That seems like a pretty big change to me. The previous Dean’s list requirement of a GPA of 3.25 has been scrapped and replaced with top 20%
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/10/28/unannounced-move-university-begin-awarding-latin-h/
The College Catalog has also been updated to reflect the changes
http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/takingcourses/
Yes. Dean’s List is now Top 20% by cumulative GPA for that academic year.
Also, the Latin Honors is top 25% by major (compared to a five-year average), whereas “university honors” used to be around that 3.25 cum. GPA.
One worry is that this new system reflects significant grade inflation going on. Another is that kids will be even more tempted to choose easy courses in order to get the honors designation, rather than challenge themselves. Other than that, it’s probably no big deal. The old system was way too lenient and someone with a high GPA at UChicago but just outside “Dean’s List” shouldn’t have to worry about finding employment.
None of this change impacts honors in the major.
Edit/Update: would be interesting to know how this new honors system compares to other top schools - is it more strict, more generous, etc. Presumably the update was made with an eye on what other universities were doing. Also, @surelyhuman, this was definitely a very recent (and very quiet) change. Someone on another college website that rhymes with Shred-It noticed the update in the College Catalog just last week.
Purdue’s dean list requires a 3.5+ GPA for the semester, with a cumulative GPA no lower than 3.0
To graduate with distinction, you need to be in the top 10%. To graduate with the highest distinction, you need to be in the top 3/10th of that top 10%.
For last year’s class, for highest distinction, the GPA cut off was 3.96.
Distinction by college was:
Agriculture - 3.78
Education - 3.91
Engineering - 3.83
Health and Human Sciences - 3.90
Liberal Arts - 3.82
Management - 3.80
Pharmacy - 3.83
Polytechnic Institute - 3.74
Science - 3.87
Veterinary Medicine - 3.63
Then there is honors college distinction - minimum of 3.5 GPA, 24 honors credits, and completion of a thesis or scholarly project.
Wow. This is a big change. This seems like an acknowledgement of grade inflation - because the rubric is based on placement in the class (e.g., top 20%), rather than a strict GPA cut-off for honors (e.g., 3.25+ for Dean’s List).
I wonder if, had the U. kept the old system, there would just be too many students with a 3.25+ GPA, and the honors would mean less.
It now seems much more in line with what other grade inflated schools are doing.
The Dean’s List / Honors change is a big change. Even in my kids’ classes – 8-10 years ago – over half the class got general honors, i.e. 3.25 cumulative GPA. And I think it has been an even higher percentage in recent years. So they are cutting that by more than half.
I like the idea of looking at GPA per major, so kids in tough-graded majors will be recognized for their achievement in the proper context. But I fear that will be a strong disincentive to take challenging electives.
Yale in my day awarded Latin honors solely on the basis of class rank. I think summa was top 5%, magna 6-15%, and plain old cum 16-30%. (It’s funny – I just looked it up, and everything says that Latin honors system has been in place since 1988 . . . but I graduated a decade before that, and that’s what everyone thought the system was then, too. I wonder what happened in 1988?) Honors in one’s major required, I think, a 3.7 GPA in courses that counted toward the major plus an acceptable senior thesis. Both of those are pretty consistent with what will be in place for Chicago going forward, except that there will be more STEM majors with Latin honors at Chicago.
Possible changes in student behavior could include fewer 2nd majors, as some opt for “easy” electives over a specific planned course of study. Perhaps admissions could screen for that risk somehow, but doing so might conflict with their mission to offer a broad liberal arts education to those who truly seek that.
A better idea would be to stop the grade inflation where the College has the ability to do so - and, at least in some cases, has indeed done do. The strict rules about math and FL placement, for instance, ensure that would-be curve busters stay enrolled at their level of ability. Other ideas, in “draconian” order:
Of course, the College might be taking a more positive approach by awarding magna and summa at its own discretion. If you are up in the top 8-15% of GPA’s, but didn’t take advantage of the breadth and depth of the offered curriculum, or took just the minimum load you could, or didn’t avail yourself of graduate courses - in short, you seemed to opt just for the “Easy A” - you may end up with just a “cum laude” on your transcript.
