4 ms·

Dean Says Median Grade at Harvard College Is A-, Most Common Grade Is A

27 points by mayneack 13y ago

codex 13y ago
Grade inflation stepped up a notch during the Vietnam War, when professions were reluctant to fail students out of college an into the draft. Now it's done to protect a college's graduation rate, which affects rankings. Elite Ivy League institutions admit bright, motivated high school graduates and produce bright, motivated college graduates. The institution's value add is mainly networking and branding--kind of like YC.
- nether 13y ago
  It's also due to the fact that easier grading brings more positive student evaluations of profs, which are taken into account with salaries and tenureship.
  - greenburger 13y ago
    I assure you that at a Research I university like Harvard, student evaluations have at best a pro-forma impact on tenureship, and probably salary as well. Faculty at Harvard are tenured and compensated on their abilities to publish high profile research and attract major grants, showing up to lectures is about all that is expected of them teaching-wise.
    - nether 13y ago
      Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I don't have firsthand experience with Harvard, this is what I've just heard to be the general case with universities.
    - impendia 13y ago
      Maybe Harvard. But I am employed as a math professor at a Research I state school, in which context you are quite mistaken. Research is most important, but good teaching is also important. "Universities don't care about teaching" is a fun meme to kick around, and there are anecdotes to support this, but by and large it is not true.
      - greenburger 13y ago
        My comment was directed more specifically to Harvard and narrow set of top tier schools, I do not believe that universities don't care about teaching. The list of "very high research activity" (apparently research 1 is no longer used) includes 108 schools [1] of which Harvard is at one extreme end. That said, my father recently retired after 33 years with his department at a "high research activity", the second tier, and he can't recall a single case when someone was denied tenure where teaching performance was an issue. Research, and increasingly grant acquisition were always the issues. Personally, I went to a small liberal arts school. Having taught at two top universities, private and public, I'm happy I went where I did. Undergrad teaching was the top priority and the difference is stark. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_i...
      - pge 13y ago
        To play devil's advocate for a moment, the tenure evaluations I am familiar with at many universities take student feedback into account, as a proxy for "good teaching," but unfortunately teachers students like and teachers that are good at teaching may not be the same. Thus universities seem to care more about keeping students happy than about "teaching" per se.
chris_mahan 13y ago
So a 4.0 at Harvard is equivalent to a 2.0 at a community college. Niiiiice!
- MrZongle2 13y ago
  Yes, but the Harvard degree comes with a lifetime of Smug.
  - hyperbovine 13y ago
    Similarly, lack of a Harvard degree comes with a lifetime of hating on people who went to Harvard.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - MrZongle2 13y ago
      I wasn't aware that observation of demonstrated behavior equated to "hating".
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  In high school I took number theory at the local community college. We stopped right before the chapter on quadratic reciprocity. Later, I found the Harvard midterm for their undergrad number theory class online. I took a look out of curiosity. The first question was on quadratic reciprocity, and I had no clue what the other 9 (or 14, maybe) were about. They were moving >2x as fast and doing 3x as much homework (the homework was online too). I suspect the worst student in the Harvard class would have been competitive with the best student in the CC class. If 20% of the kids in the CC class get As, it's not a stretch to believe that 100% of the Harvard kids would have gotten As had they taken the same class. Obviously this holds for some classes more than others, but the point is that variation in difficulty between classes, professors, and peer-groups can easily dominate variation in difficulty imposed by the grading scale.
  - 13y ago
phren0logy 13y ago
I would imagine there's a significant selection bias at work here. This is not a random sample of students, and I don't think it's super odd that many of them get As. Perhaps more get As than should, but I'd look at the grade distribution of a less discriminating institution if I wanted to get huffy about grade inflation. Especially with no meaningful data in the article about historic grade distributions at Harvard.
ianferrel 13y ago
Old joke: What do you call a guy who gets straight C-minuses at Harvard? A Harvard Graduate. Harvard is effectively graded pass/fail. I'm not convinced that's actually a bad thing.
HorizonXP 13y ago
I always hated this about other schools. While I will be the first to admit that I could probably have tried harder in school, I blame this practice in Ontario for part of why I could never get an interview for medical school. Waterloo engineering was definitely one of the tougher programs, and an 80 average was actually tough to attain. It seems that my friends at other schools or programs had an easier time getting 80s and 90s.
- hyperbovine 13y ago
  PhD programs are well aware of grade inflation at different universities and take this into account when conducting admissions. No idea if med schools do the same but I'd be surprised if they didn't. Your difficulty getting into med school could also have been because engineering not a typical "pre-med" degree.
  - HorizonXP 13y ago
    Medical schools specifically stated that they did not adjust grades. There was some different weighting mechanisms employed for certain schools, but that was at the school level, not program level. Furthermore, medical schools here typically encourage students not to pursue "pre-med" degrees. They want students that pursue challenging programs, in order to demonstrate their abilities and to have a backup if medical school doesn't work out. I don't have any regrets about engineering, it's the best decision I ever made, and I'm sure I'll have an impact in other ways. It's just still a bitter/sore spot for me.
- CaveTech 13y ago
