Interesting discussion going on in another thread, and the topic of grade inflation at colleges (and elsewhere) has come up. I had heard about this but simply hadn’t realized how pronounced it is, to the extent that the average undergrad GPA at Harvard is something like a 3.7 out of 4.0.
That’s staggering to me, and I am curious what others (parents, students, etc) think about grade inflation. What purpose does it serve? And does it hurt our students?
Rather than hijacking the other thread, I thought I would post one on the concept of grade inflation at any school and the motivations behind it.
Here’s a couple of recent articles on the topic to consider:
I think that this makes it more difficult for the stronger students to stand out. I suppose that this is somewhat offset if you are at a school that allows an A+ grade. I would at least hope that an A+ grade is relatively rare anywhere.
It looks as if some schools at Harvard allow an A+, and some do not. Stanford does allow A+ grades (and gives a 4.3 towards your GPA if you get one). MIT does not have + or - grades at all, but when I was there (a long time ago) grade inflation was not a problem.
In terms of your overall GPA this also means that if you take one single class well outside of your major and get a bad grade, it becomes very difficult to make up for this with a lot of A’s in your major since everyone else is also getting a lot of A’s in both your major and their major. However, at least in my very limited experience applying to graduate schools it looked as if they did not care at all about either a couple of really bad grades in “way outside of my major” courses or the impact that this had on my overall GPA.
I guess that’s my central point. For me too, it wasn’t like that.
I just am clueless as to what is the purpose behind grade inflation. Is it to make the school look good or to allow individual professors to get great reviews? The articles that I found are all over the place in terms of coming up with rationales.
From the Harvard ACLD thread, one of the posters came up with this as to the GPAs for the class of 2021 at Harvard:
GPA and % of Harvard Class of 2021 with that graduating GPA.
4.0 11%
3.9+ 41.1%
3.8+ 63.5%
3.7+ 79.5%
3.6+ 88.1%
3.5+ 92.5%
3.4+ 95.4%
3.3+ 97.2%
3.2+ 98.3%
3.1+ 99.2%
3.0+ 99.6%
So that the college can get its graduates into medical and law school (or any other type of professional school where college GPA is at least a very important first cut) and be an attractive place for pre-med and pre-law students to attend.
Ok, I can buy that 28 years is not recent, but I am still asking why there is the “student as consumer era”. Do you really think that students are consumer in today’s environment?
And most importantly, what triggered the rise?
The 2021 Harvard GPA figures cited above courtesy of @BUMD are staggering. What, exactly, is the purpose of grades? If this is like Yale Law School, “back in my day”, where, once you got in everything was pass or fail, that’s fine. I am simply looking for the why.
It’s kind of interesting that many US universities especially the highly competitive ones are now using a holistic approach to evaluate applicants to their undergraduate programs. Meanwhile, their graduate programs (especially medical school and law school) are still using traditional criteria such GPA and standardized test scores with strict cutoffs for their admissions process. What explains the reason for the difference in their methods?
Graduate programs vary. PhD programs are presumably holistic reviews by the department. Medical schools use holistic review after applicants meet the GPA / MCAT cutoff (and there are many more applicants meeting the GPA / MCAT cutoff than will be admitted, even though many applicants are weeded out by the GPA / MCAT cutoff). Law school appears to be the most stat (GPA and LSAT) focused of the usual post-BA/BS programs.
I appreciate all the thoughts, but I am still stuck on this basic question: what prompted grade inflation? It’s been posited that grad school admissions is one reason, but I beg to differ: grad school admissions have ALWAYS looked at GPA plus, if relevant, standardized test scores.
Something happened to make Harvard’s average undergrad GPA plus 3.7. I am just asking what that something was that wasn’t there before.
So why don’t undergraduate schools do the same thing, look at holistic methods after evaluating the GPA and standardized test scores? Many schools are discounting the value of standardized score such as the SAT/ACT, but they stringently evaluate applicant scores on the MCAT and LSAT
There’s a good argument to be made that part of this reflects the pressure for students to pick a “useful” major rather than the humanities majors that were common a generation ago. Humanities are seen as “high grading” majors and that has been the case for many years. If humanities departments want to stop themselves becoming extinct, the natural reaction is to be more generous in grading. That becomes self-reinforcing because then the only humanities graduates that can get a job are those with close to 4.0 GPA.
“Grade inflation is most virulent in the humanities, whereas the natural sciences and mathematics have done a better job of maintaining standards. As a result, and as studies show, grade inflation disincentivizes students from majoring in the sciences and mathematics”
If you believe all admits are qualified, you’d try very hard not to fail any of them, wouldn’t you? You’d create courses, majors, etc. where nearly all of them could earn good grades, wouldn’t you? Besides, grade inflation, like the other type of inflation, once started it’s difficult to control. Just as inflation can’t be contained within one or few product categories, grade inflation can’t be contained within one or a few schools. They all spread.
I agree there may be a backlash if STEM majors feel hard done by, but a 3.2 CS or engineering graduate is still much better positioned to get a job than a 3.2 history graduate.
I was thinking something similar but with a sports analogy. Sports leagues are copycats. When you’re successful everyone else will copy. Once one school inflates, they all must inflate to stay competitive.
Yes, I agree. Future employers/grad schools can tell much more easily whether a STEM student earned his/her grades, because there’re more objective measures.
