<p>There is a theory that grade inflation began in the Ivys during the Vietnam War era because of the draft. I think another source of pressure to give high grades at the Ivys is because employers and grad school admissions offices don’t give sufficient weight to the highly selective nature of the Ivys. They don’t take into sufficient account which school the gpa was from, or they are not aware of the differences in student quality. In a way, it does seem unfair in a broader sense to grade Harvard students on the same scale as Podunk students. But it wasn’t always that way. The Ivys graded harder in the pre-Vietnam era. Hence, the debate at all the Ivys about grade inflation and honors. Honors is not the same as gpa. Students have to qualify via gpa for honors candidacy and then elect to do an honors thesis which is graded by two or more faculty. There are reasons other than gpa why honors might be more common at one Ivy than another, but percent honors is a rough guage of gpa.</p>
<p>I have more first-hand knowledge about Cornell engineering than other majors or other Ivys. I know the workload is high and grading runs the full range from A to fail at Cornell eng. Multiple choice exams are considered “evil” and students are required to think and write (as at the other Ivys, I believe). The little I have read leads me to think that the administrative position at Cornell is that the proof of a Cornell education is in success after college, not honors or gpa. (This is from an “Uncle Ezra” question…the administration’s mystery liason.) I have wondered whether this attitude comes down from the vice-provost for undergraduate education who is a Harvard Summa grad from the pre-Vietnam era. Don’t really know.</p>
<p>I think colleges should be required to publish a “difficulty index” like the following:
- for each grade assigned, also print the percent of A+B grades in that class on the transcript
- SAT score divided by cumulative gpa (the higher the difficulty score, the harder the school)
- GRE, MCAT, LSAT, or GMAT national percentile divided by cumulative gpa (higher score means more difficult)</p>
<p>getting back to the original question, my perceived rank the Ivys as follows according to difficulty getting a high gpa (trying also to account for the HYP selectivity)
Cornell (most difficult to get a high gpa)
Dartmouth
U Penn
Princeton
Yale
Brown
Harvard</p>