rainbowzootsuit 3y ago

At Harvard, "A" is for "Average."

polygamous_bat 3y ago

It always surprises me how some people are shocked a plot of P(student learned the class material well) is starkly different from P(student learned the class material well | student was hard-working enough to secure admission through one of the most selective* processes). * Minus the legacies and the atheletic admissions I guess.

internetter 3y ago
> * Minus the legacies and the atheletic admissions I guess. Well the other 20% needs to come from somewhere!

fn-mote 3y ago

The information is about the 2020-2021 grades, which is to say the height of Covid in the US. I would not generalize.

zamadatix 3y ago
Following the opening link to the report it shows the year was not an anomaly in the trend, rather the last (and somewhat naturally the most extreme of the trend) in the dataset.

lefstathiou 3y ago

My brother graduated from MIT 20 years ago and I recall one summer when I stayed there one of his fraternity brothers quipping “the fastest way to get a girl in Boston is to tell her you go to Harvard, and the fastest way to lose her is to tell her you go to MIT, they don’t want nerds”. Amazing how things have changed but even then it was basically an accepted truth that Harvard massively inflated grades. At the time I was told perfect GPAs were basically unheard of at MIT (back then least). Grade inflation is real and I think it leads to significant unintended consequences. I do find myself flip flopping however on whether there should be grades at all. If you’ve read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, you’ll recall there is a powerful case made to eliminate grades at the college level. I still lean toward having them currently.

lefstathiou 3y ago
Another fun anecdote about those times and MIT specifically. My brother was arguably the top student to come out of the Atlanta Public School System in 1996. This was a kid used to being the best in everything he did. He starts at MIT and takes the Calc 2 placement exam (he got a 5 of course on the AP BC test) and scores an 11 out of 100. He said the teaching assistant sat him down and told him “we are not in Kansas any more, forget everything you think you know, you are not prepared to be in this class and we will not accept your AP test results.” Unfortunately, I recall in 1996 4 or 5 students committed suicide at MIT due to the academic rigor (which is why the first year was pass fail). I’m not advocating for this system just sharing stories told to me.
- nunez 3y ago
  Amazing. If you as an educator did that sit-down at the high school level, you'd be fired or be rubber roomed.
- ghaff 3y ago
  While there are softer subject escape hatches at a school like MIT (and I've known some very smart people have taken them while remaining in technology-related areas generally), it's hard to avoid math and hard science/engineering topics in general. And there are a lot of straight A students in high school (and most people at MIT were at least close to that) who were fine with memorized plug and chug high school physics suddenly hit stuff they just can't handle and struggle to just pass the class. In my experience, MIT is actually pretty good about wanting to help students work their way through once they've been admitted. But there's definitely a firehose aspect to a lot of it a lot of incoming students aren't prepared for--even leaving aside a lot of the distractions and other elements of suddenly being away at college.

crazygringo 3y ago

This statistic is useless without any comparison to other schools. Maybe this is the same as the average across all of the top 20 schools? It also raises an interesting question: should it be harder to get an A in a class at Harvard than at e.g. a third-tier school? Because the answer to that is not obviously yes. E.g. if you take Calculus 101 and master it to some level of proficiency that is an A- at some third-tier school, should you also get an A- in Calc 101 at Harvard, or should that merely be a C there? (And if you think it should be a C, then why? Isn't calculus just calculus? Either you master the material or you don't. Why should you be graded differently depending on where you learn it?) Because if you think grades should reflect some kind of absolute level of proficiency, then it's not surprising at all that 80% of grades at Harvard would be in the 'A' range, considering how many straight-A applicants Harvard accepts in the first place.

