<p>Well, I would argue that that what you just said, which is something that I have myself pointed out many times on CC, doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why a school gives out lower grades, relative to its peers. We can talk about whether it’s because technical subjects are graded harder than non-technical subjects (which then begs the question of why that is), but all of that is neither here nor there. For the purposes of med-school admission and grade inflation, the only thing that matters is whether a school grades harder than its peers do, or not. </p>
<p>Even the data you show illustrates this point to some degree. According to the Princeton data, humanities is graded significantly easier than all other fields, especially the natural sciences and engineering. And Princeton is one of the better Ivies when it comes to the natural science and engineering. I would therefore assert that it is likely that a more humanities-oriented Ivy, like Yale, would display even more grade inflation due to the heavier humanities weighting. </p>
<p>Whether it’s because of the school or just because of the various discplines, I don’t think really matters. What matters at the end of the day is whether there is inflation or not. A guy who does EECS at MIT and has his grades suffer from that so much that he can’t get into med-school is not going to be mollified by being told that it wasn’t really MIT, but rather EECS that was the cause of the problem. All he cares about is that he can’t get into med-school.</p>