The author is a fairly-recent Yale grad, fwiw.
From the article “Without the threat of poor grades, students have largely stopped trying in their courses“.
One thing that I learned when I was in graduate school, or perhaps in the break between undergrad and graduate school: The effort to keep solidly on top of ALL of your coursework is way less stressful compared to worrying about what you are not on top of.
If almost everyone gets something close to straight A’s, then getting a few B’s becomes bad. If you are not fully on top of everything, you might still expect A’s, but shouldn’t, and might be stressed about it.
Way back when I was in high school I am pretty sure that there was no student who had all A’s (there was one single student who I am not completely sure about). This was not stressful. We got some B’s. That was okay. Plenty of students with some B’s still went to McGill, and in a few cases MIT or EPFL Laussane or somewhere similar. B’s weren’t stressful because we just assumed that they would happen. Also, if you were actually really good at something, the A or even A+ meant something.
How do you stand out if everyone has straight A’s?
Grade inflation does not mean that we are making things easier for our students.
By the way, our daughter who recently got a DVM did not notice grade inflation in her DVM program. There were lots of B’s going around, and for some students (including some who are now good veterinarians) some C’s as well. This was something that the school warned incoming students about at the beginning of the first year of the program. “C’s get degrees” is one of the first things that they were taught.
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That is true in undergraduate as well.
However, sometimes higher grades are needed for various selection gates like entry into a capacity-constrained major, seeking jobs or internships (where employers commonly have a GPA cutoff for preferred interviewing), or applying to graduate or professional school.
In high school, D grades are enough to graduate, but many students are aware that doing better than D level work in high school is necessary for many post-graduation paths.
One year when I was in South Africa visiting a family friend who’s a professor, he asked if I could help grade some engineering exams for him. I said sure. After I’d been at it for awhile, he came in and asked how it was going. I said, “Well, it seems like the kids are struggling - most grades are around 80 or so.” “What do you mean, that’s a good grade!” That was a surprise!
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How sad that the school that generally represents the gold standard of the American university system is worried about:
Bringing rigor back to the academic mission
If a Harvard education doesn’t represent rigor, what does? Why bother to attend if the easily-earned diploma no longer signals a serious depth of intellectual achievement?
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Caltech?
(If you also include required rigor that is not necessarily academic, you can add in places like the military service academies.)
However, more generally, the minimum academic rigor level in college does not necessarily increase as much as admission selectivity.
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Agree. And years ago I was told by an employer that being admitted to Harvard was more important than the degree as successfully passing the “admission selectivity” filter was the more important signal, so I guess it doesn’t matter if Harvard has become a paper mill.
Although it mostly signals that the Harvard graduate was a high school superstar and did not have parent financial (or other) limits against attending. But, if you were in a position to hire, would you judge college graduate applicants by their high school achievements?
It may be more like the minimum rigor of Harvard is not so much higher than that of a typical university, so that the students who can pass the admission gate do not find it that hard (unless they specifically seek out added rigor that is offered).
The HS record becomes irrelevant once a college degree has been earned, no?
While HS record may not specifically be shown to employers of college graduates, the name of the college is the evidence of the applicant’s high school record and parental support. Graduation from Harvard implies something different in this respect than graduation from a minimally selective university that admits students with 2.5-3.0 HS GPA.
Bringing the conversation back into college:
Grade inflation does not mean students’ lives are easier, in fact many a times it means the opposite: A single A- can cost you a chance at scholarships or graduating cum laude. Students are ever more stressed about getting 93+% in a class instead of a 92% (A-). At my university (large Big Ten flagship) if you want to win any awards or recognitions you need a 4.0
We learn in Econ 101 it is important to align incentives to motivate action. But there is simply no incentive for focusing so much on academics. McKinsey/Goldman Sachs would prefer to hire the 3.85 GPA student with an amazing resume, over the 3.99 bookworm solely focused on academics. In society, we also view the first student as a superstar/role model, and the latter student a nerd.
Finally, America’s entire education system is set up with an ethos to be more “applied” / hands-on and less bookish compared to Oxford and Cambridge, which till this day is still extremely scholarly. The main clubs that exist there are sports and recreation (swimming/pickelball etc.) without any pre-professional experiences (consulting, social impact, finance, IR, hands-on projects etc..). Students compete to have the “best thesis in history” and the London branch of McKinsey focuses on hiring those with Book Prizes and Dissertation Awards. A completely different world, and one that the US ecosystem does not support.
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No one has ever thought Harvard was hard. Hard to be admitted, yes? This is old news. Ugh, Harvard.
The grading scale is different. 80% is an A in SA schools and 75% is a first at university. In UK universities, 70% or sometimes 75% is a first. It often just means it’s graded differently especially for non quantitative things like essays - what you’d get a 90+ for in the US they’d give you a 75 or 80 there.
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Yes, that’s what I mean. The grades are inflated here.
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I thought we had a pretty good grading system at Berkeley Law (not sure if grade inflation has crept in there these days). A limited number of people got the top grade HH (10%) and 30% got the next grade H, so 60% of the students got a Pass (unless they really screwed up). I don’t remember anyone who got straight HH’s. Most of the “top” students got mostly HH’s and H’s but also a few P’s. As long as you had a few HH’s and H’s, it was not hard to say you were in the top half of the class for job recruiting purposes. So you had to work your butt off for an HH or H, with class participation a real factor, but unless you were gunning for a prestigious clerkship or a super-selective Big Law firm, a few P’s did not matter.
St. John’s College!
D did her master’s degree a couple of years ago at a foreign university. She earned an 84 in one of her modules and the supervisor told her it was the highest grade anyone received that term. To graduate with a First at Oxbridge, for example, a student’s grades all need to be at 70 or above. I suspect it is virtually unheard of for anyone to get 100. Perhaps they practice grade deflation?
This is all pretty demoralizing for high school students. I do get why some of them feel like it’s the end of the world when HYPSM doesn’t work out for them. I remember D saying that she thought college was easier than high school in some ways.
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Many professors at US colleges also do not use a 90% = A type scale, including colleges with grade inflation. For example, I once had a class at Stanford where grades of 40% on exams were A’s during college. 30% might be a B+. This was an underclassmen large lecture class with hundreds of students, so curving was practical.
When a different professor taught the same class in a different year, the exam difficulty was completely different, so the grading scale was completely different. The new professor gave exams with median grades of ~90%. While when I took the class, none of the hundreds of high-achieving (mostly premed) students in the classes received a >= 90% on any of ~4 exams.
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My daughter called in tears after her first college math exam. I think she got in the 70s. I asked her what the mean was. Wasn’t posted yet. Turns out the mean was in the low 40s and her score was an A. Good lesson not to panic when just seeing raw scores. I remember the same being true even back in my day. I recall getting a 47 on a chem exam which ended up being a B+ because the mean was in the 20s.
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Agree. Indeed, the US high school standard of 90% = A, 80% = B, 70% = C, 60% = D (or something similar) means that high school teachers tend to load up tests with easy questions so that C/D students can pass the course, with only a few harder questions to distinguish between C, B, and A students. College instructors not bound by the US high school percentage to grade mapping are able to include a greater percentage of medium to hard difficulty questions relative to easy questions in order to better distinguish between C, B, and A students.
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