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<p>I don’t get it…shouldn’t the top students in America be getting good grades in college? Why is it a bad thing?</p>
<p>@ChasingStarlight</p>
<p>Internet wars are a fun waste of time at least.</p>
<p>@spanglish</p>
<p>I’m not quite sure why people are arguing that a lack of FAILING grades somehow indicates horrible grade inflation. But when too many people get really high grades, the value of getting those grades goes down.</p>
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<p>Since the number is insignificant, it’s an insignificant issue. But for some people, the tiny exception is just one more occasion to trumpet their subjective belief that CalTech and MIT are superior to research universities, LAC’s, and Ivy League U’s – for that simple insignificant issue. It really says more about the posters than about anything else.</p>
<p>Not to mention, given the list of colleges mentioned in the OP, the poster probably doesn’t care about MIT and CalTech, reinforcing the evidence that this is just another attempt to introduce the irrelevant.</p>
<p>The facts are that the most selective U’s in the country get their prime pick of the most brilliant students in the land (as well as a number from overseas). While they don’t fill the entire class with just those (because of other special admissions considerations such as discussed), most of those brilliant students overwhelmingly share classes with students of their similar ability – competing with them for grades. They didn’t take easy classes before admission, and they don’t take easy classes after admission, for the most part. So any particular valedictorian from a college-like prep school who has already proved himself or herself a scholar several times over, arrives at a setting which includes the double effect of frank grade deflation and latent grade deflation. Further, the vast majority of those admits are super-qualified across the board in all academic fields, including math & the sciences, regardless of their major. Historically and currently, such students have always been the most desired students by those U’s.</p>
<p>It helps to know something about the real world outside of two specialized institutions + one link before attempting to make assertions about Ivy League U’s that later prove false.</p>
<p>Setting aside the Princeton/Caltech-MIT posts for a moment, OPs question asks for a response concerning grade inflation in general.</p>
<p>My conclusions are based upon</p>
<ul>
<li>attending both public high school and private prep school</li>
<li>attending both Stanford and UCLA, and a wife who attended both Cornell and UCLA.</li>
<li>studying the data at the link from post #13 [National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com), as well as that author’s (ex-Duke hydrology professor) blog.</li>
<li>reading hundreds of posts here on CC over the past year related to this subject, and many of the links to university websites and publications regarding this subject.</li>
</ul>
<p>1) Grade inflation is real (approx. .3 between Public/Private, and .3 between hard sciences and Humanities), but not terribly relevant, owing to points #2 & #3 following.</p>
<p>2) A GIVEN student headed to a Public Flagship with 3.1 ave. gpa and a Private with 3.4 ave. gpa will probably end up with the identical GPA at each. That is to say, identical twins who ended up at Berkeley and Emory, both either hard science or both humanities majors, would after four years have about the same GPA, let’s call it 3.5. The Berkeley student would be in the top 15% of his/her graduating class, whereas the Emory student would be at the 50%. Not picking on Emory… just substitute any Private school ranked from about 17 -24. One could make the same argument about the public William and Mary vs. the private NYU, or the public University of Illinois vs. George Washington University.</p>
<p>3) Graduate schools (and to some degree employers) have every incentive to reach a method of normalizing GPA from one school to another. Why? Because education is a business, even if a non-profit one to some extent, and every business looks for ways to gain advantage over its competitors. If most adcoms were to not normalize grades from one undergraduate institution to another, those that did would have an advantage by populating their law, medical, business and Ph.D. programs with superior students. Do you really think adcoms and university administrations have not, over these past 35+ years of grade inflation, learned what a 3.5 means at Emory vs. a 3.5 at Berkeley? Or more to the point, what a 3.5 at Berkeley means in comparision to a 3.5 at Cal State Long Beach? Or that a 3.5 in Sociology represents approximately the same top 35% ranking in a private University as does a 3.2 in Physics from the same University?</p>
<p>I meant to add:</p>
<p>To all you engineering and natural sciences majors out there, you have only to convincingly deliver the mantra: “Just add 0.3”!</p>
<p>Dunnin,</p>
