The problem is that grading serves two purposes that are at odds with each other: comparison within a group and comparison between groups.
Harvard's grading system is useless to a student that is trying to figure out how they are ranking among their peers or whether their studying habits are increasing their performance. However, it's great when they're on the job market and their 4.0 GPA is better than the 2.9 GPA of Engineering State that still grades on a sharp curve.
The increase in grade inflation has reflected the trend of college goers valuing extrinsic factors (get a better job) over intrinsic factors (learn more stuff).
A solution to this problem would be to split the two grading systems apart, having one standardized, SAT style test at the end of college that would allow more accurate comparisons between schools while preserving GPA as a within school measure.
In fact, it stuns me that the College Board hasn't positioned the GRE as this kind of service and pioneered some kind of aGPA score that would combine your college GPA with the relative performance of your college against all others.
I went to ETH Zurich, Switzerland for both my BSc and MSc degrees.
The undergrad program that leads up to the BSc degree is ridiculously easy to get into (Swiss nationals even have to be accepted into the program by law AFAIK -- I'm not Swiss) but the first year of that program is so absolutely horrendously hard to survive (one massive set of 10 or so finals at the end of year 1) that you literally come out of your first year with five kilos off the scale and pale like a ghost (I'm Caucasian ... ?).
At any rate, point being at ETH Zurich in particular and other European unis in general (again AFAIK) the goal is to survive and get your degree whichever way you can.
Grade inflation at "top notch" American unis with their laughable grading standards, the constant availability of extra credit to push up your final grade at will, and the weird financial and social hurdles that applicants are presented with utterly confuse me.
Speaking of which, tuition fees at ETH Zurich were 750 CHF per year (830 USD).
One of the most interesting arguments against extreme grade inflation I've seen arose in the context of students considering going to grad school in a difficult field. Several professors in the conversation said they weren't comfortable with writing a recommendation or encouraging a particular student to go on to graduate work, but that it was difficult to convince these students that thhe weren't cut out for it after they had given them As in upper level courses.
At my alma mater the grade A+ was used in some departments for this sort of purpose. It wasn't mandatory, and it didn't count towards GPA, sometimes no one got one at all, but it signaled something to the students who did.
Separately I had one professor, in history of all things, who was a notoriously tough grader but was retiring the next semester after I had her. As a one time policy she issued two sets of grades, the one you deserved and the one she decided to give out to be in line with her colleagues. I was much prouder of the B in the first category than the A- in the second.
> In fact, it stuns me that the College Board hasn't positioned the GRE as this kind of service..
The CS department at my alma mater did require the ETS Computer Science Field Exam for graduation. The results are interesting as you can compare your personal score against students from several dozen other universities as well as your department's score.
All the noise about standardized testing aside, I think that this sort of thing should be required for anyone to get a degree. I've met far too many people with Master's degrees who seem easily confused by basic math and science.
The fact that there aren't any measurable standards that go beyond the institutional level really dilutes the value of a degree.
My experience was that it's relatively easy to stack rank Harvard undergraduates, but it often doesn't feel like it serves any educational purpose to do so.
In the class I taught of 12, there were 10 that seemed like they deserved an A or A-. They completed all the assignments and did their absolute best as far as I could tell. Some were definitely better than others (A vs. A-), but giving the hardworking but not genius students Bs just made them stressed out. They would come to office hours to ask how they could improve. The only true answer I could give was "there are 2-3 students in this class that are just incredibly creative and gifted writers, they get the As."
Maybe it's the role of a teacher to stack rank students, but it's no fun. I'd much prefer to try to get the best out of each student. The truly top students are going to have no problem distinguishing themselves later in life anyway, it's just so obvious how good they are.
Ya, that's my difficulty with the article. If all the students learned the material, then what is the problem? OTOH, if they just didn't grasp information, or didn't try, they deserve something other than an A.
There is no easy answer, and it varies by course. In an algorithms course you are going to learn trees, sorting, graphs, and complexity analysis. If you master those, why not an A? Sure, you can make the course insanely hard, and force the students to do essentially original research to get an A, but what is the point there, exactly? You end up with a pressure-cooker, swamped with work school just to create a bell curve. I spent so much of my University time on my own research ideas, helping professors, and so on - course work was almost a back drop. I think I got so much more out of it doing it that way. A competitive fight of churning out massive amounts of work against other straight-A's in high school type-A personalities? Not so valuable (IMO). Time to think, dream, and experiment is what is valuable, and how do you put a grade on that?
edit: I take this back somewhat. In some fields it definitely pays off to have a broader foundation. I took quite a few math classes, but would have profited by by even more. Lots of research papers are tough going because I don't have all the math. So there is value in volume of work, too.
Stack ranking in small groups is stupid and counterproductive because it forces a distribution where none necessarily exists. So for any particular class of 12 I agree with you.