  An 80 can be difficult at Waterloo, but no doubt theres over a dozen students in your year with a higher avg. It's good, but not remarkable. Consistent 90's in any degree program in Ontario is quite the accomplishment, regardless of inflation.
dba7dba 13y ago
Preferred admission to kids of alumni at top private school. And easy As that will pave way to other grad schools. I don't want to believe US is a class based society but ...
avolcano 13y ago
I have to imagine that the long-term solution for this is for employers to find better criteria to judge candidates on than a GPA. There's too much variance in schools and classes to really consider it an accurate judge of ability. It's a measure of how well you did in school, not how well you will be able to do your job.
impendia 13y ago
I taught an upper-level undergraduate course in math (combinatorics) at Stanford a few years ago. There were 18 students, and I gave all of them A's or B's. They deserved it. I was inspired by what they accomplished. I would have felt uncomfortable if I had been asked to make sure the average was around a C. (And all of this is very typical of the experience of people teaching math at Stanford.)
- scrabble 13y ago
  This could be the case, but why couldn't it instead be the case that a 2.9 at Harvard is comparable to a 4.0 at a lesser school, and a 4.0 at Harvard is outstanding and means something truly incredible?
- nether 13y ago
  This is why I think concerns over grade inflation are overstated. High grades for outstanding students doing outstanding work are warranted, and these are the kids Harvard by-and-large admits. The apparent grade "inflation" over the past few decades reflects the fact that it's no longer possible to get into Harvard with one AP course: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/29Rparenting.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/...
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    Your overall point is well-taken, but the Harvard admissions people always stress that there is no definitive profile of an admitted student. If they wanted to fill the class with perfect-SAT valedictorians from NYC and Boston, they probably could, but that is not what happens.
- secstate 13y ago
  That's all well and good, but the whole point of a scale is that students fall somewhere on it and it reflects work done in comparison to something. If not other students, then just patting ourselves on the back for a job well done. Would you need a some slacker half-following directions to earn an Average? No, you'd need the Average of the students in the course to earn an Average. Otherwise the distinction is meaningless. Then again, I've just spent some time re-reading Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective people, and I've given up caring too much about grades per-se. They discourage cooperation and encourage competition amongst peers. And in doing that strongly bias their adherents to win-lose scenarios when we should all strive for win-win scenarios. If you think that's bunk, I encourage you to read Covey's book. Coming at it with an open-mind can truly be life-changing in a positive way.
rayiner 13y ago
I never understood the complaints about grade inflation at top schools. The people who care to make distinctions among graduates at Harvard (investment banks, consulting companies, graduate schools), already know how to do so. Everyone else just cares about the "Harvard" on the resume. So who cares what the median grade is? They could hand out degrees "magna cum fruitcake" and nobody would blink.
- sp332 13y ago
  I went to a liberal arts college that didn't do grade inflation. The average grade was nominally a C. The campus bookstore sold t-shirts with "C+: Better than average!" on them. Oh, and our diplomas are comically large :)
chatmasta 13y ago
I go to Yale where the average GPA is a 3.6. So we suffer from a similar "problem." But honestly, I do not think it is a problem. Kids here put an absurd amount of work into their classes. It's not surprising that the average GPA is a 3.6, because the average assignment actually is A- level work. The obvious argument against this is that the grades should be curved so that the average level of work receives a C... but what do you do when most kids are getting the same top grades on tests, or writing the same high quality papers? It's a hard problem to solve, and as long as other colleges have grade inflation, it would be disadvantageous to your students to not have it. The problem I have is differing GPA distributions between majors. History majors have a much easier time getting in the 3.6-4.0 range than CS majors, because history teachers will rarely give anything less than a B. So when a CS major applies to jobs that other majors are also applying to (say, finance), he can look bad in comparison.
- jayd16 13y ago
  No one gives a shit about GPA in the real world.
  - chatmasta 13y ago
    Right, and then there's this. But employers do give a shit about GPA when recruiting college seniors, because it represents one of the only available metrics for quality of work. In my experience, providing employers with other metrics reduces the value they place on GPA.
    - pge 13y ago
      It may depend on the case - in many cases, the school a student attended trumps the GPA the student achieved at that school. For schools like Harvard and Yale, it is the brand that employers react to most, not the GPA. Having recruited students from those schools while at a strategy consulting firm, typically we looked at school, then major, then other stuff (which may or may not include GPA). Major was a better indicator of talent level than GPA at those schools.
    - eitally 13y ago
tristanz 13y ago
My experience was that it's relatively easy to stack rank Harvard undergraduates, but it often doesn't feel like it serves any educational purpose to do so. In the class I taught of 12, there were 10 that seemed like they deserved an A or A-. They completed all the assignments and did their absolute best as far as I could tell. Some were definitely better than others (A vs. A-), but giving the hardworking but not genius students Bs just made them stressed out. They would come to office hours to ask how they could improve. The only true answer I could give was "there are 2-3 students in this class that are just incredibly creative and gifted writers, they get the As." Maybe it's the role of a teacher to stack rank students, but it's no fun. I'd much prefer to try to get the best out of each student. The truly top students are going to have no problem distinguishing themselves later in life anyway, it's just so obvious how good they are.
- RogerL 13y ago
