Or even 30 years ago. All the Harvard interviewers feel imposter syndrome. So many of these kids are so much more impressive than we were.
A real twist on the “kids (or young people) these days!” trope, huh?
I am wondering where you got that 90 percent figure from. But even if confirmed, it would be hard to compare to today’s. In 2023, Yale has a fixed class size. In 1923, they were just beginning to restrict class size by no longer admitting every applicant who had the required preparation courses, passed the admissions test, and met whatever discriminatory policies were in effect.
13.7 percent admitted to Yale in 1923 were “sons of Yale.” I do not interpret this as necessarily discriminatory, but will stand corrected with evidence.
Yale was a little slow to discriminate against Jews, and in 1923 had not yet done so. In 1924, the Jewish admits went way down, and the alumni child admits went up, so I would be posting differently if your post had waited a few weeks!
As for the low admit percent today, this suggests that it is hard to know who will be admitted. That seems inconsistent with the great majority of admits already being able to write a superb essay or term paper.
No link for this, but in 1923, I’m pretty sure you had to pass a Yale-specific admission test with essay answers. It was an in person test, so no getting editing and assistance from parents or admissions consultants. As far as I can see, Yale thus should have been in a better position to only admit students who would excel than with today’s wholistic system.
Yale so rarely admitted African American students, before 1964, as to suggest discrimination. Beyond, a century ago, losing out on the presence of the strongest Black students, I don’t see how admissions policy can explain the grade inflation.
I’m guessing that difference is almost 20%. I didn’t go to Yale though, am I close?
What? It’s low, but it’s not random. 50% of students at Yale had at least a 1540 on their SAT; 75% had at least a 1470. Virtually all of them had straight or nearly straight As in the most rigorous courses their schools have to offer. All that can be faked, obviously, but not easily. If there’s anything fishy at all about an application, they can and will toss it: there are plenty more highly qualified applications.
You seem to be arguing that a very low admissions rate makes the academic qualifications of students less predictable. This seems exactly backward to me. As someone who has worked on the secondary side of highly selective applications for years, I would say the problem is more the opposite; they don’t take many risks because they don’t have to.
So the pool now includes minorities, women (since 1969), and people who cannot readily travel to Yale to take an admissions test. And you are arguing that the absolute number of talented candidates is lower?
That doesn’t even take into account the issue of improved financial aid. Highly selectives used to be out of the question for middle class and poor kids. Now they are quite literally the least expensive options (100% need met, including living expenses, and no loans).
Past that, the internet has made it infinitely easier to research schools and apply. A student in Peoria 25 years ago would know nothing about Yale. Now they can join the Subreddit, read the Wiki, follow current students on social media–infinite information.
On top of that, Common App and it’s fee waivers for poor and lower middle class kids have made it so much more feasible to at least try. When you had to send a physical letter for an admissions packet and physically send it back, 5 applications was a ton–and expensive. Now each school is just a matter of a few extra essays, an optional interview.
There’s also a lot more intensive academic schools available. It used to be only fancy prep schools and very rich suburban schools had the sort of curriculum Yale (and the like) looked for. But there’s been an explosion of highly academic magnets, charters, and other “choice” schools over the last 20 years, and they are providing opportunities for students to excel that just didn’t exist before.
So yeah. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the absolute number of highly, highly qualified candidates applying to schools like Yale has increased many-fold over the last century.
A lot depends on what you think grades are supposed to indicate or measure. And as long as there are wildly differing interpretations of that, grading is going to be something of a confused mess.
I lean toward the idea that a student’s grade in a class should be an objective-as-possible measurement of how well the student has mastered the content of that class. Of course, that’s easier said than done. And it’s easier in some classes and subject areas than others.
But if that’s your stated interpretation, then giving a student an A for reasons unrelated to their mastery of the material is a lie or a misrepresentation. If a student’s grade in Underwater Basketweaving I is supposed to represent their mastery of underwater basketweaving at the level covered by that class, and you give them an A because they tried really hard or they went through some personal tragedy, they’re still going to flounder when they take Underwater Basketweaving II, or when they get hired for a job that involves underwater basketweaving.
Bullshit or not, I think that’s kind of essential to the job of “teacher.” You’re both assessing your students’ knowledge and understanding and helping them to increase that knowledge and understanding. And it seems more conflict-y if you think of grades as a competition, which I don’t.
But if you’re teaching AP classes, then you have the AP tests to serve as a “referee” or standardized, objective measurement of students’ mastery for you.
I think people like to think thats what grades mean, but that’s not how they use them
A kid who fails Calculus and retakes it and makes an A has been eliminated from many colleges. Nothing can make up for the fact that they failed it the first time. It is my understanding that the same is true for med school: if ypu have a rough first semester of undergrad, whatever the reason, they will never over look those grades, and you’ll never get in. There is also the absolutely routine practice of taking grades on formative assessments: you give a quiz the day after you teach a concept, and one kid fails and another gets an A. On the unit test and final, they get the same grade. The kid that needed a second day of thinking is permantly marked as leaa capable, as either stupider or lazier. And that doesn’t even get into the issue of time limits: you can have two kids that have 40 minutes to take a test. One kid scores 20% higher than the other, but if they’d had 60 minutes, they would have had the same score. Is that first grade accurate? Its easy to say “well, knowing how to do it in the time allotted is part of knowing the topoc”, but its not like the teacher has any training whatsoever in test development. They have no data to suggest how quickly a kid can or should take. They just wrote a test that covered the material and it was as long as it needed to be.
