Legacies may also have school-specific knowledge advantage based on information from their parent (or whichever relative counts). For example, which courses are high workload so that taking too many such courses together is not a good idea, or which pre-professional clubs are actually worth joining (or applying to in the case of those with competitive admission).
Similarly, first-generation-to-college students have a knowledge disadvantage about college in general compared to non-first-generation-to-college students.
No, just that those students like aren’t “The Best Of The Best” that MWolf was referring to.
MIT and Caltech’s recruited athletes are generally held to a much higher academic standard (1500+ SAT, extremely high GPA with max rigor, etc), which is why neither are capable of fielding D1-level teams.
You think the distribution of effort normally follows that pattern, vs. the pattern of grades should look like a normal distribution just because. The latter is what I take issue with..forcing a distribution just to force it.
Ah, yes. I agree - if a student has a 90% they should get an A. If 65% of the students have 90% or higher, than, for that course, 90% have As. If, on review, the instructor was too lenient or the course was too easy, it is the instructor’s responsibility to correct that, the NEXT time they teach the course.
I recall a few exams, not at Harvard but at similarly ranked schools, that seemed to be quite clearly written with the intent of avoiding this problem. If the class average on the final is 90% then I think that you just need to give out a lot of A’s. On the other hand, if the class average on the final is 45%, then it is perfectly fine for someone with a 60 to get an A (and for an 85 to be an A+ at schools that have it, which isn’t Harvard).
…and while they stopped publishing this information during COVID, the admission rate for someone with a 690 Math SAT in the class of 2024 was exactly zero:
I’ve deleted further responses from @chekov and @data10. This thread is not about MIT, it’s not about SAT scores, and my note above was not meant as a suggestion. Move it along please.
Answering a question I had further up thread about what the actual negative consequences are of grade inflation. There’s a new study about it! Short answer seems to be that there IS a negative impact of grade inflation on future income.
Here’s a relevant quote from the article:
The economic cost is not small. Denning estimates that when a teacher doles out grades that are substantially higher (0.2 or more points on a 4-point scale, the difference between a B and almost a B-plus), a student in that class loses about $160,000 in lifetime earnings, measured in present dollars.
Note, the study has NOT yet been peer-reviewed and formally published.
