<p>The Daily Princetonian reports that Yale is discussing options to address grade inflation:</p>
<p>News</a> & Notes: Yale considers grading overhaul - The Daily Princetonian</p>
<p>As posted in the Yale Daily News:</p>
<p>I would love to know in what major’s this 62% is derived from. I can speak from my son’s experience it’s not in his science major, although I wish it were. :o</p>
<p>Apparently Yale is also changing the “shopping period” rules. I can’t help but wonder how such changes may affect students.</p>
<p>To be clear, that 62% refers to A’s and A-'s, not just A’s. probably about 45-45% total are A’s. </p>
<p>Still, grades aren’t distributed very fairly. I’m taking a math and a physics class this term in which historically only 10-15% will get A-'s or higher; last term I took a political science lecture in which I’m willing to be 90% got A-'s at least.
However, it varies from class to class, not from department to department. For example, I took a philosophy class with the infamous Shelly Kagan last term, whose curves are at least as bad as the average STEM curves. I’m also taking a differential equations class that’s traditionally been very harshly graded with a new professor, and the curve will be much better for that class than the average for STEM. </p>
<p>I think the only way to make the system fair to all students is to artificially curve all classes at the end of the term according to the same scale. I’d say 30% A/A-, 40%B/B-, 20%C would be fair and wouldn’t unfairly disadvantage Yalies compared to other colleges without deflationary policies.</p>
<p>My $.02</p>
<p>I don’t know how a place like Yale goes about changing the current situation, in which individual professors have very different approaches to grading. Personally, I don’t think it’s worth doing anything about. Let employers and graduate programs figure it out if it matters to them.</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem like it would be too hard for professors to submit grades to the registrar on a 100 point scale at the end of the term and have the registrar scale all the grades to fit a certain curve and not violate transitivity. </p>
<p>Of course, professors would complain about losing their autonomy, but…</p>
<p>There are, of course, classes here in which 90% of the students get almost all the questions right, and it wouldn’t seem fair to the students to give them poorer grades. But if 90% of the students are getting A’s, I’d say the questions just aren’t hard enough.</p>
<p>
This suggests that the purpose of grading is to sort the students out in order of performance. Personally, I don’t see this as the main role of grading at Yale–I think it should be to measure whether the students have achieved mastery of the material presented in the class. If 90% of the students in a class do so–something that wouldn’t be surprising for Yale students–I don’t consider it a problem at all if they all get As. I don’t think classes at Yale should be a competition.</p>
<p>KDog</p>
<p>Like you–we are baffled by the claims about grade inflation and easy As…our student is a STEM major and that is not the case …
One P set took 19 hrs to complete.</p>
<p>I suspect it is major/discipline dependant.
K1s foreign language grades are high, and some other core req courses…seem “easy” to K1…
however in the last 2 years, physics, computers, DefEq etc…were not at all easy As.</p>
<p>Clandarkfire makes a good point.
Our student had strong grades going into the final and a decent final,and a really really tight curve brought what in a reasonable mind/traditional scale was a decent grade, lower.</p>
<p>We aren’t seeing “inflation” at all…</p>
<p>What incentives are there for this? Who wins here?</p>
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<p>I agree with this. Everyone likes to cite the % of As, but what they don’t consider is the competency of the pool of students getting those grades. </p>
<p>D1 spent fr year at a top public, and as one of a dozen recipients of their top scholarship, she was likely in the top 5% of her cohorts academically. When she transferred to Y she felt like she was more in the middle of the pool. She commented that she wished she’d taken more of her premed courses while a fr. </p>
<p>You’ll have a hard time convincing her that grade inflation makes Y an easier school to earn a high gpa.</p>
<p>Yale is trying to follow Princeton now, after no other top colleges follow Princeton’s step for years?! </p>
<p>What I have observed is that what happened to other colleges for any kind of top-down grade policy change is that the higher percentage of faculty (esp. those more vocal ones with a stronger opinion on it) will likely be for it, while everyone else at the college are mostly against it. </p>
<p>If Yale decides to follow Princeton step in the end, I think it would be a long destroy-and-build process. I think Princeton had to send out every transcript with some special notes for years after it had enforced the policy. Many high school students who may have a professional school in their future plan may choose other college with the similar caliber at least for years to come. (I do not claim this is definitely bad. It is rumored that many professors, esp. in the STEM majors, really do not like to teach too many students who have little interests in following their step. This is also likely true at almost all other top research colleges, I think.)</p>
