https://www.1843magazine.com/ideas/the-daily/the-extraordinary-silliness-of-american-college-grading
Most large employers who hire big numbers directly out of college already correct for this. My recruiting teams know the difference between a 3.0 in engineering from Cornell and a 4.0 in finance from Villanova (for an entry level job which requires neither engineering nor finance knowledge). We read transcripts and we know the difference between a rigorous, statistics with programming class vs. “Buyer Behavior”, even though the course content overlaps… and the student gets the same credit for a market research class regardless of which one she takes.
Grad school- whole nuther matter.
That article seems to be suggesting something like high school weighted GPAs as the solution?
Considering that a college’s course catalog is much larger than that of a high school, and there is considerably greater variation in what college students can take compared to what high school students can take, perhaps it is not surprising that many law and medical schools punt on trying to assess course rigor behind the GPAs.
Some employers would adjust for differences in college GPAs, whereas some would not and they clearly state on their ad. that they require a college GPA of 3.7 (or even 3.8).
“My recruiting teams know the difference between a 3.0 in engineering from Cornell and a 4.0 in finance from Villanova”
I do not know the average GPA at Cornell engineering, nor that at Villanova finance, but a 3.0 is very different from a 4.0.
Furthermore, the average GPA at the entire Cornell was 3.36 in 2006. This number today is likely to be higher. The average GPA at the entire Villanova was 3.37 in 2015.
Is the GPA in engineering really that low? The national number is 2.90 for engineering and 2.95 for economics.
I do not know this national number for finance. But I bet most people will tell you that finance GPA is unlikely to be higher than economics GPA, at least this is so in the school that I teach.
It appears that IU has all course grade distributions online. This is from an earlier discussion on this website: “It is interesting. Kelley’s (finance) junior/senior classes are more grade deflating than those from chem/biol.” http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/indiana-university-bloomington/1642005-how-hard-is-to-get-a-high-gpa-as-finance-major.html
“The extraordinary silliness of American college grading.”
Ah, yes, the great Empire coming back to tell us Colonists how to run our Universities. 
Uhh, no. What remains a mystery is the purpose of this article.
Yeah, its called the GRE, the LSAT, the MCAT…
It’s not really the GPA itself that’s silly, it’s the idea of using GPAs interchangeably, without looking at the transcript. Yes, engineers do tend to have lower GPAs than students in some other areas. At my university, this would be somewhat masked somewhat by the fact that a relatively high GPA is required to be admitted to an engineering major, and to stay in it. Before admission to the major, the course work has to include a lot of calculus, calculus-based physics, and chemistry. Separate overall GPAs and STEM GPAs are computed, and to get in, the student has to cross the threshold in both. This means that the students majoring in engineering have–on the whole–stronger academics than those majoring in many other areas. I can’t comment on Econ specifically, but I would suspect that students in math-intensive subjects also tend to have lower GPAs than those in less demanding majors. Of course, it is possible that math majors have very high GPAs, if only those who are very gifted in math wind up majoring in it.
My university tracks the average grade awarded by class, by semester, and by college (which boils down to area of major–engineering is a separate college, as in business, science is separated from arts and letters, etc.). We also track the difference between the average grade assigned in each course, and the overall GPA of the students in that class. This is quite informative. But we don’t issue the results to the students.
Some colleges (e.g. Columbia) list on the transcript the % A grades awarded in a class, as well as the student’s grade. The %'s tend to vary a lot by course. Some colleges (e.g. Cornell) list the median grade in the class. This is also illuminating–though a grade of A+ in an advanced mathematics course loses a just bit of its luster when one learns that the median grade in the class was A+ (but it could be that only very talented mathematicians got that far).
I think the MCAT has some ability to show what students have learned and what skills they have developed. The GRE does that less well, if one tries to compare students from different colleges. The general section of the GRE is not greatly different from the SAT. In physics and mathematics, the subject tests tend to emphasize the first two years of university course work, so quick response based on an excellent mastery of that material is very helpful, but it doesn’t get too far into the more complicated work. Also, in my field, the interpretation of the subject GRE scores is somewhat skewed because of the large number of international students who take the test, often when they are close to completing a master’s degree, and sometimes when they have also served as a lecturer in the subject for multiple years. Then too, they tend to prepare very heavily. Near the high end (top scorers) in my field, the percentile corresponding to a given GRE subject test score has dropped over the last 30 years or so, as more international students have taken the GRE subject test–i.e., a score around 900, which used to be 98th or 99th percentile is now about 90th percentile. Not sure about scores of 950+. (Also, the high-end subject test scores might have been truncated at 900 or so more recently than the last time I looked at percentile conversions.)
There have always been people who look through the wrong end of the scope. But today, they get to push their views out on the web. And big forums get to debate them. The fact this is The Economist doesn’t sway me.
I didnt read his piece on gelato.
@QuantMech, ah… it is an aside for this thread, but for the life of me I could not figure out how so many international students (or students in general) were scoring 900s and higher on the Physics GRE. Your explanation makes a lot of sense. I’d been thinking it is pretty much undergrads taking the test, but that probably isn’t true.
^^Actaully, I think your description about the GRE supports my point QM, even though that was probably not your intent.
