3 ms·

> as a rule students who choose an appropriate major make As and Bs, unless they're having personal problems. This is grade inflation, not a badge of pride to

by pekk 12y ago

> as a rule students who choose an appropriate major make As and Bs, unless they're having personal problems. This is grade inflation, not a badge of pride to MIT.

hga 12y ago
Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is online), and there's been none except for a "'60s" period that coincides with the draft, a widespread phenomena of the time. Heck, since I attended in the '80s, they've reduced the pass-fail period from your entire freshman year to just your first term. What's happening is that MIT very carefully matches its student body to the demands it places on them, something that's worked out well since the post-Sputnik reforms in K-12 science and math education (for more historical perspective, when it started, post-Civil War, a large fraction of students would only be mastering the calculus at the end). There's many levels of oversight including the "outsiders" in Visiting Committees, feedback in the system, etc. And MIT really cares about undergraduate education (which I gather is all too rare except at "low end" higher education where the school has no pretenses about doing a lot of serious research; one of my chemistry TA came from such a school). All classes are taught by tenured or tenure track professors, with exceptions that prove the rule such as SF author Joe Haldeman, and professors don't get tenure unless they're adequate at teaching. I once witnessed the EECS department head make a professor read every student evaluation (i.e. students providing feedback) for a course he'd just taught, all but one of which were negative (and the positive one was a special case), and at the end told him he'd never again be allowed to teach that particular course. Etc. etc. ADDED: MIT tries very hard to be a meritocracy, and since it's focus is on "you can't fool Mother Nature" engineering and science, that's practical. Semi-disclaimer: I have a lot of ties and history with the EECS department, but being an EECS major is not one of them, I was science track.
- thedufer 12y ago
  > Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is online) Citation? Every source I can find shows that a) they haven't released average GPAs since 2000 and b) from 1950-2000 they inflated grades at or above the average national rate.
  - hga 12y ago
    Source was as I remember The Tech, MIT's student newspaper, but I can't find it right now, it was a raw data series. This '75 article starting on page 5 http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf covers '62-'72, but the data I looked at went quite a bit further. If you're really interested I can try harder. Note that you should throw out results from the '50s and a bit further, when science and especially math education was poorer and MIT had to accept and weed out students. If one was really serious about this, you'd have to find the transition to when they could send acceptances to students they were quite sure could do the work, which had long been the case when I was got in in '79. Can't say anything based on data about this century; do wonder why they stopped releasing them, but there are reasons that wouldn't touch on grade inflation per se, e.g. the dot.com crash resulted in a great discontinuity for the EECS, which lost more than half its students, after having 40% of them for decades. That resulted in the panic which replaced SICP/6.001 with harder introductory courses (it's even less a place where a pure CS type can slide by on two pure EE courses after the first required course), and it was some time before EECS enrollments returned (and not just at MIT, e.g. Stanford experienced this). Hmmm, I'm not at all sure what that period might have done to the outside of EECS student body, but I could see many mathematically strong students simply not going to MIT, and my source on what's going on, who would definitely know in at least the School of Engineering, hasn't mentioned any grade inflation problems, I'll ask if that's changed. There's also one discontinuity before this century, when a professional admissions director actually followed the faculty's official guidelines/rules/whatever on who to admit. There are two classes that were much less strong, this was fixed when e.g. physics faculty members made a big fuss and admissions got realigned with reality. As for "every source", there's plenty that talk about MIT "suffering" from grade deflation. Actually a problem with others interpreting MIT GPAs vs. schools with notorious grade inflation, pre-meds are understandably very concerned about this; search on mit grade deflation.
    - thedufer 12y ago
      Yes, there are plenty of articles discussing MIT and grade deflation. Unfortunately, none of the ones I could find have any data - its all anecdotal from students. The hard data I did actually find (http://www.gradeinflation.com/ http://www.gradeinflation.com/) shows grade inflation at MIT matching that at Harvard (the media's favorite grade inflation target) almost perfectly from 1950-2000. I never thought this before, but now that I've actually looked at what little data is available, it looks an awful lot like the MIT grade deflation thing is a myth.

