And a reality-request: if grade inflation doesn’t matter, my simple question remains why is it done at all?
Outcomes for different post-college paths emphasize different criteria to different degrees. For example, it is well accepted that GPA is highly influential for law and medical school admission. Med/law schools generally do not just use GPA as a basic > 3.0 screen, like is common among many employers, so much higher GPA numbers may be expected/required.
There are also other influential factors besides just admission to grad/profession school or getting a quality job after college. For example, the student quotes I listed from the Princeton’s post-mortem report after attempting to limit A’s to 35% of class mentioned different issues, specifically:
- More competitive atmosphere with some students refusing to help peers out of fear that their peers would get the limited 35% A’s. Reports of students “actively sabotaging” peers by giving wrong notes or information.
- Students who sufficiently understand and master material as measured by very high % on exams getting non-A grades
- Losing financial scholarship that depends on maintaining a particular GPA each semester
The thread has also mentioned that GPA influences major persistence/attrition and class selection.
I’d imagine the college also cares about things like how grading policies impacts number of applications, how likely a desired admit is to choose that college over peers, and generally how content students are while attending the college.
Note that I am not saying everyone should get A’s or the higher the GPA, the better. I am instead saying that grade inflation/deflation influences a variety of factors that are relevant to both students and the college, even through many employers place little emphasis on GPA besides a basic threshold screen.
In my field, the GPA and test scores eliminate over 70% of applicants. There is not enough time to review all of the applications that are received in any detail. The ones that meet the threshold screen are looked at more carefully to determine who eventually gets an interview. Of course, as the % of applications that meet the threshold screen increases, the utility of using it decreases. In response, one can try to raise the GPA and test score threshold. But if it’s already near the maximum value, what’s the point?
There are lots of things that don’t matter that students and/or college administrators think are important- or ARE important in an academic setting but not that important in a corporate setting.
Triple majoring? No. Employers don’t care. I read posts here from kids who get three hours of sleep a night because they are overloaded with a triple major. I post “Drop one or two ASAP; convert it to your major and POSSIBLY a minor in something you love, and then go attend a concert, your roommates poetry slam, listen to a symposium as two professors debate each other on the future of wind and solar”. I get pushback that triple majors are SO important for hiring. Ok, you’re 19 years old and you’ve got corporate America all figured out. If you think your resume is getting flagged as “Got to hire this one” because you are majoring in applied math, majoring in French AND majoring in econ you are wrong. You can major in math, write “fluent in French”, and show a couple of econ courses and you are just as good- really- and will get more sleep AND get more out of your college experience.
The vogue for fake type internships? Ditto. You interned at XYZ and your job was getting coffee for the head honchos? Better to get an actual paying job where you were responsible for something- and your value to the organization was proven by your paycheck.
I could continue but you get my point. Just because kids think it’s important in hiring doesn’t mean it is…
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It’s not just about getting a job and corporates not caring about grades. Many of these undergrads are applying to grad schools where grades do matter (e.g., law school, med school, B school).
Of course. I wasn’t implying that my own experience (35 years in recruiting for large, global corporations) was the be-all and end all of academia. But the argument made upthread “the companies are causing the grade inflation because if kids don’t have a 3.9 they’ll never get a job” or some flavor thereof… well, do your homework before you assert that it’s industry that’s created grade inflation.
And agree with Data that correlation does not imply causation- at least on the grad school front.
I may have missed it, but I don’t recall anyone asserted that employers were primarily responsible for grade inflation. IMO, they’re just part of the feedback loop for grade inflation. Many of them do use grades as a filter because of the number of job applicants. If grades keep going up, they may have to raise the minimum threshold to maintain the effectiveness of the filter, which may trigger, directly or indirectly, another round of grade inflation.
I may have missed it in this rather long thread, but I am just sort of curious. With grade inflation how common is it for a student to graduate university with nothing but A’s over the fully four years (or with nothing but A’s and A+'s for universities that allow A+'s)? Let’s assume for this purpose that the student takes a rigorous set of courses (with either multiple classes on the “organic chemistry” level, or the equivalent hard classes in other majors).
I would think that this would be rather rare if only due to (1) the need to take some courses outside of your major in areas where you might not be as strong; and (2) the likelihood of running into one professor somewhere over four years and 40 classes where you just do not “jell” with the professor. Way back in answer #3 of this thread I see numbers that suggest that this is 11% of the Harvard graduating class, which seems high to me but maybe it has become this common. Of course being in the top 11% of the Harvard graduating class is quite good.
In terms of looking for a job or in terms of applying to graduate school I am not sure that this will matter when compared to a student that has mostly A’s with a handful of B’s, or even mostly A’s, a handful of B’s, and one or two C’s in courses outside of their major. It might just be one of those things that a student does for the sake of doing it and knowing that they could.
It does appear that use of GPA by employers for hiring out of college is going down:
Use of GPA in hiring out of college fell from 73.3% of those surveyed for the 2019 report* to 46.3% of those surveyed for the 2022 report*. It also says that “Among organizations that use GPA to screen candidates, 3.0 is the most common cut off” and “Still, the overall drop and the trend away from using GPA appear to reflect growing awareness among the employment community that screening by GPA may undermine efforts to build an inclusive workforce and disadvantage students who are balancing school with work and other responsibilities. It also suggests that the competition for talent has employers scrutinizing their initial screening procedures.” (Such reasons would not be mutually exclusive to the possibility that grade inflation has reduced the usefulness of a GPA screen; if so, perhaps employers are opting out rather than raising their threshold GPAs.)
*Which probably means the actual survey was done the previous year.
Probably not very common, but it is likely that it does occur simply because there are lots of students graduating from lots of universities every year. It even occasionally occurred decades ago when there was much less grade inflation.