  Ya, that's my difficulty with the article. If all the students learned the material, then what is the problem? OTOH, if they just didn't grasp information, or didn't try, they deserve something other than an A. There is no easy answer, and it varies by course. In an algorithms course you are going to learn trees, sorting, graphs, and complexity analysis. If you master those, why not an A? Sure, you can make the course insanely hard, and force the students to do essentially original research to get an A, but what is the point there, exactly? You end up with a pressure-cooker, swamped with work school just to create a bell curve. I spent so much of my University time on my own research ideas, helping professors, and so on - course work was almost a back drop. I think I got so much more out of it doing it that way. A competitive fight of churning out massive amounts of work against other straight-A's in high school type-A personalities? Not so valuable (IMO). Time to think, dream, and experiment is what is valuable, and how do you put a grade on that? edit: I take this back somewhat. In some fields it definitely pays off to have a broader foundation. I took quite a few math classes, but would have profited by by even more. Lots of research papers are tough going because I don't have all the math. So there is value in volume of work, too.
- wnissen 13y ago
  Stack ranking in small groups is stupid and counterproductive because it forces a distribution where none necessarily exists. So for any particular class of 12 I agree with you. However, Harvard enrolls over 1500 frosh next year. Is there really so little daylight between them that they should all get an A or A-? Graduation is supposed to ensure the minimum fulfillment of standards, GPA is for ranking. Given that you're seeing kids on the far end of the tail, I would expect more variance, not less. Let's be honest here: grade inflation is not something we do for a reason, but rather something that happens because no one has any particular interest in preventing it. Full disclosure: I attended a demanding college whose 2007 median GPA was 3.35 (the average was less). Of the 150-ish annual graduates, only 7 have ever achieved a 4.0 since its founding in 1955.
shalmanese 13y ago
The problem is that grading serves two purposes that are at odds with each other: comparison within a group and comparison between groups. Harvard's grading system is useless to a student that is trying to figure out how they are ranking among their peers or whether their studying habits are increasing their performance. However, it's great when they're on the job market and their 4.0 GPA is better than the 2.9 GPA of Engineering State that still grades on a sharp curve. The increase in grade inflation has reflected the trend of college goers valuing extrinsic factors (get a better job) over intrinsic factors (learn more stuff). A solution to this problem would be to split the two grading systems apart, having one standardized, SAT style test at the end of college that would allow more accurate comparisons between schools while preserving GPA as a within school measure. In fact, it stuns me that the College Board hasn't positioned the GRE as this kind of service and pioneered some kind of aGPA score that would combine your college GPA with the relative performance of your college against all others.
- rizzom5000 13y ago
  > In fact, it stuns me that the College Board hasn't positioned the GRE as this kind of service.. The CS department at my alma mater did require the ETS Computer Science Field Exam for graduation. The results are interesting as you can compare your personal score against students from several dozen other universities as well as your department's score. All the noise about standardized testing aside, I think that this sort of thing should be required for anyone to get a degree. I've met far too many people with Master's degrees who seem easily confused by basic math and science. The fact that there aren't any measurable standards that go beyond the institutional level really dilutes the value of a degree.
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  One of the most interesting arguments against extreme grade inflation I've seen arose in the context of students considering going to grad school in a difficult field. Several professors in the conversation said they weren't comfortable with writing a recommendation or encouraging a particular student to go on to graduate work, but that it was difficult to convince these students that thhe weren't cut out for it after they had given them As in upper level courses. At my alma mater the grade A+ was used in some departments for this sort of purpose. It wasn't mandatory, and it didn't count towards GPA, sometimes no one got one at all, but it signaled something to the students who did. Separately I had one professor, in history of all things, who was a notoriously tough grader but was retiring the next semester after I had her. As a one time policy she issued two sets of grades, the one you deserved and the one she decided to give out to be in line with her colleagues. I was much prouder of the B in the first category than the A- in the second.
aliston 13y ago
Unless you're planning on applying to grad school, GPA really doesn't really matter for anything after about 6 months out of school.
mjmahone17 13y ago
I am convinced the best way to deal with classes is to make failing a non-factor, i.e. if you fail a class, it doesn't affect anything, and no one really "knows" outside of your school. Then, make all classes graded on a pass-fail basis, perhaps with a professor's ability to note that a few students went above and beyond expectations. This way, you can actually say "This person knows x and is capable of doing y at z standards. See, they passed the course that required you to do all that." And you don't end up with weird situations like the "gentleman's" C, where you've passed a course but gained next to nothing from it. If you've passed an intro physics course with a C, what does that mean? Can you calculate vector forces? Or are your diagrams sometimes OK looking, but you can't crunch numbers?
727374 13y ago
The problem is that law (and other professional) schools are incentivized to largely disregard the institution of applicants and instead base most of their admissions decisions on GPA and LSAT so they can get high US News rankings. An elite undergrad institution can best serve it's students by making sure high GPA's are achievable to hard working, smart students who want to go to professional schools.

