Purdue sponsored a study last year on grade inflation, something the university is trying very hard to avoid. My D’s major, chem e, had a net grade inflation of -.04 since 2008 so unfortunately for her, is bucking the grade inflation trend.
Purdue on a whole, has seen a .22 point raise in GPA since 2008. This study said a good amount of that can be accounted for by a combination of more prepared applicants (average test scores and gpa have skyrocketed for certain colleges), students being able to skip some of the traditional weed out courses with AP credits, and students having more flexibility with scheduling. That one was interesting to me - the study pointed to students actively avoid the profs that are rated as hard graders on sites like ratemyprof. The researchers concluded that they can account for about 2/3 of the shift but not the other 1/3.
The only other point the study made was that the university has made a big investment in quality and training of professors over the last decade and that too could have a positive impact on grades.
In any case, from an engineering perspective, the courses are almost universally graded on a curve. Last semester one of my D’s courses had to re-set the grading scale after the final because “too many” students earned As and the department made the prof re-calibrate (as you can imagine there were lots of unhappy students in that class).
Seems like employers are still happy to recruit from Purdue but not sure I’d want to be a pre-med there.
Interesting to note for the purposes of the original TO part of this thread, the study relied heavily on incoming ACT scores to draw some of their conclusions. I remember last year that the vote to go test “flexible” this cycle almost didn’t pass.
There is a paragraph that I think is interesting on the admissions FAQ page about Purdue’s test flexible policy:
"How is test flexible different from test optional?
Test flexible means that the institution would still prefer an SAT or ACT test score. Test optional typically implies a student is given the option to choose whether or not to submit a test score for consideration."
I would bet money that Purdue will require scores for next year’s applicants.
Interesting about Purdue. We have heard that theirs is also one of the harder graded schools for some of the reason you mentioned, but I don’t view that as a negative. To me it just makes the students more prepared. Also, excellent point about the AP Exams. I also wonder however, if any of it is also because students elect to retake courses they took in high school and earn the same or higher grades the second time because it’s a refresher course and they want the grade boost.
Your comment about them recalibrating a course because of too many A’s reminded me of a Linear Algebra course at Cornell two semesters before my daughter took it well before Covid. A 95 on the first preliminary was graded down to a B+. Clearly the students either knew the material too well or the Professor made the test too easy. Not sure which.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing either. Employers don’t seem to have a problem either ; )
I think that’s a valid point about students retaking an intro course they already took in HS.
As for Cornell, my second chem exam at Cornell was like that. I remember getting a 48 or something awful on my first 207 exam and that ended up being a B+. For the second exam, I got a 84 and was feeling awesome until the mean posted and it ended up being a C-.
We told our daughter never to worry about a raw exam score until the mean gets posted. Plenty of Purdue exams have means in the 40s.
Chem is still like that there. That’s why mine worked her studied for that AP test more than anything to make sure she got a 5 to ensure she didn’t have to take that Chem class otherwise she knew she would be miserable.
Btw, I don’t know if you took any CS classes there but there is one professor that is still there that everyone’s parents seemed to have had and is awesome. My daughter had him last year. He co-teaches his courses since he’s in his 80’s. Just amazing!
How does the grading affect those students who want to go to other types of graduate schools? Some posters have stated that grade inflation in college is partly motivated by colleges’ desire to help students who intend to go to graduate schools.
That’s a valid question. It’s not on our radar because D doesn’t plan to get her MBA until much further down the road. Seems like there are plenty of engineers that go on to grad school but I don’t know about the other majors.
I’m not sure that’s the right conclusion to draw from the Harvard lawsuit data. Among admits, a legacy admit may be on average weaker academically than a typical/average admit. However, among applicants, a legacy applicant could still be on average stronger than a typical/average applicant. I’m totally against legacy preferences, BTW.
Yes, that could very well be true. Likewise, the admitted legacies could have been less qualified than some (or even many) rejected applicants - there is just no way to know. When I looked at Princeton I was struck by the fact that legacies made up only 2% of the applicant pool, but 30% of admits. Maybe this group of kids is just exceptionally talented, but it seems way out of line with what you’d expect knowing the caliber of students that apply to these kinds of schools. At the end of the day it just underscores the fact that most students are competing for a very small number of seats at top schools once legacies and the like are factored in.
