What I do not understand is if some ivies, selective, elite schools practice grade inflation why would other similar schools not do the same thing? Further up this thread someone mentioned that at Stanford a student can repeat a class to improve their GPA with the lower grade basically “erased.” How is it fair to other college students at other institutions who do not have the same benefit especially when applying to coveted medical, law or b-school spots?
And don’t this disparity really hurt those kids who are not as financially able to fund a 5+ year college experience?
And yes having very smart kids can result in an over balance of A’s in a particular class, but if the professor school has a policy essentially limiting how many A’s, B’s etc. are given aren’t those students disadvantaged. Just trying to make sense of it all.
^ I don’t think you can.
In England, unis have profs from outside peer universities write questions and give grading guidelines for end-of-year exams, and those exams determine your entire grade for undergrad, so people are confident that a 1st or 2:1 means roughly the same thing across all the top-tier unis*. This doesn’t happen in the US.
- This tradition started with Durham, the first non-Oxbridge English uni established. They hired Oxbridge profs to administer exams and give final marks for their Durham students in order to show that a Durham degree was as legitimate and high-quality as an Oxbridge degree.
@cheetahgirl121 I’m following this thread bc I want to make sense of it all too. I don’t think Stanford is the only selective school that allows retaking a class. We learned at MIT info session that only pass grades are given the first year so students don’t have to worry about grades their first year. Fail grades are not given, and if a student is failing a class, he/she has to retake it until the student passes. The EE grad student told parents he failed the same class twice before he finally passed taking it the 3rd time. I recall Harvey Mudd has similar first year experience, if I recall correctly.
If you define grade inflation as the average GPA of the class increasing over time,at a faster rate than differences in quality of interesting students would suggest, then the overwhelming majority of 4-year colleges practice grade inflation. Gradeinflation.com suggests an average increase in class GPA of ~0.1 per decade across all colleges, which is approximately the same rate of increase at most elite colleges.
A few outliers have tried to stop grade inflation over time, which generally did not work out well. For example, Princeton was mentioned in the post above. They tried to combat grade inflation by requesting that professors give no more than 35% of the class A grades. Many students said it negatively impacted their decision to attend Princeton. Most students said that the policy negatively impacted their experience at Princeton in surveys, with some saying it caused them to lose scholarships, quit pre-med, and similar. Many students gave examples of specific classes where a professor told them their high % grade on a midterm of final would usually be an A, but they need to make it a B+ instead to avoid exceeding the A quota. In classes with few students, sometimes the professor would announce something along the lines of, “There are 11 students in the class, so I can only give 3 of you A’s.” There were also many professors who did not follow the policy well. Some departments still averaged more than 50% A grades, so there was still a large inconsistency in grading. Princeton abandoned the policy in 2014, and class average GPA has increased rapidly since then, but it still remains lower than the other Ivies and most similarly selective colleges.
While most colleges have grade inflation, many colleges with similar degrees of selectivity and quality of entering class have significant differences in average class GPAs. For example, earlier I mentioned the average GPA is ~3.45 at Princeton, much less than the ~3.65 at HYS. Public colleges tend to have lower average class GPAs than private colleges with similar degree of selectivity. This may not seem fair, but it’s an expected result with colleges that have independent grading systems and different institutional priorities, learning styles, classroom sizes, and major distribution. If grading systems are a big deal to particular students, then one option is to factor those policies in the decision about where to apply.
Unless there is some need to pass on a certain number of students, say there are 100 students in a first year/sophomore program but only 20 spaces in the junior/senior year program, this policy is just dumb.
I would be interested to hear a defense of the “specific # of As” policies when winnowing the class down to a certain number is not a factor.
@Data10: “Public colleges tend to have lower average class GPAs than private colleges with similar degree of selectivity.”
Similar student body stats, similar admit rates, or both?
@OHMomof2: I went to b-school with an upperbound on the average GPA (many of the M7 have or at least had that policy).
I suppose this way, employers could differentiate between the very top academic performers in the MBA program and others if they wanted to.
It didn’t really matter outside of internship recruiting as almost no one was going on to a PhD program and employers cared more about experience, what you did, and personal attributes more than grades anyway, for the most part.
@Penn95 “Princeton, Columbia, Penn and Cornell”
The students at these four Ivies have to work very hard for grades. The GPA averages may be fairly high but they will fail you quick if you don’t keep up, especially in engineering. There are some stressed-out students at these schools.
The original 2004 proposal and related defense is discussed in the memos below: https://web.archive.org/web/20050315105525/http://www.princeton.edu:80/~odoc/grading_proposals/01.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20050315104949/http://www.princeton.edu:80/~odoc/grading_proposals/04.html
The majority of the faculty voted to approve this proposal. The argument is along the lines of :
When comparing similar admit rate and stats, private colleges tend to be higher than publics. Of courese, there are many individual exceptions. For example NYU has an ~32% acceptance rate and 29-33 ACT range, lower than most top publics; yet their ~3.55 average GPA is well above all publics I am aware of. No publics I am aware of even match Princeton’s post grade deflation average GPA.