<p>If this happens, hopefully it will encourage more of their STEM majors to attend graduate schools (or go work for companies) rather than the professional schools. Actually, some leaders think this should be a healthy thing for the society. (Isn’t it true that Bill Clinton once jokingly said that, between US and China, it may be mutually beneficial to swap some of our lawyers and their engineers? Hey, he himself and his wife were trained as lawyers! And I do not remember their D is anywhere close to being an engineer – I once noticed she was a member in some governing committee of a prestigious med school in NYC! Has she ever taken any single premed science class while at Stanford?! Rant off.)</p>
<p>One of the deciding factors for my son in which college to choose came down to this very issue…he thought the grading policy at Princeton created cutthroat atmosphere that wasn’t necessary…he works hard and wants to get top grades but thought that sabotaging the next person to be in the top percentage wasn’t his style…Maybe that is the way of business…but he likes studying with friends and collaborating with classmates. He felt strongly that his success shouldn’t have to come at the expense of others…if they are all smart and know the work why pit student against student…at least that’s not the collegial atmosphere he wanted so it was no to Princeton and yes to Yale…</p>
<p>It seems to me that the dichotomy between grades’ existing to rank students in order of performance and demonstrating whether they’ve learned the material is largely false. </p>
<p>It would be great if the only purpose of grades were to show that students had mastered the subject, and we could give everyone A’s, but the reality is that the students here are all competing for the same majors/honors/internships/jobs, and grades are one of the few ways distinguish between them and determine who is most qualified. Student are well aware of this. </p>
<p>I’ve found that the “everyone works happily together and no one worries about his grades compared to other people’s” phenomenon is largely limited to College Confidential. Students here know they’re competing with each other, and those who get the short end of the stick by taking harder classes and thus end up with lower GPAs feel cheated. The result of this environment is that during shopping period, hoards of people look for the guttiest classes possible to boost their GPA, often in spite of the total irrelevance of the classes they’re taking to just about anything. </p>
<p>That this kind of thing happens also seems to be ignored on CC, where an excessively romanticized vision of college, in which everyone studies whatever they find interesting and doesn’t worry about grades is too prevalent. There’s a reason why classes like “Elements of computing” and “history, biology, and politics of food” and “black dance” are among the most popular classes here, and it isn’t that people are just thrilled by those classes.</p>
<p>Anyway, clearly grades can still demonstrate whether students have learned the material while also awarding fewer A’s. There are basically no classes here where one can’t just go into more depth and thus make the tests harder and make students learn the subject more completely. Like it or not, grades will be used to rank students according to their peers, and in that case, they might as well be used fairly.</p>
<p>BTW, this issue isn’t unique to Yale at all; it’s widespread especially in the U.S.’ top colleges. I think Princeton is approaching this the right way, though I think it would make more sense to just curve all classes artificially and equally at the end of the term rather than allowing professors to do it themselves, which allows the different grading schemes in different departments to continue in some degree.</p>
<p>It seems to me that a more relevant issue is the difference in the distribution of grades in different departments, and from different instructors. I suspect that the students who are graduating with summas and magnas come from certain departments disproportionately. </p>
<p>Also,the grade compression means that a student who contracts mono in freshman year and is affected by it, but doesn’t withdraw, can wind up completely out of the running for a summa, regardless of later performance. I view this as problematic.</p>
<p>Further, it seems to me that excessive focus on students’ GPAs rather than the transcripts is another root cause of the problem.</p>
<p>
But what difference does even this make? Are there employers or graduate/professional programs who are complaining that they can’t tell how accomplished Yale graduates are? Are they complaining that A students from Yale didn’t actually learn anything? The only place I can imagine it might matter is if people from “easy” majors are completing with people from “hard” majors to get into law school.</p>
<p>Again, who exactly is being hurt by the current situation?</p>
<p>I think that the focus on GPA without consideration of the transcript does actually hurt some students. Students in difficult majors, or students who have taken difficult courses, wind up artificially not looking as good, when the comparisons are run not within a given field, but across fields.</p>
<p>I think the situation also creates artificial incentives for students to take classes with easy grading (or easy for them, anyway), at the expense of better learning.</p>
