<p>It depends on the disribution so it's likely that the average is not equal to the median. One kid with a 2.0 and three with 4.0 gpas averages out to 3.5.</p>
<p>The Cornell grades cited above were "median 3.34".</p>
<p>Pton's grade deflation policy is explicit that there is to be no more than 35% As in most courses. Since they haven't had their finals yet, we have yet to see another wave of disappointment. This is a big change for the arts and humanities as the science and engineering programs were already at that approximate level. Mini, given that the quality of the freshmen class is much better than 30+ years, there is no 'grade inflation' (SAT1 scores up 100 to 200 points higher for incoming class, see The Chosen). The reality is you have a lot of bright, hard working kids that would have run rings around the class of '70 and they are going to get their first Bs. The bigger question is will people down the line (i.e., employers, grad school, professional schools) be able to make that distinction that a 3.35 is not their mother or father's 3.35.</p>
<p>"Mini, given that the quality of the freshmen class is much better than 30+ years, there is no 'grade inflation' (SAT1 scores up 100 to 200 points higher for incoming class, see The Chosen)."</p>
<p>I think the distribution of students across colleges is relatively the same as it was 25 years ago (except that at the top private colleges, there is less economic diversity - note that I said 25, not 35). 35 years ago, the average GPA at my alma mater was 2.6. </p>
<p>But the grade inflation at Cornell which I cited was over the past TEN year period. Doesn't matter much, though. The percentile distributions will remain the same. If the median grade is 3.34, anything below that is below the median. The bottom half of the class is still the bottom half of the class, no matter how you slice it. A freshman's grades may rise. They may also fall (I seem to remember something called "sophomore slump".) My grades soared after my first year. One of my roommates' grades remained stable. The other one's grades sank like a stone, and he dropped out for a year.</p>
<p>Regarding posts 76 and 77, the problem in many high schools, including my D's, is that there is no "honors" history; it's either AP or regular. All of the high-achieving students take the AP track, and one must take AP in order to have the challenging, "most rigorous" schedule desired by many college admissions committees. My D feels that her AP history and English courses may actually have undermined her writing ability, as all of these courses focused so heavily on the one-draft, relatively short, timed writing assignment. In college, she's had to unlearn the bad habits acquired in the AP courses; she's had to learn to write the multi-draft, carefully constructed, carefully-argued long essays required in every English and history course she's taken.</p>
<p>Amen to robc1116 about AP track. Once you're on it, you can't get off unless you want to be out of running for top schools. My high school's English department recognizes this problem of lacking writing abilities due to the format of the program. They did have Honors for 9, 10, and 11th grades but not for senior year. So the 11th grade Honors students like me had a choice- to "drop down" or to bite the bullet and take the AP. I wanted a 12th grade Honors just so that I can still have the fast pace of the AP but have the time to hone my writing abilities. This year is now their first year honoring that. Sigh!</p>
<p>AP ruins so many lives..... :) The stress! The anxiety! The overdermination! The reality!</p>
<p>On the median gpa question, I think it would be more relevant to compare Engineering gpas. I would bet they are lower than the overall median gpa within every college or university.</p>
<p>My husband, who is an engineer with a PhD from Berkeley recently came across his undergrad transcript from his technical college. He thought he'd gotten a D in freshman calculus. It turned out the D was in welding (yeah, he also took three required classes in concrete). Calculus was a C. Even given grade inflation, I don't think engineering grad programs or employers expect to see 4.0s.</p>
<p>On the APs, a lot of universities give credit units for a 4 or 5 but do not necessarily let you use it to pass out of a particular requirement. They may also only allow that credit after you've taken a certain class and obtained a grade of C or higher. Science departments tend to dismiss the idea that APs are the equal of their introductory classes. But, even if they were in terms of depth, the AP classes cover a college semester's worth of material over the length of a high school year. So, they do not prepare a student for the pace of a college class. Studying for an AP exam also is not comparable to studying for a college final.</p>
<p>Same thing with History. Our kids must choose either regular track or AP track history, which have completely different curriculums. Also, we have no Honors English for seniors. It's just as ticklmepink said, there is nothing for the intermediate student. This resulted in so many signing up for AP English (oh no! too many sections of that!) that the school actually tries to discourage students from taking it.</p>
<p>Also, I can see now that our AP courses are completely geared toward getting good scores on the AP exam, rather than covering a college level course. I'm glad DS took the easy freshman As!</p>
<p>Last year I was nervous about similar lower grade problem at prep school. My kid's prep school has many friends who score a C in class but majority of them earned five on AP exams. My kid has highest grade in some classes, which was only a B. No student in the class received a grade A. Two students did score nearly 4.0. However, they did not participate in any meaningful extracurricular activities. Both of them barely made lower ranked ivy school even though prep school sends more than 20% kids to Ivy League. The teacher told me that grades matter but more important is what you do with your life. It makes sense to me now that probably Ivy League uses the same criterion.</p>
<p>"On the median gpa question, I think it would be more relevant to compare Engineering gpas. I would bet they are lower than the overall median gpa within every college or university."</p>
<p>I bet they would be, too. But still, 50% of the engineering students are going to be below the median "for engineering students" - the laws of mathematics don't disappear regardless of school attended, department, or grade inflation or the lack thereof.</p>
<p>When I attended Cornell, Dean's List for the College of Arts & Sciences was 3.5 or above. Dean's List for the College of Engineering was 3.25 or above.</p>
<p>Don't know about now...</p>
<p>
[quote]
the laws of mathematics don't disappear regardless of school attended, department, or grade inflation or the lack thereof.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I never claimed math was MY strong suit! :)</p>
<p>The point I was trying to make was to put an engineering gpa into context in terms of the expectations of engineering grad programs or employers.</p>
<p>Maybe it is just the Cornell Engineering that is graded hard. . .</p>
<p>The confusion is the kid at school A where the average GPA is 2.9 and the kid at school B with an average GPA of 3.34. The kid at B says I should be admitted/hired because my 3.1 is better than my competition...a kid at A with a GPA of 3.0. However, the kid at A is in the top half of his/her class where the kid at B is in the bottom half of the class. As the averages move around due to grade inflation or a subsequent grade deflation policy (i.e., Pton), people may or may not change their idea of a good, mediocre or bad GPA. In sum, comparing GPAs across schools is stupid but it is done every day. The good news is colleges generally disclose class rank even though many (most?) high schools don't release such data.</p>
<p>When S was considering grad school, we were surprised at how many top programs he was ineligible for because they required a 3.5 or higher GPA. Some government jobs were the same. It was frustrating to have all college GPAs treated equally, regardless of the caliber of school, program, or student body.</p>
<p>I remember his dream school was London School of Economics, and he wasn't even allowed to consider it because he had a 3.4. He went to a challenging university, and took classes he was interested in rather than classes he thought would be easy, never realizing that pursuing genuine education would prevent him from pursuing further education!</p>
<p>Ok, this business of grades comes up often. Let me give you my thoughts on this (LONG POST).
