Grade inflation at colleges: good thing? or bad?

Parents Forum
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As a 21 year Harvard alumni interviewer, I can assure you that 1) grade inflation is very real, 2) grade inflation is not a recent phenomenon, and 3) the median GPA of a Harvard College graduate is not 3.86 (which is the GPA inferred from the above data).

88% of graduates do not attain a 3.8+. The most recent data I’ve seen from the Harvard Crimson shows that the cut-off for cum laude was 3.63, and the faculty caps cum laude at 60% of the graduating class. It follows that about 40% of the class has below a 3.63. Not saying it isn’t a problem, just that 40% is rather different from the 11% stated in the data above. I’d say a 3.7 is about right for median, if not mean GPA.

The primary reason for grade inflation at Harvard is that 80% of the senior class is applying to elite management consulting firms, I-banks, law schools, and/or med schools, all of which require high GPAs to even get one’s foot in the door for an interview.

It has little to do with humanities. That’s a reasonable assumption but it really doesn’t contribute to this if you look at the numbers. The five most popular concentrations at Harvard are Computer Science, Economics, Government, Neuroscience, and Psychology. None of those are humanities. The humanities are dying, even in the Ivies.

I would add that this is not an elite college problem. There is grade inflation in all levels of higher education, for similar reasons. I would add that another reason is the high cost, but I’ve gone on too long already. Just know that when the retail price is $320k, colleges are more inclined to please their “consumers.”

While we’re on the subject, the reasons why there is collegiate grade inflation mirrors the reasons why there is rampant grade inflation in high schools.

High schools have responded to the increased competitiveness for college admission by eliminating class ranking (only 20% still rank) and handing out As like candy. I can’t tell you how many 4.0s I’ve interviewed who scored 3s and 4s on their AP exams. High schools that give a 97 in AP Literature to someone who ends up scoring a 3 on the exam are both muddying the waters for the college application process and contributing to the expectation of inflated grades later in the academic process. This is a societal issue that can even be traced back to primary school, IMO.

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60% are cum laude??? Purdue caps it at 10%, and within in your college.

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To be clear, I’m not defending the practice; I’m just describing it and attempting to explain it. Public colleges market themselves partly on the basis that students receive a similar education there as they would receive at a private college — but at a fraction of the cost. I think there is some truth to that claim.

So, the key question for grading becomes: if Computer Science 101 is the same class at Purdue as it is at Harvard, should students at Harvard be graded on an absolute scale, according to their knowledge of the material, or should they be graded on a curve relative to their own classmates?

In essence, Harvard has decided (given the pressures of employment, grad school, and costs that I outlined above) that the answer is the former: students should be graded on whether or not they learn the material in some absolute sense.

This explains, at least in part, why at Harvard the median grade is an A- and the median student graduates with honors. They have tacitly determined that when it comes to grades and honors that they will reward students for learning the material and not penalize students simply for being in classes with a lot of other really smart students.

Personally, I think there is a happy medium somewhere in between, but the administration and faculty have yet to ask me to share my limited wisdom on the issue.

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My son is a senior in college. He told me that many companies employ automated resume screeners. Such that anyone below a 3.5 automatically gets screened out.

If you’re a hiring manager, and reviewing resumes from thousands of colleges, most have no way to compare the rigor of various colleges. They simply go by the perceived prestige, and GPA.

Even the rigorous colleges known for deflation (UChicago, Princeton, MIT) are relaxing their standards. Better to have a well employed graduating class than to torture the students with stringent grading. Also makes for more satisfied grads, who donate more.

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These companies may set 3.5 as a minimum GPA today, but they may have to raise that minimum next year, and the year after that, because the colleges are then motivated to inflate grades further. The cycle will continue. Nearly identical dynamics exist in high schools because of college admissions and the desire to keep students and their parents happy. We already have so many high school students graduate with perfect or near perfect GPAs today. And that’s probably we should expect to come out of many colleges in the future if the trend continues.

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For an employer’s cutoff GPA, 3.0 is much more likely than 3.5, based on NACE surveys.

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I guess it depends on the industry. For STEM/CS majors anything above a 3.0 would look favorably. But for other more competitive jobs, a 3.5 was the minimum threshold.