<p>Let’s focus on one very misleading assumption on your part, which assumes parallels (or projections) between particular privates and other privates, as well as particular publics and other publics. You cannot make such projections in the generalized way you have (and the OP was looking for specifics); again, grading policies vary among private reach U’s within the same level of academic difficulty. More importantly, schools and colleges within a public University or a private University also change the equations. I keep very abreast with what’s going on at Berkeley, and it continues to be that the levels of grading throughout the U are Hard, Harder, and Even Harder. (Not unique to Berkeley, but just an example here.) College of Engineering at Berkeley would be one example of Even Harder. The fact that it’s a “public flagship” does not make Berkeley “easy” or even “easier” than Stanford, Cornell, etc. (including within the same major). Same for other publics.</p>
<p>epiphany, your post seems non-sequitor to mine… what do you mean? My conclusions are primarily based upon the website gradeinflation.com … perhaps I did not make that clear. All the rest is simply to point out that I have navigated the waters of both public and private high school and university, and find the average gpa (from which the grade inflation discussion stems) differential of .3 between public/private and humanities/eng+natural sciences, as discussed at gradeinflation.com, to be consistent with my experience.</p>
<p>It’s not a non-sequitur, unless you didn’t mean to generalize about adding .3 here and there or didn’t mean to make parallels across private U’s, and among other institutions.</p>
<p>Ah, OK, generalizing by nature is problematic… and I did in fact generalize. and thanks for the latin spelling reminder hehehe</p>
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<p>No, I’m afraid it is not an insignificant issue. Not many people may slide by, but they could, and they know it. The situation is akin to holding insurance: it may be highly unlikely that my house will burn down, but if it does, I am protected by fire insurance. Princeton provides students with ‘graduation insurance’ via grade inflation at the lower-end of the grading spectrum, which, as I mentioned, where grade inflation is the most salient. </p>
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<p>Uh, while I can’t speak for others, not once have I ever touted the grading policies of MIT or Caltech as evidence of their superiority: indeed, if you’ve read my other posts on other threads, I have deeply criticized the grading schemes used by those two schools. I have often times wondered aloud why their grading needs to be so harsh or, even more importantly, why those schools don’t simply reject those students who are going to perform poorly. As a parallel notion, I have also wondered why engineering & science courses in general, at any school, tend to be graded more harshly than are humanities courses. Nobody decides to ‘slide through’ college by majoring in chemical or electrical engineering. </p>
<p>But to not only infer ad-hominem statements about other posters, but statements that those other posters don’t even support, says more about the person making those statements than about anything else. </p>
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<p>The question on the table is whether Princeton is grade inflated, and it is, and that is relevant to the discussion at hand. To say otherwise is to introduce the irrelevant. </p>
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<p>I agree: it helps to know something about the real world, rather than just a few tidbits of one single Ivy, and provided no links or data at all and mere assertions. Believe me, I know quite a bit about a number of schools, both the tech institutes and the Ivies. I’ve attended a tech institute and an Ivy. Can you say the same? At least I’ve been providing data. You’ve provided nothing at all.</p>
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<p>I phoned several law schools, including Harvard, UNC, Vanderbilt, Yale and I think Duke too. I asked them straight ahead: do you make comparisons between schools, say someone of a lower GPA from Harvard undergrad vs someone with a higher GPA from a lesser (known) school?</p>
<p>They all said no. And they appeared to mean it. They say that they look at the pool between students within the same school as well as on the LSAT(obviously a poor student will get a poor LSAT). But no comparisons or favoured schools. </p>
<p>Are they lying? I spoke to mostly assistant deans.</p>
<p>Hithle –</p>
<p>One of my conclusions regarding grade inflation is precisely that a 3.5 at a Grade Inflated school like Harvard is worth the same as a 3.5 GPA at a State Flagship. At H, the student is at the midpoint, at State Flagship, they are top 15%, and my view is that those are about equivalent college achievements in the view of the adcom.</p>
<p>The real question is whether a professional school adcom would view a 3.5 English major at Harvard in the same way as a 3.5 Physics/Engineering/Chem/Math major from Harvard. That would produce a more interesting discussion. I am assuming that the approx. 0.3 grade deflation in the Natural Sciences holds at Harvard in particular as it does across all universities in general.</p>
<p>Grade inflation/deflation is meaningful only in the historical context of any single university. Even in that case you need to understand how the student body demographics (e.g. smart vs dumb) changed over time at that university and what impact that mau have over the grade distributions. You may also have to study separately the trends in lower level classes that my not be curved vs trends in upper level classes that are invariably curved.</p>
