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<p>a "C" really and truly meant "average." Now C's are seen as failure.</p>
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<p>True at the college level, too, in many cases. The normal distribution with "C" as the center has been abandoned in most cases, it seems. It was alive and well when I was in Engineering school!</p>
<p>Then again, there was a time when profs saw their role as weeding out weaker students. Today, for colleges there are both financial and ranking incentives to avoid any weeding out process.</p>
<p>Modadunn...ditto, ditto, ditto......very difficult to see the ridiculous GPA's on CC...</p>
<p>we thought that by keeping class rank our kids here would be looked at for the grade deflation that exists....only happened for a handful of schools outside of Ivies who take the time to evaluate.....and care to look at the GPA in the context of the school....</p>
<p>My own college days are long behind me, but I remember this: The classes in which I did best were the ones where the professors wanted the students to succeed. They (the instructors) demonstrated that, not by giving everyone good grades for effort, but by providing very clear guidance: what we would learn in the class, how the instructors would assess whether we'd learned it or not, how we ourselves could tell if we weren't absorbing the necessary material and doing the appropriate level of analysis, etc. </p>
<p>It's an unfortunate fact, though, that not all college instructors have time to figure out how to articulate those expectations to their students, in such a way that the students grasp the notion of taking responsibility for their own education. Maybe this article, and the inevitable others that will soon follow, will inspire college administrators to cajole their faculty into finding the time.</p>
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Well, turning my earlier question around, does anyone in the job market discount a Harvard degree because Harvard supposedly has inflated grades? (I think not.)
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<p>The basic credential there is established when you get in. :)</p>
<p>I was a professor at a top LAC in the 70s, and I have to say, having read the article and this thread, that things have changed very little since those days. Same issues, same behavior. An A paper is still an A paper, and a B a B. I'll concede that a gentleman's C might have crept up to B-. But for all the talk about grade inflation, sit in on a class at a supposedly grade inflated place like Harvard or Stanford, do the work, and see if you get an A.</p>
<p>My S attends Stanford, and he is working really hard for his grades. He hasn't seen any grade inflation. There are curves for tests and very little credit given for problem sets and class attendance. The prompts for papers are quite difficult. I doubt I could write a decent paper based on any that he has been required to do. He studies more than anyone else he knows there, attends every class, participates in discussions and feels that he truly earns every grade he gets.</p>
<p>Yeah gladmom, my son recently graduated from Stanford, in the sciences, where tests are graded on a curve, and professors made all the results available--transparent, as we now stay, so you knew what the standard deviations, etc, were. Graded on a curve with all the other amazingly brilliant science minds there. Where's the inflation?</p>
<p>It's funny that you mention Harvard, as it DID have to revise its grading policies in the early 2000s after discovery that 91% of all Harvard graduates graduated with honors at their June 2001 matriculation ceremony. At the time, that was FAR more than Yale (51 percent), Princeton (44 percent), and other elite universities. Stanford also modified its grading policies in the 90s after discovering a trend of rising grades since the 1960s. So yes, even fine academic institutions (not disparaging the schools at all nor the students that attend them!) do fall prey to grade inflation at times.</p>
<p>Gladmom, your son sounds very bright and hard working!!</p>
<p>Right, Harvard backed off on graduation honors, ie, magn summa, with honors etc.,but that's not the same thing as grades; an A paper is still an A paper, a B a B. There's an argument that Harvard (and others) admit a lot more A students than they used to. I simplydon't think that the teachers' standards have fallen.</p>
<p>On the other side of this issue, I recently read a long exchange of views by Princeton alums on the subject of why Princeton's gross applications for admission did not rise like at many other top schools. Most people seemed to think that Princeton's new procrustean grading system had a lot to do with it--students want to know that an A paper will get an A.</p>
<p>I agree, I don't think there are nearly as many Bushes and Kerrys and other C student legacies or other special admits as there used to be. I see no particular virtue to grading on a curve. I believe in standards. If everyone in the class knows the material - why shouldn't they all get A's?</p>
<p>When I interviewed candidates for jobs at the software company I used to work for I never knew anything about the candidates' grades. What we were looking for was a person who had interest in the company and could answer questions about the specific work (s)he would be doing. I always assumed that every company worked like that, and that grades in college were only important for getting in to grad school. Am I wrong -- are there jobs where the companies are comparing the candidates' college GPAs?</p>
<p>I'm ok with grading on a curve, at least based on my experience with high school. If no one can do well on a test I feel that it's more a reflection of the teacher than the students. At least in AP and Honors classes, if the teacher presented the material effectively at least one of the students will do well on the test.</p>
<p>Every resume I have seen from college students looking to work at my employer has the student's GPA; we also require a copy of the transcript. This is standard in the financial world. My college senior son, applying for non-financial world jobs, was advised by the career counseling office at Colgate to always include his GPA on his resume - they said if you leave it off, employers will assume the GPA is less than 3.0. I do think that college GPA has become important for first jobs in most fields.</p>
<p>From my experience, many kids feel they deserve an A because all class grades were not created equal.
In my public high school, A.P. Government demonstrated this perfectly.
If you had the male gov. teacher, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to get an A, my friend who had straight a's up until that class barely managed a B.
But if you got the female teacher, it was very easy to get an A as long as you did the reading.
here's the catch, both classes had the exact same material-i mean same tests, same quizes, same papers, same homework. But the female teacher was a better teacher of the subject.
this was demonstrated when I (who had the female teacher) got an A in the class and a 5 on the A.P. exam. The fact that only one person from the male teacher's class got a 5 shows that he was a bad teacher
my point is that many times teachers can determine the grade you get--not by their grading methods but by their teaching methods</p>
<p>We look at GPAs and transcripts very closely and do adjust expectations for different schools in my business. My husband's firm does the same and also looks at SAT scores closely. We don't even interview below the cut off. We get so many resumes from the same school we absolutely know what a GPA means in context.</p>
<p>DS1, at MIT, says GPAs are very important for most jobs/internships he's looking at.</p>
<p>My guess is that the better the job in terms of desirability and pay, the more closely stats are looked at.</p>
<p>In my time interviewing both for large law firms and a financial services company, we always looked at grades. Most people had a GPA right on the resume; if they didn't, we asked about it. It was not determinative, but it was definitely something that was considered.</p>
<p>My own experience in school is strikingly similar to cstone's. I'm currently in an AP Government class taught by a female teacher; government students are split between her and a male instructor. The male teacher was nominated teacher of the year at our school last year (in Oklahoma), and I was initially disappointed when my counselor put me in the female instructor's class. I've come to find that while the male teacher is more knowledgeable in government in general (the female teacher basically teaches straight out of the book), he severely lacks in stringency. Students openly cheat in his class on quizzes (not tests), and they flip coins to decide whether or not they take these quizzes. These students aren't being pushed to read out of their books at home--they take pride in the fact that they have the "fun" teacher, and that it's twice as easy to get an A in their class.</p>
<p>Both the female and male teachers give out the same tests, and that's where the major discrepancy in student performance is found. Our class routinely averages 10% points higher on tests, even on a benchmark test required throughout the entire state. It's safe to say that we'll be more prepared for the AP exam even though our grades would suggest otherwise...</p>