The title captures it all. What schools have grade deflation? Do employers or graduate schools know about the deflation and factor it in?
When I was at HBS, the top 20% in a class got a 1 for a course grade. The next 65% to 70% got a 2. The bottom 10-15% got a 3.
If you got a enough 3s, you were asked to leave. This was called “hitting the screen.”
I saw only 1 person get asked to leave. I saw a legacy who SHOULD have been asked to leave and was not. And I saw 2 people leave the school to pursue other opportunities. This may have been legit or it may have been them hitting the screen.
We had an Honor Code that said we would not reveal or discuss grades with recruiters. Recruiters could see your grades AFTER they hired you, but not before.
I interviewed for many years in my field (education) and my husband did so in engineering. Neither of us factored grade deflation into anything. We looked at the transcript, and grades and made sure the student didn’t have many C or any D or F grades. And we looked at LOR, and previous internship and job experiences. Then we decided who to interview. No consideration at all to grade deflation…or grade inflation.
Employers don’t generally know how a college grades. They also don’t know that course X is known at ZCollege to be very difficult even though it may not be elsewhere. Most know Engineering tends to have a less compressed scale than Business or other majors.
Some have thresholds like a 3.0 GPA and your application is not getting reviewed by human eyes if you don’t clear that basic hurdle.
Some colleges may get a little leeway - HarveyMudd, GTech- but generally, grade inflation/deflation isn’t part of the process.
I’m not sure any do…at least based on data that I’m aware of. It seems grade inflation or lack of grade deflation are far more common.
As myos mentioned tech/engineering college and/or engineering majors might have relatively lower GPAs….but it seems engineering grads generally find jobs, even those with sub 3.0 GPAs.
Many jobs that one might pursue immediately after undergrad do ask for grades and sometimes transcripts where a 3.0 minimum is often cited. Undergrad hiring is not similar to hiring coming out of an M7 business school.
My understanding is most of the well-known holdouts eventually caved and renormed their grades to something consistent with contemporary standards. I think that basically tells you your answer. If, say, even Princeton decided many of its students would be better off with higher reported grades, I doubt there are many if any colleges that could get away with it.
Now, what I believe still exists is materially different norms by major, but I am not sure that is always accounted for when you try to jump fields.
Like, Applied Math, Engineering, Physics, and Chemistry usually have relatively low reported average GPAs, and I think that may not be a big deal if you continue in those fields.
But you can major in anything you like for law school, and so you can, say, major in Physics and then apply to law schools. But then do law schools really adjust fully for the different grading norms in Physics? I am not sure they actually do. Like I am not sure a 3.5 Physics major will actually do as well in law school admissions, all else equal including LSAT, as a 3.7 English major, even if they arguably should.
So personally, depending on what options I might want to keep open, I would not necessarily worry too much about which college I chose, but I would think carefully about which major I chose.
Regarding choice of major, while physics has a reputation of being a hard major, there may be some students who find physics easier than other majors like English.
I don’t think employers for most part try to “adjust” GPA’s based on some perception of grade inflation or deflation across schools. However, employers do tend to hire from a limited set of schools where they have a sense of relative rank based on GPA and some factoring in of the difficulty of majors.
At the 2 prior firms I worked for, which hired nationally, the same group would do on campus interviews for flybacks, so we were looking at relative GPA’s from the same school before offering flybacks to between 5-10 interviewees. I personally took into account majors when hiring for analysts (for legal and banking associates there really wasn’t a difference in major rigor, although I had a bias for interviewees who had a quantitative background undergrad or subsequent work experience).
If so, though, I would not necessarily choose law school as a next step!
But generally, my point was definitely not that all kids should avoid STEM majors. I was just noting I think that certain non-STEM next-step gatekeepers may not fully account for different grading norms in STEM majors.
Right, the liking and being good at Physics thing isn’t a problem, it is the not being as good at English part that I would reflect on.
Because the vast majority of lawyer jobs are fundamentally reading and writing jobs. Even patent attorneys.
And I feel like the lack of clear communication on this point is part of why so many people fall into law school and then end up hating being a lawyer.
Just to begin with, you don’t see many lawyers on TV just reading and writing for long hours.
Moreover, kids thinking about law school often talk about areas of the law they think would be cool based on their interests in the non-legal subject area–like, they are interested in environmental issues so they talk about environmental law, or they are interested in business so they talk about business law, or patent law because they like STEM, or so on.
But what is missing in all this is what the LAWYERS specifically do when it comes to the environment, business, STEM, or so on. And what the lawyers do is not necessarily something most people with those interests actually want to be doing! Indeed, it can be frustrating to be directly seeing people doing things you would find interesting, but instead you have to do the lawyer stuff.
Anyway, this is all quite a tangent, but I do think this is part of why maybe law schools do not necessarily compromise too much on GPA standards for STEM kids.
According to the link below Math and Physics majors have the highest LSAT scores of any major. Also comparably the average GRE verbal score of Physics/Astronomy majors is 156. That compares to 157 for English Language and Lit majors and a 160 for the top scoring major of Philosophy, so not that far off. I would not conclude that Physics majors are therefore not good a English. I can only speak for my Physics major son but he is an avid reader, widely read, and enjoys courses in History and Classics.
Can only speak for the companies where I’ve worked.
Yes, we know about grade deflation- both at an institutional level and for particular courses/majors.
I remember “back in the day” when I worked in aerospace (decades ago) that we basically had no GPA requirement for a few schools as long as the fundamentals were there, evidence of initiative, focus, etc. So you graduated from Cornell with a 2.5 in Mech Eng and your entire “other” experience in college was planning frat parties and balancing the spring break budget- no. But that same 2.5 with cool research experience, a summer job that was relevant, founder of a coding academy to help incarcerated adults develop employable skills- the GPA becomes less important, ESPECIALLY if the student had clearly challenged him/herself with tough, tough classes. Kid took a notorious philosophy seminar (with philosophy grad students) and got a C? Wow, this is someone who reaches intellectually.
So there were two handfuls of schools where the GPA “benchmark” was kind of/sort of a suggestion.
And since then- a bunch of schools where A’s are handed out like candy at the circus so that they are mostly meaningless, and so the actual transcript becomes VERY important. You have a 3.7? Terrific. What classes did you take? Do you show evidence of stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone, or is the transcript filled with the “every football player takes this sociology class because it’s an easy A with a multiple choice exam and no papers to write”.
The single best finance hire I ever made had a BS in Geology and knew NOTHING about finance, middling GPA from a college where nobody had perfect grades (so the GPA was less important). We put him through our “mini MBA” program and even the faculty was impressed. He was just a creative thinker and problem solver (in addition to fantastic quant skills) and the best part- challenged “received wisdom” on topics. So not the kind of employee who is told “this is the numerator, this is the denominator, crank out the answer and then go on to the next problem”. No. Always came up with an innovative approach.
We’d have missed a terrific hire if we’d been faithful to the (somewhat random) GPA “cut-off”.
But note that not being good at or interested in reading and writing fictional literature (as one may focus on in an English major) may not necessary mean difficulty reading and writing other subjects.