It’s hard to see this change doing anything other than inspiring a “race to the top” re GPAs, no? As there are no clear cutoffs any more, won’t this incentivize (at least some/many) students to try to push their GPA up and up? And, as the cutoffs aren’t clear, this probably means there will be more high GPA (read: very marketable) students walking around.
This is probably a win win for the College, but also makes it pretty indistinguishable from the many other places that structure their honors this way.
@Cue7 - well, pretty sure Harvard allows up to 50% of the class to graduate at least “cum” and Dean’s List is 3.3 and higher. So UChicago is actually DISTINGUISHABLE from at least one other institution. And Harvard - at least historically - has had more grade inflation than Chicago.
Wouldn’t call it a “win” since they needed to tighten up the Dean’s List anyway. Under the new system, the “race to the top” won’t really matter if you still remain out of the top 20% for Dean’s or top 25% for Cum. I actually think those will now be challenging goals for a whole lotta kids. And, by the way, it’s perfectly OK to work for good grades - the operative word being “work”. One advantage of the the low bar for Dean’s and University Honors is that you could take some risks w/o worrying too much about your overall GPA. Now, GPA might be seen as more important than learning something different or taking an academic risk. To me THAT is the key drawback to the new system.
When it comes to “Latin Honors” I’m with you 100% - I think they must have introduced that because of what other schools were doing. They could have done a graduated system - by major - for University Honors w/o resorting to “Latin Honors.”
I think this discussion has something to do with the change:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1659610-garde-deflation-p1.html
In that 1000 of the 1200 graduates got “Honors” and GPA is over 3.25.
It’s about time.
@JBStillFlying said: Now, GPA might be seen as more important than learning something different or taking an academic risk.
That is certainly the biggest drawback, but the admin has made it clear they’re incentivizing high GPAs over academic risk taking. If you wanted to encourage academic risk taking, why would you structure honors this way?
Also, there will be a creep up of GPAs universally, as more students try to make their GPAs as high as possible (to hit the latin honors that don’t have clear GPA cut-offs).
I suspect the actual GPA cut-offs will then resemble peer schools, like Yale, where the tacit cut-offs are absurdly high: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/09/10/latin-honor-cutoffs-inch-toward/
As seen in the article, the cut-offs for summa, magna, and cum laude at Yale are crazy high: 3.96, 3.88, and 3.80. That means 30% of Yale’s student body has a GPA above 3.8.
The honors system, in a way, will just encourage more grade inflation. Even if you don’t make the 3.8 cutoff at Yale, I suspect there are a lot of Yale students walking around with a 3.75 or 3.7 GPA - still very marketable!
One thing missing from the article – and I’m sure the Registrar makes hard to get – is the mean GPA for graduates.
Based on what I’ve found, Yale (~3.6) is second to Brown for highest mean GPA of a Uni. (Pomona is up there for LACs.) In other words, all three have a near A- average GPA, so it should be no surprise that Latin Honors are so high. (It’s simple math!) If you exclude the more rigorous grading in the Frosh STEM classes, Lit/Hume majors have to have a A/A- average.
As I indicated upthread, it’ll be hard to achieve something like 30% of UChicago students above a 3.8. Not sure you can find enough engaging electives to make that happen. Willing to be corrected on this one. The Core itself is particularly “grade-deflating” due to the requirements: at least 9 of your 42 courses have to be Hum/Sosc/Physc/Bio/Calc even if you aren’t good at some of them. A 3.8 requires that 2/3 of your courses be A- average and another third be straight A’s. Nothing can be below a B+. Yes, some kids are doing this; the question is “how many”? The grade distributions I’ve heard about don’t tend to support this trend, at least for Core courses.
Anyway, the standard is top 20% (and top 25% by major for Latin Honors). That’s not tied to a GPA. The “race to the top” might max out at 3.7 which is a 50-50 split of combination of A’s and B+'s. Honestly I believe it’s going to be very hard to top that.
@JBStillFlying - I have no idea what the cut-offs will be, but it’s clear that such a policy would push GPAs up. Using the Yale example, in 2006 the cutoff for cum laude was 3.72, and just 6 years later, the cutoff bumped up to 3.80.
I’d imagine in 5-6 years, there will be a lot more students walking around UChicago with a 3.7+ than there were five years back.