<p>I think the concept is purely academic. Yes, Princeton was concerned about the drift up and tried to adjust. Why don’t you think the student body got smarter over time?</p>
<p>Even in high schools where the grades are not curved, grades are not comparable across schools. For example, you have to work so much harder to get an A in our top tier high school, compared to other high schools in the district which are not ranked. But people on this board complain I can’t spell grade inflation at my school because too many kids have 4.0. The fact is we have a lot of smart kids who work very very hard compared to the average school.</p>
<p>A personal observation. Students transferring from 4 year institutions to the Ivy I am familiar with generally enter with GPAs >3.5. In the classes I am familiar the GPA of transfers drops .2 to .3. Transfers interested in the sciences majors are more likely to see a GPA drop. Community college transfers are even a bigger challenge. Some one must have data on this issue.<br>
I think it is important to keep in mind that the rate of attrition from science and engineering is ~30% at most selective campuses. I have taught classes at an Ivy and top state u. Used same book, lectures and similar assessments. Average grade at the Ivy was higher than at the state u. Biggest difference, state u students did not put as much time into the course. The Ivy students tended to be better organized and seemed to have a better sense of what they needed to do to get an ‘A’ or at least a ‘B+’. By the way this does not mean that the Ivy students were smarter than the state u students. Students at the state u were more likely to have a real job (20+ hours per week) and/or live at home and have a significant commute. Ivy kids, live on or close to campus few work and if they do the number of hours is 10 or fewerper week.</p>
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<p>Nope, we can’t care less. I’ve sat on graduate school (PhD) admissions committees at 3 colleges across 15 years. I’ve read thousands of files. We don’t have some formula or insight into how schools grade. We have a general ballpark of grades we are looking for, look at grades earned in particular courses and any patterns that jump out, we care very much about one’s research, who one has worked with in the field and the letters they write, any publications, and GRE scores. No one is slicing and dicing GPA or trying to recompute it based on one’s former school. But I assure you, the grading system of the school you went to is not going ot change your GPA enough to make a difference in light of all the other factors.</p>
<p>appdad:
and of course that Ivy to which you refer would not be Princeton by definition, as Princeton does not accept transfer students, from anywhere.
Thanks for the info, though. </p>
<p>Thanks also to starbright for the add’l info.</p>
<p>It’s amazing how many people like to spin the facts to make personal points not at all in keeping with an OP of any particular thread. (And no matter how inaccurate or inappropriate those points are. I am not referring to Dunnin, but to a number of posters, plural, who tend to come on threads and do this in regular fashion whenever they see an “opening.”)</p>
<p>^
One of my coaches used to say: opinions are like ***holes.
The problem is everyone has one. That’s what boards are about.
Few facts, lots of opinion.</p>
<p>starbright – your post reminds me that there are really four completely separate and divergent criteria used by adcoms –</p>
<ul>
<li>medical school</li>
<li>Ph.D. programs</li>
<li>law school</li>
<li>business school</li>
</ul>
<p>I think your description well summarizes the Ph.D. selection criteria. Certainly B-school is some weighting of actual job performance, GMAT, and undergrad major/gpa. </p>
<p>Most of the time on this board when a poster asks about gpa, they are contemplating either law or medical school. The implied question is – will one school yield a higher gpa for me than another? Will a higher gpa at X University give me a better chance of admission to (Law, Med) school?</p>
<p>I agree with you, btw, that there is not enough difference in gpa among schools to pay much attention to it. I do wonder though, whether the lower grading in engineering and sciences matters, especially as regards law school admissions standards…</p>
<p>Starbright, what sort of patterns are on the lookout? And also, you say that the GPA from different schools are not evaluated inbetween them based on prestige etc?</p>
<p>Dunnin,</p>
<p>It’s not just business school that takes into account several admissions factors in addition to gpa. (Some would argue, having worked with business school graduates from so-called prestigious U’s, that of all schools, business is least interested in the quality of the undergrad academics – in other words, where that gpa was earned – than any other professional school.) But candidates applying to Ph.D. programs are evaluated very much according to several factors which starbright names:</p>
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<p>I will just add that the Statement of Purpose for (Ph.D.) grad school is also extremely important – as it is for undergrad admissions to Elites.</p>