<p>I don't see how top university academics are any tougher than top liberal arts academics on average. Most of these schools require 32-36 courses, distribution requirements, have qualified teachers, and qualified students. By and large the difficulty is going to be the same across schools. </p>
<p>Much more important is the overall academic reputation and quality of students than the school type (Swarthmore, Amherst, Harvard, Princeton will have roughly similar degrees of toughness)</p>
<p>so you are saying schools that are notorious for grade inflation will be as rigourous as schools which have a reputation for giving out no A's?</p>
<p>A school can be both rigorous and give out many "A's," or not so and give out many "A's."</p>
<p>"Rigor" doesn't only have to do with grades. Required courses, workload, number of courses required, etc. are all equally important.</p>
<p>The whole notion of grade inflation may be over inflated. The kids that are accepted into these alleged "grade inflated" schools have always been the brightest high achievers. Why shouldn't that trend continue in college?
Could it be possible that they actually deserve the grades that they are receiving in college?</p>
<p>Why would a straight "A" high school student with extremely high standard test scores and proven academic abilities suddenly slack off in college?</p>
<p>Well, it's not a new thing that the best and brightest go to top schools. But it is a new thing that GPA's are up massively at the top schools. Perhaps people are just getting smarter? LoL?</p>
<p>A professor, Harvey Mansfield, at Harvard who gave a lecture here a few months ago says that he gives his students two grades--what they deserved and what he is obliged to give them as a professor at Harvard. Haha.</p>
<p>In any case, you shouldn't think that a person who gets an A+ at Harvard really deserves a B-, I don't think grade inflation is so dramatic.</p>
<br>
<p>it's not a new thing that the best and brightest go to top schools.</p>
<br>
<p>To a large extent, that IS a new thing, something that came about only in the 70's and 80's. When Harvey Mansfield was an undergrad and earlier, HYP et al. were largely the next step for privileged young men coming out of prep schools, most of whom had family connections to particular universities (W wasn't alone at Yale by any means). Some of them were smart and/or hard-working, but plenty were satisfied with the "gentleman's C," which had that name for a reason. Back then, the smart children of nobodies from public schools got whatever space was left over in the HYP class, and even brilliant kids often stayed close to home for college. So filling 99% of the class with the brightest and most driven kids from all over the country is a recent innovation in the history of HYP.</p>
<p>Of course, Harvey Mansfield attributes grade inflation to affirmative action (which wouldn't begin to explain why the trend has continued over the last 20 years even though affirmative action has remained constant), but he's not the only one with a theory. One school of thought that holds that grade inflation follows tuition inflation -- in other words, tuition has been rising much faster than incomes over the last 40 years, and people aren't willing to pay those prices in exchange for C's...they'd just go to a public school instead. This is consistent with the fact that public schools have inflated grades at a much lower rate than privates.</p>
<p>Hanna, good point, the meritocracy, the nationalization of colleges, college "rankings," etc. is a very recently phenomenon. 20 years old or so. What I am amazed at is how well colleges that were on the "top" in the 1950s, 1920s, and earlier have generally stayed at the top (of course, your Stanford, MITs, Dukes, Emorys have done much better recently, but not at the expense of the old school elite colleges). Colleges that earned their reputation largely on classism, elitism, and money remodeled themselves rather drastically (starting in the late 1960's, but really accelerating in the 1980's)...</p>