27 points by mayneack 13y ago

codex 13y ago

Grade inflation stepped up a notch during the Vietnam War, when professions were reluctant to fail students out of college an into the draft. Now it's done to protect a college's graduation rate, which affects rankings. Elite Ivy League institutions admit bright, motivated high school graduates and produce bright, motivated college graduates. The institution's value add is mainly networking and branding--kind of like YC.

nether 13y ago
It's also due to the fact that easier grading brings more positive student evaluations of profs, which are taken into account with salaries and tenureship.
- greenburger 13y ago
  I assure you that at a Research I university like Harvard, student evaluations have at best a pro-forma impact on tenureship, and probably salary as well. Faculty at Harvard are tenured and compensated on their abilities to publish high profile research and attract major grants, showing up to lectures is about all that is expected of them teaching-wise.
  - nether 13y ago
    Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I don't have firsthand experience with Harvard, this is what I've just heard to be the general case with universities.
  - impendia 13y ago
    Maybe Harvard. But I am employed as a math professor at a Research I state school, in which context you are quite mistaken. Research is most important, but good teaching is also important. "Universities don't care about teaching" is a fun meme to kick around, and there are anecdotes to support this, but by and large it is not true.
    - greenburger 13y ago
      My comment was directed more specifically to Harvard and narrow set of top tier schools, I do not believe that universities don't care about teaching. The list of "very high research activity" (apparently research 1 is no longer used) includes 108 schools [1] of which Harvard is at one extreme end. That said, my father recently retired after 33 years with his department at a "high research activity", the second tier, and he can't recall a single case when someone was denied tenure where teaching performance was an issue. Research, and increasingly grant acquisition were always the issues. Personally, I went to a small liberal arts school. Having taught at two top universities, private and public, I'm happy I went where I did. Undergrad teaching was the top priority and the difference is stark. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_i...
    - pge 13y ago
      To play devil's advocate for a moment, the tenure evaluations I am familiar with at many universities take student feedback into account, as a proxy for "good teaching," but unfortunately teachers students like and teachers that are good at teaching may not be the same. Thus universities seem to care more about keeping students happy than about "teaching" per se.

chris_mahan 13y ago

So a 4.0 at Harvard is equivalent to a 2.0 at a community college. Niiiiice!

