I don’t know enough to contradict this assertion..but the original article in this thread is about grade inflation at colleges too and does seem to contradict it, at least at the colleges it refers to.
I recall an exam where a 60 was an A, and an 85 was an A+ (there were only 5 students with grades over 60 in a class of more than 100 students at Stanford). I do not recall whether a 50 would have been an A or a B. My daughters have both mentioned classes with exams that were just as tough. The toughest I can recall was an exam where any positive score at all was a passing grade. Some students did fail this exam.
I think that to some extent Harvard is already suffering a bit from a small amount of “reputation decay” based on this. This may be more of an issue in high tech, which is where I worked for my entire career.
I think that it will take a very, very long time, probably multiple generations, before this reputation decay adds up to being enough for the university to care, and at that point it could be too late to do anything about it. Of course this reputation decay might be reversed before it is obvious enough for the vast majority of the population to have even noticed.
Where does the article contradict the assertion? Grade inflation does not require any particular relationship between what % correct on exams corresponds to an A grade. It instead generally corresponds to a larger % of students receiving A grades than in the past.
For example, a particular professor might give a challenging exam where the median exam grade is 50%, then curve that exam such that anything above a 40% on the exam is an A, such that the vast majority of students receive A grades. The percent of students receiving A grades might be the same as a different class in which the professor gave easier exams where the median exam grade was 90%. Either one of these 2 classes could have grade inflation, with the vast majority of students receiving A’s.
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A Caltech, Reed, MIT, Williams, or Princeton education?
[quote=“ChoatieMom, post:5, topic:3697134”]
Why bother to attend if the easily-earned diploma no longer signals a serious depth of intellectual achievement?
[/quote]
Because the hard-fought admission letter signals a serious depth of… something. The Harvard name has always been valuable over and above the Harvard education. After all, it’s not as if “show me your transcript so I can see your course rigor and GPA” is a typical response to “I went to college in Boston".
Agree. Pretty much what I said above:
Presumably, Harvard students come from the following types of admits:
- Actual top-end academic achievers and potential.
- Those admitted with LDC-type hooks but not top-end (beyond “typical excellent” HS record) academics.
- Those admitted for some non-academic achievement and potential but not top-end academics.
Likely group 1 focuses on academics, choosing high rigor course options and striving for achievement in them, as well as academic achievement beyond that. But groups 2 and 3 may be more likely to get by with “gentlemen A-” grades in ordinary courses, since their post-graduation paths depend more on their connections (group 2) or non-academic achievement and potential (group 3), with the Harvard name on their diploma giving some boost through the aura of group 1.
But this probably isn’t new for Harvard. Decades ago, it was probably similar, except that the academic standards for admission of group 2 were lower, and they were satisfied with “gentlemen C” grades in college.
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You probably need to back up a step and ask what an A is supposed to signify. If it is pure mastery of the material, and the test-takers are bright and diligent students, and if the prof did a good job of teaching the material and designing an assessment that tests mastery, it seems reasonable that many students will indeed show mastery of the material and earn an A.
If, otoh, the A signifies that they received one of the top 7% grades in the class – the “grading on a curve” that was so familiar to most people my age – then there will likely be no grade inflation. It may also require an assessment that includes application of the subject matter in a way that is very challenging and perhaps novel to what has been covered in class. It may also mean that mastery of the material is a given, not what is being tested.
Personally, I have no problem with the first model. But I do have an issue with any model that allows for grade revision through re-takes, extra credit/work, etc. While this may help a student master the material - the objective! -, it doesn’t change the fact that at the point of taking the exam, that mastery wasn’t there.
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I agree in principle and have made posts with similar comments in other threads. However, I doubt that the primary reason why grades have been increasing is the current students are better mastering the material than previous years.
For example, a comparison between senior survey in class of 2025 and class of 2017 is below. I chose class of 2017 because it’s the oldest class for which the full distribution is displayed. Are recent classes really far less likely to have students who do not master the material than the class of 2017?
2017: 18% had below A/A- GPA, 21% had >= 3.9 GPA
2025: 7% had below A/A- GPA, 53% had >= 3.9 GPA (median GPA = 3.9)
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The question though is whether the nature of assessments have changed in that time. I have no idea!
But if previously, they were used as differentiators and now they are used as markers of mastery, it’s about changing what’s measured. To be, grade inflation suggests measuring the same thing but scoring it more leniently.
Indeed, Caltech, Princeton, MIT, Reed and Williams appear in this site:
Although I totally agree that the students at Williams study an incredible amount, we have certainly seen grade inflation, even in upper level STEM courses
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Sounds like utter hogwash.
Tech-oriented schools tend to be well represented in this site, with Caltech, Mudd, Olin, Rose-Hulman, MIT, Webb and Rice all appearing. A cluster of NESCAC LACs — Williams, Colby, Bowdoin, Amherst and Hamilton — also appears.
There are still some schools out there that have avoided the siren’s call of grade inflation. When my son was researching schools we saw many posts about tough grading at Rose Hulman. The school even had a term for their grading: Rose rigor. Incoming freshman were told to expect Ds, and even Fs, and that that they should not get discouraged. I think part of the reason for the relatively low grades was that Rose was on a quarter system, and they tried to pack a lot of material into a relatively short term.
The dilemma for students who attend schools that still engage in what I call “honest grading” is that employers and grad school AOs have GPA cutoffs. Unless employers are intimately familiar with the grading practices of various schools and adjust their expectations accordingly, students from rigorous schools are at a disadvantage.
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I had EE friends at CMU in the 1980s who had single digit grades on a circuits exam where the class mean was 20. Interestingly, the professor made that test particularly difficult because he thought the class mean was too high on the previous exam.
Those were the days when competitive engineering programs were trying to fail out the bottom 20% of each class.
Were they actively trying to do that, or did they merely expect it because admission was much less difficult then than now?
Of course, less selective engineering programs today have high attrition.
I think it was at least partially intentional. Classmates told stories about the dean of engineering giving incoming freshmen the “look to your right, look to your left, one of you won’t graduate” routine.
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We got that speech. Scared the heck out of me!
My son is a freshman at Rose and he’s learning that the grading system is no joke. It’s a far cry from high school where he expended very little effort to get an A. But an A at Rose really means something, and it’s wonderful seeing him push himself so hard.
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Thing #1 is working his tail off at Case and pulling good grades, but I bet his GPA would be lower at Rose with the same effort. We where hoping he would choose Rose, but he could not get past the remote location.
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