Past that, there’s the practical realities of the system. If a kid gets in an accident senior year and misses 8 weeks of school, if they fail everything, they won’t graduate. They can’t go on to college. They will have to jump through a lot of weird hoops to get the credit, which will be complicated, possibly impossible if a savvy parent or counselor doesn’t walk them through it. . It could easily derail their entire life. On the other hand, if they show up to college, the military, or a job knowing a little less about American Government or British Lit than their transcript suggests, chances are, it will work pit. They have 90% of what a K-12 education is supossed to represent.
Finally, 30 years ago, teachers weren’t supossed to be coaches, just refs. We weren’t “held accountable” for student achievement. We weren’t told that part of our job was to detect abuse and neglect and get help, to identify kids in economic crisis and send them to the school food pantry, to prevent suicide. Society has greatly expended our role, and I don’t really object. But it has created a conflict with the “evaluator” role that society has yet to acknowledge.
And yes, finally, having an evaluative teat at the end resolves a lot of these issues. I’m glad I have that. And it allows me to say with confidence that the more i have inflated my grades over the last 20 years, the higher my students have achieved.
Wouldn’t a person who misses 8 weeks of school because of an accident be allowed to take the year off and then the next year do that year of school?
Who wants to give up a whole year of their life, watch all their friends go off to college, and be stuck repeating 75% of the stuff they did before? Who or what does it advantage to make them do that? The principle?
That’s not to mention that many households will struggle to afford to support a kid for a whole extra year.
I believe students need a grading system to keep them on track and motivated to succeed, unless they have a one-on-one mentor to guide and assess their progress. Moreover, I think an A – F system is better than pass/fail because it encourages students to strive for excellence rather than settling for the minimum.
This is true even for highly motivated students, who may excel in subjects they enjoy but neglect those they dislike, if there is no grade to measure their performance. This can be problematic if those subjects are relevant to their chosen profession.
Would you trust the diagnosis of your Johns Hopkins-educated general practitioner for that dark spot on your foot if you learned that instead of attending his boring dermatology class, he was out playing beer pong and simply took the derm final for a minimal passing grade? Meanwhile, the spot that Doc told you looked like a mole of no concern turned out to be malignant melanoma? I think not.
Even self-motivated high achievers need some external incentive to master subjects they are not interested in. Grades provide that incentive. It is human nature to slack off in areas we do not care about, even if we are smart.
If the choice is between taking a year off and having a chance to have very good grades for the next year and going back to school immediately after the eight weeks that it took to recover from the accident and getting poor grades for that year, I would certainly choose to take the year off. My father got sick one year in school (this is in the late 1930s) and had to take a year off in the middle of his school years. It’s possible that these days it wouldn’t require as long to recover from the same disease. In any case, the notion that it’s terrible to watch all your friends go off to college when you’re not yet doing that is bizarre to me. In my father’s case, he soon after graduating from high school joined the Marines and went to fight in World War II in the Pacific. He came back home afterwards to become a farmer as he always intended. Sticking with high school friends forever was never thought about.
After high school, I (who never had to take a year off) for disease or anything else) went off to college, graduate school, and a job far away. Sticking with my high school friends was nothing important to me. I knew perfectly well that I would be living far away from anyone I knew as a child. I wanted a completely different sort of life from what I had grown up with. Life is all about occasionally making big changes, as far as I’m concerned.
In the case I was talking about specifically, the kid was in a terrible car accident in January of his senior year, he lost two family members and both he and his mom were in the hospital for weeks, and in rehab for longer. I didn’t think the choice needed to be between bad grades or losing a year, after losing so much: I gave him an A for the semester in my Government class, because it seemed unthinkable to me that he should be punished for such a tragedy–and both the “repeating a year” and the “permanent low grade on his transcript” seemed like punishment. We never talked about it, but I don’t think I was the only one. His college applications were already in; he was good students and sure to get good offers. It seemed like the least of all evils to send him out in the world with a little less knowledge than he might have had. Nothing we covered in that 8 weeks would be impossible to learn on his own. He probably had to take a few college courses he would have otherwise tested out of (like Government, and maybe the second semster of Calculus), but that’s fine.
But this is your problem here:
On the one hand, you have grades as an assessment of where students are now. Your “A” here is a lie.
On the other hand, you have grades as a proxy for potential success in the next phase. Your “A” here is probably accurate, insofar as can be judged with the information to hand.
You can’t assign one letter to cover both possibilities. Looking at the transcript shows a pattern, which is useful; the GPA as a proxy for that pattern is less useful. The transcript with letters of reference is even better, but humans have to do it rather than algorithms.