@Cue7 - that could be. For a few reasons including higher quality students who are mastering the material better than they did historically. I think that can be esp. true in Math and Science, as we see with the SAT subject test scores. (20% of takers get a perfect standardized score, for instance). So it’s not just UChicago!
If a Calc. 152 section sees a full half the class scoring 90+ on a midterm, what do you do - up the difficulty of 150’s, force more kids into 160’s, or give everyone the grade they deserve, even if it means half will get an “A”? Now, what if you also learned that the instructor runs extra office hours and problem sessions which pretty much everyone attends AND that - as a result - the section is ahead of schedule in terms of material covered, how does that change your answer? This is a real example of the kind of students matriculating at UChicago. Maybe that’s also true at Yale in a similarly-paced math course. In which case, those A’s are completely deserved.
^ And, by the way, that’s why basing Dean’s list on percentages and NOT grades makes sense. That way if the mean grade is 3.7 - or 3.8 - it’s not anything special.
So I think, @JBStillFlying - there will actually be less difference between, say, the Class of 2017 and the Class of 2027, than there was difference between the Class of 1997 and the Class of 2007. Chicago changed a lot more between 97-07.
The window under Nondorf has narrowed considerably at Chicago - so, again, the Class of 2017 already had sky-high test scores and accomplishments. I don’t think the Class of 2027 will look much different - Admissions will just reject more multiples of the same type of kid.
Similarly, I don’t think the difference in ability between the Yale Class of 2006 and 2012 was that different - but the cutoffs for latin honors were meaningfully higher in 2012.
This has much less to do with the strength of the student body (which has been comparable and steady at many places for a number of years), and more to do with policy decisions that encourage grade inflation.
As all elite colleges are doing it, what incentive would Chicago have to NOT do this? It only hurts graduates from the school that chooses NOT to inflate grades! Princeton was an interesting case study here, as they tried to fight the inflation, and it wound up only “hurting” their own students (vis a vis their peers).
I think it’s very much an open question whether Princeton’s grade deflation hurt Princeton graduates, or whether it just hurt Princeton admissions because of a widespread fear that it would hurt Princeton graduates at some point.
In any event, they more or less gave up on trying to stem the tide.
Agree with most of @Cue7’s post #15 re: UChicago specifically. It’s been a moving target on quality the past 10 years but will be less so going forward. However . . . . they are also spreading their wings on diversity of income, Pell, first gen, under-represented groups and so forth. Perhaps the more they look like H and Y on this, the higher the GPA’s because everyone will be grading easier to accommodate some who don’t have the college prep advantages of others. Maybe that’s what has been happening at Yale between 2006 and 2012.
Grading should reflect mastery of both content and the tools of critical analysis, so I guess one incentive NOT to follow the others in the Grade Inflation journey is that UChicago kids might graduate with more intelligent writing samples, or have a better knowledge of their specialty subject (ie major), or think more critically than those at other top schools. Can’t see how a school could be “hurt” by that. Princeton’s problem may have been that it wasn’t perceived as distinctive enough from others with more grade inflation, although Princeton is known for being rigorous. UChicago’s Midwest locale - not to mention its underdog reputation! - may keep it distinct from the Ivy group.
We hear a lot about two kinds of kids - the very hard workers with eyes on GPA, on the one hand, and the easy-goers who are content to do the necessary without being ambitious for high marks, on the other. I am wondering if there might not be another kind of kid - who is very serious about his or her studies but has a certain disdain for marks, who is smart enough and works hard enough to get high marks and therefore gets pretty high marks but not the very highest, for lack of a certain killer instinct in that department.
I ask this question because, despite the reputation of the U of C as a place of grinders and grade-grubbers, it was actually a place in my experience where grades were not that much of an objective in and of themselves. There was little talk about them among me and my friends. That was considered petty. There was even a suggestion that to get the highest marks (at least in the humanities) your work and your take on your subject must necessarily be a bit stodgy and lacking in the fire of brilliance. Now that was what was truly admired - brilliance. It didn’t always translate into marks. Kids knew that and took them with a grain of salt.
I don’t think that there is any question that a grade deflation policy hurts law school admissions, and perhaps med school admissions. (but the latter are a lot more holistic than the former.)