However, Harvard enrolls over 1500 frosh next year. Is there really so little daylight between them that they should all get an A or A-? Graduation is supposed to ensure the minimum fulfillment of standards, GPA is for ranking. Given that you're seeing kids on the far end of the tail, I would expect more variance, not less.
Let's be honest here: grade inflation is not something we do for a reason, but rather something that happens because no one has any particular interest in preventing it.
Full disclosure: I attended a demanding college whose 2007 median GPA was 3.35 (the average was less). Of the 150-ish annual graduates, only 7 have ever achieved a 4.0 since its founding in 1955.
I go to Yale where the average GPA is a 3.6. So we suffer from a similar "problem." But honestly, I do not think it is a problem. Kids here put an absurd amount of work into their classes. It's not surprising that the average GPA is a 3.6, because the average assignment actually is A- level work. The obvious argument against this is that the grades should be curved so that the average level of work receives a C... but what do you do when most kids are getting the same top grades on tests, or writing the same high quality papers? It's a hard problem to solve, and as long as other colleges have grade inflation, it would be disadvantageous to your students to not have it.
The problem I have is differing GPA distributions between majors. History majors have a much easier time getting in the 3.6-4.0 range than CS majors, because history teachers will rarely give anything less than a B. So when a CS major applies to jobs that other majors are also applying to (say, finance), he can look bad in comparison.
Grade inflation stepped up a notch during the Vietnam War, when professions were reluctant to fail students out of college an into the draft. Now it's done to protect a college's graduation rate, which affects rankings.
Elite Ivy League institutions admit bright, motivated high school graduates and produce bright, motivated college graduates. The institution's value add is mainly networking and branding--kind of like YC.
It's also due to the fact that easier grading brings more positive student evaluations of profs, which are taken into account with salaries and tenureship.
I always hated this about other schools. While I will be the first to admit that I could probably have tried harder in school, I blame this practice in Ontario for part of why I could never get an interview for medical school. Waterloo engineering was definitely one of the tougher programs, and an 80 average was actually tough to attain. It seems that my friends at other schools or programs had an easier time getting 80s and 90s.
PhD programs are well aware of grade inflation at different universities and take this into account when conducting admissions. No idea if med schools do the same but I'd be surprised if they didn't. Your difficulty getting into med school could also have been because engineering not a typical "pre-med" degree.
I taught an upper-level undergraduate course in math (combinatorics) at Stanford a few years ago. There were 18 students, and I gave all of them A's or B's.
They deserved it. I was inspired by what they accomplished. I would have felt uncomfortable if I had been asked to make sure the average was around a C. (And all of this is very typical of the experience of people teaching math at Stanford.)
That's all well and good, but the whole point of a scale is that students fall somewhere on it and it reflects work done in comparison to something. If not other students, then just patting ourselves on the back for a job well done.
Would you need a some slacker half-following directions to earn an Average? No, you'd need the Average of the students in the course to earn an Average. Otherwise the distinction is meaningless.
Then again, I've just spent some time re-reading Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective people, and I've given up caring too much about grades per-se. They discourage cooperation and encourage competition amongst peers. And in doing that strongly bias their adherents to win-lose scenarios when we should all strive for win-win scenarios.
If you think that's bunk, I encourage you to read Covey's book. Coming at it with an open-mind can truly be life-changing in a positive way.
This could be the case, but why couldn't it instead be the case that a 2.9 at Harvard is comparable to a 4.0 at a lesser school, and a 4.0 at Harvard is outstanding and means something truly incredible?
This is why I think concerns over grade inflation are overstated. High grades for outstanding students doing outstanding work are warranted, and these are the kids Harvard by-and-large admits. The apparent grade "inflation" over the past few decades reflects the fact that it's no longer possible to get into Harvard with one AP course: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/...
I never understood the complaints about grade inflation at top schools. The people who care to make distinctions among graduates at Harvard (investment banks, consulting companies, graduate schools), already know how to do so. Everyone else just cares about the "Harvard" on the resume. So who cares what the median grade is? They could hand out degrees "magna cum fruitcake" and nobody would blink.
I went to a liberal arts college that didn't do grade inflation. The average grade was nominally a C. The campus bookstore sold t-shirts with "C+: Better than average!" on them. Oh, and our diplomas are comically large :)
I have to imagine that the long-term solution for this is for employers to find better criteria to judge candidates on than a GPA. There's too much variance in schools and classes to really consider it an accurate judge of ability. It's a measure of how well you did in school, not how well you will be able to do your job.
I am convinced the best way to deal with classes is to make failing a non-factor, i.e. if you fail a class, it doesn't affect anything, and no one really "knows" outside of your school. Then, make all classes graded on a pass-fail basis, perhaps with a professor's ability to note that a few students went above and beyond expectations.
