Grades below A were very common in that class already. The grade distribution would probably change less in that class than others.
Also, to @blossom’s point, employers seemed to care much more that Math 55 was taken than if they got an A.
To my knowledge, that didn’t happen.
Psychologically, this may happen more in the future when they know there is a limit to As…. scrambling for “scarce points” will be real - it is now feeling like a zero-sum game.
Could be wrong -time will tell! There is also some group behavior aspect of this that is hard to predict.
Would more competitive grading be more of an issue in a premed course like organic chemistry than in a triple honors math course?
My prediction? yes.
Maybe some grad student will use all this as a natural experiment to study something!
Yes. Those that take Math 55 and realize they’re out of their depth can drop down to 25 or another sequence; those that remain in 55 will be uber self-selective.
Organic chem is a weed-out course as it is. The options are take it or don’t apply to med school. But I do think there will be a shift from 17/27 to 20/30.
This practice never made sense to me. It seems common knowledge that schools do not grade the same. It always feels like a misuse of numbers to try to seem objective. Some places grade harder than others.
Some instructors or courses or majors within the same school grade harder than others.
But would an employer trying to make a first pass over thousands of new graduate or intern applicants look that deeply at academic records, or just start with a GPA cutoff to determine which applicants to prioritize for further review and interviews?
I’m not questioning that employers do it, just saying it does not make sense to me. And, to the extent it happens (unless the cutoff is incredibly low), it is a strong argument in favor of grade inflation so that students don’t get weeded out due to arbitrary hiring practices.
I am thankful that the colleges my D26 applied to did not have arbitrary gpa cutoffs. My D26 goes to an incredibly rigorous school with little if any grade inflation and no weighted GPAs. Her GPA is below the mean at most of the schools she was admitted to, including some “safeties.” And yet, my wife who is a professor in a field that uses math says D26 has done higher level math in high school than she did in college. And D26 is not at the top end of math courses in her school. A GPA cutoff would have arbitrarily shut her and many peers out in lieu of students who have less mathematical knowledge.
Skills-Based Hiring Grows, but College Students Don’t Fully Understand It indicates that a still substantial percentage of employers (42%) use a GPA cut-off, although this is down from 2019 (when it was 73%). It also mentions 3.0 being the typical GPA cut-off.
This older thread at Confessions of a Med School App Reader indicates that GPA and MCAT were used to prioritize the order in which applications were read at the medical school that the poster was at, in addition to auto-rejecting those below a threshold.
Thanks for this. In my mind, your points weigh in favor of grade inflation. Why give lower grades if your excellent students will be weeded out of jobs and grad school because of them? If the market doesn’t understand nuanced grades, why give them?
Yes, reducing grade inflation would have to be done at colleges in general. A single college that reduces grade inflation would create disadvantages for its graduates (or perceived disadvantages which could induce increased stress and cutthroat competitiveness among students) if other colleges do not reduce grade inflation. Note that Princeton unilaterally tried to reduce grade inflation by capping A-range grades (A+/A/A-) to 35% from 2004 to 2014, but gave up on it.
I think Harvard’s approach, with no cap on A- grades, might be more palatable.
One other nuance of grade inflation is that it can be difficult to separate the causes of rising grades between:
#1 above is presumably the issue being targeted. #2 above is a problem that is also being looked into largely separately (e.g. colleges going from unproctored to proctored exams, using AI AI-detectors for papers, etc.). #3 is an effect that is likely present at the higher end of the college selectivity spectrum (but the opposite could be true at colleges that are losing desirability). #4, if not accounted for by instructors, may result in missing out some of the gains of technological advancements (i.e. that students can learn more with the same effort).
Holy ■■■■, you and @skieurope are still going strong over here. This is the first time I’ve logged in years after getting a notification you linked to my now 8-year-old thread. I’m an attending now!!
My opinion. I believe students should be getting graded based on a standard set for mastery of the material taught. I’m not a fan of curves. Curves actually have students being graded based on the performance of the rest of the class.
When I was an undergrad back in the Stone Age, one of my profs graded on a curve. Trouble was that the class had a lot of very capable students who studied the material and did well. Many of us got grades either in the high 90’s or 100 on all the exams. He tried to give those of us without perfect scores C grades. I can tell you, this was escalated all the way to the Dean of our college. There were four of us with grade averages exceeding 95% accuracy and we were getting B grades. Even the Dean agreed, there was something wrong with that picture. I should add, this particular professor was world known, and was reported to be a very tough teacher. This is why we all studied very hard for everything and always came to his class well prepared , and we never missed classes either.
The Dean changed our grades.
So…the professors at Harvard, in my opinion, need to set a high bar for mastery of what they are teaching (like my prof did)…and great for any student who meets the mark.
Hard to believe the averages in the finals are that high. It is possible the courses are already hard and they are just setting very wide bins and giving A’s.
Yes, grading on a curve is competitive grading, with the implications that has for incentives for students (cutthroat competition and such).
Presumably, it is done so that it is not necessary to calibrate the difficulty of exam questions perfectly (without reusing old exam questions). However, the basic assumption that the distribution of student academic strength from one semester to another remains similar only really works with larger classes over a time period when the entering student academic strength distribution remains similar. Smaller classes are more likely to have student academic strength distributions different from the curve assumption. Longer term, increases or decreases in the college’s admission selectivity can make old curve assumptions invalid.
Even if the curve assumptions remain valid, an exam that results in a compressed raw score distribution (as in your example) makes it less sensible to slice that compressed raw score distribution into different grades.
The standard for Harvard and the bar they have set is laid out in the student handbook, and mere mastery of the material is not considered A work.
From the opinion article posted above (post 34) authored by two Harvard econ professors:
“Although all the highest-ranked EC 10 students had mastered the material, they hadn’t all crossed the threshold of “extraordinary distinction” that the student handbook says a full A is supposed to represent.”
Good test design can differentiate between mastery of material and extraordinary distinction.
While I agree with the issues around a curve, they are not talking about a curve - only a limit on A grades. Everyone else could get an A-.
It is competitive grading for A grades, even if not for A- or other grades.