One system shouldn’t have to do double-duty. It is my understanding that student GPAs are starting to be requested by potential employers, which wasn’t the case generations ago; a degree was a degree, and therefore a university “C” wouldn’t hurt in opposition to an “A” unless that student was on a track to a graduate degree. This is one reason why university grades and GPAs for grades 9–12 are different beasts.
I would also argue that, given teenage brain development, grades for ages 14–18 are more or less rewarding those who are a little bit ahead of the developmental curve, and punishing those who are a little bit behind. Things like motivation to do homework, fulling getting the consequences of not doing so—these are harder for high school students than university students. I know I only did my work in high school because of external pressure: no way was I going to motivate myself.
Right now, my pre-med students believe they won’t get into a decent medical school unless they have a 4.0 in university. I don’t know whether that is true or not, but the belief is toxic. For one thing, with the stakes so high, there’s a lot of cheating. You don’t learn if you cheat.
This is a really good way to put it. Colleges rely heavily on grades as predictors of future behavior, and on a macro level, they are generally pretty accurate. But there are two big problems: one, there is no standardization. Our math teachers are insanely tough graders. Every graduating class, there are probably at least a dozen students who have never gotten an A in math, but have gotten 4s and 5s on all three AP math exams and have a 650 or higher on the math portion of the AP exam. And it’s not a homework thing: I have all these same kids and they aren’t like, dramatically non-compliant. Our math teachers are just super convinced that no matter what questions are on the test or what the class average is, 90% is an A. It took me years to get them to stop giving kids a failing grade when they missed two questions on a five question quiz, because 60% is 60%. They were dreadfully sorry there were only five questions on the quiz, but what could they do?
The other problem is that, as I said up above, grades are crude. It’s like a classic sig figs issue. My instruments are not sensitive enough to put my kids into 100 different buckets, or even 10 different buckets, with a high degree of confidence. But we take GPA’s out to 3 decimal places and act like it means something that one kid finished high school with an 84.56 and another kid had an 84.92.
And yes, the cheating is insane. Every year we have kids we know are constantly cheating. Often, it’s not a lack of motivation: it’s parents that will ground them if any assignment is below a 90, or a deep existential belief that if they get a B, they will be ruined. They are scared to just do their best and let the chips fall where they may. Learning happens through cycles of memory and synthesis. As you say, you can’t learn if you cheat. So we have kids who quite literally almost never miss a point in class go on to gets very poor scores on their AP exams. It’s clear what has happened.
I just haven’t found kids try less if there is no grade. If I set up the class that way, maybe they would. But I start every class every day with an ungraded quiz --an active recall opportunity–and I never even had a kid try to opt out because it’s not graded, or answer with random noise. We go over the quiz right there (if it was graded, I’d have to keep it secure until every kid in later classes had taken it) and they are as interested in the right answers as they were when I graded things like that. I think people think it was the grade that motivated them in high school, but it’s not what I see.
I can’t speak for all medical schools or any American ones. In Canada, good overall grades are needed along with several prerequisite courses, a decent essay, broad interests and often a decent MCAT score. But this doesn’t mean there is no room for error. Some schools emphasize the two last years of grades, others compensate in graduate school or in other ways. There isn’t a lot of room for mediocre marks, but I know several people who did bounce back from not performing well in first year university. It isn’t easy but it can be done.
If they got all Bs and Cs and retook the same classes and got As, do those As replace the Bs and Cs, or are evaluated along with them?
Probably depends on the school. A buddy of mine got a 2.1 grade point his first year of university (though buckled down and turned things around after that). Most medical students do well in almost all their courses. I’m not suggesting there is a lot of room for misadventure. But there is some.
nm. don’t have the energy.
Well, I always gave % grades, but the assignments were weighted. I described this on the syllabi or course descriptions, and I made sure that every assignment was linked to a course outcome, also stated, and explained where assignments fell in relation to Bloom’s taxonomy. A student could get an A in the class only by 90%+ work in most assignments, weighted such that class contribution and knowledge base mattered but demonstrating analysis and synthesis were more heavily weighted.
ETA: So a 5-question quiz that tested for knowledge and retention might be worth 5% of the grade, and a test that required applying the knowledge might be worth 15%.
It may be different in college, but high school and younger students are incredibly demoralized by a failing grade–it doesn’t really matter how it is weighted. The failed a quiz. They are a failure.
It also feels weird to me to have the cut point in a course be the thing that is fixed and everything else designed around that. I think it’s just a convention people don’t think about. Imagine a teacher who has 100 points students can earn on a100 question test. The test takes 3 hours. A review of the scores reveals that every single student who got 70 or more points answered the easiest 50 questions perfectly; knowledge of even 40% of the “hard” half perfectly predicts knowledge of the first half. So the next year, the teacher drops the easy questions, so the test takes two hours and is less grueling. Kids who used to get 50 or fewer correct now get none correct, and get the same F they got before. Kids who used to get 90 correct and get an A now get 40/50 correct, 80%. They missed the 10 hardest questions before, so they miss the 10 hardest questions now. Shouldn’t they still get an A? People will call “grade inflation” if that 80% earns an A.