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This comes from a few recent changes in college admissions. Less students are enrolling in college, and this trend will likely continue for the next 10 years. P

This comes from a few recent changes in college admissions. Less students are enrolling in college, and this trend will likely continue for the next 10 years. Part of this is due to there being less people 15-18 years old compared to previous years, so colleges need to be more competitive to retain the same number of students. The other part is rising costs of colleges, to the point where many who would normally consider it are pausing and asking if it is worth it. In a normally competitive college market, students are pressured to do well academically. If they do not, they receive low grades, then get put on academic probation, then get dismissed from the college and are replaced by a more academically capable student. For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), there will always be more students. But for state level universities and community colleges, there is not always another student to take their place due to factors above. So, grade inflation seems like a natural solution to the immediate number of enrolled students problem, however the long-term tradeoff is that it devalues the institution's image by not holding new graduates to the same standard that graduates 5-10 years ago were held to. You see this all the time in FinTech - some firms only hire from Stanford, Yale, etc because those colleges are great at creating students with a certain baseline standard of education. The amount of time it takes to ramp up students from those universities compared to others is significantly less. So in general, grade inflation is a short-term fix that might have long term consequences.

mhuffman 3y ago
>For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), I went to one of these type schools. At the time, grade inflation was already a hot topic. It seemed then that there were two schools of thought: 1) Grades where artificially inflated for some students that couldn't keep up for social or political reasons and to help with their economic future. The idea being that in a "real" job, it isn't about always being exactly right and you can always research any info you need in quasi-real-time, not to mention most of your actual job requirements will be taught to you on the job. So a can-do attitude and good communication skills are adequate and a bad grade should not stop your progress. 2) Students were just smarter and better prepared each successive year. If a student makes an A, you give them the A! And if the school is very selective a lot of students will make A's. They are not there by accident after all! As an example, the average GPA in my school was a 4.1! (And I mean my university, not my high-school where AP "tweaks" GPAs) I was even in a class where one of our projects was to research and write about this. At the time, there was no one right answer, it seemed.
carabiner 3y ago
There isn't grade inflation in STEM programs. These discussions neglect this fact because the vast majority of college students are still humanities majors. If you look at Math or Mechanical Engineering departments, there is zero issue of grade inflation. OP article is about philosophy program where I can definitely see the fuzzy nature of the subject leading to soft grading. If anything most engineering schools are known for grade deflation. At my school, they started adding the course average grade to transcripts, but only for courses at the college of liberal arts.

mhuffman 3y ago

>For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), I went to one of these type schools. At the time, grade inflation was already a hot topic. It seemed then that there were two schools of thought: 1) Grades where artificially inflated for some students that couldn't keep up for social or political reasons and to help with their economic future. The idea being that in a "real" job, it isn't about always being exactly right and you can always research any info you need in quasi-real-time, not to mention most of your actual job requirements will be taught to you on the job. So a can-do attitude and good communication skills are adequate and a bad grade should not stop your progress. 2) Students were just smarter and better prepared each successive year. If a student makes an A, you give them the A! And if the school is very selective a lot of students will make A's. They are not there by accident after all! As an example, the average GPA in my school was a 4.1! (And I mean my university, not my high-school where AP "tweaks" GPAs) I was even in a class where one of our projects was to research and write about this. At the time, there was no one right answer, it seemed.

carabiner 3y ago

There isn't grade inflation in STEM programs. These discussions neglect this fact because the vast majority of college students are still humanities majors. If you look at Math or Mechanical Engineering departments, there is zero issue of grade inflation. OP article is about philosophy program where I can definitely see the fuzzy nature of the subject leading to soft grading. If anything most engineering schools are known for grade deflation. At my school, they started adding the course average grade to transcripts, but only for courses at the college of liberal arts.