by pekk 12y ago

> as a rule students who choose an appropriate major make As and Bs, unless they're having personal problems. This is grade inflation, not a badge of pride to MIT.

hga 12y ago

Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is online), and there's been none except for a "'60s" period that coincides with the draft, a widespread phenomena of the time. Heck, since I attended in the '80s, they've reduced the pass-fail period from your entire freshman year to just your first term. What's happening is that MIT very carefully matches its student body to the demands it places on them, something that's worked out well since the post-Sputnik reforms in K-12 science and math education (for more historical perspective, when it started, post-Civil War, a large fraction of students would only be mastering the calculus at the end). There's many levels of oversight including the "outsiders" in Visiting Committees, feedback in the system, etc. And MIT really cares about undergraduate education (which I gather is all too rare except at "low end" higher education where the school has no pretenses about doing a lot of serious research; one of my chemistry TA came from such a school). All classes are taught by tenured or tenure track professors, with exceptions that prove the rule such as SF author Joe Haldeman, and professors don't get tenure unless they're adequate at teaching. I once witnessed the EECS department head make a professor read every student evaluation (i.e. students providing feedback) for a course he'd just taught, all but one of which were negative (and the positive one was a special case), and at the end told him he'd never again be allowed to teach that particular course. Etc. etc. ADDED: MIT tries very hard to be a meritocracy, and since it's focus is on "you can't fool Mother Nature" engineering and science, that's practical. Semi-disclaimer: I have a lot of ties and history with the EECS department, but being an EECS major is not one of them, I was science track.

thedufer 12y ago
> Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is online) Citation? Every source I can find shows that a) they haven't released average GPAs since 2000 and b) from 1950-2000 they inflated grades at or above the average national rate.
- hga 12y ago
  Source was as I remember The Tech, MIT's student newspaper, but I can't find it right now, it was a raw data series. This '75 article starting on page 5 http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf covers '62-'72, but the data I looked at went quite a bit further. If you're really interested I can try harder. Note that you should throw out results from the '50s and a bit further, when science and especially math education was poorer and MIT had to accept and weed out students. If one was really serious about this, you'd have to find the transition to when they could send acceptances to students they were quite sure could do the work, which had long been the case when I was got in in '79. Can't say anything based on data about this century; do wonder why they stopped releasing them, but there are reasons that wouldn't touch on grade inflation per se, e.g. the dot.com crash resulted in a great discontinuity for the EECS, which lost more than half its students, after having 40% of them for decades. That resulted in the panic which replaced SICP/6.001 with harder introductory courses (it's even less a place where a pure CS type can slide by on two pure EE courses after the first required course), and it was some time before EECS enrollments returned (and not just at MIT, e.g. Stanford experienced this). Hmmm, I'm not at all sure what that period might have done to the outside of EECS student body, but I could see many mathematically strong students simply not going to MIT, and my source on what's going on, who would definitely know in at least the School of Engineering, hasn't mentioned any grade inflation problems, I'll ask if that's changed. There's also one discontinuity before this century, when a professional admissions director actually followed the faculty's official guidelines/rules/whatever on who to admit. There are two classes that were much less strong, this was fixed when e.g. physics faculty members made a big fuss and admissions got realigned with reality. As for "every source", there's plenty that talk about MIT "suffering" from grade deflation. Actually a problem with others interpreting MIT GPAs vs. schools with notorious grade inflation, pre-meds are understandably very concerned about this; search on mit grade deflation.
  - thedufer 12y ago
    Yes, there are plenty of articles discussing MIT and grade deflation. Unfortunately, none of the ones I could find have any data - its all anecdotal from students. The hard data I did actually find (http://www.gradeinflation.com/ http://www.gradeinflation.com/) shows grade inflation at MIT matching that at Harvard (the media's favorite grade inflation target) almost perfectly from 1950-2000. I never thought this before, but now that I've actually looked at what little data is available, it looks an awful lot like the MIT grade deflation thing is a myth.