<p>Yes, they have! But one has only to look at the released application from President Kennedy to understand the extent of the changes in the past decades. As far as getting better, the incredibly brutal selection process allows Harvard to bury a few special admits in a pool of high achieving students. </p>
<p>And, lastly, is 3.45 is indeed the average GPA, how low would it have to be for someone to abandon the notion that Harvard must be the poster child for grade inflation?</p>
<p>Fwiw, what do people think might happen if it were possible to send the entire freshman class to repeat one year of high school at the toughest, most competitive high school in the country? Would one expect the students to earn more Bs than As? The average GPA to be below 3.5?</p>
<p>I’m a lawyer. As you may know, applicants for law school have to take the LSAT. Their actual transcripts are submitted to the LSDAS and LSDAS calculates the gpa for every applicant on the same scale, to the extent that is possible. It also compares all the gpas of all applicants from that college. </p>
<p>So, while X college may not release data as to the median gpa, every applicant is told after the fact, that the median gpa of law school applicants form his/her college is a 3.48 or a 3.28. He’s also told the median LSAT. The law schools know where each applicant stands in comparison with all of the other LS applicants from the school that cycle. </p>
<p>To get a rough idea of how much “real” grade inflation there is at any given college, LS compare the median LSDAS calculated gpa and the median LSAT. </p>
<p>So, the idea is that if the LS applicants at Prestige U have a median LSDAS calculated gpa of 3.6 and a median LSAT of 166 then Prestige U is not more grade inflated than the college whose LS applicants have a median gpa of 3.2 and a median LSAT of 149. (The numbers in my example are fictitious and do not refer to actual colleges, except that Harvard usually has a median LSAT of 166.)</p>
<p>I think people tend to assume that if you suddenly took a B+ /A- kid from Prestige U and planted him at the second school in my example, his gpa would plummet. I think that’s an invalid assumption.</p>
<p>Inasmuch as I am not certain of the accuracy or timeliness of this list (borrowed from a LSAT site) it might be helpful to place Harvard’s 166 in perspective. As others have said, 170 average would be insane.</p>
<p>The list presents a range of from 156 to 166. </p>
<p>Harvard seems quite difficult, from what I have seen with students I know there. Reading for a given week is extensive and often very difficult material (sometimes the subject of black humor, as in “Is this an art class or a foreign language class?”.</p>
<p>One other observation. Harvard is getting more diverse in terms of student backgrounds. I have heard that many students get B’s or C’s first year but then do very well the other 3 years. I also read an interesting article that said that some of the kids with lower quality backgrounds are less jaded and work harder than those from selective high schools/preps etc. and that things tend to even out in terms of grades after that first year.</p>
<p>Just repeating what my D’s thoughts are about H grades (she was a physics major):</p>
<p>It was difficult to get a full on A (A- doesn’t count), but you really haVe to work to get a C-. Most grades fell within the A- to C+ range.</p>
<p>Can’t vouch for humanities majors.</p>
<p>For her, the first year classes were pretty easy, but the material got tougher as the years progressed. Or she just got busier with her life. More likely both!</p>
<p>A 3.45 average GPA would be pretty shockingly high. It would be hard to have an average GPA that high if well over half the grades were not As or A-s, unless the number of grades B- and below were very small. </p>
<p>I suspect it’s more likely that Harvard’s median GPA is 3.45. That’s still pretty high, but not quite as shocking.</p>
<p>I know for a fact that Harvard students do receive Ds. My oldest was a TF in a social science subject, and there were students in her section, and others, who received Ds on tests and papers. I don’t know if they then brought their grades up to at least a C in all cases, but probably in most.</p>
<p>^^^ Yup - that “no Ds” assertion was my error.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Now this I actually do know. In 2005, the Harvard FAS faculty approved a change from the 15-point scale to the 4.0 scale in order to better conform with the high ed norm. Conform? Harvard?! Yes and what’s more, they now complete the fall semester before the winter break!</p>