<p>So, Yale is thinking about setting up the same grade deflation scenario as Princeton (35% in A and A- range). Seems like the Princeton students hate this grade deflation. If the Princeton students hate it so much, why should Yale adopt it?</p>
<p>I do like the 0-100 scale better, though, because it provides more detail than A, A-, B+, etc.</p>
<p>At many other unis, the STEM classes have harsher curves than the humanities classes, no? If the STEM curves are too harsh, maybe Yale can set up similar curves for all departments and majors? 65% A or A-, 30% B+ or B or B-, 5% C+ and below ;^D</p>
<p>
I’d want to see some evidence that some–or any–Yale grads are suffering in terms of getting jobs or places in graduate or professional schools as a result of these disparities before making changes that could make Yale more cutthroat. I’m skeptical.</p>
<p>Actually, I don’t support the suggested change. I think that grading papers in a literature or history class on a 0-100 scale is silly, actually. Science and math exams may be graded on a point basis, but in most upper-level classes, when the exams are tough, a student deserves an A with appreciably less than 90%. So the student would have one true % score and a different one appearing on the transcript.</p>
<p>I also don’t support making Yale more cut-throat.</p>
<p>My suggestions are:</p>
<p>1) Award Latin honors based on the major, and the distribution of grades among students in that major. I think that the odds of a student’s receiving a degree summa cum laude or magna cum laude are rather different, depending on the major.</p>
<p>2) What I would really like to see on the transcript is an expanded version of the Columbia transcript, which lists the % A grades in the class, along with the student’s grade, or the Cornell transcript, which lists the median grade in the class. I think the relevant information is the grade distribution in the class, plus the number of majors/non-majors enrolled in the class, plus the levels (i.e., fr, so, jr, sr, grad) of the students in the class. I keep reading what a “bad” grade B+ is at Yale. Meanwhile, QMP racked up a few of them for performances that, in my opinion anyway, were far from bad–e.g., as a first-semester sophomore in a class where the majority of students were in the Ph.D. program.</p>
<p>3) To pick on Harvard rather than Yale, get rid of courses such as “Science of Cooking.” For the distribution requirements, I believe that STEM majors take “real” courses outside of STEM, and I would like to see non-science majors take “real” courses. Perhaps “Science of Cooking” is a wonderful course. From the outside, it seems a bit suspect.</p>
<p>4) Offer separate sections of languages courses for students who have lived in a country and spoken the language for 2+ years before enrolling in a first-semester course in the language at Yale. Or at least, discountenance enrollment in the entry-level courses strongly.</p>
<p>Ideally, I’d like to see organizations that hire college grads avoid imposing across-the-board GPA cut-offs, without respect to the actual courses on the transcript or the major field.</p>
<p>None of my suggestions would require changing the distribution of grades given now, and none of them would make Yale more cut-throat, as far as I can see. With a sample size of one, I have no evidence of Yale grads suffering in grad school applications, but my sample is pretty limited.</p>
<p>To pick on some (granted, not many) professors at many research (not only Yale) who are too hung up with their main business, “publish-or-perish”:</p>
<p>What university really should spend their resources on first is to see if any professor not only asks some TA to grade the test but also asks him/her to prepare/write the test items on the test. Do not delegate what the professor should do to his/her TA (or RA)! Some poor students might think the most challenging part of doing well on the test is to understand the test items, rather than to have knowledge to answer them.</p>
<p>This may help the professor to gauge the performance of his teaching team, including himself: Occasionally the professor assigns one of their TAs the role of a student (possibly with more pay, as the workload, the pressure to do well due to his ego issue, and the time needed could be higher.)</p>
<p>It may be interesting to know what grade this faked student will receive in a mid-term when the class average is 46 out of 100 in an introductory science class. The professor may also find that this TA/faked-student may have troubles in some of the labs just as many other real students because insufficient or unclear instructions (written or verbal) are given. If this faked student’s research topics (and therefore his previous UG experience) happens to be very different from the material covered by this class, this could happen. (BTW, this is not really a fault of this TA, as this TA/graduate student is admitted not for his experiences on some introductory labs; rather, it is for his research experiences/potential in his very specialized research area.)</p>
<p>I am all for the improvement of students’ learning experience, before the university spends a dime on such a high publicity issue like grade inflation/deflation which will be loved by the media. If we really want to address this issue, think carefully about its consequences on all aspects. The university has many short-term/long-term goals. The faculty may not have a concern for most of these because it is not their job.</p>