The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A (re: Grade Inflation at Harvard and Beyond)

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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