MrZongle2 13y ago
Yes, but the Harvard degree comes with a lifetime of Smug.
- hyperbovine 13y ago
  Similarly, lack of a Harvard degree comes with a lifetime of hating on people who went to Harvard.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - MrZongle2 13y ago
    I wasn't aware that observation of demonstrated behavior equated to "hating".
jjoonathan 13y ago
In high school I took number theory at the local community college. We stopped right before the chapter on quadratic reciprocity. Later, I found the Harvard midterm for their undergrad number theory class online. I took a look out of curiosity. The first question was on quadratic reciprocity, and I had no clue what the other 9 (or 14, maybe) were about. They were moving >2x as fast and doing 3x as much homework (the homework was online too). I suspect the worst student in the Harvard class would have been competitive with the best student in the CC class. If 20% of the kids in the CC class get As, it's not a stretch to believe that 100% of the Harvard kids would have gotten As had they taken the same class. Obviously this holds for some classes more than others, but the point is that variation in difficulty between classes, professors, and peer-groups can easily dominate variation in difficulty imposed by the grading scale.
- 13y ago

phren0logy 13y ago

I would imagine there's a significant selection bias at work here. This is not a random sample of students, and I don't think it's super odd that many of them get As. Perhaps more get As than should, but I'd look at the grade distribution of a less discriminating institution if I wanted to get huffy about grade inflation. Especially with no meaningful data in the article about historic grade distributions at Harvard.

ianferrel 13y ago

Old joke: What do you call a guy who gets straight C-minuses at Harvard? A Harvard Graduate. Harvard is effectively graded pass/fail. I'm not convinced that's actually a bad thing.

HorizonXP 13y ago

I always hated this about other schools. While I will be the first to admit that I could probably have tried harder in school, I blame this practice in Ontario for part of why I could never get an interview for medical school. Waterloo engineering was definitely one of the tougher programs, and an 80 average was actually tough to attain. It seems that my friends at other schools or programs had an easier time getting 80s and 90s.

hyperbovine 13y ago
PhD programs are well aware of grade inflation at different universities and take this into account when conducting admissions. No idea if med schools do the same but I'd be surprised if they didn't. Your difficulty getting into med school could also have been because engineering not a typical "pre-med" degree.
- HorizonXP 13y ago
  Medical schools specifically stated that they did not adjust grades. There was some different weighting mechanisms employed for certain schools, but that was at the school level, not program level. Furthermore, medical schools here typically encourage students not to pursue "pre-med" degrees. They want students that pursue challenging programs, in order to demonstrate their abilities and to have a backup if medical school doesn't work out. I don't have any regrets about engineering, it's the best decision I ever made, and I'm sure I'll have an impact in other ways. It's just still a bitter/sore spot for me.
CaveTech 13y ago
An 80 can be difficult at Waterloo, but no doubt theres over a dozen students in your year with a higher avg. It's good, but not remarkable. Consistent 90's in any degree program in Ontario is quite the accomplishment, regardless of inflation.

dba7dba 13y ago

Preferred admission to kids of alumni at top private school. And easy As that will pave way to other grad schools. I don't want to believe US is a class based society but ...

avolcano 13y ago

I have to imagine that the long-term solution for this is for employers to find better criteria to judge candidates on than a GPA. There's too much variance in schools and classes to really consider it an accurate judge of ability. It's a measure of how well you did in school, not how well you will be able to do your job.

impendia 13y ago

I taught an upper-level undergraduate course in math (combinatorics) at Stanford a few years ago. There were 18 students, and I gave all of them A's or B's. They deserved it. I was inspired by what they accomplished. I would have felt uncomfortable if I had been asked to make sure the average was around a C. (And all of this is very typical of the experience of people teaching math at Stanford.)