@Data10, well, no public has Princeton’s selectivity.
About the NYU GPA, does that include NYU-Poly? Engineering classes generally average a lower GPA. Though UNC also doesn’t have engineering so they would be comparable to NYU without NYU-Poly.
In D’s MV cal class, the average GPA for the class will be from 2.6 to 3.1 per dept policy. She is freshman at Vandy. Top 2 will automatically get A. Others will work for it!
I think GT also allows you to retake and erased your bad grades. It is ironic that we heard this from a parent of Stamps scholar during scholarship weekend.
BTW, according to a Redditor, the average male GPA in the UMich COE is 3.267.
The average UMich GPA outside Engineering is almost certainly higher.
People on here are saying Engineering GPA’s at elite privates (with selectivity and student body stats comparable to or higher than UMich) are lower than at UMich Engineering.
It is an estimate based on all undergraduates. Liberal Studies had the highest GPA, and Poly had the lowest GPA.
Many elite privates have higher GPAs than UMich. For example, the report at https://thelittledataset.com/2015/07/31/eduanalytics-101-an-investigation-into-the-stanford-education-space-using-edusalsa-data/ suggests that in 2011 Stanford engineering had a mean GPA of 3.6, with ~65% A+/A/A- grades. This was slightly higher than the overall average GPA across all schools of 3.57, with ~62% A+/A/A- grades. At the current rate of grade inflation, the average engineering GPA would be closer to 3.7 today.
Stanford engineering courses having a high GPA compared to certain other fields of study with my personal experience as well. The classes with the lowest grade distribution tended to be underclassmen intro/foundation courses that are taken by a wide variety of majors, with little self selection. In contrast, engineering courses are almost entirely upperclassmen major-specific courses, with notable self selection.
So maybe it makes sense for a student to pick a less prestigious school, one where they are in the top-tier of applicants, if they want to go to graduate school. My freshman D has a couple of friends (one wants to go to medical school and the other wants to become a professor) who decided against the top tier schools, took the full-ride scholarships, and have 4.0 GPA.
It ain’t so simple. In the first place, a top tier (private?) Uni is gonna have more research opportunities, albeit with more students after them, and with Profs who are known in the field who are writing recs. Second, professional schools will go way down into the GPA pool of a top tier Uni. I posted earlier about students with a 3.0 GPA at WashU getting into med school. The chances of a. 3.0 from Podunk U getting in are much, much slimmer, even with the same MCAT.
@Data10, Stanford, like Princeton, is not at UMich’s selectivity level.
You have to compare like with like. Didn’t someone here say that Lehigh’s engineering GPA is below 3.0?
I thought these are government inspectors, no? I think that is an excellent idea btw. This way no weak student can hide behind the name of an elite school, and no strong student can be penalized because he did not attend one.
My children attended a commerce program that accept 6-7 students out of a hundred. There is no attempt at yield management and no hooks. Yet the school regulation would not allow more than 25% A grades in any class.
It took me a while to figure out the reason. The school only provides interview spots ( investment banking and consulting) for those on the Dean’s List, and this ensures the students given such opportunities are truly outstanding. I still think the entire grading system highly unfair.
No, the examiners are not government employees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_examiner
The external examiner system is also used in some ex-British possessions like New Zealand and India.
“This way no weak student can hide behind the name of an elite school, and no strong student can be penalized because he did not attend one.”
Well, the unis typically choose external examiners from peer institutions. Certainly, in the UK, you still find a wide variation in rigor across unis.
@purpleTitan “Didn’t someone here say that Lehigh’s engineering GPA is below 3.0?”
I did. D2 is a Lehigh sophomore. She says that the average GPA in engineering is between about 2.8X. I haven’t seen that published by the school, but I have seen documents that appear to be consistent with that.
Lehigh is reasonably selective with a 25% acceptance rate, a middle 50% of admitted students in the 30-33 ACT range (per Admissions) and the middle 50% of enrolled students are in the 29-32 ACT range (per CDS).
Below is the published GPA data for the Fraternities and Sororities. Fraternity Average GPA is 3.03 and Sorority Average is 3.34. Engineering students are about 40% of all Lehigh students, and about 30% of engineers are women, so the men are going to be lower with over twice as many engineers.
That suggests to me that a 2.8X average engineering GPA is probably about right.
Right, and Lehigh is comparable to UMich in distribution of entering student quality while Princeton and Stanford (while there is overlap), are not on average.