In an ideal world, there would be a way of comparing the performances of students across the board. The GRE was partly designed to do this, but it is inadequate. Sadly the trend is to have LESS testing of students not more. Only a universally administered test that distinguished between high levels of student ability would equalize different schools.</p>
<p>In the absence of such tests one is faced with a dilemma that is mentioned often in the Caltech and MIT forums (and Chicago and Cornell). A mediocre grade from a tough program may be worse than a good grade from an easy university, no matter how unselective. This is a more serious problem for med school and law school than for PhD programs. On the other hand, it is less critical to graduate from the very top law and med schools just to get a decent job.</p>
<p>For the PhD the issue is complicated. We know which undergrad programs are tough, we just dont know what the appropriate conversion factors are. The upside is that if we see a 3.9 from MIT or Caltech and the recs are good, we usually dont care if the courses taken match the exact requirements of the program. That applicant moves to the head of the pile. A 4.0 from a mediocre school will keep you in the running when a 3.3 from Caltech/MIT might get you cut in some programs. But sometimes, there is nothing that the 4.0 from an undistinguished school can do to raise his/her visibility against the other applicants. A 4.0 with letters from teachers we dont know may not do any good.</p>
<p>The student at a top school like Cornell has the possibility of compensating for a lower grade by doing research as an undergrad and getting a strong and detailed letter of recommendation from a well known professor. Or even of publishing papers in serious journals. Students at elite schools have more chances to meet profs who are doing cutting edge research and who will know exactly what the top programs want.</p>
<p>The unfairness comes because schools minimize false positives not false negatives. Phd programs often want the kid who would have gotten an A at the very toughest schools. That sometimes means they mistakenly accept a weaker student with an A from a state school who might not perform as well as the 3.3 from a tough college. </p>
<p>On the other hand, some programs (for example Chicago in economics) take advantage of these errors by accepting many students who would be rejected by HYPSM and then flushing most of them in their early years of the PhD. Chicago has been extremely successful with this strategy of finding diamonds in the rough.</p>
<p>You also get to meet more top students in elite schools and these can be useful for business even if you do poorly in class. </p>
<p>Finally there are intangibles. There is the satisfaction of finishing in a top program. It is not about a career, its about how you view yourself. If you just want to maximize your career choices, go to the most famous school with the easiest grading but be aware that if you dont impress any profs, even that strategy may not pay off. So you pay your money and you take your chances.</p>
<p>My D is a freshman at a school that has competitive admissions standards and is known for challenging grading. At orientation, this past semester, they addressed this phenomenon with the students. Let me see if I can articulate how she recounted it to me:</p>
<p>-Students here come from the top strata of the general population with regards to academic capabilities. </p>
<p>-While here, variations in the abilities of that top strata will be in evidence as your performance is evaluated. (Think of a rubber band with pencil point marks on it being streched so that the marks are more readily differentiated.)</p>
<p>-When you are done here, you will go back out into the top strata of the population. (Think of that rubber band now being relaxed back to its original size.)</p>
<p>-So, don't sweat it. You will do just fine in life. And--as a dividend, you will have been challenged and responded to the challenge so that you can do so in the future.</p>
<p>"In the absence of such tests one is faced with a dilemma that is mentioned often in the Caltech and MIT forums (and Chicago and Cornell). A mediocre grade from a tough program may be worse than a good grade from an easy university, no matter how unselective."</p>
<p>Just as Cornell has had the highest rate of grade inflation of the Ivies over the past 10 years, of schools considered, UChicago has had the second highest rate of grade inflation (UWashington being first) over the past three decades.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gradeinflation.com%5B/url%5D">www.gradeinflation.com</a></p>
<p>Some myths die hard.</p>
<p>There seems to be a conflation of meanings of inflation in this discussion. One meaning is that the grades are higher than those students would have earned at another institution (synchronic). The second meaning is that grades within the same institution have risen over time (diachronic). The first denotes a static situation and a comparison, the second a process.</p>
<p>Harvard's grades have not risen as fast as at some other institutions, but they have also been consistently somewhat higher (synchronic). Chicago may have had a higher rate of grade inflation (diachronic) but they remain lower than at Harvard. I did not see Cornell on the list provided on the site.</p>
<p>to add onto dvan's post, my AP Psych teacher told us the following:</p>
<p>"When I went to law school, the dean told us that we were all very much the top of our classes at our colleges. Now there are 300 of us. Yes, everyone wanted to be the top but he needed someone to be in the 300th ranking and someone needs to be number one."</p>
<p>Bring out the competition!</p>