If you are saying a GRE taking xx years after undergrad (and after completion of a MA/MS) may not fairly represent undergrad grades, ok, but that is not the authors point. S/he claims that there are no alternatives, and in fact the GRE serves as just that even in your example. In fact, in this case, the GRE makes a low undergrad transcript almost moot. So in can serves as an alternative (along with MA grades).
The GRE does have higher level math than the SAT, but not very high as to exclude hume/lit majors. Also, the Verbal portion requires a much broader vocab that the SAT. But I do agree, that the MCAT (and DAT?) are probably the only pre-grad/professional tests that cover subject material. The LSAT certainly does not.
btw: the GRE changed its scoring last year to a 170 max.
I interpret the comments to be regarding the specific subject GRE, not the general GRE. Whole different kettle of fish.
What’s a lot dumber than using GPA is the British system of branding people for life on their degree classification (first class honours, upper second class, lower second class, third class …)…
Yes, I meant the subject tests, when talking about the high score range. They are still scored up to 990. However, because of the way the mean is set, I think it may not be possible to score 990 in some subjects. The other point is that the GRE subject tests in physics and math tend to cover only the more elementary material. CB claims that it is the first three years, but it looks to me like the first two years.
I think the general GRE tests are useless as a measure of undergraduate learning. A strong high schooler could score quite well on them.
In my view, the right way to assess an American undergraduate education is through the transcript (and if it were possible, the actual syllabus for each of the courses). Back when I applied to MIT for grad school, they wanted a list of all of the textbooks we used for each science/math course. This makes good sense to me, although it is imperfect in assessing the course level.
At one point, I had the students in a statistical mechanics class calculate how many different sets of courses could be taken at my university, to exactly fit the graduation requirements with regard to number of credits (not guaranteeing that the general education requirements would be met, or that the requirements for a major would be satisfied, or that the selections would make any sense–just the raw number). It came out somewhere around 15 trillion. While that is obviously a wild overestimate of the possibilities once you include the constraints on course selection, it is nevertheless the case that most large universities (and the very top schools) have many, many routes to graduation that are pretty easy and many, many routes that are pretty hard. The courses that a student selects (when given any choice) give a good indication of the student’s level of thinking, so the transcript useful in that way also.
GPA is not a pointless indicator when coupled with the transcript, but separated from it, it doesn’t tell you much.
Would not be surprised if this type of evaluation were common among PhD program admissions, since departments are familiar with what the undergraduate course work taken to prepare for PhD study should be like. But law schools would be a different story and probably do not want to evaluate every applicant’s combination of courses from different undergraduate schools.
No ‘probably’ about it. LS admissions is (almost) solely about two numbers: GPA+LSAT, as those two are the primary criteria used by USNews for rankings. The undergrad coursework could be in basket weaving with a bunch of Passes (looking at you, Brown). Law schools just don’t care*, and they have no reason to since any major can attend LS successfully. A 4.0 from directional state U in a ‘studies’ major beats a 3.6 from Harvard nearly every time (assuming similar LSAT).
*Well, they do give a small bump to engineering/physical science types who go into intellectual property. And they do that since these folks are easily employable (which always makes their numbers better).
The comment from bluebayou is probably true a lot of places now. At one time, though, the law school at Berkeley adjusted GPA’s based on the undergraduate school. Someone on CC (years ago) found a link. I think once the list emerged, they were forced to abandon the practice pretty quickly, because the Cal States tended to come out poorly.
Law schools and med schools are GPA driven (plus LSAT or MCAT), which is too bad, because it means that students who are planning on law or medicine need to prioritize GPA optimization over the selecting the courses that would cause them to learn the most (for the most part–there are always a few outliers).
http://articles.latimes.com/1997/jul/16/local/me-13288
http://web.archive.org/web/20000829094953/http://www.pcmagic.net/abe/gradeadj.htm
According to that Los Angeles Times article from 1997, the colleges’ GPAs were rated in comparison to LSAT scores (not grades of enrolled students in law school). Not exactly a big surprise that more selective schools (where students needed to be good test takers to get admitted in the first place) did well.
MIT has published admissions rates in the past to various grad programs (including law schools, which allegedly don’t care about “rigor”, just gpa) and I’ve been surprised that the numbers suggest that grad school adcom’s DO adjust for rigor. Kids with “low” gpa’s getting into law schools that they shouldn’t be getting into; kids with “below the bar” gpa’s getting into med schools, etc. Since ALL MIT students take the “core” of chem, bio, physics, math, etc. it shouldn’t be a surprise that a kid who is interested in medicine but is not a scientific genius might be doing quite respectably in the premed type classes but NOT acing out over the engineering types. Hence lower GPA’s, but med school adcom’s “adjusting” for the pace of learning, rigor, and competition in their classes.
I haven’t seen the tables for other colleges so i can’t comment-- but again, I think the “you can have a 4.0 in underwater basketweaving and waltz into med school” is tremendously overblown. At some point, MCAT scores and GPA converge. Kids who have not challenged themselves academically in college are going to score high on the MCAT’s exactly how? And kids who are doing underwater basketweaving are going to do well in orgo how? Especially sitting next to a kid who is gunning hard in a class which is curved?
Some physics PhD programs still ask for this. 2 of the 11 programs my kid applied to last year did.