<p>The bigger question in all of this is, "What is the harm of super grade inflation?" One author spells it out here:</p>
<p>For grade mongers, if grades are super inflated, why attend class?</p>
<p>Yup. May have nothing to do with grade inflation at all. At Smith, very, very few students receive "Latin Honors" because in addition to GPA, it also requires heftier distribution requirements. Some folks choose to double major, making Latin Honors rather more difficult to obtain.</p>
<p>If you want to find schools that are difficult to obtain high GPAs, try engineering programs at the better large state universities. Compared to them, most of the LACs (including Swarthmore) and the Ivies are a breeze.</p>
<p>Marite, to reply to your post, yes, there are graduates of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton who came out with a 3.8 under the old inflationary grading and who did not get their degrees with honors. The admin speaks of a "compression," and this is what they have now eliminated.</p>
<p>aparent:</p>
<p>The point I'm trying to make is that the percentages of students receiving honors has little to do with GPA as such, much less grade inflation. You can have a 3.8 average, with or without grade inflation, and still graduate without honors. Wesleyan had (and may still have) much higher GPA than most other schools discussed, but had the lowest percentage of students receiving honors. I believe the discussion of honors at Harvard focused on the GPA required to receive cum laude. Summas have always been quite rare.</p>
<p>Marite, I was seeking to affirm what you said. Still, there is something to be said for graduating with honors. You can put that on your resume all your life, which you don't usually do with your GPA. In any case, personally, I am not a fan of the anti-inflationary measures when they take the form of percentages and quotas. If these colleges think their students don't take their studies seriously enough, I think they ought to revisit their admissions criteria. Right now I am hearing a lot about profs announcing downward curves on tests and whatnot. To me this is crazy.</p>
<p>Aparent. I understand.
I, too, am not a fan of percentages and quotas. There are so many different reasons why students take certain courses and so many different degrees of motivation, self-selection, preparedness.
Last year my S took a math course. At the end, the prof anoounced the overall grades in an email in which he said: "Since this is not Princeton, I have no qualm awarding As and A-s to more than one third of the class"" or words to that effect. And why not? Apparently, the students were great. Another year, and that might not be the case.</p>
<p>The reason that "grade inflation" is so difficult to evaluate at Swarthmore is their highly unusual honors program, which has absolutely nothing to do with G.P.A. (except that you can't be accepted as an honors candidate unless you have a high freshman/sophmore GPA.)</p>
<p>The honors program consists of three areas of concentration in your major department and one in your minor department. A "concentration" consists of multiple seminars or independent projects (two now, three prior to 1997) in a specific topic. For example, an English Honors candidate might have James Joyce as one of the "concentrations". These concentrations took up 3/4s of an honors candidate's class load prior to 1997, 1/2 today. The honors track culminates in a final semester senior thesis.</p>
<p>Whether you receive an Honors diploma (and then, whether it is Honors, Honors with Distinction, etc.) has nothing to do with grades. It is determined solely by a panel of four external examiners who come to Swarthmore and give you both a written and oral examination in each of the four areas of concentration at the end of senior year.</p>
<p>Prior to 1997, honors candidates did not even receive grades for any of their honors seminars, papers, thesis, etc. Today, their honors seminars are graded by their Swat professors, but those grades do not impact the awarding of the various Honors distinctions. Those are still solely determined by the panel of external examiners.</p>
<p>For a time, there were "Distinction in Course" notations for students with high GPAs who opted not to participate in the Honors program. But, that program no longer exists. </p>
<p>Over the last four graduating classes, about one-third of the students successfully earned an Honors distinction from the panel of external examiners. Between 6 and 13 graduated with "Highest Honors" each year.</p>
<p>So with all that funny business, it's actually very easy to evaluate - they had the same method of awarding honors and not including grades for honors seminars, etc. existing in 1978 as they did in 1997. And Swarthmore GPAs STILL inflated at virtually the same rate (actually greater) than Princeton. If all those folks in those honors seminars were truly honors students, likely to get high grades, it's likely that the true grade inflation rate would have been even higher.</p>
<p>But that's all history. Differences in current grades among top private schools - uni.s and LACs - are negligible (except it is probably still true that students taking rocks and stars might get higher grades at some schools than in pre-med chemistry. High GPAs can represent brighter students...or simply more of them electing to take rocks and stars. Having student evaluations readily available not only provides incentives for profs to give higher grades; it also provides the impetus for some students to "grade-shop".) The good publics are another story.</p>
<p>Well, not exactly. 1997 was after the honors students started receiving grades. You would have to go back to 1995-1996 for the final year of ungraded honors work.</p>
<p>If you went back to 1996, you would see that only 10% of the students were in the ungraded honors program, half of the percentage in the baseline years of 1970s.</p>
<p>I have seen no data for 1996 for comparison.</p>
<p>I also don't know if the the data on the gradeinflation.com website for 1973 is even comparable. That data was pulled from an alumni letter in 1999 referencing data from an article in the student newspaper twenty years earlier referencing a GPA for the 1973 academic year. </p>
<p>I think the only valid way to determine "grade inflation" is to have the same statistic, on an annual basis, over a period of time, sufficient to plot a graph. Two snapshots, especially when they are snapshots of different things and may be snapshots of very different things, doesn't seem like a particularly valid approach.</p>
<p>Still, I think Mini has a point. It is far more relevant to compare grading practices synchronically rather than diachronically. And on that basis, there's not much to choose among top LACs and smaller, selective private unis. And there should not. Both the student bodies and the profs are drawn from the same pools. In large state unis, there is often a larger number of students and a wider range of abilities, preparation. I have heard profs who've taught at both state unis and private ones that students at the top end are the same; but standards drop more rapidly below that level at the state unis. Competitiveness in the UCs may actually change this picture somewhat.</p>