No, I am saying the 4.0 women’s study major from H/Y may be downgraded by a sub 170 LSAT, and not favorably compared against a 3.9 econ major from H/Y, other things being equal. IMO law school admissions are more nuanced than many seem to make them out to be on CC. GPA’s, colleges, majors are all not the same.
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While grade inflation is an issue, the insane competition for admissions to places like Yale also means that these are students who generally have extremely high GPAs in high school. One of the repeated claims of people attending these colleges who came from extremely competitive high schools is that admissions to these colleges is more difficult than attending these colleges.
So Yale students who had an average of HSGPA of 3.95 having an average college GPA of 3.7 is not that surprising.
Of course, grade inflation is even more common in high schools, and especially at the high schools (public and private) for affluent kids which most Yale students attended, so there’s that.
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True. But not everyone who attends these schools is an academic superstar. Even the special populations seem to do very well academically once they get there.
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Here is the thing. I cringe at the distinction between more rigorous versus less rigorous courses. When my son did his high school in Canada, it was easier to get a 95% in pre-calculus or AP Physics than it was to get a 90 in English lit. Basically, no one got 90s in English lit or even humanities. This is why a student’s full academic profile needs some context. And so much depends on the program a student is applying for. Some require “soft” skills which are not covered well by traditional grading. Many med schools are using Casper to weed out students applying.
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Isn’t general GRE mostly SAT level stuff?
Subject GRE would only be useful within the related major, not comparing across majors.
To assess for a particular field, like presumedly the LSAT.
I sometimes think that the “Humanities = easier” trope was invented by some people in STEM so that they could feel better about the fact that they cannot string a coherent sentence together to save their lives, and haven’t read a non-professional book since they graduated high school…
I write this as somebody with a PhD in ecology, married to a PhD in CS, and whose kid is a neuroscience major and will likely do a PhD in that field. I have reviewed enough articles by supposed native English speakers to understand just how many STEM people are really bad at their native language.
The actually easiest classes are generally the science classes for non-scientists. The most difficult classes are generally English Composition and history classes. There is a reason that “Rocks for Jocks” the satirical name for an easy class, not “Comp Lit Lite” or something like that.
The reason that some of those humanities majors have so many high grades is that the majors are comprised of small numbers of students who are absolutely obsessed with their major. You’re not going to get people who are taking “women’s studies” because they don’t really know what they want or because it will allow them to make a lot of money. The classes are also tiny, allowing for personal attention and the sort of class in which every student ends up understanding enough that they perform extremely well.
I have never taken or taught a class with fewer than 10 students in which more than one students earned a B, and none in which any earned a C.
On the other hand, at least 1/3 of the first and second year CS majors are kids with inadequate math skills who think of a CS degree as a ticket to a lucrative career, and believe that CS = coding.
Engineer, CS, “pre-med” biology, and business are full of students who lack the required skills and talents but are in those majors either because these fields “prestigious” and are expected to lead to prestigious and lucrative careers, or because their parents think that these fields are lucrative and/or prestigious.
I cannot remember one high school student who post on CC that they are planning on majoring in English (Lit, Gender studies, etc) and their “dream college” is Yale, but they have a B- in English lit and a 610 on the language part of the SAT. Yet how many students come on here with those stats in math and still believe that business, CS, or engineering is the best major for them?
GPAs are lower in the fields that are the most lucrative and/or most popular because these majors are full of students whose strengths and talents are not the ones needed for these majors.
Here is a fact - the math SAT scores are always higher than the language scores, bot by way of median on the score required tp be in the top percentiles. If math were more difficult in some universal/global way, the opposite would be true.
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For those STEM graduates who can write well, writing well can be a very significant asset in terms of how they do in their careers and can in some cases impact what they do in their careers.
I thought that I majored in math at least partly because math was relatively easy. I guess that we each do what we can and what works for us.
Sure, but this was just as true in the 1990s when I was in college, and the grades were less inflated then. The chart of Yale GPAs only goes back to 2010, but the same linear pattern goes back to at least the '80s.
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The irony to me is that a lot of Ivy grads are going to be given interviews, consideration, etc., based on the name of the school alone, regardless of GPA.
It seems to me it is students at “average” public schools that could receive the most benefit from a high GPA and those are the schools with the least inflation.
High school B students are probably mostly aiming for the local non-flagship public schools, or the similarly (not that) selective private schools, not high-end* schools like Yale (that they will not get admitted to anyway). These do not seem to be popular on these forums. At such schools, the common distribution of majors is more like:
- Business is very popular.
- CS is less popular because it is “hard”. Unlikely to be oversubscribed, unlike at high-end* schools.
- Engineering is less popular because it is “hard”. Sometimes known as “pre-business” due to students switching to business after a semester or few. Unlikely to be oversubscribed if offered, unlike at high-end* schools that offer it.
- Instead of pre-meds, there may be lots of students studying health professions, which may be oversubscribed.
- Liberal arts like English, math, history may be seen mostly as preparation for teaching the subject in high school.
- There are other pre-professional majors that are typically not offered at high-end* schools, some of which are likely to be looked down upon on these forums (sometimes with good reason, due to being too specialized for a career path which does not give the major an advantage, or due to general lack of academic rigor).
