Mine as well. That said I am far closer to a 1990s vintage and selectivity. My kid (different school) present selectivity works his tail off.
My observation yours may differ.
Yes, thereâre more students apply to Harvard these days. But if we assume the âbestâ students all apply to Harvard, whether in the past or currently, doesnât it make any difference how many applied? Harvard hasnât reduced the number of students it accept each year.
Columbia was on my sonâs radar screen at one point but he never applied because he didnât need to. He was lucky enough to be admitted EA and had a real easy time that year, but I donât think his experience was typical. He now attends supposedly one of the most challenging schools and he told me that he had more time to relax than he was in HS (and his GPA reflects it).
I donât accept your premise that in 2005 âall the bestâ students applied to Harvard. Your implication is that the incremental 20,000 applicants are neither âthe bestâ or created greater ârealâ selectivity.
In reality elite schools are much more accessible and diverse geographically and socioeconomically. Top academic candidates face fewer barriers to apply and consequently selectivity has risen.
Your initial multiple choice question prompted me for why GPAs have gone up. I responded more candidates and greater selectivity resulting in a stronger academic class. You wanted numbers and I offered a doubling of applicants and 50% decline in acceptance rates.
We can agree to disagree on grade inflation but is the âHarvard always had the bestâ the hill to die on. I donât think any reasoned observer of college admissions would suggest it hasnât gotten more competitive drawing top candidates globally. Certainly not what we hear from AOs.
Most importantly congratulations on your kidâs successes.
I donât think it is a big secret that colleges who have a larger portion of students doing A quality work tend to give a larger portion of A grades. They almost never hold A% constant regardless of quality of students or quality of work (Princeton tried this briefly, and it was a disaster). Many colleges publish grade distribution reports. Recent reports at âeliteâ type private colleges almost always show the most common grade is A, and many admins and professors have commented on that.
The Harvard class of 2021 senior survey recently came out. The grade distribution (self-reported) listed on the survey is below. Very few at Harvard (and similar) get Câs, and failing out for low GPA reasons is almost unheard of.
4.0 â 11% of students
3.9 â 30% of students
3.8 â 22% of students
3.7 â 16% of students
3.6 â 9% of students
3.5 â 4% of students
3.4 â 3% of students
3.3 â 2% of students
Less than 3.3 â 2-3% of students
They are doing A level work because the bar for an A is set to be attainable by the majority of accepted students, ie, grade inflation.
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That sounds like opinion. Source or basis in fact please? Do you have a kid at one of these schools and seen it first hand?
As a long time CC observer it seems that everyone whose kid didnât get into their elite school choice puts forth the grade inflation, the game is rigged, itâs a lottery theories yet you never hear such things from parents of kids who attend.
Granted we are all prone to confirmation bias but at least the parents of kids who attend are seeing things first hand. I respect your opinion but please donât discount my experience.
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Thatâs not how I would define grade inflation. Grade inflation could either be defined as grades increasing over time, regardless of differences in student quality. Or grades increasing over time, with control for student quality. I think both types of grade inflation occur, but itâs not just limited to âeliteâ private type colleges. Grade inflation occurs nearly all college selectivities and on nearly all educational levels for which A/B/C grading of students exists.
Whether the bar for A is set to be attainable by the majority of students is a different issue. I personally think that if the majority of students have sufficiently mastered the material, then it is reasonable for the majority of students to receive Aâs. However, many view grading differently and think of Aâs as a way to identify the top students among the sample, so only the minority top students should receive Aâs, and most should receive lower grades.
From the perspective of the point of this thread, the more relevant question is whether itâs easier to get a high GPA at a âprestigious collegesâ or less selective college. I donât think itâs a simple answer, like always choose the less selective college so youâll have the best GPA for med school when you have fewer top students to compete with on the curve, or always choose Harvard since most grads have a 3.7/3.8 or whatever with their large grade inflation and less selective colleges grads have lower average GPAs. Instead it depends on many factors, including characteristics of the specific student, specific colleges in question, and specific field of student.
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That seems like a fact.
We know the average GPA from the 2021 senior survey, which shows the majority of students are meeting the bar to earn an A. What am I missing? Whether one calls that grade inflation or not doesnât change the fact that most students have an A average.
Suggesting the bar is being set lower to be attainable is the point of disagreement. I am suggesting the increase is because the bar is relatively constant while the academic quality of the students has increased. In addition I am suggesting that elite schools with a better academic base case of students should have a higher average gpa.
â Whether one calls that grade inflation or not doesnât change the fact that most students have an A average.â.
The contention isnât whether or not grades have gone up (inflation). The question is whether or not those grades are hard earned and deserved. The prompt was âthe hardest thing to do is get into elitesâ.