<p>It seems to me that if most students at Harvard, and at similar schools are told, “If you do x, you will receive an A,” they will do x, more so than at some other schools. Is there anything wrong with that?</p>
<p>“If you do x, you will receive an A,”<br>
This is certainly not true at Princeton. There even if everyone does x and then some, there can only be 1/3 of people get A- or above.</p>
<p>My husband had a teaching fellow who graded papers in the Mug and Muffin. (No longer there, of course…probably it’s a Baybank now.) He said it helped him get back in touch with the actual median.</p>
<p>He wasn’t judging the essays against each other, but against a general standard of excellence. Most of them were pretty darned good.</p>
<p>The other was earned by L. G. Hawkins, whom I have not located online. However, his father may have owned an engineering firm of the same name, and L. G. Hawkins (the company) later made the “Tecal,” which is like the “Teasmade.”</p>
<p>More so, perhaps, than at Fagan College of Delinquency. But on the whole I don’t think the people Harvard wants are those more likely than their relevant peers to do x to earn an A. They are more the ones to say “Why in the world should I do x, when y is so much more interesting and valuable?” And be right about that. More so than their authority-questioning friends at other schools.</p>
<p>I’m not suggesting that Harvard is free of x = A dronedom, but I hardly think that Harvard is defined by being dronier than other schools. And I imagine that, if one could measure such things, one would find the Harvard faculty significantly less likely than, say, the faculty at Temple, to say “Do x and you will get an A.”</p>
<p>The author of the study claims this is the average (mean) GPA at Harvard, not the median. If that’s “shocking,” so be it. Don’t know where he got his data, though. </p>
<p>Harvard’s documented grade inflation is among the highest for any school. Perhaps some of that is because the students keep getting better and better</p>
<p>Very true…and yes, they’ve been great for awhile.</p>
<p>I have no problem with a class having a large number of deserved “A’s”. I don’t think a bell curve should be used in classes that have a lot of smarties.</p>
<p>However, at some point, it can be argued that there is an assumption that these kids are “A” students and therefore “A’s” will be given regardless of the quality of work they submit. If the kids KNOW that they’re going to get A’s anyway, some incentive is lost to work hard.</p>
<p>When I was at a football game in Calif last fall, a Yale mom lamented that her son wasn’t trying very hard because the profs were announcing on the first day of class that 85% would be given A’s. Now, that sounds nutty to me. The mom told me that her son had to work much harder for his A’s at his prep school than he was at Yale. The family is full-pay and a bit resentful that their son seemed to be having too good of a time with little work to do.</p>
<p>JHS located information about L. G. Hawkins, Jr. (which I had not found), and sent it to me in a PM. For those who might be interested (quoting JHS’s message):</p>
<p>“Lester G. Hawkins, Jr., was the son of Lester G. Hawkins, an accountant in Belmont MA, also a Harvard grad. Lester, Jr. was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Guardian, which billed itself as the first student-edited social sciences journal, which was very active from 1937 into the war period. During the war he served as assistant to a Harvard government professor at the Office of War Information and then with other agencies, and afterwards he got a PhD from MIT, I think in political science. He had foreign-policy jobs in Europe, then spent much of his career working for defense-oriented think tanks in the DC area. He finished his career as a professor of public administration at SUNY Albany, and died a couple of years ago.”</p>
<p>(Above, I left out JHS’s remark, “You didn’t look hard enough,” also true.)</p>
<p>I really do NOT believe that Yale story. Oh, I’m not doubting that the mom told it. Maybe her son even told her that. But I don’t believe that “profs”–plural–at ANY college would tell people on the first day of class that 85% of them would get A’s. </p>
<p>That means 30 per cent of all students have gpas of 3.76 or higher. Now, that’s a high percentage, I’ll grant, but it certainly doesn’t indicate that lots of profs were giving 85% of the students “flat” As.</p>
<p>I have heard many kids say their prep school was the most intense work they had so far ; that college while intense is easier because you don’t meet every day .Have others heard this as well ? I am talking about kids who went on to rigorous colleges after a prep school .</p>