<p>“If you go to a college with tougher grading standards than average, youre less likely to get into graduate school, new research showsand theres a similar problem within the job market. ‘Correspondence bias,’ a psychological phenomenon that makes us judge people based on their behavior (like GPA) while ignoring context (like the difficulty of the school attended), could be keeping you from getting the jobs you want.” …</p>
<p>[The</a> psychological phenomenon that skews college admissions and hiring ? Quartz](<a href=“http://qz.com/110434/the-psychological-phenomenon-that-skews-college-admissions-and-hiring/]The”>The psychological phenomenon that skews college admissions and hiring)</p>
<p>I just want to say ^ please don’t use this article as either a reason to go to a school known for grade inflation (even if you really want to go somewhere else, or solely for that reason). Also don’t use it as a reason to not apply to grad school if you have a slightly lower GPA from a place with grade deflation.</p>
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<li><p>The researchers in this study used fictional colleges, and fictional grade distributions. While I’m not discounting the validity of their findings, the generalizability is limited (as it is in any study). Knowing that a fictional school has a hypothetical grade distribution is a lot different than comparing an engineering major from Georgia Tech and Columbia - the reputations of the schools are more ingrained, and other factors affect decision-making in that kind of decision-making.</p></li>
<li><p>People with lower average GPAs get in all the time. This is a statistical analysis holding all other things constant. The only information the admissions officers were provided were the student’s GPA and the student’s alma mater’s grade distribution. Real admissions don’t work that way - the deciders have a lot of other information on students. I would say that this is probably very true for law and med school admissions which are very numbers-driven. But for many professional degrees where work experience is important, and academic grad school where research experience and fit is important, other factors are also really important.</p></li>
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<p>FWIW, though, I am a grad student at Columbia (a school known for grade inflation, which is why I chuckled at the picture selected in the Quartz article). I’ve also served as a teaching assistant, and our department has a grade distribution that is very inflated (80% of students in any given class are expected to have an A or a B, and the grades are curved to achieve that). When discussing it with a professor, she told me that the professors realize that the grades are inflated, but we do it to compete with our peer schools. Columbia students won’t be able to get the same jobs and graduate school admissions as Harvard and Stanford and Princeton students if they have lower average GPAs, they fear, so we keep grades high in general here to better ensure success or at least the ability to compete.</p>
<p>I will say, though, that I don’t remember ever giving a B to someone who didn’t deserve a B - if we take a B as a measure of average/decent work (and not great). But I think nowadays, a B is the standard expectation for decency; As are marks of great/excellent work and C is below average. I will also say that the level of work undergraduates experience here IS tougher than at many other schools.</p>