scrabble 13y ago
This could be the case, but why couldn't it instead be the case that a 2.9 at Harvard is comparable to a 4.0 at a lesser school, and a 4.0 at Harvard is outstanding and means something truly incredible?
nether 13y ago
This is why I think concerns over grade inflation are overstated. High grades for outstanding students doing outstanding work are warranted, and these are the kids Harvard by-and-large admits. The apparent grade "inflation" over the past few decades reflects the fact that it's no longer possible to get into Harvard with one AP course: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/29Rparenting.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/...
- jessaustin 13y ago
  Your overall point is well-taken, but the Harvard admissions people always stress that there is no definitive profile of an admitted student. If they wanted to fill the class with perfect-SAT valedictorians from NYC and Boston, they probably could, but that is not what happens.
secstate 13y ago
That's all well and good, but the whole point of a scale is that students fall somewhere on it and it reflects work done in comparison to something. If not other students, then just patting ourselves on the back for a job well done. Would you need a some slacker half-following directions to earn an Average? No, you'd need the Average of the students in the course to earn an Average. Otherwise the distinction is meaningless. Then again, I've just spent some time re-reading Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective people, and I've given up caring too much about grades per-se. They discourage cooperation and encourage competition amongst peers. And in doing that strongly bias their adherents to win-lose scenarios when we should all strive for win-win scenarios. If you think that's bunk, I encourage you to read Covey's book. Coming at it with an open-mind can truly be life-changing in a positive way.

rayiner 13y ago

I never understood the complaints about grade inflation at top schools. The people who care to make distinctions among graduates at Harvard (investment banks, consulting companies, graduate schools), already know how to do so. Everyone else just cares about the "Harvard" on the resume. So who cares what the median grade is? They could hand out degrees "magna cum fruitcake" and nobody would blink.

sp332 13y ago
I went to a liberal arts college that didn't do grade inflation. The average grade was nominally a C. The campus bookstore sold t-shirts with "C+: Better than average!" on them. Oh, and our diplomas are comically large :)

chatmasta 13y ago

I go to Yale where the average GPA is a 3.6. So we suffer from a similar "problem." But honestly, I do not think it is a problem. Kids here put an absurd amount of work into their classes. It's not surprising that the average GPA is a 3.6, because the average assignment actually is A- level work. The obvious argument against this is that the grades should be curved so that the average level of work receives a C... but what do you do when most kids are getting the same top grades on tests, or writing the same high quality papers? It's a hard problem to solve, and as long as other colleges have grade inflation, it would be disadvantageous to your students to not have it. The problem I have is differing GPA distributions between majors. History majors have a much easier time getting in the 3.6-4.0 range than CS majors, because history teachers will rarely give anything less than a B. So when a CS major applies to jobs that other majors are also applying to (say, finance), he can look bad in comparison.

jayd16 13y ago
No one gives a shit about GPA in the real world.
- chatmasta 13y ago
  Right, and then there's this. But employers do give a shit about GPA when recruiting college seniors, because it represents one of the only available metrics for quality of work. In my experience, providing employers with other metrics reduces the value they place on GPA.
  - pge 13y ago
    It may depend on the case - in many cases, the school a student attended trumps the GPA the student achieved at that school. For schools like Harvard and Yale, it is the brand that employers react to most, not the GPA. Having recruited students from those schools while at a strategy consulting firm, typically we looked at school, then major, then other stuff (which may or may not include GPA). Major was a better indicator of talent level than GPA at those schools.
  - eitally 13y ago

tristanz 13y ago

My experience was that it's relatively easy to stack rank Harvard undergraduates, but it often doesn't feel like it serves any educational purpose to do so. In the class I taught of 12, there were 10 that seemed like they deserved an A or A-. They completed all the assignments and did their absolute best as far as I could tell. Some were definitely better than others (A vs. A-), but giving the hardworking but not genius students Bs just made them stressed out. They would come to office hours to ask how they could improve. The only true answer I could give was "there are 2-3 students in this class that are just incredibly creative and gifted writers, they get the As." Maybe it's the role of a teacher to stack rank students, but it's no fun. I'd much prefer to try to get the best out of each student. The truly top students are going to have no problem distinguishing themselves later in life anyway, it's just so obvious how good they are.

