Yes, there’re different levels of competency or incompetency in a subject matter (even at a school like Yale).
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Yale is essentially a liberal arts college and as such selects students who have broad academic capabilities and interests outside of a single subject. If I had a child whose sole academic interest was engineering, for instance, I don’t think I would suggest this sort of school, nor do I think they would be accepted. Yale encourages students to engage in coursework outside their major (and discourages dual majors for the same reason) and facilitates this by having limited course requirements within a major so that students have plenty room to explore other disciplines. If courses were graded on a curve, these broadly academically capable students would likely stick to coursework in which they feel most confident…defeating the purpose of being at an institution with over 2000 courses and noteworthy professors and lecturers. Curved grades often also invite competition between students which is not consistent with the collaborative community Yale strives to nurture.
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Okay, but that’s beside the point. If grades are given to indicate a level of competency, students need not be graded relative “to each other.” Give the students who demonstrate “A” level competency an “A” whether it be all the students, none, or somewhere in between. Education is not a competition. Or at least it doesn’t have to be.
Funny, I’m strongly encouraging my engineering focused kid to apply for exactly that reason—to be part of such an interesting and diverse student body. 
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I have seen a syllabus where if a student asks for a regrade of a test problem, the instructors will regrade the entire test – i.e. putting the student on notice that a regrade could result in a lower score because incorrectly generous grading elsewhere on the test could be corrected as well.
In the US, C is supposed to mean that the student passed the course well enough to continue on to the next course. Of course, increasing competition for colleges, graduate and professional schools, and jobs, as well as grade inflation, means that C is now seen as a poor grade.
Medical schools apparently agree with you (A+ = A = 4.0) but law schools do not (A+ = 4.33, A = 4.0), when recalculating applicants’ GPAs.
Among the HYPSMs, Yale is the only one that sends likely letters to kids that are exceptionally strong in STEM, and follows that up with an invitation to Yale Engineering and Science weekend (YES-W), to get those kids to attend. My son knows many of the kids that were invited one year, and they were primarily specialists in their particular area of STEM, not generalists.
Yale wants to be more than an excellent liberal arts university that keeps losing the brightest STEM minds to MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. Yale reports that about half of the 100+ kids that attend YES-W end up at Yale, so clearly it is working for them.
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Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2. Line, 73 
A similar statement could be made about grading in general. Different professors and different departments may have very different grading scales. An A from one professor may mean something very different from A from a different professor or different department. For example, I had an EE professor that said he didn’t like to give any grades below A because he felt <A grades discouraged students. He instead wanted to make the class a positive experience that inspired kids to continue to pursue his subfield. Based on grade reports, he often did give the entire class A’s. And I’ve also had EE professors in the same department who gave the majority of the class B grades and had some C grades. There didn’t appear to be a consistent standardization of grading.
My personal experience (not recent) with the A+ grade at Stanford was the few A+ grades I received usually involved something beyond just getting high grades on exams and problem sets. For example, my one A+ involved listing additional solutions to a final exam question that the professor hadn’t considered. Another involved winning a final project programming contest. It was up to the specific professor to decide what constituted an A+ grade, and most seemed to reserve it for a rare few who went above and beyond.
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It depends on what you believe the primary purpose of grading is. Some people believe it is to distinguish students from one another, such that only a small minority of the class of the class at a college full of exceptional students are expected receive A grades. If you give the majority of the class A grades, then the top performers are not separated from average performers.
Others believe an A grade should indicate sufficient mastery of the work. If the majority of the class sufficiently masters the course content, then the majority of the class should receive A’s. At a college like Yale that is full of exceptional students, it is likely that the majority of the class would sufficiently master the course content and be deserving of A’s.
Different colleges have had a different balance between these grading objectives. Several years ago Princeton tried to limit A grades to 35% of students. As one might expect, this policy s did not go well, and many/most professors didn’t follow the grading recommendations. Some example quotes from the post-mortem report are below.
I have experience[d] multiple negative effects from the grading policy. Because of grade deflation it has been extremely hard to find any kind of collaborative environment in any department and class I have taken at Princeton. Often even good friends of mine would refuse to explain simple concepts that I might have not understood in class for fear that I would do better than them. I have also heard from others about students actively sabotaging other student’s grades by giving them the wrong notes or telling them wrong information
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On the first day of classes, my [language] teacher said that only 3 of us in a class of 11 would receive As. This often means that despite receiving an overall grade of 90+ a student cannot receive an A-grade because some other student got a 91 or 92.
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I earned a college scholarship at the end of high school. To keep the scholarship, I had to maintain a 3.4 GPA throughout college. I did not have a 3.4 my first semester due to grade deflation in large introduction classes and lost my scholarship.
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Liberal arts encompass a broad spectrum of subjects, some of which are highly dissimilar. There’s no guarantee that a student who excels in one, or a few, of these subjects will excel, or even be relatively competent, in the others. There need to be measurements for students themselves to identify their areas of compentency, not to mention the need of the society to identify talents in those areas.
That’s why I think schools should have distribution/general education requirements. But that’s a different topic.