This way, you can actually say "This person knows x and is capable of doing y at z standards. See, they passed the course that required you to do all that." And you don't end up with weird situations like the "gentleman's" C, where you've passed a course but gained next to nothing from it. If you've passed an intro physics course with a C, what does that mean? Can you calculate vector forces? Or are your diagrams sometimes OK looking, but you can't crunch numbers?
In high school I took number theory at the local community college. We stopped right before the chapter on quadratic reciprocity. Later, I found the Harvard midterm for their undergrad number theory class online. I took a look out of curiosity. The first question was on quadratic reciprocity, and I had no clue what the other 9 (or 14, maybe) were about. They were moving >2x as fast and doing 3x as much homework (the homework was online too).
I suspect the worst student in the Harvard class would have been competitive with the best student in the CC class. If 20% of the kids in the CC class get As, it's not a stretch to believe that 100% of the Harvard kids would have gotten As had they taken the same class.
Obviously this holds for some classes more than others, but the point is that variation in difficulty between classes, professors, and peer-groups can easily dominate variation in difficulty imposed by the grading scale.
You are assuming that community colleges and Harvard have the same distribution of academic skill in each classroom and that the difficulty of the courses are equivalent.
I would imagine there's a significant selection bias at work here. This is not a random sample of students, and I don't think it's super odd that many of them get As.
Perhaps more get As than should, but I'd look at the grade distribution of a less discriminating institution if I wanted to get huffy about grade inflation. Especially with no meaningful data in the article about historic grade distributions at Harvard.
The problem is that law (and other professional) schools are incentivized to largely disregard the institution of applicants and instead base most of their admissions decisions on GPA and LSAT so they can get high US News rankings. An elite undergrad institution can best serve it's students by making sure high GPA's are achievable to hard working, smart students who want to go to professional schools.
[+] [-] shalmanese|12 years ago|reply
Harvard's grading system is useless to a student that is trying to figure out how they are ranking among their peers or whether their studying habits are increasing their performance. However, it's great when they're on the job market and their 4.0 GPA is better than the 2.9 GPA of Engineering State that still grades on a sharp curve.
The increase in grade inflation has reflected the trend of college goers valuing extrinsic factors (get a better job) over intrinsic factors (learn more stuff).
A solution to this problem would be to split the two grading systems apart, having one standardized, SAT style test at the end of college that would allow more accurate comparisons between schools while preserving GPA as a within school measure.
In fact, it stuns me that the College Board hasn't positioned the GRE as this kind of service and pioneered some kind of aGPA score that would combine your college GPA with the relative performance of your college against all others.
[+] [-] user1239321421|12 years ago|reply
The undergrad program that leads up to the BSc degree is ridiculously easy to get into (Swiss nationals even have to be accepted into the program by law AFAIK -- I'm not Swiss) but the first year of that program is so absolutely horrendously hard to survive (one massive set of 10 or so finals at the end of year 1) that you literally come out of your first year with five kilos off the scale and pale like a ghost (I'm Caucasian ... ?).
At any rate, point being at ETH Zurich in particular and other European unis in general (again AFAIK) the goal is to survive and get your degree whichever way you can.
Grade inflation at "top notch" American unis with their laughable grading standards, the constant availability of extra credit to push up your final grade at will, and the weird financial and social hurdles that applicants are presented with utterly confuse me.
Speaking of which, tuition fees at ETH Zurich were 750 CHF per year (830 USD).
[+] [-] bradleyjg|12 years ago|reply
At my alma mater the grade A+ was used in some departments for this sort of purpose. It wasn't mandatory, and it didn't count towards GPA, sometimes no one got one at all, but it signaled something to the students who did.
Separately I had one professor, in history of all things, who was a notoriously tough grader but was retiring the next semester after I had her. As a one time policy she issued two sets of grades, the one you deserved and the one she decided to give out to be in line with her colleagues. I was much prouder of the B in the first category than the A- in the second.
[+] [-] rizzom5000|12 years ago|reply
The CS department at my alma mater did require the ETS Computer Science Field Exam for graduation. The results are interesting as you can compare your personal score against students from several dozen other universities as well as your department's score.
All the noise about standardized testing aside, I think that this sort of thing should be required for anyone to get a degree. I've met far too many people with Master's degrees who seem easily confused by basic math and science.
The fact that there aren't any measurable standards that go beyond the institutional level really dilutes the value of a degree.
[+] [-] ryanhuff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tristanz|12 years ago|reply
In the class I taught of 12, there were 10 that seemed like they deserved an A or A-. They completed all the assignments and did their absolute best as far as I could tell. Some were definitely better than others (A vs. A-), but giving the hardworking but not genius students Bs just made them stressed out. They would come to office hours to ask how they could improve. The only true answer I could give was "there are 2-3 students in this class that are just incredibly creative and gifted writers, they get the As."
