What schools have grade inflation and deflation? I am planning on going to law school after college and i want to make sure that i don’t end up with a low gpa just because a school grades too harshly. I know you should work hard and everything but grade inflation and deflation does happen at schools and i want to take it into account when i choose what schools i should go to. So what are schools with the hardest grade deflation (William and Mary? Princeton?) and what are the ones with grade inflation (Harvard? Brown?) and what is the situation at schools like
VCU
Colorado College
Macalester College
Scripps College
Also tell me about schools like Wesleyan, Haverford, Davidson, Rice, Dartmouth, USC, Emory and Tufts. I will be most likely majoring in international relations and affairs or economics, have not made up my mind yet
Most students who complain about grade deflation were expecting to be graded on effort rather than results. “I tried so hard and only got a B. I deserved an A.”
I haven’t heard a lot of complaints about either grade deflation or inflation at Wesleyan other than that A(s) are not easy to come by. Many people relieve the stress by minoring in something they really enjoy, like art, music or dance. Hope this helps.
Colleges with a range of grading policies may nonetheless graduate many students who find places at desirable law schools:
The 20 Schools
Amherst
Brown
Claremont McKenna
Columbia
Cornell
Dartmouth
Duke
Georgetown
Hamilton
Harvard
Middlebury
Northwestern
Pomona
Stanford
UChicago
UMichigan
UPennsylvania
U of Southern California
Yale
Yeshiva
I looked into this for colleges my son was applying to a couple years ago and did a whole chart at the time (I like studying comparative data). No idea where it went since. I do specifically recall that Davidson seemed to have one of the lower average GPA’s of the schools he was considering among many Northwest LAC’s and W&M. Wesleyan had a pretty high average GPA as I recall. W&M was closer to Davidson (maybe the South has more grade integrity?)
I do think what people perceive as “deflation” is relative to the inflated averages at other places though. When you look at the stats, college GPA averages have crept up substantially over the years, with no evidence that it reflects the increasing brilliance of the students. I spent years warning my son that when he got to college there would be no grades for “participation” and he would have to live or die entirely on how well he did on tests, papers or projects (participation points were always grade boosters in high school). That’s how it was in my day – you could kill on participation and it wasn’t worth jack to your grade. Then he got to an elite LAC and many of his classes do have a participation grade, LOL. Changing times.
I looked up the average GPA at UCLA close to the time I graduated and it became with a 2. These days that would be considered massive “deflation.” Back then it was just rigorous classes and policies that made it nearly impossible to “game” your GPA. 3 weeks into a class you were permanently committed and couldn’t drop or change to pass/fail and even if you re-took the class your original grade remained on your transcript and in your GPA. Many schools now have much more generous rules for dropping or re-taking in ways favorable to your GPA now, and ore generous curves.
A lot of the reputations are pretty dated. William and Mary, for instance, could be argued to now have grade inflation (look at the http://www.gradeinflation.com/ link). One graphic shows the average GPA is above 3.3 and has risen about .14 since 2000. The link above indicates that “There are no schools in our dataset that have been untouched by rising grades over the last 50 years.” So it is really not a question of grade inflation, it is largely whether the institution is above or below the average increase.
Most selective, expensive schools appear to have pretty high average GPAs. You could argue this is because the students are very good, but alternatively, you could argue that there is an expectation of a relatively high GPA and if they don’t deliver they won’t remain hot schools.
@IzzoOne Agreed, almost all schools have seen grade inflation compared to their own past. But even at 3.3 W&M is on the lower end of the scale when I compared average GPA’s a few years ago among the schools y son was considering. Many of the NESCAC’s are up in the 3.5 range, some even higher than that.
Even decades ago I remember comparing grading policies with some of my friends going to top private schools and was surprised how easy they made it to manipulate your GPA compared to my public school. At Stanford for example you could drop the class all the way until the final. So if you knew it was going badly you just dropped and it never hit your GPA. Then if you did take the final and ended up with a low grade, you could re-take the class and the new grade would replace the old on on your GPA and transcript. Some students apparently would intentionally fail the final if they realized they were not doing well on it so they would be eligible to repeat the class. At UCLA you had to drop by week three, which is usually before you had any graded result in the class. After that you were locked into a grade on your transcript and GPA, even if you retook the class.
And those were just the ones with relatively recent data in the report (typically 2015). Many of the others didn’t have data newer than 10 years old, but their averages at the time were in the 3.4x which is in line with what those schools above were at the same time frame, so they likely have moved into the 3.5x by now. Again, I found my own data 3 years ago I just don’t have it handy right now. Bottom line was that for many LAC’s particularly in the Northeast, 3.5x was the average.
@Undercrackers Berkeley certainly has a lower GPA than some of it’s peers that have significant inflation but their data doesn’t suggest deflation. Their average has gone up over time and remains higher than the national average by a good amount: http://www.gradeinflation.com/Ucberkeley.html
From the second link, in most of the typical pre-med courses (CHEM 1A, 3A, 3B, MCELLBI 102, BIOLOGY 1A, 1B, PHYSICS 8A, 8B), about a quarter of students earn A- or higher grades.
Pre-law students can look up grade distributions in the courses for their possible majors and out-of-major electives of interest.