Collaboration and competition aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s no absolute benchmark what an A-level competency in a college course is, because a course, even with a similar sounding name, is likely different in depth and breadth at different colleges, and students who take the course are likely very different.
Incentives are what make our economy work, our society innovative, and our most talented students do their best. In the absence of incentives, few would exert themselves to do their best. If nearly everyone gets an A, why not take it easy? We don’t live in a utopia and we can’t change human nature.
Agree! I studied Engineering at a school with a well regarded Engineering program and appreciated my experience…but I did not take many courses outside my major. If one of my kids wanted to study Engineering I would love for them to study at a place like Yale where they would be encouraged and able to enjoy a broader overall education.
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I appreciate your point of view but I will share something said at a welcome event with the Head of one of the colleges. Someone asked what sort of student Yale is looking for. He said they are looking for students who they suspect will most fully take advantage of the enormous resources and opportunities of the school. He also shared who is not a good fit. This included students who will prioritize getting the highest grade in the class or writing the perfect paper…over investing time to attend the lecture of a renowned visiting speaker or even attending their roommates musical concert. They want students who love learning broadly and these students learn outside the classroom and generally don’t need to be motivated by the threat of a bad grade to fully engage in their coursework. They consider going to class to be a privilege (or so Yale professors hope!). And the professors are not concerned about helping society discern who will be the best Investment Banker. They are there to share their love of their subject matter with eagers learners! By the way, Yale does have a distribution and foreign language requirement.
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I was curious and looked at the grading policy of Berkeley Law which I attended decades ago. Back then there were only 5 grades, High Honors (HH - top 10%), Honors (H - next 30%), Pass (P - remainder unless your work was really substandard), Sub Pass (SubP) and No Credit (Fail). The 2 honors grades were strictly curved 1L (with some latitude in 2L and 3L) and the vast majority (60%) of students in each class received a P. Since 60% of any class got a P, it was not such a negative. There was no GPA or official ranking. The “worst” thing was to study hard and get the highest P in the class.
This system seemed to address both the concepts of identifying/rewarding stronger students relative to others in a class as well as not creating a “negative” badge for employers that a “C” grade might because the majority of a class will have received “P’s”. Since there was no GPA or ranking, as long as you had a good smattering of HH’s and H’s (more of those than P’s), you were going to get callbacks from most any firm as long as you did not bomb the campus interview. I felt this system deescalated the competition with classmates since there were fewer groupings. A +/- system just creates more situations where 1 point of difference matters.
It looks like UCB Law still uses the same grading practice, which I think is a good thing for current students.
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Yes! My son has several friends who have received these likely letters. All of them with a strong and specific STEM background…but also strong overall academic capabilities and diverse interests. My son’s roommate was deciding between MIT and Yale for Engineering. I asked him why he choose Yale. For him, it was cultural. He preferred the more diverse academic community. MIT is a remarkable institution that is a best fit for many of our brightest STEM students (I use “our” as I am hopeful this next generation of smart kids are going to help solve some of our biggest problems), especially those with a great gift and focus in a technical field that can be truly nurtured. My oldest son’s two flat-out smartest friends attended MIT…and it was a perfect fit for them both!
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I’ve never said this about any school but, from your posts on this thread, Yale sounds like it would be such a good fit for my STEM-oriented D22 who also has a passion for languages - French, Japanese (and Latin) and looking to learn Russian - and deep interest in history and ethics. She’ll only be applying to 4-5 US schools so hopefully Yale will be among them (of course, fully understanding that odds of admission are very low).
Well… When I was teaching at a less elite university, I’d give A+s to the kids who I checked my answer key against. They weren’t always right, but when they were wrong, I knew the rest of the class was completely lost.
Back to the subject, grade inflation is nothing new. I recall a friend at a private university being appalled that TAs were told that for what the parents are paying in tuition, the grades had to be higher than a D, even if the student didn’t come to class. That was 25 years ago.
We’d gone to a lesser ivy where in some colleges things were curved to a C. And yes, that meant if the average was a 90, a 95 was curved downward. Makes you prefer hard tests, because they get curved upwards.
Again, this is all beside the point. You are assuming a default A grade, but that is not what I am suggesting. Departments and professors are quite capable of coming up with standards for levels of competency without applying a curve, and it is entirely possible that at a school like Yale a high percentage of the students will be able to manage to meet the standards for the top few levels. And if students don’t “exert themselves” they may not reach the standard and thus receive a lower grade.
Seems to make at least as much sense as pitting the students against each other in order to draw meaningless distinctions between students who have mastered the material, or awarding a certain percentage of students an “A” even if none of them meets that standard of competency.
Your child sounds like such an interesting person! I think you will find that most US universities, especially the most selective, generally appreciate students with diverse interests and capabilities as it reveals a powerful personal quality…curiosity! Best wishes for your child to find just the right fit in their admissions journey!!
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What standards? Historical standards? Grade inflation is real at Yale (and other places). There’s no evidence students at Yale or other places are getting smarter. The standard has been progressively lowered. The meaning of a grade is always relative. It’s relative to the course and the school, not another course at another school.