Maybe it's the role of a teacher to stack rank students, but it's no fun. I'd much prefer to try to get the best out of each student. The truly top students are going to have no problem distinguishing themselves later in life anyway, it's just so obvious how good they are.
[+] [-] RogerL|12 years ago|reply
There is no easy answer, and it varies by course. In an algorithms course you are going to learn trees, sorting, graphs, and complexity analysis. If you master those, why not an A? Sure, you can make the course insanely hard, and force the students to do essentially original research to get an A, but what is the point there, exactly? You end up with a pressure-cooker, swamped with work school just to create a bell curve. I spent so much of my University time on my own research ideas, helping professors, and so on - course work was almost a back drop. I think I got so much more out of it doing it that way. A competitive fight of churning out massive amounts of work against other straight-A's in high school type-A personalities? Not so valuable (IMO). Time to think, dream, and experiment is what is valuable, and how do you put a grade on that?
edit: I take this back somewhat. In some fields it definitely pays off to have a broader foundation. I took quite a few math classes, but would have profited by by even more. Lots of research papers are tough going because I don't have all the math. So there is value in volume of work, too.
[+] [-] wnissen|12 years ago|reply
However, Harvard enrolls over 1500 frosh next year. Is there really so little daylight between them that they should all get an A or A-? Graduation is supposed to ensure the minimum fulfillment of standards, GPA is for ranking. Given that you're seeing kids on the far end of the tail, I would expect more variance, not less.
Let's be honest here: grade inflation is not something we do for a reason, but rather something that happens because no one has any particular interest in preventing it.
Full disclosure: I attended a demanding college whose 2007 median GPA was 3.35 (the average was less). Of the 150-ish annual graduates, only 7 have ever achieved a 4.0 since its founding in 1955.
[+] [-] chatmasta|12 years ago|reply
The problem I have is differing GPA distributions between majors. History majors have a much easier time getting in the 3.6-4.0 range than CS majors, because history teachers will rarely give anything less than a B. So when a CS major applies to jobs that other majors are also applying to (say, finance), he can look bad in comparison.
[+] [-] jffry|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jayd16|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codex|12 years ago|reply
Elite Ivy League institutions admit bright, motivated high school graduates and produce bright, motivated college graduates. The institution's value add is mainly networking and branding--kind of like YC.
[+] [-] nether|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HorizonXP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperbovine|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CaveTech|12 years ago|reply
Consistent 90's in any degree program in Ontario is quite the accomplishment, regardless of inflation.
[+] [-] impendia|12 years ago|reply
They deserved it. I was inspired by what they accomplished. I would have felt uncomfortable if I had been asked to make sure the average was around a C. (And all of this is very typical of the experience of people teaching math at Stanford.)
[+] [-] secstate|12 years ago|reply
Would you need a some slacker half-following directions to earn an Average? No, you'd need the Average of the students in the course to earn an Average. Otherwise the distinction is meaningless.
Then again, I've just spent some time re-reading Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective people, and I've given up caring too much about grades per-se. They discourage cooperation and encourage competition amongst peers. And in doing that strongly bias their adherents to win-lose scenarios when we should all strive for win-win scenarios.
If you think that's bunk, I encourage you to read Covey's book. Coming at it with an open-mind can truly be life-changing in a positive way.
[+] [-] scrabble|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nether|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianferrel|12 years ago|reply
A Harvard Graduate.
Harvard is effectively graded pass/fail. I'm not convinced that's actually a bad thing.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avolcano|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjmahone17|12 years ago|reply
This way, you can actually say "This person knows x and is capable of doing y at z standards. See, they passed the course that required you to do all that." And you don't end up with weird situations like the "gentleman's" C, where you've passed a course but gained next to nothing from it. If you've passed an intro physics course with a C, what does that mean? Can you calculate vector forces? Or are your diagrams sometimes OK looking, but you can't crunch numbers?
[+] [-] chris_mahan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjoonathan|12 years ago|reply
I suspect the worst student in the Harvard class would have been competitive with the best student in the CC class. If 20% of the kids in the CC class get As, it's not a stretch to believe that 100% of the Harvard kids would have gotten As had they taken the same class.
Obviously this holds for some classes more than others, but the point is that variation in difficulty between classes, professors, and peer-groups can easily dominate variation in difficulty imposed by the grading scale.
[+] [-] superuser2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrZongle2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phren0logy|12 years ago|reply
Perhaps more get As than should, but I'd look at the grade distribution of a less discriminating institution if I wanted to get huffy about grade inflation. Especially with no meaningful data in the article about historic grade distributions at Harvard.
[+] [-] 727374|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aliston|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dba7dba|12 years ago|reply
I don't want to believe US is a class based society but ...