Grade inflation starts earlier than college, but I wonder about this headline and what it conveys. The situation at Harvard is much the same. I’ve met many Harvard students and grads over the years, and a fair number from Yale also. It’s not easy to get in those schools, the students are highly motivated and show effective academic achievement to get there. 80% is clearly on the high side, but I would expect a very high rate of accomplishment from these students. Perhaps 80% getting at least a B wouldn’t seem outlandish to me.
Now some may think this is just not right on some sort of principle that grades should end up distributed over between A’s and D’s with a smattering of failures and incompletes. But is that realistic at these schools and their selectivity?
I feel a little strange defending colleges because I have a strong anti-academic bent, but this story just didn’t trigger the alarm bells that I think were intended. So how does this look to you guys? Are the classes too easy (note less grade inflation apparent in economics, mathematics and chemistry classes)? Does this really devalue the grades through inflation? Or am I missing an opportunity to disparage the world of academia?
IMO low grades should not be the goal of schools and schools should be evaluated on the quality of the education they deliver and not the distribution of grades.
I suspect no one really cares about your grades within reason. You graduated from Harvard. End of story.
If you’re going to law school from Harvard for example, letters of recommendation somewhat from one professor at Harvard to one a Yale law school are of importance.
My undergraduate school could be described that way and we didn’t get all As, not even I did. The standards were higher because of the high level of performance of most of the students. Some of my classes weren’t even graded because of the program I was in. Instead, we got written, detailed reviews which were attached to our transcript (and annoyed my graduate school admissions officer) but those classes were probably the hardest ones I had. How you were graded depended largely on department - the lowest grades I received were in philosophy, which was fucking hard and graded on a curve, and anything with a lab attached to it, like astronomy.
My initial thought is that it doesn’t matter whether Harvard hands out all As or not, but I guess the question for me would be, how do you then know how to measure your improvement as a student? My lowest grade ever was my first philosophy paper - I got a C-, which was horrifying to me. But you can bet your ass I busted mine to turn out an A- as a final grade. Even in my classes without grades, you got numbers, which indicated exactly how bad you were doing (this was for intensive Spanish language, a sort of immersion boot camp where they just throw you in and see whether you sink or swim. A whopping 2/3 of the class failed their first exam.)
I don’t like the idea of just having to do “good enough” without any real way to measure my progress. I like to do hard things, and the satisfaction of getting better at doing them. I would be surprised if Harvard students were not the same way.
So no, it doesn’t matter in terms of these kids’ futures, I guess, but it matters in terms of character building, in my opinion.
I got all As in grad school, as did most of my peers, but grad school tends to have lower standards in terms of what qualifies as an A.
All of my undergrad classes were like this. It was a ton more information to anyone who cared to learn about me than an “A” or a “B.”
I attended a top 5 law school. A’s were hard to come by, but B’s were pretty standard. A “C” would indicate some serious problem. You only failed by not trying.
I read that article. It noted that science and economics programs were harder, with 60% or so getting an A or A-. Which still seems ridiculous to me.
Great universities should not have to pander so dramatically to students, who naturally want good grades. Professional programs need to know who the better students are. Going to a good university means you have a good educational foundation, but not necessarily that you learned something important there.
I went to a very good Canadian university. In my program, most courses were marked on a curve. Under 5% of students got an A, the highest mark. Under 15% got an A-. The average was usually C+ or C. Maybe students didn’t like it. But a good grade had real meaning. Does it still? Are today’s students better and more dedicated, but just somehow not doing as well on the PISA?
At some Scottish universities, an A is a mark over 70%. Even this is reportedly very hard to attain.
I don’t get this approach. If 50% of the students learned everything the professor taught, shouldn’t they all get an A?
“You’re a great class. Every one of you excelled on the written exams and participated in meaningful ways during the seminars. However, only 5% of you will get an A. Please pull a card from this hat to determine which ones it will be.”
Great universities shouldn’t have to pander to some arbitrary curve. Presumably, a great university attracts better students (not always the case, but for the most part), so one would expect to have a better-than-bell-curve average of students churning out A-level work. If they know the material, they know the material. Personally, I don’t think grades are even useful at that level.
It’s been almost 40 years since I graduated from Law School. I don’t think I’ve been asked for my grades even one time in all those years. The Bar Association wanted to know I graduated. No employer even asked to see my transcript. It might be different in other fields. (Also, we have never asked for grades when we interview lawyers to employment).
When Ivy League Universities start inflating grades and coddling students, it strengthens my belief that the film, Idiocracy is less a comedy, and more an accurate futurism documentary.