It would not be surprising if such students were more likely than others at the same university to choose harder courses overall. Yes, there are many students who try to grade-grub to high GPAs, but those earning 4.0 GPAs in college (especially with numerous A+ grades) are likely to be among the academically strongest students who have no need to grade-grub for their 4.0 GPAs.
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Note that the 11% number is from a newspaper survey, which may include selection bias, rounding, people listing in-major GPA rather than cumulative, etc. The summa cum laude threshold for top 5% has never been a 4.0, although with post-COVID influence from remote learning, the top 5% GPA thresholds seem to be getting close, with >3.9x GPA required for the highest latin honors.
Harvard also gives a valedictorian like award to the seniors with the highest GPA in the class, which typically requires a perfect 4.0. This award has been shared as tie between to 0.2% to 1% of the class in the 5 years prior to COVID, suggesting <= 1% of the class is tied for highest rank with a perfect 4.0, which seems low. Perhaps they are considering other criteria, such as honors within department.
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Doesn’t seem that low to me (3 to 15 people per year). I think we’d hear of more people with a 4.0 (for example it seems to typically get put in the blurb for prestigious scholarship winners) if the number was much higher.
D’s lower ranking college has summa as top 1% and despite relatively generous grading, fewer than 1% get a 4.0 (cutoff is typically 3.99+). Having said that, I bet someone with 3.995 and perhaps even some with 3.96 would round up if asked by a newspaper survey. I’d guess that even at larger state universities the absolute number of graduates with perfect grades is in the low double digits per year.
During Covid however it was often possible to switch to P/NP much later in the semester. Because of that, I’m sure more people were able to preserve a 4.0 if they were concerned about it.
No one should be surprised that fewer employers will use GPA for screening as grades become more inflated. As more and more students crowd the upper GPA bands, their value for screening diminishes. Employers who had relatively high GPA threshold would have to be abandon it. However, the remaining employers would still need to raise the threshold if they wish to continue to use GPA for screening.
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If that was the case, then we’d expect the portion using GPA as a screen to be gradually decreasing for decades since average grades of grads has been increasing for decades. However, there is a very different pattern – little difference in portion using GPA screen until 2020. There were other changes in many employment fields that occurred in 2020, besides just effects of grade inflation.
2014 – 67% use GPA screen
2015 – 68% use GPA screen
2016 – 69% use GPA screen
2017 – 69% use GPA screen
2018 – 68% use GPA screen
2019 – 73% use GPA screen
COVID Occurs and Leads to Large Changes in Many Employment Fields
2020 – 63% use GPA screen
2021 – 57% use GPA screen
2022 – 46% use GPA screen
But what value does gpa have in the first place - in terms of getting a job (obviously important for graduate and professional school)? For technical jobs they test your skills and for non-technical positions your personal skills and attributes are often more important than your gpa. I’ve known brilliant people that have been absolute disasters in the work place and less well educated folks that are star performers.
I wouldn’t expect changes to come gradually. It isn’t practical for employers to change the threshold gradually (e.g. from 2.5 to 2.6). Instead, they’re likely to respond to grade inflation with more abrupt changes.
The primary reason employers use GPA is simply because they have too many applicants and they can’t interview them all. They may view GPA as a measure of some demonstration of basic intellectual competence (e.g. the ability to learn new things).
Your earlier post wrote, “Employers who had relatively high GPA threshold would have to be abandon it. However, the remaining employers would still need to raise the threshold if they wish to continue to use GPA for screening.”. Suppose employers abandoned GPA screening when the average cumulative GPA of a particular college exceeds 3.5. Over time the portion of colleges with cum GPA over time gradually becomes larger, so the portion of employers using GPA screen gradually decreases.
In any case, this theory doesn’t appear to have happened. Instead the survey results suggest the portion of employers using GPA as a screen appears to be relatively flat until COVID. Following COVID, there appears to have been a rapid decrease in portion of employers who report using a GPA screen.
I still vividly recall comparing grading rules with a friend when I was at UCLA (public school) and he was at Stanford.
At UCLA students had 3 weeks to drop a course or switch to pass/no pass. After that they were stuck – no matter what happened you would either get a grade. Three weeks was often before you had any graded work at all and always before you had a major grade to calibrate against. If you got a C- or lower you could retake the course, but the original grade was permanently on your transcript and in your GPA. I once had a professor wait until week 4 then smugly announce to the class that he was going to do his part to compensate for perceived grade inflation (back when the average GPA was way lower than now) by capping the top of his curve to a B.
Meanwhile at Stanford the process worked like this (at least at the time). You could drop a course until the last week before the final. It would not appear on your transcript. If you got a C- or lower as your final class grade you could retake the course and the new grade would replace the old grade on your transcript and GPA; the old grade would be wiped from your record. He said it was not uncommon if someone knew they weren’t performing well on the final to purposely tank it so they would be eligible to fix their grade the next time around.
I would be curious to see stats at both the high school and college level comparing average GPA’s for public vs private schools. I suspect the latter are higher, not necessarily because (or at least not exclusively because) of student achievement but because private schools are more incentivized to accommodate student and parent expectations. My kids are/did go to a great public school. Some teachers are known for being similar to that old prof: they grade very hard and give out few A’s even to high achievers. They have tenure. The school leaves them alone. I can imagine the parent pressure at a school collecting large tuition checks with the expectation of setting them up for college admissions.
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And public schools, subsidized by tax payers, have an obligation to be more efficient with the public’s money – which may mean making classes available to as many students as possible by allowing each student only one shot at each class.
But the point that it’s impossible to compare across schools, programs, class choices is well taken