@BiffBrown : Lots of nuance is needed here. Use grade inflation.com (don’t trust insider info from a single school to say that it is exceptional. Faculty and admins at other schools with rampant inflation or changes in grading will not openly talk about it. Though there is a lot of literature and discussions about Duke due to a faculty member from there who actually created the gradeinflation.com website and tracks that data. Stewart R. I think)…perhaps more so than other top research Us slightly outside of the super elites). There are tons of other private schools where the most common grade is an A. What is an interesting trend is that it appears that some schools use the grading patterns as a competitive tool it seems. As in, over time, if their admit rate or SATs reach a certain level, the grades suddenly start to float much higher than can be explained by the statistical differences in the student body. It literally at some places (I think VU is really starting to see it because it used to be more at 3.32ish, now it has ballooned to over 3.4, and the graduating GPAs may be in the mid 3.4s.*gradeinflation.com reports their fall terms, but this includes all cohorts including freshmen so will be skewed downward. I would generally say add upwards to .1 or more to get senior GPA at graduation) looks like there is sort of an intentional “correction” is happening. Either faculty in certain departments are setting curves higher (this can happen in STEM and econ), or certain departments that traditionally award easier grades/have easier workloads are experiencing inflation simply because performance on the SAT does more directly correlate with performance (basically instructors in some heavily subscribed to majors or heavily enrolled departments give exams and workloads that are lower than or on par with normal level HS work. No one likes admitting this when they attend an elite, but outside of many seminar style courses, this ends up being true more often than it should be…“gut” courses that is). However, STEM grades have not really changed that much (in a PM I sent you a course website, the second semester of the sequence can be tracked over several years and grades did not dramatically improve or even change on the exams, which remained at the same level in spite of scores that had substantially increased over time).
If the most common grade at Harvard is A, it is just not surprising. Humanities departments and some social sciences tend to award lots more As due to the nature of courses and grading and Harvard has decently high subscription to those. This in addition to curves in certain STEM classes being set slightly higher than some other elites (perhaps this is justified) and this statistic makes sense.
Emory’s graduating GPA actually decreased (from 3.39 I think to 3.34…a big dip) this year which was interesting because that cohort was about the same as others in terms of incoming stats. Subtle things like the economics department going to the b-school grade distribution for most of its core courses caused a) some instructors to naturally make their courses harder to avoid curving down (Banerjee appears to have done this, he used to be known as extremely good, but also very easy at both intro. and intermediate levels. Boy have things changed in his intermediate course) or they do indeed leave their course to be relatively easy (kind of inevitable considering that many of those courses, unlike STEM have graded problem sets and other projects, so if an instructor gave basic level exams, a high numerical grade in the course is likely because all the other non-exam components will buffer most people) to earn a high grade on a numerical scale and then apply the curve. But the econ. major is maybe 2nd or 3rd in terms of numbers of majors (after the actual business school) in ECAS, meaning that the first cohort to experience the recommendation will see the effect. Indeed I believe it was 2014 when they started so, that corresponds with class of 2017 (if there are 600 people majoring, double majoring, or joint majoring in econ plus tons of folks taking intro and intermediates for fun or the b-school, harsher grading does damage. Econ. at Emory was known for relatively inflated grades before then). Also, yes you must look at the base line. What was extremely noticeable is the considerable jump between 2002 and 2003 at Emory.
This looks like one of those “corrections” or just plain luck. Furthermore there has been a general inflationary trend that snapped with the most recent graduates. Considering that Emory’s stats have been quite flat, this makes little sense. However, it could be because of more AP/IB prep, but even this is not convincing because students are not as ambitious (academically) on the whole as they were. Enrollment in things like freshman orgo has declined a lot. Physics 15x series appears to merely have changes that correspond to increased enrollment levels at the college. The new Honors Linear Algebra class is on the struggle bus which I could not imagine a decade ago where even upper division honors courses had decent subscription (this is significant because not only did such courses exist, but people actually took them despite any perceived risks to their already established GPAs that they should supposedly be trying to preserve based on conventional and lame wisdom. Courses that could function as de facto upper division honors courses are now on the struggle bus for enrollment today when they did very well in the past). Basically, I am not particularly convinced that current Emory students are better (but this is chicken and egg, higher prep plus less ambition could ironically lead to higher grades. Why? Because students will retake courses for which they have AP/IB/A-level/dual enrollment credit and be more prone to sticking to ultra safe courses).
Either way, the general inflationary trends at privates, especially elite privates ain’t going away. You must keep the “customers” happy after all. This is effectively irreversible now. Hardly no one wants to truly work for a grade. It should just come naturally or easily like it did in HS or here comes the shock(because they never experienced struggle academically before or their HS teachers basically lied to them via grade inflation and teaching directly to the tests whether a midterm or AP/IB) and the mental health issues that result from a dramatically different situation. Are most of these colleges certainly adjustments for most high achievers, yes. But at many/most places it probably could be much bigger. However, students came to have fun, live relatively comfortably, and earn a prestigious degree. Stress and the right kind of academic rigor does not play well when it comes to recruiting and retaining students. Grading practices at any time reflect various cultural values and how we view our own “education” or what we feel we need from it. It has obviously now been kind of reduced to a needed credential that also needs to be accompanied with a pretty transcript. Given the price of these schools, you effectively get what you pay for (and let’s get this straight, a B+ average for university is high despite it being lower than many places even when we talk schools full of high achievers. It basically says: "hey we want to be more rigorous than high school, but since you think you are so smart, we don’t want to ruin your self-esteem by not at least somewhat reinforcing that idea constantly).