<p>do most ivies have grade inflation? anyone know if yale does?</p>
<p>Yes. Yale does.</p>
<p>princeton has instituted guidelines which actively suppresses grade inflation - putting caps, for instance, on the numbers of certain grades per class. </p>
<p>I am not sure what the average GPA is at Yale, but I doubt it is lower than a 3.2/3.3.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gradeinflation.org%5B/url%5D">http://www.gradeinflation.org</a></p>
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<p>princeton has instituted guidelines which actively suppresses grade inflation - putting caps, for instance, on the numbers of certain grades per class. </p>
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<p>targets, not caps. big difference.</p>
<p>Most top universities have some kind of grade inflation, which is caused in large part by the unwillingness of professors to give low grades to students who they know could excell at any other university in the country. Also, bad grades hurt job prospects, which ultimately reflect poorly on the university. Hence, grade inflation.</p>
<p>I don't understand why students would complain though. ;-)</p>
<p>I have found as a professor that college students get high grades because they are intelligent, creative, and work hard. I believe in setting grades according to how well someone does not by some curve. I could give a technical explanation of the problem of the curve but it basically has to do with the existence of a selection process that ensures a very high average level.</p>
<p>In addition, I think students are working harder these days. They are not smarter necessarily but they are trained from high school on to get very high grades. And the students who get into Yale are obviously very good at doing this. You can always force a curve on anything but it is silly to assume that every group of students achievements fit naturally into a normal curve.</p>
<p>Among students at the best universities, I found that most could get Bs if they tried and many could get As if they tried hard. If I have a class of 30 why should it be assumed that some specific percent should get an A (10? 25? 33?). </p>
<p>Princeton is wrestling with this problem right now. </p>
<p>Yale's answer is to limit the college honors, which I think can be a be another way of dealing with high grades. At Yale, only 30% get any honors. Of these only 5% get summa and another 10% get magna. I hope no one think that even the lowest level of honors is an easy thing to accomplish. It is harder to get than an A in most courses at many colleges. And that's just the lowest level of honors. </p>
<p>I don't know why there is not more recognition of this and, even more, greater concern about how various universities use different systems for honors, some much less rigorous than others. I don't know if people outside the specific schools understand the honors. Yale students should resent the fact that students from some other schools get the same honors so much easier. You might call that honor inflation.</p>
<p>And Yale is not the most difficult university with regards to honors.</p>
<p>Just to expand a bit.</p>
<p>I have had certain classes that just, by random chance, had an unusually large group of very strong students (even by the standard of the specific university) and other classes with fewer than average strong students. Imposing a curve in these situations would, IMHO, be wrong as well as unfair. </p>
<p>The question of grade inflation has been hyped up (no pun) by various people for various reasons. But the real problem is to establish reasonable objective standards of what counts as an A, B, C, etc. If students meet those standards they deserve the grade. </p>
<p>I've tried to do this. I've established my standards and I've made them as clear as possible to students at the start of a class. They find this helpful. Sometimes students have challenged me, and they have helped me improve the standards to make them better.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, academics generally don't focus on these questions at their department meetings. And there is even less discussion between departments. I know that professors vary a great deal in their grading, and to some extent entire departments vary. </p>
<p>Pre-med science classes are notorious for harsh curves. I have an anecdote about this.</p>
<p>I took a chem course in my freshman year. Early on I was suprised to hear the prof tell the class, "I am going to make it hard for you to do well in this class". I thought at the time, and I still think, this is a stupid idea. A professor should want students to do as well as possible objectively. They should not use grading as a sort of punishment (the prof in the story had a prejudice against pre-med students, as he acknowledged when he said critical remarks about "those of you who just want to get an A so you can get into med school"). </p>
<p>In the end, this prof and his grading system, made the class unpleasant for me, even though I did fine in the class. It made the students competitive and unhappy, which made me less happy to be in the class.</p>
<p>Ivyalumni, the fact of the matter is that Yale still grades generously in comparison to other schools at a lower tier or similar tier. I'd be surprised that the students were that much better than those at MIT/Cal Tech/UChic/Cal. Publics in general I would think grade deflate (at least top tier publics). These schools seem to represent the gold standard of what grade deflation should be.</p>
<p>What schools have <em>more</em> grade inflation than Yale? Stanford, probably. Perhaps you have additional insight into this topic?</p>
<p>The question is whether a school really has "grade inflation" if students of similar ability are not ranked higher than they would be at another school.</p>
<p>Looked at this way, the Ivies hardly suffer from "grade inflation."</p>
<p>Just take a look at the results when colleges were ranked by the famous "Boalt Formula" - comparing the GPA for college grads attaining similar LSAT scores:</p>
<p>That is a very interesting link. It makes sense too based on my experience in several of these colleges. Thanks Byerly.</p>
<p>An interesting link, no doubt. I do contest some of the results though. MIT seems to be a bit low for the image it conveys. Is Duke really that hard? It also seems to highly overvalue large publics in other states (MI/VA/TX).</p>
<p>I have a feeling that much of this data is based on few data points. Also, major undoubtedly has a bigger effect than school choice in many cases.</p>
<p>Hmmm...what I found surprising is that MIT gets less of a boost than Harvard and Princeton, though I thought that grade inflation was more rampant in the latter two.</p>
<p>Anyone care to explain?</p>
<p>Well, it's based on LSAT scores... and so I'm guessing that there's a stronger pre-law group at Harvard and Princeton than at MIT, just because of the differences in the student body. Just a hypothesis.</p>
<p>I don't think the hypothesis holds; the truth is, a lot of publicity has gotten churned up from time to time about "grade inflation" at this school or that - notably Harvard, thanks to contrarian Professor Harvey Mansfield. </p>
<p>Fact is, the problem is no worse at Harvard - and never has been - than at virtually every other school in America, at the college, high school or kindergarten level, as the Boalt data demonstrates.</p>
<p>Harvard's problem was never <em>grade</em> inflation, but, rather, <em>honors</em> inflation - with too many people graduating summa, magna or cum. That problem has been addressed now.</p>