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<p>Well, it’s not quite THAT extreme. Harvard is certainly grade inflated, but it’s not THAT heavy.</p>
<p>“A’s accounted for 23.7 percent of all grades given to undergrads last academic year”</p>
<p>"The most common grade at Harvard since 1989-1990 has been an A-minus. Those almost-stellar marks accounted for 25.0% of all grades last year. "</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=511242[/url]”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=511242</a></p>
<p>Hence the percentage of A’s or A-'s given out is 48.7%. That’s obviously a lot, but not so much that ‘almost every student gets A’s in almost every course’.</p>
<p>And frankly, I don’t find Harvard’s grading policies out of line with the rest of the Ivy League. If anything, Harvard is in the middle of the pack. </p>
<p>“Data from the Ivy League schools indicated that 44% to 55% of their students received “A” grades.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://ls.berkeley.edu/?q=about-college/l-s-divisions/undergraduate-division/colloquium-undergraduate-education/november-2004[/url]”>http://ls.berkeley.edu/?q=about-college/l-s-divisions/undergraduate-division/colloquium-undergraduate-education/november-2004</a> </p>
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<p>Not anymore. What you are referring to is the record year of 2001 where 91% of the class graduated with honors. Harvard honors are now capped at 50-60% of the class. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/05.23/03-grades.html[/url]”>http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/05.23/03-grades.html</a></p>
<p>Personally, I would say that grade inflation is * exactly * what schools should be doing, or put another way, schools should not be deflating their grades. That’s why I think difficult schools like Caltech, MIT, Chicago, JHU, etc. are misguided. The truth is, we live in a competitive world where students from different schools are going to be judged by their grades, with little regard for the difference in difficulty of the school. Hence, by enforcing difficult grading standards, you are only hurting your own students in relation to the competition they will have to face from students from other (easier) schools. Hence, your students are going to become relatively less successful, and that is going to reflect badly on the school itself, as they will tend to occupy relatively less powerful positions in the world, and will have relatively less money to donate back to the school. Sad but true. </p>
<p>Of course, the REAL solution would be for thoe other institutions to stop comparing GPA’s from different schools in a superficial, myopic manner. Grad school adcoms (especially law and med-school adcoms, who seem to be the deliberately most myopic) should be made to understand that some schools are more difficult than others. Major scholarship committees (i.e. the Rhodes Scholarship), and employers should be made to understand the same. But that’s obviously not going to happen. So the next best thing is for the difficult schools to begin inflating their grades. Sad but true.</p>