Its funny, was thinking is it really grade inflation, or are kids today that much smarter and hardworking than we were back in the day? So many impressive kids !
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why?
Bold statement without backup for why this needs to be true.
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Harvard itself sees a serious problem???
Well, we know that the Dean of Undergraduate Education has a bee in her bonnet about this, but we donât know who put it there or what internal and external politics contributed to this. What really doesnât make any sense is this quote from her 25 page report, âNearly all faculty expressed serious concern.â
Really???
This faculty are the same professors who were giving all of those Aâs in the first place. If they truly had serious concern, they wouldnât have been doing that. So, pardon me if I donât believe that report or buy its conclusions.
I spent a career in education and Iâve seen these same pendulum swings over my decades in the business and since. Thatâs all I see this as.
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Maybe they were giving so many As because they felt pressure to do so (from students, parents, administration, or because other professors give so many As and they donât want to be outliers), but they would prefer not to do so?
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So now you donât like this swing of the pendulum but thought the previous one was fine. Got it.
Ha Ha! 
Itâs not like I said that, but whatever floats your boat boat. 
An increase in average GPA by 0.2 over 10 years is not âvery smallâ in the absolute sense. That is not a normal rate of increase. Beyond that when the maximum GPA is 4.0, increasing from 3.6 to 3.8 implies a tremendous increase in rate of A grades. Consider what would happen if the same rate of increase continued. In 10 years, Harvard would have a 4.0 average GPA, implying 100% of grades are As. A graph of this linear trend line from the report is below.
The original post of this thread mentions a â25 page reportâ on grading at Harvard, which is implied to be the reason for reduction in A grades this fall. The authors of the report use phrases like the following:
When asked about grading in general, nearly all faculty expressed serious concern. They perceive there to be a misalignment between the grades awarded and the quality of student work. Faculty newly arrived at Harvard are surprised at how leniently our courses are graded, and those who have taught here for a long time are struck by the difference from the recent past.
âŠ
Faculty lament that our grading practices are, as one puts it, âout of whack.â But many feel powerless to grade otherwise. About half of the faculty surveyed reported that they simply cannot award the grades students have actually earned, while the rest reported that they can only do so with difficulty.
2015 was part of a trend that has been ongoing for decades, but became worse in recent years. The report has a long âHow We Got Hereâ section that discusses the history and why this is a problem. There are many contributing factors â faculty feel they cannot give grades students have âactually earnedâ, public course evaluations in Q guide that include student ratings (started in 2008), student pressure including litigation and impact on scholarships or grad/professional school, pressure from college to protect less prepared students, pressure from college to have lower stakes and more rewarding assignments (started in 2007), etc. Itâs a multifaceted problem that does not have a simple solution.
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Iâll ask the naive question here: Does anyone besides instructors care about grade inflation and the high number of A grades? Iâm curious to see if graduate and professional schools care. Do employers care? Do students care? Does it need a âsolutionâ at all? Why?
Iâm not asking this to be obtuse. Iâm just genuinely curious what the impact of grade inflation is in society.
The report highlights some negative consequences for students. For example, the report highlights that increasingly fewer students are taking 4 undergrad courses because students feel the need to find other ways to distinguish themselves if they cannot do so with grades, such as putting more time in to ECs or clubs. A graph is below. Some students also report that academics feel âfakeâ, with getting the same grade for satisfactory work as exceptional work. In this environment, many students choose to do the bare minimum, and that bare minimum yields the maximum possible grade. The report also mentions increase in risk aversion behavior in class selection because many students believe that get an A- would be especially costly in an environment where the vast majority receive Aâs. Last year the cutoff for summa honors was a 3.99 GPA, so even a single A- could prevent the student from graduating with summa honors.
However, in the short term, grade inflation tends to have overall positive effects for both the students and the college, which is one reason why it is so common. If a larger portion of students get A grades, a larger portion of students tend to be accepted to selective grad/professional school, and tend to have better average internship/employment outcomes. Students are more likely to maintain their scholarships. Students are also more likely to rate professors well, and professors are more likely to have career advancement. The college is less likely to have related complaints from students and parents, and is likely to have increased applications.
In the long term, I expect there would eventually be a negative response from employers or grad schools, such as needing to find other ways to distinguish students if they canât rely on grades to do so. This is likely happening already and may be a negative for students who donât excel in the other non-grade measures. There may eventually be a negative reputation hit for the college, reduction in alumni donations, etc. This doesnât appear to have happened yet.
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My 15 years of experience teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as the cumulative experience of dozens of other faculty who teach college. Far more students just do the required work than students who are excellent.
If most people will get a A just by showing up and doing the required work, an A stops being an indication of excellence. You then get to the situation that you have now in which there are realy only two grades: A and F.
After all, if A = did the required work and no more, that means that B = failed to even do the basic requirements of this course.