I only did undergrad, but it was the same for me. For getting into grad school, it would have been different. Now, granted, I’m a photographer, and I have my own business now, but early on I had to apply for jobs, including as a legal assistant for a criminal defense law office (which I got), and nobody ever gave a shit what my grades were. (Thankfully.)
I think grading spurs some people to study/work harder.
Some people are internally driven to be their best. Others are driven to compete with those around them. Or impress a romantic interest. Others want to please their teachers, or a parent, or other authority figure. Probably most people have a mixture of such motivations.
Overall, I think meaningful grades improve university-wide learning and performance. But I’ve no cites to prove that.
First, pretty much all grades are bullshit. Its a horrible idea to reduce everything that happens in a class: learning, improvement, effort and compliance to one letter. There’s no consistency. They make education transactionary, encourage kids to follow the path of least resistance instead of takong intellectual risks, and are often used as a measurement of character rather than anything else. For everyone inspired by a low grade, 3 more kids give up.
They are also at least as susceptible to wealth as SAT scores, but somehow when a rich kid does better on the SAT because his parents read to him, thats an unfair advantage, but when a rich kid has straight As because his parents help him keep up with his assignment list, it is still a testament to his character (or rather, we still say the kid whose parents never even look at his report card still should have known better than to miss that one thing and so make a B).
In any case, Yale selects for students who are good at making As: not only are they good learners, they are compliant and they care about making good grades. I would expect the vast majority of them to make nearly straight As.
Furthermore, people bitch all the time about how the highly selectives are a scam, and how the material is the same as any school and that people are “paying for prestige”. If thats the case, I would certainly expect them all to be making As. I imagine if ypu surveyed kids who got into Yale and opted for a less selective university, that cohort is alao getting 80% As. Does that bother anyone?
If, on the other hand, you think the courses at Yale should be substantially harder than at a less selective school, such as that A work other places is B or C work at Yale, then thats a very different idea.
Another point is just that people, especially high-achieving people, need some humility. I think that’s good for one’s character, to not always be the best at everything, and if everyone is getting the same grade it’s hard to determine that there are a lot of people doing better than you are. Getting your proverbial ass kicked opens you up the possibility that you might be wrong, which IMO is necessary to think critically. If you get As slapped onto all of your ideas, how do you ever learn which of your arguments are complete horseshit? How do you learn how to respond to someone telling you your idea is horseshit? How do you learn to formulate a better argument? I feel this is especially relevant in liberal arts education.
You get your ass handed to you in class discussion. You get your papers back covered in critical comments. Truat me, you can humble a kid all sorts of ways.
Why does there need to be a grade, specifically? It is the worst sort of feedback. Its transactional. Its reductive. It encourages min-maxing. Just the worst.
I’d prefer that. But like, the average SAT score at Yale is a 1515. 75% of students there had a 1470 or about, which is like 97%. Virtually all of them had straight As or nearly straight As. There are hardly any mediocre students there.
I remember my first day of law school. A speaker told us in the incoming class that we may have been A students in our undergrad schools, but we weren’t necessarily going to be at law school. And indeed, by the time we finished, our grades spanned the spectrum. At least those of us who graduated; we lost about 10% of that incoming class due to failing too many courses.
As an adjunct, I am under immense pressure to deliver “student satisfaction.” Students are happier in courses where thry will get better grades. There is a lot of lip service paid to instructor freedom, but when I run a rigorous class with a “C” average, I get called on the carpet.
Last year, students circulated a petition and sent a deputation the the department head, demanding that my class average be raised to match the averages of the previous instructor (which data, insanely, is public at my university).
I try to fight grade inflation and pandering to students, because I don’t think either is actually helpful in the long run, but they have more power than I do.
Edit: my university isn’t Ivy League but consistently ranks in the top 50 worldwide, so is comparable.
A lot of the rules to being successful in the world are arbitrary. I never had a problem with it, by which I mean, I have never had a problem following stupid rules to get the result I want, but not everyone is like that. There might be an advantage in learning to follow stupid rules just to get to the next stepping stone in life. God knows the working world is full of stupid rules.
I’m a grant writer, and I come up against a lot of stupid rules. The government in particular is just astonishingly good at producing stupid rules. But school made me so good at following them, I excel in this sort of environment. Do you want me to give you something innovative and full of substance, complex and moving? I got this. Do you want me to write something dry and boring and regurgitate your RFP requirements back at you? I got that too. I think having different classes with different rules helped make it possible for me to distinguish between the expectations of various funders. I realize for everyone you aren’t going to make a straight line between class grades and how you do at work, but that’s how it shook out for me. School has never been anything but good to me, even when it was kicking my ass.