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For first time jobs. By the time you are in your late 20’s early 30s companies will be more concerned with what you’ve done in your professional career

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After your first job they probably don’t care much about GPA. That first job though, that can unfortunately be a “weed out” point.

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At Columbia, the cap is 25% for latin honors:

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 .

I can’t speak for other colleges, but only comment at what I see at some of the undergraduate colleges at Columbia University.

I understand that whatever “average GPA” at “pick your Ivy” makes for a great “talking point” and feeds into preconceived notions some might have, but my take is different:

If you pre-select the top students across the country, with u/w HS GPA’s above 3.8 (so basically an “A” in every class for 4 years), who are top performers of standardized tests (not graded by well-meaning local teacher/schools pacifying local school boards), including top AP/IB Scores,…
and from that crème de la crème still reject >90%, you end up with cohorts who likely combine

  • certain intellectual abilities to quickly grasp advanced concepts in a variety of fields,
  • with good studying habits,
  • reasonably good time management,
  • ability to pump out papers,
  • unsupervised discipline to self-study/prepare for tests…

So why would anyone assume that a large percentage of these individuals would magically lose those abilities, once they enter whatever top-tier college!?

Specifically, my daughter had 4 crazily intense years at high school (her own doing). Yes, she found the college class-schedule of x classes per week much more amicable than her HS schedule of x classes each single day. But, she carried through her work-habits at an Ivy League university, and whenever we spoke, or met, or when she was home, she always already had whatever next paper or lab in mind, she’d still had to work on.

After four years of equally disciplined work (still interspersed with plenty of fun), with classes taught at a much higher level than what she did at HS, she succeeded in maintaining the grades, and her class-standing, that she had had in high school.
I’m also not surprised that the few, very bright, peers of hers that I met, would do similarly well on average.

Why would I suspect anything nefarious? I’m writing the “inflated” label off as mostly envy.

Thus a more appropriate title for this thread should be:
Grade inflation at colleges: good thing? or bad? or a thing at all?

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Thanks for your insight. That is some great perspective.

However, with respect to the quote above from your post, that has ALWAYS been the case. At least for med school and law school (the former based on family experience and the latter based on my own), they have always required high GPAs. For med school, that’s particularly the case for the core pre-med classes like Organic Chem, etc. And that has been the case for decades. Accordingly, I still don’t understand why grade inflation is so massive.

Also, a mean/median undergrad GPA of 3.7 is astronomical. As noted in the other thread on Harvard ALDCs, it’s almost pointless to have grades if this is what Harvard (and others) are doing. In reading some of the quotes by Harvard deans and senior administrators, they aren’t too happy about it either, but with these numbers, it doesn’t look like they are doing anything about their unhappiness. Perhaps, as one here noted, this is all about pleasing the “consumers” (i.e., the students). How that benefits them intellectually in the long run is questionable at best.

At the risk of dating myself, it sure wasn’t like this “back in the day.” I didn’t go to Harvard, but did go to alleged “top schools” for undergrad and law. And it was very much grade-oriented then, and we sure didn’t have a median/mean GPA of 3.7 out of 4.0.

I am not pointing the finger at Harvard, the Ivies, or colleges in general. I just wonder, as you point out, how this is possibly helping students LEARN. Getting a job is one thing, but learning is another.

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Absolutely no envy at all. My question, which still remains, is how is this any different than decades ago when GPA meant something? And the added question of what exactly was the need for the steep inflation starting in the early 1990s and continuing today?

All of these factors that you cite have been present at Ivies and other “top schools” for many, many years. A 3.7 mean/median GPA of the senior class at Harvard is a bit of a farce. They might as well give Pass/Fail grades, rather than this kind of stuff.

As noted here and in the ALDC thread, there are some striking examples of deans and senior admins at Harvard bemoaning grade inflation. They certainly don’t think it’s a good thing. But they also don’t appear to be doing anything about it either is the most recent senior class had a 3.7 mean/median GPA.

Feel free to change the title if you have the editing rights to do so. It’s obviously “a thing at all” because, otherwise, what’s the point?

Thanks.

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FWIW, 30 years ago 10% of the graduating class at Yale was summa, and nearly half got latin honors. They changed it so that it became determined as a fixed percentage of the class (now, 5% is summa, and no ore than 30% get any latin honors), which was an attempt to keep the integrity of “honors” without necessarily finding a solution to the grade inflation that was clearly occurring.