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Anyone using college GPA as part of the process for post-college selection (e.g. for jobs or professional school) may find that compression at the top means that other applicant characteristics become more important among the larger pool of those with top end college GPAs.
This is analogous to high school grade inflation, where 4.0 or very close to 4.0 HS GPAs are common enough that many colleges have to include more other criteria or subjective evaluation to distinguish between the increasing number of applicants with those GPAs.
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How do so many Harvard students take fewer than 4 courses in a semester and graduate on time, which requires 128 credits or 32 4-credit courses (4 per semester on average)? Harvard does not give credit for anything pre-matriculation (including AP or IB, although advanced placement may be given), so that does not let students take lighter loads.
Thatâs the part Iâm curious about. Are there many companies that are complaining that they canât adequately distinguish between candidates? Do they think that GPA is a better characteristic to distinguish students by than by their extracurriculars and other ways they might express or demonstrate excellence?
Do colleges want to distinguish by high school academic performance? One idea thatâs often expressed in holistic admissions is that thereâs often a baseline of academic performance (i.e. can the student successfully do the work in college) and then colleges choose their class based on extracurriculars/essays/etc. that more closely align with the schoolâs priorities. So even colleges seem to not mind some grade inflation as long as they have a way to evaluate that the student is good enough academically to do the work.
This will be really interesting when it occurs. Or perhaps colleges will course correct, like Harvard seems to be doing now, before those negative effects are felt.
Depends on the college. Colleges with many hooked students like Harvard may find high school grade inflation convenient for exactly this reason. But colleges that traditionally focused on academic criteria for admission may need to change their criteria when flooded with applicants who are compressed at the top of the GPA (and SAT/ACT if applicable) scale.
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Well, no.
Michigan is a fabulous public university, with a lot of very smart students, and certainly most of the best students from Michigan. Both my kids applied EA there and were thrilled to be admitted. But tellingly, both chose to go elsewhere.
But I compare Michigan to getting a job at Google. Lay people would consider Google on the best jobs possible, but few truly elite CS or Math students would choose to go there. Likewise, few truly elite college applicants would choose Michigan over any Ivy+ college.
Many of you know that I had a child that recently graduated from Harvard.
Some classes at Harvard are incredibly challenging. Most students taking Math 55 were among the strongest math kids in the nation, and they were still spending 20-30 hours per week on that class alone. Physics 16 is similar, and I am sure non-STEM majors have their own uniquely challenging classes.
But most classes at Harvard are not particularly challenging, taking only a few hours per week, and I doubt that getting an A is more difficult there than getting an A at an equivalent class at Michigan.
Also, I had a child that went to Chicago, and found the elective classes there generally more rigorous than the equivalent Harvard class.
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I would interpret it a bit differently: Michigan likely has at least the same number of high caliber undergraduates as Harvard does. For the sake of simplicity and to be generous, weâll consider all 7,000 of Harvardâs undergrad enrollment as exceptional. The 7,000 at Michigan may have chosen it because they are in state and itâs a far better value, or because they are engineers and top engineers rarely choose Harvard, or for a variety of other reasons.
The remaining 25,000 or so undergrads at Michigan probably do run a wider gamut of achievement than they do at Harvard. That range wouldnât be as wide as at some schools, but it would still be wider than at HarvardâŠwhich is part of what may lead to less grade inflation at Michigan.
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Yes, Harvard is similar to any really good university, and its classes in fields in which Harvard is known to be a top college, like math, will be at the level of the top undergrads at that field. For other fields, less so.
My basic point is that the grade inflation at Harvard mostly an indication of grading policies, rather than because the students are all so great. My secondary point is that, if Harvard students were all so great, Harvard should be providing classes that are challenging enough that their students wouldnât find the classes all so easy that 60% on the grades are As.
PS. Most of the grades being As is expected for PhD students because these have gone through high levels of selection - both self selection and in admissions. Most applicants for PhD programs are very passionate about their field, and that will be reflected in the level of work they produce, and acceptance rates for most PhD programs is 10% or lower. For top PhD programs in the field, it is generally 5% or lower.
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Apparently, Harvard does offer such challenging courses (Math 23, 25, 55 being the usual examples), but it is not required for students to take them to graduate, unlike, for example, Caltech. Presumably, Harvard wants to offer something for the hooked students who are âordinary excellentâ but not academic superstars like those taking the more challenging options.
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Indeed, and so why is it Harvardâs fault if a student who could struggle and get a hard-earned B+ in a more rigorous version of a course opts for the easier A which leaves more free time for clubs etc since employers look at GPA rather than course rigor?
It seems similar to how many high school students strategically minimize the time spent on school (while still maintaining excellent grades and top rigor) in order to maximize time available for extracurricular activities.
Many employers do look primarily at GPA rather than rigor. As do certain grad programs like law and medicine.
But there are others that look at rigor very closely. Several companies that recruit at Harvard send recent graduates that know the courses and professors well, and then quiz you on what was taught in those classes.