spondylosaurus 3y ago
Should it be harder? No, I don't think so. Ideally the classes at any two schools should be roughly on par with one another. But I would assume that disparities do exist, unfortunately. An anecdote: my father was valedictorian of his podunk high school but nearly flunked out of his first year of college. And he's a smart guy, it was just a mixture of (1) not having study skills, since he'd never really needed to study before and (2) being a little behind on certain subjects (like math) that hadn't been taught well at his high school compared to the schools his peers attended. In a situation like that, I'd assume that an A in a class whose teacher is just phoning it in is not equivalent to an A in a class on the same subject whose teacher is serious about both teaching and grading.
- riskable 3y ago
  This is why standardized tests exist. They're the same test no matter where you're from. IMHO, standardized tests should always be about mastery and scoring should reflect that rather than having a simple number like 1200 or 1600. Someone could get a 600 on their Math SAT but the parts they got wrong were related to simple fractions or time-based calculations. If the only information you have is, "600 out of 800" you don't have that information. Furthermore they shouldn't even have scores, really. They should be pass/fail based on mastery of required subjects (whatever the test is about). Either you know quadratic equations or you don't. If you got 90% of the quadratic equations correct you know how to deal with quadratic equations... You probably just made a minor mistake somewhere or were running out of time. You still "got the gist of it". It would make a hell of a lot more sense to me if students had to take dozens of standardized tests demonstrating mastery of all facets of the high school curriculum rather than one great big test at the end of their schooling that measures their ability to remember randomly-sampled fractions of that knowledge.

vincent-manis 3y ago

When I was a grad student (back in the Old Stone Age), the minimum passing grade in graduate courses was an A. (This was based upon the theory that we were cherry-picked from the set of applicants.) This may be Harvard's premise (the people I've known who went to Harvard were generally outstanding), or maybe not. I would be interested in seeing the correlation between legacy students (the ones who got in because a parent attended) and grades. In 30 years of teaching first- and second-year computer science courses, I always saw a bimodal distribution, with one mode around a C and the second at a B+/A- level. (In first year, it often was trimodal, with the third mode at an F-, students who gave up early in the course and didn't withdraw). I would be astonished if there were not something like that going on in Harvard's first year CS. Mr Turley quotes William F Buckley on preferring the first 400 names in the Boston phone book to Harvard faculty. I would prefer to listen to a conspiracy theorist explaining why the lepton samurai of Jupiter were about to invade the earth than to listen to Mr Buckley, even if he were still alive.

nunez 3y ago
I took CS grad courses at Stevens Tech in Hoboken, NJ during my undergrad. The minimum passing grade to stay in the grad program was a B. Tons of curves were had.

VirusNewbie 3y ago

I don't know anyone in tech who is impressed with traditional IVY schools. It's not a negative signal, but I don't really think they have rigorous CS or EE programs. MIT, Stanford, and CMU do stick out to me as a positive signal but I could care less about anything else, including Harvard.

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Aeolun 3y ago

Shouldn’t you want a bigger/more relevant range? They are already in Harvard, now I want to see who is any good at Harvard level.

thelastgallon 3y ago

According to Liz Elting, graduates of the Ivy League had literally peaked in school. They lacked the hunger and ambition she needed in her company. The case against hiring people from Ivy League schools: https://bigthink.com/business/case-against-hiring-ivy-league-schools/ https://bigthink.com/business/case-against-hiring-ivy-league...

rvba 3y ago
The blog post seems to say that the Harvard grads couldnt be squeezed out like a lemon with 100h weeks ("balance between hunger and burn out")... As much as I dont like grads from top schools. Here they showed some actual smarts. You dont need to work 100 hour weeks in a sweatshop that tries to "balance you between burned out and hungry". Probably that grad has rich parents too, so they can switch jobs to a boring corporate job. They have a safety net not to be exploited with 100hour per week gruel. Come on? Is that some success story? 100 hour weeks is eithet a sweatshop or shitty work organization. I bet that lady wanted that motived, hard working harvard grad for 15 dollars per hour and also with 50 hours of UNPAID overtime. That's jusr the typical sweatshop approach. Also they should "think big" but not too big like for example "we should pay better in our sweatshop". I looked who she was - and seems her own partners kicked her out from that company that she was supposedly building by exploiting people.

fluxem 3y ago

To get to Harvard, you need to be a valedictorian or close to that. And not every valedictorian gets to go to to Harvard. It’s not a surprise then that Harvard is full of overachievers with straight A’s.