It’s not a coincidence that they are “mostly off-the-radar.” A a general rule, as a larger portion of student body does ‘A’ quality work, a larger portion of students receive ‘A’ grades. So the general pattern is the more selective the college, the higher the average GPA. Of course there are particular individual colleges that are outliers from this trend. Some example colleges are below using numbers from the linked gradeinflation.com site or more recent source when available, listed in rough order of selectivity. There is a clear correlation with selectivity, although MIT seems to be a severe outlier. Fields with primarily objective grading (problem sets rather than papers) as are common at MIT tend to have less grade inflation than more subjectively graded fields . Princeton also has a lower GPA and did actively try to pursue grade deflation. The attempt at grade deflation did not go well and was abandoned.
Average GPA
Stanford - 3.75 (as reported in 2020 senior survey, actual is probably lower than survey)
Harvard – 3.7x (as reported in 2020 senior survey, actual is probably lower than survey)
MIT – 3.39 (2015)
Brown – 3.62 (2012, would likely be ~3.7 today)
Penn – 3.44 (2015)
Duke – 3.51 (2014)
Rice – 3.55 (2015)
WUSTL – 3.53 (2015)
Vanderbilt – 3.40 (2013)
Emory — 3.38 (2012)
Berkeley – 3.29 (2014)
UCLA – 3.27 (2015)
Michigan – 3.37 (2015)
Lehigh – 3.17 (2012)
UCSD – 3.14 (2015)
Ohio State – 3.17 (2015)
NC State – 3.11 (2015)
CSU LA – 3.01 (2014)
LA State – 2.96 (2014)
West GA – 2.83 (2014)
Just as HS GPA should be viewed in the context of the HS, college GPA should also be viewed in the context of the college. In addition, the issues that exist with course rigor (AP vs Honor vs regular course, AP Physics C E&M vs AP Human Geography, etc.) in HS GPA comparison are greatly magnified in colleges. While one’s college GPA is still a useful measure, grades in upper-level courses in one’s major are probably more meaningful to graduate schools and future employers.
Presumably, PhD programs look at upper level courses and grades in the major, along with recommendations and research activity. Medical schools look at all courses and grades, but with a particular emphasis on biology/chemistry/physics/math courses and grades. However, law schools seem to be less picky, because there are no specific course requirements for pre-law students, so a selection of law school applicants may have no common courses between them.
GPA is also important for certain employers. Many have minimum requirements and its one of the initial screens. I recently had someone ask for my college GPA and I’ve been out of college well over 20 years. And, while it would be nice to think they would take your college into consideration, in reality, they don’t - particularly when much of the initial screening is done via AI.
According to NACE surveys, 3.0 is the most common cutoff GPA when employers are deciding which college applicants to preferentially interview (GPA may not be the only criterion, of course). So it may very well be that the difference between 2.99 and 3.01 college GPA is more significant than the difference between 3.01 and 3.4 college GPA in terms of getting to interviews for the first job out of college.
I think you’re correct that 2.99 vs 3.01 is significant. However, may of the top accounting, consulting, banks, etc. use 3.5 as their cutoff. So, it really depends on what type of organizations you’re looking at.
Could this result in unnoticed or hidden age discrimination older SAT/ACT scores are not adjusted for the 1995 recentering (which made post-recentering scores higher) and 2016 redesign (where post-redesign scores were mostly, though not always, slightly higher than pre-redesign equivalent scores)?
But also, does it really make sense to judge a college graduate or soon-to-graduate college student, or someone with many years of work experience, based on a test taken while in high school?
Of course, at employers using a 3.5 college GPA cutoff, the difference between 3.49 and 3.51 becomes much more significant than any other difference in college GPA that is entirely above or below the cutoff (i.e. 4.0 does not help much over 3.51, and 3.49 does not help much over 3.0 or 2.0).
I’m not sure whether these employers ask for the date the test was taken (it’d be impossible to do the conversion without the date). On the other hand, they probably assume the test was taken just before college. It’s possible that they only ask for test scores from recent graduates or students still in college.