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<p>Grade inflation may be more severe at private colleges:</p>
<p>[Want</a> a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private College - NYTimes.com - April 19, 2010](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/want-a-higher-g-p-a-go-to-a-private-college/]Want”>Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private College - The New York Times)
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<p>Fine. Show me the public university where the student body has SAT scores equal to those of Dartmouth students–not just some of them, but all of them. Then come back to me with a grading comparison of the two. Good luck.</p>
<p>But to return to my earlier point, and the point made by Blossom: Dartmouth students as a group are very bright, very well prepared, and very hard working when they enter college. There is no evidence that the classes there are inappropriately easy. The studente are, according to Blossom, who has decades of relevant experience, viewed as well-prepared when they graduate. So what exactly is the point of imposing an artificially punitive grading structure? Is it to please ostensibly grown men with obviously shaky egos who get their jollies by putting students down? Or is it to indicate level of mastery based on appropriate standards?</p>
<p>^this. Totally agree. D is at Dartmouth, and she works very, very hard for her grades. Dartmouth is not easy. To maintain a good gpa, a student there must work hard. Overall the student body is smart and fully invested in getting the best education, and their work ethic shows this.</p>
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Even if this were true–and I think it’s nonsense–so what? You think the top employers and graduate and professional schools wouldn’t be able to figure this out?</p>
<p>It’s certainly true that there can be disparities in grading between departments, or classes, or even sections of the same class. Perhaps a mandated curve would address that problem–but wouldn’t it create a parallel problem, which is that you’d be required to penalize students who happened to be in a class or section with particularly accomplished students? Again, I just haven’t seen any really persuasive evidence that the grading system at the Ivies is broken.</p>
<p>Consolation, as I said a few posts ago, the fact that students do well in their professional lives doesn’t say anything about grade inflation. If you go into science research, for instance, the fact that you can’t cope with complex ideas in a literature course really isn’t going to hurt you.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that Dartmouth students are, as a whole, more capable and accomplished than their peers in lesser schools. That’s why there isn’t going to be a traditional bell curve - most of them do deserve good grades. But “good” should include Bs as well as As, and probably more Bs than As. </p>
<p>The SAT isn’t a terribly good measure either. Much of the verbal section is essentially a vocabulary test, and the reading passages are pretty simple. Being able to do well on that test doesn’t mean you’re going to understand The Sound and the Fury, let alone write a good paper on it. The SAT can also be studied for. Yes, you have to be bright to do well on it, but it doesn’t imply excellence. </p>
<p>Also consider that people get into schools for all kinds of reasons. I’m not even talking here about the fact that any great school will have athletes or development admits well below the academic standards of other students, although that is true. I’m talking about the fact that a math genius might deservedly get into Dartmouth without being all that fantastic in the humanities. Lord knows I couldn’t have passed a high level math class.</p>
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Why? Why, exactly, is it important for Dartmouth to sort its students in this way? Personally, I don’t think there would be much difference in work done, or in results, if all Dartmouth’s classes were pass/fail.</p>
<p>I agree with Hunt. </p>
<p>I also think the insistence on curves is silly. As an employer, I want to bring all my employees up to A performance (or at least strong B+'s). I don’t need to institute some silly curve; indeed, it doesn’t speak well to my tutelage if I have people who “fail” underneath me. If I were a professor, if all / almost all of my students showed tremendous mastery and all got A’s (or maybe some A- and B+), what’s the problem here?</p>
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<p>How? Professional schools don’t care. (Indeed, Harvard, Yale and Stanford law schools reward 3.8’s regardless of the course rigor.) Grad schools don’t care. Employers don’t care. The government doesn’t care. Who am I missing that might care (besides the OP, of course)? :)</p>
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<p>Turn your point around: perhaps the students who are actually “hurt” are those in STEM fields where curves are mandatory, where inflation does not exist, and not those in lit/hume which tend to have more lenient grading policies. </p>
<p>A question for academia: why do STEM profs enforce low grades, while colleagues in other college departments do not? (Shouldn’t an Academic Dean be asking this question?)</p>
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Well, that’s probably what’s really behind all this–STEM students who think that not only are the humanities students taking “easy” courses, they’re also benefitting from easy grading.</p>
