[orange_joe]

Truthfully, colleges have a larger, higher quality pool of applicants. Moreover lots of tedious mechanical work within colleges has been automated (grammar, spelling, arithmetic), and research has become dramatically easier. It would stand to reason that grades would rise even if standards were kept the steady.

Anecdotally, my father and I went to Ivy League schools. I saw his application and his school work. His writing was substantially worse than mine despite his focus on the humanities and mine in programming. I simply don’t believe that the increase in GPA has meaningfully eroded the quality or ambition of work.

[amy-petrik-214]

Exactly. If 10, 20 years ago a school was accepting the top 20%, and now it's the top 5%, you'd expect performance to be greater per capita. Nominally population grows exponentially but university enrollment... maybe a much weaker exponent. The edge of the blade is the fact that if we have frozen standards we'd expect a lot of "A" grades, but the other edge is things like med school where the rules is "separate this cohort of a class into the A's B's and C's" i.e. weedout courses.

But it is an interesting and testable hypothesis. Many American unis have this exponential increase in applicants where we see the pattern. But as we all know populations in my locales seem to no longer increase exponentially but in fact decrease (presumably also exponentially). So it would be interesting to see .. if we hypothesize grade inflation is secondary to population booms, should we also observe grade deflation in population shrinkage regions such is nippon or korea? My hypothesis would be a little bit of A, a little bit of B, the inflation process, even if initially driven by population, also implicitly becomes a standard of grading that we'd expect less competitive schools to not only follow, but perhaps also cheese a bit to improve their market value.

[elashri]

> and research has become dramatically easier

If you mean access to research opportunities and resources including mentorship then you are probably right.

If you mean the research itself then no in STEM at least. For example you would need much more knowledge than Einstein had when he started doing research in the same field.

[orange_joe]

Yeah I was just referring to accessing resources. I only went through undergrad, so original research wasn’t a huge component.

[epolanski]

> and research has become dramatically easier

Scientific one?

Absolutely not.

Also, imho your view is very US centric where quality of education seems very low even in allegedly good colleges. I have been an exchange student at OSU (some other friends went to more ivy league for their ones) and we all found the exams just...insanely easy.

I couldn't believe people would not pass exams, not only it was overwhelmingly multi choice exams, but professors would even grade you based on assignments and would post "example exams" days before the tests.

I really lost a lot of respect for US universities based on my and my colleagues experience.

I know and I hope some places have it tougher, but even people at MIT or UCLA told me similar stories.

In Italy for comparison you needed to know from A to Z and would have to do exams again if you didn't know anything.

Which is obvious!? How can you build bridges if you can barely scrap Calculus 1 or 2. Insane.

[Unearned5161]

You sound easily impressionable...

Please remember a few things whenever you talk about the quality of education in the United States (if you care to sound informed and thorough): - The United States is a very large country, with many states (50!) - Education quality is not federally organized (there are guidelines, but states make most of the rules) - Education quality depends on many factors, including but not limited to, the state, the county, the demographics of surrounding areas, the property value of surrounding areas, etc

There is no need for rash and poorly informed takes on the quality of education when there is so much room to criticize on more legitimate grounds.

[knallfrosch]

Even if that were true, it would not fix the problems outlined in the article:

- Pushing students to be their best - Discriminating between good and bad students of the same year.

You merely compared age cohorts.