The schools in question likely have much less grade inflation than high-end* schools.
*High-end in this case means highly selective schools (typically with high student SES distribution), including many state flagships as well as the private schools heavily focused on here.
Yes. 1960 is far enough back that there were still (some) kids at HYPS who weren’t straight-A students in high school, but that was over before 1980. Everything changed in the late '60s-early '70s, in admissions as well as in so many other dimensions of society.
I’m not talking about “B students”, but about A students who have Bs in English. We don’t get “B students” asking about CS at MIT either.
Actually, let me retract that. We do get B students who ask about CS or engineering (or business) at colleges with very low acceptance rates.
My point is that there are really no such things as objectively “easy” or “difficult” majors. Different people have different talents and at different levels. Popular majors attract more students whose talents do not match the major.
Again, very few students major in English unless they have the passion for the field, and this generally includes the required talents for doing well in these fields. On the other hand, the majority of the students who choose popular majors like CS or business are doing so because of the money making potential and/or prestige of these fields. Some of these may not have a huge passion for the field, but have the required talents.
Of course, in many cases, classes are made artificially difficult or easy, but that is often determined, by top-down pressures from administrators who want to see higher retention of who are bowing to pressure from entitled parents.
On reflection, I will have to agree with you, since a good amount of the grade inflation does have to do with pressures on the administrations, which are then shifted to the faculty. that is why it is seen more in colleges that either have very wealthy and powerful parents of students, or which have serious retention issues for students.
However, that is not why some majors have higher GPAs than others. There are many reasons for that, including what I wrote about above. What is also true is that a person cannot use teh average GPA of a major as an indicator of how “difficult” it is.
Something else that confounds the use of college data for this is the fact that some topics are taught better in high school than others. In my experience, and this is true for many other people with whom I have spoken, there are far more good English teachers in high school than there are good math teachers. On average, I think that more English majors have been prepared well for their major than Engineering/CS majors.
Of course, what is taught in high school also matter. Some topics have curricula which better prepare students for the major than others. Nothing that students learn in high school, really prepares them for philosophy. If math was taught better, that would help, but it’s not.
That’s right. Speaking as someone who teaches writing one-on-one…it’s damn hard to write well, and a lot of brilliant STEM kids can’t do it. To me, writing is a lot easier than engineering, but that is clearly not true for most engineers.
That may well be true, but for a bunch of external reasons, they are usually not requiring a lot of writing of their students or giving intensive feedback on whatever writing there is. I don’t know whether people who teach first-year writing and first-year math at Yale would agree with each other about whose kids are better prepared.
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It would not be surprising if the lowest level English and math courses were among those seen as the “hardest” courses by the students, and were among those with the lowest grade distributions, because they have the worst students in those subjects among the new frosh at the college. New frosh who are better in those subjects are commonly exempt for the lowest level courses and can go directly to higher level courses.
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At Harvard, no one places out of freshman writing, a position I agree with. Some students are required to take a full year rather than a single semester.
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@Hanna, with our kids, large public, not magnet in flyover land, they were less prepared for the STEM type classes in their private T20 colleges, especially the hard sciences like physics and chem vs classmates from the more rigorous East and West Coast schools. With my D who is a PhD candidate in Chem, one of her strengths has been writing and communication skills both in her first job at a research institute and for her grad program. I agree, too many STEMy types don’t have good communication skills which makes them less effective.
@MWolf while I agree that some of the grading discrepancy is a result of self selection and institutional pressure to make their students look good for jobs and grad school, what we also need to see is the grade distribution by major over time that we see in post #4 to see if certain majors inflated at a higher rate than others. Also I separate rigor of courses vs grade inflation as 2 separate issues. A history course can be brutally hard in terms of readings, papers and tests, but the professor could still give out 80% A’s and a “Rocks for Jocks” course that does not require a lot of work might only give out 60% A’s. That has to do with the grading philosophy of the department/professor. Is grading absolute such that A is for excellent work and theoretically 100% of the class can earn an A or is grading meant to be relative with strict curve cutoffs. Certainly for my kids, the courses that were more quant driven (clear right or wrong answers) tended to have more defined grading curves than more qualitative courses where the answer/conclusion was less important than how the student reached their conclusion.
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Absolutely.
I would have to disagree with you somewhat here. This is likely a lot more true for engineering. However, for sciences, and even more so for math, methodology and reasoning are as important, or more important, than getting a 100% correct answer.
Question on higher level tests in the life sciences often have more than one correct answer, and the professor is often not aware of alternative correct answers. In math, there may be more than a single way to get to the correct answer. In physics, we know that there is more than one way to get to an answer - you can calculate correct answers in physics using either calculus or algebra (I recommend calc…).
Engineering, on the other hand, at least at the undergrad level, students have to learn how to use one set of standard methodologies, because they need t be able to compare results across people, companies, locations, and projects. There may indeed be more than a single way to plan an overpass, but unless everybody is using one standard method, you cannot ensure that the overpass meets the national safety criteria, which were developed using a specific method.
It isn’t that " math is more difficult" so much as fewer people have or care to develop quantitative skills, whereas more people have and are able to demonstrate advanced verbal skills. Skills in short supply are automatically considered “harder”.