RogerL 13y ago
Ya, that's my difficulty with the article. If all the students learned the material, then what is the problem? OTOH, if they just didn't grasp information, or didn't try, they deserve something other than an A. There is no easy answer, and it varies by course. In an algorithms course you are going to learn trees, sorting, graphs, and complexity analysis. If you master those, why not an A? Sure, you can make the course insanely hard, and force the students to do essentially original research to get an A, but what is the point there, exactly? You end up with a pressure-cooker, swamped with work school just to create a bell curve. I spent so much of my University time on my own research ideas, helping professors, and so on - course work was almost a back drop. I think I got so much more out of it doing it that way. A competitive fight of churning out massive amounts of work against other straight-A's in high school type-A personalities? Not so valuable (IMO). Time to think, dream, and experiment is what is valuable, and how do you put a grade on that? edit: I take this back somewhat. In some fields it definitely pays off to have a broader foundation. I took quite a few math classes, but would have profited by by even more. Lots of research papers are tough going because I don't have all the math. So there is value in volume of work, too.
wnissen 13y ago
Stack ranking in small groups is stupid and counterproductive because it forces a distribution where none necessarily exists. So for any particular class of 12 I agree with you. However, Harvard enrolls over 1500 frosh next year. Is there really so little daylight between them that they should all get an A or A-? Graduation is supposed to ensure the minimum fulfillment of standards, GPA is for ranking. Given that you're seeing kids on the far end of the tail, I would expect more variance, not less. Let's be honest here: grade inflation is not something we do for a reason, but rather something that happens because no one has any particular interest in preventing it. Full disclosure: I attended a demanding college whose 2007 median GPA was 3.35 (the average was less). Of the 150-ish annual graduates, only 7 have ever achieved a 4.0 since its founding in 1955.

shalmanese 13y ago

The problem is that grading serves two purposes that are at odds with each other: comparison within a group and comparison between groups. Harvard's grading system is useless to a student that is trying to figure out how they are ranking among their peers or whether their studying habits are increasing their performance. However, it's great when they're on the job market and their 4.0 GPA is better than the 2.9 GPA of Engineering State that still grades on a sharp curve. The increase in grade inflation has reflected the trend of college goers valuing extrinsic factors (get a better job) over intrinsic factors (learn more stuff). A solution to this problem would be to split the two grading systems apart, having one standardized, SAT style test at the end of college that would allow more accurate comparisons between schools while preserving GPA as a within school measure. In fact, it stuns me that the College Board hasn't positioned the GRE as this kind of service and pioneered some kind of aGPA score that would combine your college GPA with the relative performance of your college against all others.

rizzom5000 13y ago
> In fact, it stuns me that the College Board hasn't positioned the GRE as this kind of service.. The CS department at my alma mater did require the ETS Computer Science Field Exam for graduation. The results are interesting as you can compare your personal score against students from several dozen other universities as well as your department's score. All the noise about standardized testing aside, I think that this sort of thing should be required for anyone to get a degree. I've met far too many people with Master's degrees who seem easily confused by basic math and science. The fact that there aren't any measurable standards that go beyond the institutional level really dilutes the value of a degree.
bradleyjg 13y ago
One of the most interesting arguments against extreme grade inflation I've seen arose in the context of students considering going to grad school in a difficult field. Several professors in the conversation said they weren't comfortable with writing a recommendation or encouraging a particular student to go on to graduate work, but that it was difficult to convince these students that thhe weren't cut out for it after they had given them As in upper level courses. At my alma mater the grade A+ was used in some departments for this sort of purpose. It wasn't mandatory, and it didn't count towards GPA, sometimes no one got one at all, but it signaled something to the students who did. Separately I had one professor, in history of all things, who was a notoriously tough grader but was retiring the next semester after I had her. As a one time policy she issued two sets of grades, the one you deserved and the one she decided to give out to be in line with her colleagues. I was much prouder of the B in the first category than the A- in the second.

aliston 13y ago

Unless you're planning on applying to grad school, GPA really doesn't really matter for anything after about 6 months out of school.

mjmahone17 13y ago

I am convinced the best way to deal with classes is to make failing a non-factor, i.e. if you fail a class, it doesn't affect anything, and no one really "knows" outside of your school. Then, make all classes graded on a pass-fail basis, perhaps with a professor's ability to note that a few students went above and beyond expectations. This way, you can actually say "This person knows x and is capable of doing y at z standards. See, they passed the course that required you to do all that." And you don't end up with weird situations like the "gentleman's" C, where you've passed a course but gained next to nothing from it. If you've passed an intro physics course with a C, what does that mean? Can you calculate vector forces? Or are your diagrams sometimes OK looking, but you can't crunch numbers?

727374 13y ago

The problem is that law (and other professional) schools are incentivized to largely disregard the institution of applicants and instead base most of their admissions decisions on GPA and LSAT so they can get high US News rankings. An elite undergrad institution can best serve it's students by making sure high GPA's are achievable to hard working, smart students who want to go to professional schools.