You can see the top of the curve at UCLA from the Latin Honors cutoffs. Broadly speaking top 20% 3.8, top 10% 3.9, top 5% 3.95. Perhaps 1% have 3.99-4.00.
https://registrar.ucla.edu/registration-classes/graduation/final-degree-audit/honors
During Covid the P/NP deadline was later (week 6 I think). Will be interesting to see if they move it back to the original deadline.
It’s my understanding that prior to the 1994 grading changes, you could drop the course up until the day to of the final and could repeat the course an unlimited number of times. I am not aware of a limitation of only repeating if C- or lower. Some newspaper stories claimed it was common for students to purposely fail courses since failing grades did not appear on the transcript, but I doubt that this is accurate. However, I do think many students who believed a non-A grade was on the horizon dropped the class after having completed the majority of class hours and work. This fits with students expressing concern about the proposed changes to drop deadline, rather than proposed changes of restoring failing grade.
In 1994 this generous grading system was modified to something similar to the current system, which is quoted below. Note that it mentions the student may retake “any course on his or her transcript, regardless of the grade earned.” The transcript indicates that the course was repeated, but does not list the original grade. One of the 1994 changes was limiting to a max of 1 repeat unless the student receives a NC/NP. They also restored the NC/NP grade and changed the drop course deadline to within the first 8 weeks.
A student may retake any course on his or her transcript, regardless of grade earned, and have the original grade, for completed courses only, replaced by the notation ‘RP” (repeated course). When retaking a course, the student should enroll in it for the same number of units originally taken. When the grade for the second enrollment in the course has been reported, the units and grade points for the second course count in the cumulative grade point average in place of the grade and units for the first enrollment in the course. Because the notation ‘RP’ can only replace grades for completed courses, the notation 'W’ and ‘I’ are not replaced by the notation ‘RP.’
A student may not retake the same course for a third time unless s/he received a ‘NC’ (no credit) or ‘NP’ (not passed) when it was taken and completed the second time. When a student completes a course for the third time, grades and units for both the second and third completions count in the cumulative grade point average. The notation ‘W’ is not counted toward the three-retake maximum.
These policies reflect changes adopted by the faculty Senate on June 2, 1994.
There was a long report about grade distribution during as part of the grading changes in 1994. It mentions that in 1992-93 Stanford had the following grade distribution:
In 1992-93, the mostly commonly assigned grade was A. The median letter grade in undergraduate courses was A-; it was A at the graduate level. The C was given out only 9 percent of the time to undergraduates and 3 percent to graduate students.
At the undergraduate level, the natural sciences and earth sciences assign the smallest proportion of A’s and the largest proportion of C’s. On the other hand, more than 55 percent of letter grades assigned by the humanities and language/literature departments are A’s. They assign about half as many C’s as do other H&S divisions,
I attended Stanford after the grading changes were in place that are described above. My experience was the vast majority of students did not repeat courses, but there was a minority who did. Earlier in the thread, I mentioned one woman I knew who repeated courses in which she received an A- grade. She attended Harvard Medical School on a special award after Stanford.
With the repeat courses option and the most commonly assigned grade being A, one might think this means Stanford classes were all easy A’s with little work. My experience was quite different. It was common for undergraduate math/science/pre-med foundation classes with students from a variety of majors to have a median grade of B/B+, particularly ones that are not at a more accelerated or more rigorous level than the default track. Many students found classes challenging and found achieving higher grades in those classes to be challenging, which sometimes led to switching out of quantitative majors. For example, following the first midterms of freshman year, they had psychological counselors sent to our dorms as a preventative measures because a significant portion of students were struggling with getting the lowest grades of their lives, such as first ever B’s.
As I noted earlier, I don’t think achieving A grades at Stanford was consistently easier or harder than other colleges where I have taken classes, including publics. However, it was common for Stanford classes to require more work per week than other colleges, such as more pages of reading. There were also often opportunities to take higher levels of classes for students that were looking for higher levels of rigor or more advanced treatment of subjects. For example advanced freshman physics at Stanford was at a far more rigorous level than the physics courses I took at RPI. I found this physics class to be one of the most challenging courses I have taken, even though the median grade in the class was at least A-.
1NJ: I think I’m reading this almost the opposite. That the reason they are dropping GPA as a screening tool is not because everyone is crowded above the hurdle due to grade inflation so that the hurdle doesn’t mean much anymore, but that the companies are looking to hire people from different backgrounds, but the GPA cutoff was preventing them from reviewing the resumes of the people they are seeking. So that the hurdle/cutoff was too strict for their goals, not that it was meaningless.
Companies try- not always successfully, but most of them try- to conduct a thorough analysis to make sure that the screeners are actually tied to job performance. So if a company has data that shows that new hires with a verbal SAT score of below 650 wash out in year one at a significantly higher rate than new hires with a verbal SAT score of 700+, that might suggest (in the good old days when college bound HS kids took SAT/ACT’s) that using standardized test scores was an appropriate and easily implemented resume screen.
Ditto for GPA although the variability (do you compare a 3.7 in chemical engineering from Cornell- a very high GPA from that college to a 3.8 in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic?) if you are hiring for a Sustainability role becomes muddy.
