@BiffBrown: You really aren’t supposed to compare MIT to Emory. That is ridiculous. Emory is less selective (even schools with similar stats are less selective because the STEM background beyond scores and transcripts of MIT students is usually quite a bit or even much more impressive than super high scoring students at other stats sensitive schools, mainly those in the elite but not super elite brackets). Only the schools with close ranking could truly claim to be as or more selective) for one while also having a lot of STEM majors and those in grade controlled majors (econ. and business and there is a lot of cross-over with pre-meds being econ. majors. Perhaps at MIT, STEM students tend to stick to a single tough major and focus upon that). Also even the pre-laws are in rampant in political science which typically grades intermediate between STEM and humanities. I think MIT has a mixture of better students AND more inflation.
Emory just has “less inflation” than some places. I hate loosely throwing around the term “deflation”. It has inflated over time with very little changes in statistics. Grades are not really meant to be compared between schools and are supposed to be internal measuring sticks. The only reason folks have started making comparisons like you are is because the pattern has become so rampant that students are seriously looking at schools and going “which one has the most inflation. Some prospective students literally get on CC and do this”. But again, some schools are just not as conscious about grading at the whole institution. Whatever the departments want to do, they get to do. You never know what is going on at another school, so it gets difficult to compare across them. Like what if at MIT, more students were coming in as non-STEM and started their introductor classes in economics or something. Economics is one of the more rigorous grading social sciences but still often grades significantly higher than STEM and most schools do not have departments with grading recommendations so even at many elite schools, often economics is known to be relatively easy (you choose a bunch of easy professors with no limits on the amount of As awarded and then boom, higher than you probably should have GPA). Some of it comes from competition for enrollment. Like when humanities and some social sciences started to struggle for enrollment they were the first to start lowering the standards to maintain or recover those enrollments. Faculty turnover could play a role. Emory has “greying” faculty which tend to stick to inflated but more standard than normal (versus well ranked publics and privates) grading faculty whereas some schools may have been more able to recruit new faculty after the recession acquiring many younger tenure track faculty who tend not to grade rigorously (because they know how the tenure game is played. They can teach at a mediocre quality and still get solid evaluations if they just make the course easier than students expect).
There is also another major difference I think: MIT has lots of engineering majors, so even if professors there had similar grading practices to those at Emory, the grades would be slightly higher. The literature always suggests that engineering grades are slightly higher than natural and physical science grades. This makes sense, because engineering courses usually have a heavier GRADED workload and not just exams. Homework assignments and projects provide alternative assessments that could compensate for not so great exam performances. So imagine Emory before this year where labs in intro and intermediate science courses would maybe contribute 25% to the score in an integrated lab course, yet in engineering courses, HW, projects, and writing count worth upwards to 40 or 50%. With these new 2 credit hour labs at Emory that likely should not be 2 credit hours (apparently that is really only supposed to happen for labs that meet twice or meet once for at least 4-5 hours) for gchem, ochem, etc, it makes me wonder if it will contribute to some modest inflation in STEM grades over time, because gchem specifically just isn’t a lot of work. going from 1 to 2 hours will make lab essentially count as 40% of the grade representing “gen. chem” on a students transcripts as opposed to 25%. However, I guess this may be balanced by biology where many score lower than the lecture. But in ochem, most students definitely score higher. See, again, subtle things can contribute to differences within and between schools. I would not over speculate and definitely would not call Emory deflated. Deflated tends to be the “I am on the inside looking out realizing that this isn’t enough inflation for me. I want more” so I avoid using that term because that really isn’t what it is.
*Also, I already explained how the dip happened. Between 2012 or so and 2017. Emory was consistently between like 3.37 and 3.39 and then Emory suddenly dipped this year. If I had to guess, the new econ. grading recommendations had that effect. 3.34 is reasonable to me. I don’t really care what the “rival schools” are doing except for when they have better or some interesting curricular options that Emory should consider (but lately looks like they want to borrow from us). Let them provide joke grades to their students or allow them to promote sketchy course selection tactics (this can also result in inflation…access to internal course evaluations by students has always been shown to have inflationary effects over time. A study was done at Cornell when they started publishing course medians). It won’t make much of a difference. STEM grading for the most part is still strikingly similar, and where it isn’t, Emory is often easier in certain areas (like physics) than most peers. If it is occuring at others in social sciences and humanities, those folks usually must demonstrate specific skills before being hired anyway and it seems like Emory students do a good job at gaining those skills and has tons of folks who are well-liked candidates for fulbrights, Marshalls, etc. As long as it really isn’t affecting the top students and the more average students know how to pump up their resumes in ways that compensate, things are pretty much all good. This appears to be the case.