austinl 3y ago

There's been a general trend of grade inflation in U.S. universities, accelerating in the 1960s (during the Vietnam war), and then again in the 1990s [0]. In some sense, this might be because the role of the student shifted more towards that of a consumer purchasing a product. Harvard average GPA was a 3.0 in 1967, now it's a 3.45 [1]. There are some universities that have tried to actively prevent inflation (e.g. Purdue with a 2.73 average in 1986 to 3.09 in 2012 [2]). [0] https://www.gradeinflation.com https://www.gradeinflation.com [1] https://www.gradeinflation.com/Harvard.html https://www.gradeinflation.com/Harvard.html [2] https://www.gradeinflation.com/Purdue.html https://www.gradeinflation.com/Purdue.html

ghaff 3y ago
So 15% vs. 13% (albeit from a slightly lower starting point). Not sure that makes a case for a dramatic difference.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Nor is inflation the only possible explanation.
Spivak 3y ago
God I hate this take. This mythologizes grades as an end rather than a means. I much prefer the world where tests are written with the expectation that people who've mastered the material get an A rather than the endless hamster wheel where the test gets harder until you get a distribution centered at C. I would have burnt out on my schooling so fast as to make it worthless. How demoralizing it must be when every test is designed so that you won't know all the answers. Why even bother trying? I'm not in school to compete with other students, I'm there to learn.

yCombLinks 3y ago

I'm near finishing my undergrad at Harvard extension school. Many of the courses (especially in CS) are taught alongside traditional Harvard students. Same assignments / tests / lectures, they just have to be physically in the lecture hall. The work is rigorous, and the grading is usually harder than the state school I attended long ago. (I have taken a few non-math / non-CS courses that were easy A's). Maybe grades have inflated, but overall the students are really good. Grading really harshly just to "separate the top" or whatever doesn't make sense. They all mastered the material in "Introduction to Computer Science" in the semester.

j7ake 3y ago
It does make sense because grades no longer mean anything if everybody gets the same grade. The most informative grades would be uniformly distributed, it’s an opportunity for the geniuses to shine and give a signal to profs about who to hire for their PhDs.
- antonyt 3y ago
  Sounds like you are looking for grades to indicate class ranking. Should that be the function of grades?
  - j7ake 3y ago
    Grades are most useful to a professor if it indicates class ranking of who has potential to do research level work. The only function of giving everyone an A is to prevent shattering fragile egos who have never experienced setbacks before. Unfortunately real life is full of set backs, so it’s better to learn to deal with it in a safe environment.
    - antonyt 3y ago
      If PIs or employers want to discriminate based on class ranking, they can ask for it and do exactly that. Why conflate that with grades? A common understanding of a grade is as an indication that the course material has been mastered. Higher grade = more mastery. This is a measure independent of the performance of fellow students.

currymj 3y ago

i think it's fine if universities grade on whatever scale they want, or none, and it's not clear who is hurt by this. I guess if you have to hire Harvard new grads, want to base your decision on their academic performance, and would prefer more fine-grained rankings of performance, this is not in your interest. The very top students may also wish they had more chance to distinguish themselves. However the way it seems to work in many schools with grade inflation is that it's easy to get an A, but still pretty hard to get an A+, so there's still some opportunity here. I'd also add that at Princeton, attempts to combat grade inflation were very unsuccessful and resulted in strange unintended consequences, like students carefully strategizing which sections of courses to take to avoid those believed to have heavy competition.

ghaff 3y ago
>I'd also add that at Princeton, attempts to combat grade inflation were very unsuccessful and resulted in strange unintended consequences, like students carefully strategizing which sections of courses to take to avoid those believed to have heavy competition. Certainly, if you're going to major in some quantitative field, you can only avoid so many of the courses in that major. But, if you're really interested in optimizing for GPA, you can often still major in some variant of the major that provides more flexibility and--where you have electives--take classes that are easy (for you).