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Well, Harvard faculty believe grade inflation is an issue, with 70% saying âgrade inflation is a prevalent issue in their departmentsâ in a recent survey (just over 300 participants). Forty Percent of Surveyed Faculty Say Harvardâs Standing in Higher Ed Has Fallen | News | The Harvard Crimson
Not sure this will play out at schools like MIT, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, and CMU who arguably have higher academic students on average than the Ivy schools.
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As I said, Iâm speaking from my own personal experience. No sour grapes here. My kid got admitted to Harvard and chose a full ride as I did not see the value of spending $320k for undergrad, and thatâs coming from someone with 2 top 10 degrees (thatâs what the OP was actually about). She may, however attend for grad school (already accepted to the #1 program in her field). Of course the parents of students who attend wonât admit it. The students themselves will. Admin admits it. The professors agree that itâs happening. Whatâs not to be believed? No one is saying the students donât work hard.
I now work in a field that highly values prestige and I am often surprised and disappointed at the writing and analytical skills of some of the grads from these schools. They wouldnât have been hired without top grades yet I am not impressed, though I admit that my standards are very high.
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Exactly. It was a combination of Chris Miller at Dartmouth and Harold Ramis in the ZBT house at Wash U in St. Louis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_House
I donât agree with the Bluto factor at state schools. Maybe before, but a lot of smart kids will stay in state in order to avoid the crazy debt you can rack up at a prestigious private.
In my own experience, I went to Michigan. The guys in my fraternity are for the most part crazy successful, working on Wall Street, are doctors, or lawyers. And our house used to pull some pretty big parties in our days (like 2000+ people for a 20 kegger).
Are we saying that kids that go to Michigan, UCLA, Berkeley, UVA, UNC and other places are just your run of the mill partiers? Even my daughter, who goes to ASUâs Honors College, would probably have gotten into Cornell or another Ivy, loved the Tempe campus and chose to attend there over more selective and prestigious colleges. There are 300+ NMF and Recognition Program Scholars at ASU and a ton of Fulbright Scholars. This isnât the 70s and 80s where kids just went to school to party.
One more thing I will add. I went to a prestigious boys prep school. My classmates went to Brown, Northwestern, Yale, small liberal arts schools, etc. They were heavy drinkers and partiers, even more so than the guys in my class that went to state publics. If you think that going to prestigious schools makes you more serious, think again.
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As far as I can tell, posters here telling you that thereâre fairly rampant grade inflation are no sour grapes. Your contension that
isnât borne out by the facts. With students applying to many more colleges, most of them are more âselectiveâ now than they were. That doesnât mean the qualities of their students have all increased.
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This has always been my philosophy for grading as well. I often have noticeably different grade distributions in different sections of the same course simply because one may have a significantly higher percentage of motivated students.
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Seth Curry in his senior year led Duke in scoring, was third in minutes, made the all conference team and second team nationally. As a jr, he was he was second in scoring and third in minutes on the team, and as a sophomore he was fourth in scoring and minutes. Not sure where youâre getting your âfactsâ from on Seth Curry. He also transferred to Duke from Liberty and sat out a year. So he literally went from a big fish in a small pond to a big pond and did well at the big pond.
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Youâre right, by the simple numbers, Seth seemingly did very well at Duke. However, the point Iâm making is he was a run-of-the-mill an A- student at Harvard, not the standout on the receiving end of a professorâs full attention, of his programâs powerful creation machine.
For example, in his first season playing for Duke, Seth saw his usage decrease during the most important, arguably most opportune time for growth, the NCAA tourney as Kyrie Irving returned from injury and reclaimed his spot as team alpha, and went on to be the #1 pick in the draft a few months later.
The next season, despite Kyrie having left for the NBA and Sethâs height dictating his professional prospects best lie as a point guard, Duke started freshman Quinn Cook at PG, stunting Sethâs growth at a critical juncture. This setup continued during Sethâs senior season, further preventing Seth from the opportunities he needed to gain valuable experience at a position that his professional prospects were best suited because of his height. Despite the trivial accomplishments you mentioned, Seth went undrafted during the 2013 NBA draft because teams donât see much value in 6â2" shooting guards and Duke did not provide the opportunity for Seth to adequately learn the PG position.
Contrast that with Steph at Davidson, where the program did everything it could to make Steph grow. At Duke, there was Quinn Cook maintaining a strangle hold on the PG position and a coaching staff who put a Curryâs best interest on the back burner while they tried to put together the âteamâsâ best chance to win. At Davidson, the coach moved the long-time starter at PG to SG to give Steph a chance to get valuable experience at the PG position. The coach did what was in Stephâs best professional interest, not the teamâs or his own as coach. That paid off when the NBA realized that in addition to being a scorer Steph also had the skills necessary to play PG and he became the #7 pick in the NBA draft.