In my own experience, lowering the GPA hurdle does introduce a different cohort into the room. You get students who are more passionate about learning for its own sake and who may have stretched themselves past their “I’m good at this” limit. (Physicists who took Mandarin “just because”. History majors who took CS. Lit majors who took the two semester, calc based sequence in Econ). It also introduces the kids who worked 25 hours a week and couldn’t possibly manage all A’s and A minuses while still sleeping. And everyone’s favorite candidate to interview- the PASSIONATE ec kids- the social justice warriors, the editor in chief of an award winning newspaper (who basically lived, breathed and ate journalism for four years as he/she worked their way up the ladder), the kid who revamped the city’s intake system for the homeless while converting an unused ambulance into a mobile clinic… etc.
One of my D’s internship companies wanted to see her entire transcript. They were looking for specific grades in certain courses, plus what they chose for elective.
Ongoing grade inflation trend might be due to the following factors.
Many postings on this thread suggest that employers don’t care as much,
Student and parent demand. Can they have that much pull?
Grad school demand seems like the most likely factor. Top medical schools and law schools currently have median GPAs for matriculants in the 3.85+ range Medical schools have a very narrow band. The average median GPA for the top 121 US medical schools is 3.75.
Yup, I’ve worked for companies that required the full transcript. 
I had a boss who didn’t want to interview anyone with a 4.0. She believed that indicated a low tolerance for risk OR a grade-grubber OR someone who wanted to stay in their own lane, not qualities that worked well for a role which required a comfort level with ambiguity and the need to accept failure (some of the time) as the price you pay for bold ideas.
She was an outlier for sure, but it gave us all something to think about as we looked at transcripts which pretty much screamed “I won’t take any class where I’m not going to get an A”! Some college kids just like to stay in their wheelhouse!
But when looking at academic records, wouldn’t it be obvious whether the 4.0 student was a grade grubber majoring in general studies with the minimum number of hard courses, versus one with top end academic strength majoring in (for example) physics and philosophy with electives in a difficult (non-heritage) foreign language and upper level math?
That seems a little short sighted as it discounts students who may be all around strong. My older son has all A’s as a Physics major and has also taken courses in Classics and History in which he also got A’s. He gets A’s not only because he is bright, a hard worker, and an independent learner, but also because he takes courses that he’s passionate about. All of his employers have been very pleased with him but based on the criteria of not interviewing anyone with a 4.0 he would have been discounted.
Huh, I think it sounds to me like HER boss may have made an error in their hiring practices ;-). Short-sighted, indeed. There are incredible people with 4.0s that do all of the wonderful things you mentioned above (the passion, the trying classes out of their major expertise for the sake of learning, the editors of the newspaper, people who work paid jobs simultaneous with school) and STILL get amazing grades. They are stars, and it’s pretty weird to me that you would automatically screen out people with 4.0s. But to each their own! But I agree that she is likely an outlier. I haven’t really heard of others that refuse to interview people with 4.0s.
ETA: Of course, she may have been hiring for a role where that kind of star wasn’t needed, so she may have been doing the right thing.
I’ll interview anyone who seems like a good candidate am not wowed by a 4.0. I have never liked seeing GPA on a resume. Period. If someone graduated summa cum laude and wants to present their degree that way, fine.
My bias may be closer to that of @blossom 's old boss but I am open-minded.
I’ve always thought gpa on the resume was weird. I know it is a thing now, and I’m totally dating myself, but I just don’t get it. I guess for a first job it might add value, but after that I don’t see the point. Work is not a continuation of school - excelling in one does not necessarily mean you will excel in the other (as anyone with a long career could tell you).
All of these arbitrary rules are just that- arbitrary. Don’t want to interview the 4.0’s is just as silly as “we won’t interview below a 3.2” or whatever an arbitrary cutoff might be.
Well put.
For the small number of people I have known who have gotten a 4.0 or better (better means they were at a university that gave 4.3 or 4.33 for an A+), this was definitely NOT the way that they did it. Every student who I have known who had a 4.0 or better liked to take the hardest classes. Then they aced the hardest classes. This is however based on a rather small sample size.
This does seem like something that could be figured out either by looking at the student’s transcript or talking to them or by asking their references.
Here’s a good story about the type of person your boss would overlook.
One of my best friends in college received a 4.0 at a state flagship. There were only a handful in the entire university (out of several thousand graduating) and he was the only one getting a 4.0 with an engineering degree.
He is one of the smartest people I ever met. The thing about him was how easy it was for him. Besides the grades, he was President of two major clubs on campus and had an active social life. After undergrad he went to MIT to study Physics. And there, he received the one and only B of his life, where in his first semester he took a class for later stage PhD candidates.
He then joined a startup doing optics, made a key invention that made the company successful. After making a ton of money during the dot com boom, he bought a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He still works but only to keep his mind busy, not because he has to.
Plus taking all the electives for a grade. My son claims that at UC Berkeley, everybody takes the “breadth” requirements P/F. In my day nobody took classes P/F unless they were actually in danger of failing, it was a desperation move. My husband and I convinced our son to take all his classes for a grade, we were horrified that he would even think of taking a class P/F!
It’s interesting, S didn’t discover until junior year that this was a thing, after he’d completed all the GenEd requirements. He eventually took one class (non-fiction creative writing with a bunch of English majors) P/F but one friend used P/F for all their foreign language classes (needed if you don’t have an AP).
If an arbitrary system has been put in place that you need to navigate/classify in, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with everyone making that system work to their advantage - within the parameters of that system.
“Gaming the system” has a negative connotation, but to me it’s like knowing the tax laws and IRS rulings and wherever there’s room for (lawful) interpretation, let that work in your favor - rather than leaving money on the table. I truly am “happy” to pay whatever I owe - but beyond that, I choose to pick my own causes for donations.