HumblyTossed 3y ago

What should the average be? A 'C'? I doubt it. Let's assume most of the people at Harvard wanted to be there. Wouldn't they work hard to get there and thus once there do their best to succeed?

c-linkage 3y ago
A 'C' grade is supposed to be 'average'. If you're already in the top 10% of all students in the USA, you can still be average in comparison to your peers. A 'C' grade at Harvard should still be pretty good in the job space because: 1) you were good enough to be admitted to Harvard, and 2) you are representative of an average student at Harvard.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > A 'C' grade is supposed to be 'average'. I've never heard that before, and it certainly hasn't been in any class I've ever been in. And Wikipedia says nothing of the sort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United... To the contrary, C is generally the lowest grade that is considered to be a satisfactory passing grade.
- Avamander 3y ago
  > A 'C' grade is supposed to be 'average'. Says who? I find mastery-based grading much more logical. Take the Finnish or Estonian school system, it's very rarely curved like in the States. If you master the material you get a good grade. PISA results seem to indicate that works well.

itslennysfault 3y ago

That's been the running joke an University of Chicago forever. If I wanted an A I would've gone to Harvard.

bradwschiller 3y ago

Grade inflation is an obvious problem. It does a disservice to students, making them believe they are exceptional at something they are actually mediocre at. Some rants related to this and how awful grade inflation is for students and the world. AP score data is especially indicative of this. In AP classes, most high school students earn As from their teachers (I estimate around ~60%). Yet, when you look at the AP scores, few get 5s on exams (the equivalent of an A). For example, 5-10% get 5's on AP English and Science-related exams. Scores are a bit higher on Social Sciences (10-15% 5s) and math/CS (~25%). But only ~50% of students even get above a 3 on the exam (the equivalent of a C). So there are people who essentially get a D by the standard (a 2) that are getting an A in their high school class. I could go on with countless examples of how students aren't nearly as capable as their grades would indicate. At McKinsey, I interviewed over 100 people from top schools with high GPAs. Many couldn't solve simple math problems when given the problem in the context of a real-world case. At out top institutions with our top students, we should be pushing them extremely hard and measuring them against a higher bar. I find it disappointing that they are being measured against the same (or even a lower bar) than students at other institutions. It's so bad that it seems clear that a Harvard Education isn't any better than a Penn State, Nebraska, or even UC Riverside education. The only difference is having the Harvard brand and network. It's an embarrassment. And it's not just a problem at Harvard. It's a problem at every top institution. Grade-motivated students don't put in the extra work when little effort still earns them As. One example stands out. I run an edtech company, and in our early days, we ran an experiment at doesmyessaysuck.com. You could submit your essay, get a score, and 2 pieces of feedback on how to improve the content and structure of your writing. We did about a thousand essays before abandoning it. I always think about one student. He submitted an essay we generously gave a C (it was really bad). It was incoherent, poorly structure, didn't answer the prompt, and lacked sound logical reasoning. He responded we were wrong because he had gotten a 93% on it. Also – https://www.gradeinflation.com/ https://www.gradeinflation.com/ is a good read. It's out-of-date data. But it proves the point even further than this article. Note: There is some research out there that claims grade inflation is false and that more students actually have learned more than in previous years (i.e., the academic bar hasn't changed, but more students are above it). However, this research is unconvincing (and ripe with errors). There's essentially been zero improvement (and even a decline) in basic math and literacy skills over the past couple of decades (as measured by standardized tests). Yet grades are much higher. And high school and college graduation rates are up by about 10 percentage points since the early 2000s. As it turns out, when your only measure of success is graduation rate, you end up with more graduates – even if those graduates don't have any skills.

karmakaze 3y ago

Why does this even matter? In the end as long as you pass the required courses, you'll get a degree. Who checks grades? Most don't even check that a claim of degree is true. The only loss would be that of the student not actually the learning material due to lenient grading. Q: What do you call a doctor who graduated at the bottom of their class? A: "Doctor"

chankstein38 3y ago
I think the point is that there could be some meddling to make sure people pass. I am not purporting that's the case I just think that's why it's mentioned. I went to a school that was nowhere near Harvard level and saw it regularly, people sleeping in class or who didn't do a single assignment who still graduated with me. I think it was a money thing. Still not saying that's happening at Harvard just that it wouldn't be the most shocking thing. That said, I agree with other commenters that you set this situation up with the rigorous acceptance criteria. You're testing the people who got into one of the best schools so presumably if your selection criteria works they should all excel at the courses.

highfrequency 3y ago

Probably a positive trend if college students end up worrying less about their GPA and spending more time learning things they are interested in / trying out different careers / making friends and memories. From my experience, college students worry enough about grades without forcing the curve to be harsher than it currently is.