So any supposed “back in the day” has to be more than 35 years ago, as “back in my day” it was already occurring at Ivy schools. In “my” day, the largest distinction was between an “A/A-” and a “B/B+” - the latter was “bad” and was it was hard to do worse, the former distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘great’. (If I remember, there wasn’t a single person in my graduating class that had a perfect 4.0 …or, at least, we all groaned at graduation when they said the person who won the highest academic award got his only non-A A- in that second semester of his senior year). I also remember one of the Teaching Assistants commenting on the grade inflation at the time, but his point was that it made sense, that he was grading on an “absolute” scale and having taught at other schools, he thought a lot what he got was “A” work in comparison to elsewhere.

The “why” I think is mostly that no teacher or faculty member (and frankly, no administrator) has any incentive to give out bad grades, in particular because they need to be justified and cause the giver to endure a barrage of calls from the student and his/her parents that simply isn’t worth it. It’s like inflation: the Fed doesn’t target 0% but 2%, since people always seek to have their wages rise or get a price increase, and the Fed knows it is easier to let this happen a little on average than to try to not have it happen at all.

I’d argue the solution would be not a simple ‘curve’ requirement, but (like honors) a limit on the number of As or A+s that can be given (maybe modified for class size or level)… so that at least you force a competition at the top, rather than for the middle.

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One factor that I’m starting to see more and more of, and which was not a thing “back in my day” is students asking for their marks to be bumped up, both in high school, and now, bleeding into university as well. Statements along the lines of “I want an A, can I ask my prof to bump my mark by 3%?” would have been unheard of when I attended university, but I am seeing it frequently asked by freshmen on various forums. Some students are reporting success in getting marks maybe .5% rounded up to get them to the next letter grade.

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Because that strategy worked so well at Princeton. :roll_eyes:

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Not the best example, since people in the know should have been aware of the lack of grade inflation at Princeton, but if the top applicants from Harvard have a 3.9 and the top applicants from Princeton have a 3.6, which applicant gets chosen? Med/law schools are not going to analyze which college has grade inflation vs deflation. No college wants to be be seen as uncompetitive in grad school admissions.

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Maybe that’s a good argument for why graduate schools should emulate the holistic admissions methods that their undergraduate counterparts are utilizing these days?

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SE, that’s not quite my point. What some have said on this thread is that grade inflation is designed to put the students in place to get into law and med schools etc. A 3.6 from Princeton and a 3.9 from Harvard are both exceptional grades (or at least I thought so until finding out the extent of the inflation).

It has ALWAYS been the case that you need excellent grades for these kinds of schools, along with strong standardized test scores. That was the way it was 40, 30, 20, and 10 years ago, and now. I just fail to understand what purpose today is served with a median/mean classwide GPA of 3.7. Is it simply that every school does it, so school X has to do it too?

In your scenario, I would think BOTH would get chosen, assuming good LSAT or MCAT scores, as the case may be.

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But isn’t that the point of the holistic evaluations? The regular method of using GPA and test scores were felt to be inadequate and/or unfair. So they felt like they had to use “multiple sources of information to get the fullest picture of each applicant’s potential.”

In the near future when every grad school applicant has a GPA > 3.8, what is the use of looking at grades? If LSATs and MCATs are also determined to be unfair to certain populations, grad school admission offices will essentially be in the same boat.

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The point is to make the numbers fit the claim. Out of instinct, I clicked on the “research” dataset, supposedly for Columbia - and it reads almost COMICAL:

  • 1982 and 2000, method unspecified
  • 2005, estimated from percent A’s awarded using a formula derived from other highly selective universities
  • 2006, estimated from percent A+ through B+ grades awarded using a formula derived from other highly selective universities
  • 1995-1999, 2001-2004, 2008-2009, average grade awarded for academic year estimated from %A grades in Arts & Sciences using a formula derived from other highly selective universities

So when “researchers” are using relations to single individual grades or two grades from other universities to “derive” the majority of GPA averages of the rest of the universities - and the majority of cited “references” turn out to be blog entries, opinion pieces and other articles, then I question the underlying assumption for this entire discussion.

I do agree that someone had the economic foresight to register a catchy domain name :smirk:

https://www.gradeinflation.com/Columbia.html

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