Quite a difference in how the two programs approached these two very similar players. Like you said, Seth was pretty good at Duke. Yet, the team crippled his professional aspirations to advance the coachâs aspirations to win more titles. Iâm not suggesting Coach K did something wrong, because heâs paid by Duke to win championships - just suggesting Seth might have been better served somewhere else where his growth might have been a top priority of the program.
In Stephâs three seasons at Davidson, the program sent zero players to the NBA - once it was apparent that Steph might be that guy, the program fully supported him in that goal. During Sethâs four seasons (one as a redshirt year as a transfer) at Duke the program sent 7 players to the NBA, including 3-4 that played the PG position - the position that would have best prepared Seth to be selected in the NBA draft. During Sethâs senior season, instead of allowing Seth the opportunity to be the starting PG, Duke played the less experienced (but by this time more hyped) Quinn Cook at PG, further stunting Sethâs growth. Seth scored (got his A- again) but averaged only 1.5 assists while Cook received considerably more usage as the PG and had 5.3 apg. Further proof is that Cook actually played more minutes than Seth in Sethâs final season at Duke, as did the center, NBA draftee Plumlee who also had more usage and assists than Seth.
At Liberty Seth led all freshmen nationwide in scoring - at Duke, he was repeatedly pushed down so the program could highlight other students. At Duke, Seth never played as many minutes per game or had the usage rate he had as a FRESHMAN at Liberty. At Duke, Seth scored (got his A-'s) but his growth was stunted - Seth entered Duke as a prolific scorer, and what he needed was the opportunity to learn how to be a PG, but Duke prevented that. At Duke every stat for Seth decreased from his freshman season at Liberty, points/rebounds/assists/3ptshots/usage. Seth might have fared better had he remained a big fish in a little pond.
In keeping with the theme of this thread, when Seth announced his plans to transfer from Liberty to Duke, one of the two reasons he cited was âthe basketball PRESTIGE of the university.â He chased prestige as if the prestige itself would benefit him more than any other factor.
Seth was the A- Ivy student who received no research opportunities from his professors because there was always a bigger star ahead of him. Steph was an A+ student at a less prestigious school whose professors lavished praise, personal attention, leadership opportunities and âinternship/researchâ opportunities on him, helping him unleash his potential. I shudder to think what might have happened if, after his breakout at Davidson, Steph decided to transfer to a more prestigious basketball school like Kentucky.
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Has the marketplace spoken on diet pills, hair loss treatments and anti-aging products as well?
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Grades are also getting inflated at second tier schools. Are all those kids smarter too?
Your logic that âthe parents whose kids attended donât complain about grade inflation, et alâ is self-confirming, no? That is like saying the people that agree with you agree with you. I think we all get that.
Another problem with your logic is that you are comparing apples and oranges. You are arguing that your kid (and by extension, your parenting) is superior because your kid went to a T20 school and other peopleâs kids did not. I doubt anyone is interested in that debate.
The question is why should a 4.0 GPA student with 1500 SATs attend a T20 when they can attend a really good state school at a fraction of the cost? No one has made that case yet.
Conversely, tens of thousands of straight A students with great SATs and ECs have attended state schools at a fraction of the cost and gone on to have very successful and rewarding careers. Are they under a mass delusion that not spending $300k+ on an undergraduate degree they can get for $120k somewhere else and are willing to save exorbitant amounts of money as a result of that beliefâŠor, just maybe, they are right.
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I am guessing a lot of the people that are arguing for prestigious degrees can easily afford those degrees for their children. If $300k of education is a rounding error on your net worth and your kid can graduate without loans, then your kid should pick whatever university they want. We only live once and we can not take the money with us.
Unfortunately, that is no longer the case with most families. Sticking a kid with $50k or $100k of loans for undergrad is tough. $200k or $300k is insane. A student loan that big will make a lot of the graduateâs life choices for him or her. It will affect the kind of job they can get, where they can live, how they can live. Maybe a year into being an investment banking analyst they realize they hate working 100 hour weeks and just want to be 20-somethings like the rest of their friends. They canât quit if they have $200k in loans. And think of the resentment they will have if they are sitting next to someone from a state school in the same job with the same pay, but they have $1,500 of loan payments a month while their office neighbor is spending that on clubs and beach houses. As wonderful as some schools are, the graduates are almost all still getting entry level jobs when they graduate.
And forget about grad school with those kind of loans. A young person could be in debt the rest of their lives if they take on a $200k for an MBA on top of their $200k of student loans.
It will certainly affect how prospective life partnersâ view them. Love conquers all, but it takes a lot of love to conquer $200k in undergraduate student debt. I will not even go into the complexities that massive student loans create for co-signors.
The financial situation of the graduate coming out of college should be a MAJOR factor in any school decision.
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