nunez 3y ago

Interestingly this is also a problem at the (expensive) private schools that feed students into these elite colleges. You can give out super hard exams and make them sweat/cry/worry, but you'll be given tons of shit if you actually fail them, especially if their parents are large donors. Only exceptions here are for students that failed so badly they're no way they can pass, even if you apply a crazy curve on top. now many (most?) of those students are extremely talented and deserve the grades they get, but it's still a bullshit system that encourages failing upwards.

elashri 3y ago

This is my personal experience with the grading systems and how I find (personal opinion) assigning grades as a very hard problem. I did my undergrad outside the US but in a university that follows American system. My department culture was that you don't expect curves and grades are based on what you get. So if we are all getting F then that is F for all people. No one passes a course just for the sake of passing. While these extreme cases never happened (at least when I was there). if it happens then this tells about quality of the course itself not only students effort and performance. I took a general relativity class during my undergrad. I like this field and topic. And while I am currently doing particle physics but I always liked GR. I was doing well regarding the topics but never got good grades. I struggled with its exams in particular with this particular professor. I got C although I managed not only to have a good grasp of the subject but went so far as to work on specific problem and expanded it into a paper, participated in a conference and got it published later into a peer-reviewed Journal. While when I moved for a graduate school is the US. Things is very different. Many of the undergraduate I teach were always expecting high grades anyway. curving is very much the norm and the negotiations is about how much to curve. The normal distribution of the grades is a religious belief to some people in the universities administration. And I understand it is hard to assist professors teaching and some use this as an evaluation metric but it I feel like it doesn't addressa core thing. Some people will pass even with high grades and they did not get the core of the subject. This is not about they deserve more than me or not. There is a fundamental question of are we grading on effort to learn or actually what people learned. The grading criteria will differ much based on our answer to this. In your profession effort to learn new thing is the most important thing. But with the degrees that assumes that you are ready if you have it is that the expectation or your effort and ability to learn. But how can wr measure that specially on scale. During my graduate courses I took a QFT class taught by condensed matter physicist and was focused on his area of research. I wasn't interested and it was very tough. I don't feel I understood most of the things and I struggled to the point I did not submit the final exam (take home). And to my surprise I got an A because I was the highest grade in my class (we were few anyway). I learned a lot of QFT later on my own but I am giving this example on two completely different personal experiences that hopefully deliver the idea. It is hard to design a grading system on a scale that will try to measure different things. and the universities marketing for degrees is doing much harm ( for financial reasons). And also graduate schools and companies don't usually want or sometimes doesn't have resources to look into details about applicants institutions even if they have information about what their grading works. Hell I don't even think it is possible to have one unified system per university (Is it even good thing to do?).

naveen99 3y ago

90% of employees in a 10% stack ranking environment get an “A”. USMLE has a 90+ % pass rate. 1% of the population dies every year. unemployment + inflation is between 5 and 15%, a state of permanent misery index range. in the steady state, it’s enough creative destruction.

oldbbsnickname 3y ago

Grade inflation is a many decades-old, settled topic. It's mostly a stochastic process of opportunity rather than a grand conspiracy. Hell, Stanford expressly forbids exam proctors in its university's charter. But what dull woodshed implement believes certain political figures or 50%+ of legacy admissions did their own homework or took their own tests? Hell, one of my ex gf's sold homework to legacy rubes because she was an ultra-proficient and diligent with discretion and flexible, creative ethics. If a prospective student wanted a masochistic, meritocratic challenge (in undergrad), they should consider IIT[0] (and JEE) or a lesser-known US public research university in the top 50-100 range striving to increase its ranking without hiking tuition by focusing on fundamentals. They're ambivalent if any particular student passes or fails, and have less motivation to pad grading. As a first project for an intro network course in 2001, we had to write a forking, forward caching HTTP/1.0 proxy in *nix/POSIX C89. 0. https://iitsystem.ac.in https://iitsystem.ac.in

uslic001 3y ago

Same thing at Duke back in the 1990's. The professors say you paid a lot of money to attend so you should get A's.