<p>The reason that my colleagues do not give undeserved grades of B=“good” (and in fact a number of the courses in my department have average grades between 2.4 and 2.6 on a 4.0 scale) is that a student who is inadequately prepared for professional employment in industry might accidentally kill people.</p>
<p>Hunt, either there are hard courses in the humanities at “top” schools, where the grading is not particularly easy, or QMP was totally conning me! (Not that that would be entirely out of the question.)</p>
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Why are persons averaging 2.4 permitted to obtain diplomas in that field?</p>
<p>Of course, there are plenty of hard courses in the humanities–I do think they are hard in a different way from STEM courses where there are clear right and wrong answers.</p>
<p>Many universities require an average of 2.0 on a 4.0 scale for graduation. There are types of employment in related fields where a person with a 2.6 could be quite successful–for example, technical sales fields. It’s better for the industrial employers to have an accurate indication about the level of understanding of the subjects that the students have actually attained.</p>
<p>I should add: some of the engineering departments have grade requirements in the first and second year technical courses that would prevent a student with a 2.6 GPA from continuing in that major. However, I believe that many students could continue in engineering with a 2.8.</p>
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<p>Sorry, but that makes no sense. Don’t students graduate with a 2.0 at your college? If so, don’t they (eventually) get a job, and often times in their major field? Do you have any studies of graduates to show that those with a 2.0 “kill people”?</p>
<p>Regardless, even if the average grade was a 3.0, wouldn’t the grade compression (or inflation if you will), just mean that employers would look for those with a 3.5+ (or high class rank) so they don’t “kill people”? The GPA is nothing more than class rank.</p>
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<p>So help me understand: the role of your college program is to serve industrial employers? Is that your ‘customer’?</p>
<p>Actually, based on the experiences of the students who have 2.5ish GPA’s with whom I have spoken, they rarely obtain industrial employment directly in the major field. Usually they work in jobs that demand significantly more knowledge than that of the “man in the street,” but not in jobs where they are personally making decisions about processes, syntheses, etc. </p>
<p>There are lots of jobs where graduates work with hazardous materials, and they need to know how to handle them safely. This requires knowledge that the employers rely upon. There is mandatory safety training, of course, but I believe that there is reliance upon the knowledge foundation–it’s not possible for the employers to run a 4-year training course before the employees start work. </p>
<p>My answer was a bit exaggerated, of course–but the potential for accidents is very real.</p>
<p>I think that at some point, grade compression would make GPA meaningless as an indicator of how much the student has learned. If it comes to the point that employers need to look for a student with a GPA greater than 3.67 (A-), the vagaries of grading will make GPA useless as a differentiator (at least, this is my opinion).</p>
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<p>I concur in concept. And that gets back to my original question: why do STEM fields enforce low grades while lit/hume/social sciences do not? Is this even discussed in the academic halls? Who do colleges perpetuate this difference? </p>
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<p>But of course, this begs the question: why flunk so many Frosh? (They are far removed from “industry”.)</p>
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I’m not sure what industries you’re talking about but obviously not the power generators or in the utility industries. Many of the people making serious and critical safety related decisions don’t even have college degrees. Or (from personal experience) degrees from what would be considered mediocre schools with under 3.0 GPA (often earned as a second thought after years of hands-on or military experience). And I am talking at all levels.</p>
<p>As far as engineering, you can ususally find engineering message boards with threads where people discuss their GPAs. You see the full range (down to 2.0 even). </p>
<p>The main one I participate on is related to the PE exam. People often flunk that exam (which I consider fairly rudimentary) several times before passing. And these people are working engineers doing design (although obviously not design that requires a license). But ultimately they pass. You typically don’t learn much in school really related to real-life, AFAIC</p>
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I’ve always assumed this is because it’s much easier to curve grades when there are right and wrong answers and you can quantify the grades. In an English class this is much harder to do. It’s almost nonsensical to try to figure out whether a particular paper on Shakespeare deserves a 92 or a 95.</p>
<p>Oh, heck, Hunt, the cut-lines for grades of A often go down to about 80% in a lot of STEM fields.</p>
<p>Sure hunt, but any Prof should be able to differentiate A papers from C papers. It’s just that the latter earn a B- instead.</p>
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<p>A distinction without a difference. A STEM prof can easily make the course median a 40, with an SD of 20, just by ‘hardening’ the tests. (In such case, a 65+ would be great.)</p>