If Harvard was indeed set up to provide courses that are appropriate for The Best Of The Best, a student shouldn’t be able to get a degree while only attending classes that are not academically challenging.
This brings us back to point #1: Harvard students are not getting lots of As because they are So Brilliant. They are getting lots of As because the classes that they are taking are really not that difficult for any decent student. It is a grading policy issue, after all.
Agree completely.
But I wonder if Harvard is appeasing its pre-med and pre-law students, which make up a good fraction of the class. Those graduate programs are somewhat lazy in emphasizing overall GPA rather than rigor (for pre-med, they do of course also care about GPA in the core pre-med classes). This leads students in those programs to seek easy electives to protect that GPA.
Wise pre-med students also know to avoid places like MIT because it is so difficult to get the high GPA needed for admission to medical school.
Which is likely a result of the business model that goes back generations. Harvard has long had some academically elite students but also scions of the SES elite who were not so elite academically (but which led to donations and connections for the school). The former create the aura of academic eliteness that the latter benefit from.
Of course, the “gentleman C” of past generations is now the “gentleman A-” that the hooked students today expect, perhaps related to law school aspirations and such.
A friend of mine told me years ago that getting into Harvard was hard. Getting good grades at Harvard was easy.. ….but I am sure things have changed.
I have not worked for a company that couldn’t distinguish between candidates.
We asked for transcripts (whether from Harvard, Hofstra, or culinary school). Rigor counts. If you are interested in marketing but took the “concepts in statistics” course and not an actual stats sequence– that’s telling. Knowing what a regression is– not quite as helpful or powerful in analyzing market research data, as an actual statistics class where you learned how to use large datasets. You claim an interest in ‘International Business” and yet have no foreign language capability beyond 10th grade Spanish. etc.
And it is a rumor out there in college student land that there’s a meaningful difference between a 4.0 average and a 3.8 average according to corporate employers. But one look at the transcript and you can see who plays it safe- never takes classes outside their competency zone to “protect” the GPA, and who has sufficient intellectual curiosity to say “I really want to understand why China and Russia’s economic paths diverged. I’m OK taking an econ grad seminar even if I’ll struggle to get a B”.
And of course the truism that nobody wants to believe- that GPA is meaningful once you are past the initial screen. We literally do not look at GPA once someone has been moved into the interview process. A global industrial company is honestly and truly happier with the lower GPA kid who is fluent in German, French and Mandarin than the high GPA kid who took the easy way out academically and can’t find Dusseldorf on a map.
It’s similar when applying for a PhD or a thesis masters. The overall GPA does matter, but not nearly as much as the GPA in the topics related to the field of study of the student. However, unlike in industry, missing an important, or even a critical, course is not as much of an issue, since they can still take that class as part of their PhD program.
PS. Undergrad GPA is far less important for students applying to a PhD program after finishing an MA or MS.
Both of these statements imply to me that the talk about grade inflation is almost entirely a thing that college professors and administrators might care about, but not many care outside of that.
And just to add my own thoughts here - having interviewed quite a few hires right out of college, I have not once asked about their GPA. I’m sure I’ve seen it on resumes, but can’t recall a single instance when I saw it and it made me think the candidate was going to be better or worse than someone else. Invariably it came down to the things they did at college, how they spoke about the things they learned and how they might apply that knowledge, and if I thought they were a good fit for us.
Perhaps not worrying about the grade a student receives lets them also think more broadly about what they’re learning and why it might be useful in the future? Just an idea.
GPA is more likely to be used in initial screening to determine which applicants to prioritize for interviews (and the most common threshold by employers is 3.0, but “elite” employers may have higher thresholds). Once at the interview stage, GPA is unlikely to be noticed.
Law school admission is much more GPA (and LSAT) dependent. Medical schools likely have an auto reject GPA threshold, then consider GPA and perhaps course selection in holistic reading to determine which applicants to interview.
This is such an interesting conversation to me. While I think grade inflation at Harvard or any institution is problematic, my dislike of the practice has little to do with the reasons cited by many posters. Mostly, I just think the inflation is problematic for students because it promotes a sort of fragility and fear of risk-taking. Getting a low(er) grade becomes unthinkable and an upward pressure occurs to be perfect at all costs –even if it is at the expense of becoming well-educated and well-rounded.
