Having attended my son’s graduation this weekend, and my daughters last year, and seeing people posting on social media, it seems like the majority of kids are graduating Cum Laude or greater (and way many Summa!) . I know many colleges during Covid allowed students to change classes to P/F, which likely contributed. Also while I know many students struggled with online classes (and I assume these same kids took LOA amoungst other things), those who did not, at least in my circles, seemed to indicated that the professors were much more leniant.
Because I dont have a sampling from years ago to compare, has it been this way for a while , or is this new. When I graduated back in the 80s with just lowly 3.0 in engineering that was considered great.
My S did have online classes , but also was fortunate to still have some in person classes. This last semester was almost all in person and he did not get “Straight A’s”. He also never did the P/F thing for any classes as he wanted to be “True to himself”. I think he still would have graduated with honors. My D who was less affected with Covid classes had a tougher time just getting Cum Laude, but her final all online semester she got a 4.0. Would that have happened in person?
Grade inflation takes away from those who are truly outstanding. It levels the playing field into a single tier. No one has killed it in any subject. So society loses. We cannot determine who the next geniuses are in any field because everyone is a genius and everyone is getting their trophy.
(no one gets to play in a real game where there are winners and losers because those who think everyone is a winner are the refs).
I think people who are outstanding will still do great things. It will be more difficult for employers to find them. But they will still excel. It will become a laugh to say you graduated cum laude. And it might become a laugh to someday say you graduated from a top school if there is no basis for any of it. We’re drifting lower and lower.
I think we’ll hit a wall esp as college costs rise. IF college is equal across the board then why pay $320K when you can pay $100K?
Covid changed the trajectory. But colleges can’t play both sides. They can’t make everyone a cum laude and still remain “impressive” and elitist. I think the entire system is starting to crumble. The good news, state schools are gaining traction at a fraction of the cost.
This is anecdotal, but based on my conversations with the many other profs I know:
Student performance has gone down overall during covid. Over 2 years into the pandemic, students and profs alike are maxed out and stressed and depressed, etc.
What I suspect is this: overall, grades have stayed about the same, but performance has gone down. Thus, what would have been D-level work 3 years ago might earn you a C now. Top performers are still performing well. The A students are still doing great work but are internally suffering more. The students who would have struggled pre-pandemic are struggling even more and find plenty of reasons to slack off. Many of those reasons may be justified. Profs are sympathetic and also exhausted and are just trying to get everyone through the finish lines. So they are grading more generously, but because performance has decreased overall, I think there aren’t necessarily higher grades being awarded than pre-pandemic. This is just my hunch, and I would have to ask several other profs to compare their grades across years to really see if that’s true.
I thought that the CL, MCL, SCL were the top X% of GPAs, so even if the average GPA goes up over time, you still only have the same proportion of students getting these distinctions. They call them something else, but UC Berkeley’s LSA cutoffs this year are:
CL 3.814
MCL 3.907
SCL 3.976
So they obviously are much higher than they were, but just as hard achieve.
Every school can define it differently. At S18’s university:
CL: 3.7 or 3.5 plus Honors Program and Thesis
MCL: 3.7 plus Honors Program and Thesis
SCL: 3.9 plus Honors Program and Thesis
Which means there if you aren’t in the Honors program you will never have the opportunity for more than CL.
ETA: At this same school Dean’s List every semester is top X% of each school and so Business school you might not make Dean’s List with the same GPA that qualifies in the College of Arts.
Did not know that, I thought it was a percent with a certain GPA at all colleges, regardless of honors. Interesting. I could not find the percents for LSA, but for Berkeley Engineering they are:
I just looked up my younger son’s college (Whitman) and they use the hard GPA cutoffs rather than percents. Could this be used more in private colleges versus public? Not sure why this would be though.
summa cum laude Whitman GPA of 3.900 or greater with no course grades of F
magna cum laude Whitman GPA of 3.800 or greater with no course grades of F
cum laude Whitman GPA of 3.650 or greater
At Columbia College, latin honors will be awarded “to the top 25 percent of the graduating class. Honors are determined by an undergraduate student’s cumulative GPA for all work at Columbia, with the top 5 percent of the graduating class being awarded summa cum laude, the next 10 percent being awarded magna cum laude, and the remaining 10 percent awarded cum laude.”
At Barnard, the GPA cutoff will also be reset every year (disrupted by Covid due to mandated P/F grades for some semesters) so that “the top 5 percent of the graduating class being awarded summa cum laude, the next 10 percent being awarded magna cum laude, and the remaining 20 percent awarded cum laude.”
For 2020-21, this worked out to 3.97 for summa cum laude, 3.88 for magna cum laude, and 3.76 for cum laude. In either case, SCL/MCL implies approx. top 15% of class.
For both colleges, 10% of graduates may be elected to Phi Beta Kappa by faculty, the first 2% already being elected by the end of the last fall semester!
However, for that greek honor, GPA alone is no guarantee to being inducted.
My daughter’s school (public) does it by percentages as well. First cut off for cum laude is top 10% of the student’s college. For this year’s engineering class that was a 3.86. Highest Distinction this year is 3.98% and is 3/10th of the top 1% population graduating.
I asked D about grade inflation at her school. She said covid made it harder, not easier.
Michigan LSA excludes grades received in the Winter of 2020 from GPA calculation for their awarding of distinction (Top 25%), high distinction (Top 10%) and highest distinction (Top 3%).
And they publish historical distinction levels since 1999. Grades have migrated upwards some over the past 20+ years.
Professors at my kid’s school were asked to be more lenient in fall 2020. This last year there weren’t any breaks but fewer students are showing up to class.
So, the HD GPA cut-off 3.98 is accomplished by 0.3% of the graduating class. Your daughter’s school is indeed setting a very high bar; basically there are 3 students earning HD for every 1,000 graduating.
Will be interesting to learn from others, if your D’s school is an outlier in that regard, or if that might be quite common for some state schools, or the “rule” for a particular state.