Is it true that public universities tend to grade more harshly (gives out lower average GPA) than private universities?
To make the question not to broad, let’s only discuss about universities whose national ranking fall between 20-80 is.
Thanks for any responding 
Lol… Have you heard of Harvey Mudd?
@SolidKC , here is one resource on the subject:
Should this be an indication, none appear here:
https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings?rankings=students-study-most
Hard to generalize. If you dig deeply on specific school’s websites, you can often find grade reports, since these are public institutions which are obligated to share information with the public. My kid is at UW Madison, and would sometimes use those grade reports to see whether one professor was “tougher” than another for the same course, and plan accordingly, especially for distribution requirements.
I’d speculate that, wider grade distributions at major public universities could be, at least in part,to the fact that the institution’s mission is to educate its own residents, and therefore the slice of instate students may contain more variations than at similar private schools. Again, at UW, my kid had a handful of freshman friends transfer back to their local UW campus, regrettably, because they didn’t balance school and partying. But the kids who worked hard and stayed focused excelled in the classroom and have had fabulous opportunities as students and post-grad.
Can’t make that sweeping generalization. Two professors at the same university teaching the same course don’t always grade the same way.
Even within the same university, grade distributions can vary widely by major or department.
Such a generalization cannot be made. NYU Stern has an explicit curve where only 35% of students are supposed to get As and it’s a private school. I hear BU and Wharton suffer from grade deflation as well but I haven’t done my own research.
The grade curves are steeper at public universities than at the top private colleges, but the real reason for that is the quality of the student body top to bottom (and a little bit due to the extra resources available to help those students succeed).
The top students at the publics are as good as anyone at Harvard, but the middle and bottom of the class at Harvard also are spectacular students, while that is not the case for Big State U. That kid who squeaked into Harvard with a 3.95 high school gpa, 11 APs and a 34 ACT is not going to suddenly deserve C’s just because the girl sitting next to him had a 4.0 gpa, 13 APs and a 36 ACT. Both of those kids are likely to produce excellent work.
Some of the difference is explained by the quality of the students. You would expect better results from better students. The top 25 colleges’ incoming have higher SAT/ACT averages over the time period in the gradeinflation.com graph.
“Is it true that public universities tend to grade more harshly (gives out lower average GPA) than private universities?”
Nope. Not true.
^^ It’s objective fact that average GPAs of top public schools are lower–in some cases considerably lower–than average GPAs across top private schools. Michigan and Cal have the highest average GPAs among the top public institutions at ~3.3 and ~3.4 (most elite public schools seem to be around 3.15), whereas 6/8 of the Ivy League have averages >3.45 (with Brown, Harvard, and presumably Yale >3.6). Average amongst the top LACs looks to be upwards of 3.5. Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, Rice, and Georgetown all appear to be high 3.4/low 3.5 range.
I’m not going to dispute whether or not the grading is actually harsher (that leads to the “how much does easier grading compensate for supposed higher caliber of student” argument), but the fact is, a middle of the curve kid at most top private schools will end up with a 3.5 or so, whereas a middle of the curve kid at an elite public school will end up with closer to a 3.2.
That being said, I would assume that there’s very little gap academically between the academic top ~25% of most elite public institutions (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Michigan, UNC, Virginia) and elite private schools. Within the top 10% of students at each, the gap is smaller, and it’s reasonable to believe that the top 5% of students at Cal or Mich are on pretty even academic footing with the top kids at Harvard/Stanford/MIT and co.
@philbegas BU definitely participates in grade deflation. I have several friend who attend and they all always complain grade deflation at BU is worse than both MIT and Harvard.
A lot also depends on the major. At my D’s top private school, getting >3.5 in ChemE takes a LOT of hard work, and students in that major tend to look at the humanities courses as “easy A’s”, and at those taking business or even compsci as “having it easy”. (On the other hand, the architecture majors apparently have the toughest time of all.)
I do not know why people are saying that such an assertion cannot be made. We cannot ignore that some schools perpetuate grade inflation across most of their courses (cough cough Brown and Harvard). Yes, a lot of things are dependent on major, department, etc. - but these majors, departments, etc. are largely present in both public and private universities within the top 100.
Are private universities usually more guilty of grade inflation? This article seems to say so: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/01/same-performance-better-grades/384447/ .
3.3 gpa avg at private universities vs 3.0 avg at public is far too much of a disparity to be ignored.