I also think that grade inflation obscures what I believe the true purpose of grades is. In many cases, grades are the main mechanism by which professors can give accurate (and hopefully timely!) feedback to students. So it is a problem when that feedback is inaccurate or when professors don’t grade or return students’ work. When a student is given a low but honest grade, it helps signal that there is something about their performance that the professor believes can be improved and perhaps there is something that needs to change in their study skills. When a student is given a high but honest grade, it is a recognition that the student has accomplished an achievement that the professor desires. For some professors, the expectation might be that to get an A, the student must have done something exceptional and unique compared to other students in the class. For others, it might mean that the student has mastered 90% of the material taught. I don’t think outsiders should get to dictate to the faculty what grades should mean. The professor should decide what feedback they want to give to help the student understand their performance.
I think it should be up to the individual professor or their department to create grading policies. I don’t agree that:
Even 53% is far too many A’s. Grade distribution for large classes should have more B grades than A grades. If a B is the grade that a student can get from successfully fulfilling all the requirements of the course, than, in a class filled with driven students, the most common grade should be a B. If As are the most common grade, that means that a student can earn an A by successfully fulfilling all the requirements of the course. That means that there is absolutely no place for actual excellence.
I think that depends on the course and the purposes for which the grading is being used. The assumption in the above statement is that a certain distribution of grades is necessary because the purpose of grading is to distinguish between students for external observers. And that is fine if that is your grading policy; certainly, a lot of people do believe that is the purpose of grades, but I don’t think any individual professor or teacher has to base their grading policy on the needs of some imaginary employer. Nor do I think that they have to distinguish between one excellent student and another or create a hierarchy of students in their class based on their grades. They can if they wish to, but the professor doesn’t owe potential employers anything. I am not even convinced that any individual professor owes it to potential graduate programs to implement a specific grading policy, although I am more comfortable with that notion (that professor should be thinking of other universities when grading) than the idea that the purpose of grades is to convey a hierarchy of desirability to employers. But the bottom line is grade inflation is bad (I think) because faculty owe it to their students to be honest about their performance and if they are sugarcoating their feedback, it hurts the students in the long run. Getting a B or a C or even failing something should be a learning opportunity and not be perceived as the end of the world from which there can be no recovery.
I suspect that there will ultimately be consequences if employers and graduate programs stop trusting the transcripts from certain universities –just the way when a recommender or reference is deemed untrustworthy because they sing the praises of too many applicants who later crash and burn. Maybe the loss of reputation and trustworthiness will result in downward pressure.
But it isn’t. Perhaps only Caltech, MIT, and Oxbridge are. Harvard, along with most of the other top US universities, admits not only The Best Of The Best but also athletic recruits, students from underrepresented backgrounds, students who meet various institutional priorities, etc.
If the 1400 SAT football player (or rower) who took easier classes to optimize their GPA or the 1400 SAT low income student who worked 20-30 hours a week after school and whose school had no AP/DE options were expected to complete the same ultra-rigorous courses that challenged even US Math/physics/etc Olympiad winners whose spent most of their free time on that subject, they would underperform and likely drop out. That outcome is not in Harvard’s interest nor in Harvard’s students’ interest.
Are you implying that an SAT 1400 student isn’t capable of doing high level work in college???
When did MIT cancel their 33 athletic teams? Or Cal Tech their 18 athletic teams?
More than 20% of the enrollment ay both MIT and Cal Tech are URM.
Coach support/a sports tag means very, very little at MIT or CalTech. There are likely no football players with 1400s getting into MIT for football like there are at the Ivies or Stanford. The bar for athletes is far higher and the band of stats is much narrower at MIT or CalTech.
This difference in philosophy doesn’t make one school better or worse, but reflects different cultures and values. Even among the Ivies, Harvard students are not generally considered to be the most intellectual, but are arguably the most well-rounded.
Hearing all of these schools lumped together and acting like they have the same institutional priorities is frustrating. When kids say they are applying to “all the Ivies” it’s often because they don’t understand how different the schools are, and acting as if D3 CalTech and D1 Harvard have the same athletic priorities is equally misguided.