<p>A few things:</p>
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<li><p>You have to consider the graduation rate. Having 13% of your class drop out means those honors numbers are not as inflated as they seem, since as Dean Boyer pointed out, you don’t see many transfers from Chicago moving up. It much more common to go from UChicago to UConn after flubbing your freshmen year than UChicago to Yale. When something like 1 in 8 students washes out, that is arguably important in evaluating those that make it. For instance, at the extreme, UChicago PhD students pride themselves on being one of say 12 out of 30 who makes it to the end of their program. </p></li>
<li><p>This honors inflation phenomenon would have to be relatively new. I only graduated from the University a few years back, and just slightly less than half the class got “Honors in the College,” or a 3.25+. This trend seemed solid between my first and fourth years, and contributed greatly to the idea that GPA’s centered just below a B+. </p></li>
<li><p>I am only speculating, but one thing that could be driving this is the fact the underlying demographic shift in the collegiate body. Entering first years today are much stronger than first years five years ago, particularly at the bottom half of the class where the school’s heightened admissions selectivity has weeded out the intellectuals without any tangible work ethos / organization capacity (jump back to the late 90’s when the school was admitting the majority of those that applied). Consequently, it becomes harder for professors to dump curve derived C’s onto students, since there are less who are clearly just not doing the work to begin with. I remember on more than one occasion a professor made a remark to the tune of, “the midterm grades distributed nicely, the curve worked itself out, I don’t think you will be too surprised with how you did.” In contrast, I would wager professors today are more commonly inundated with work that fairly they cannot give a C+, in a sense beginning to approximate the Harvard grading paradox harped on by Harvey Mansfield (Student X and Y should both be ‘A’ students as far as the outside world is concerned, but as far as I am concerned X is superior to Y by multiple letter grades). </p></li>
<li><p>It’s true that letting 75% of the class graduate with honors cheapens the quality of the distinction. But I have more of an issue with majors using variable cutoffs without clear justification. It really would make things much easier if Chicago went to the Latin honors system that is widely used, where earning a Magna often makes reference to your overall, departmental, and thesis performance.</p></li>
</ol>