Perhaps. I did teach high school, too, and community college. In my classes, a grade under 70 was always “meeting with instructor required” to develop a remediation for a potential higher grade (if the student wanted it, and typically to bring the class grade to 70, not to get an A).
I just wanted to say something about why schools have become so much more selective. I started college in 1954. My age cohort had started to recover, but only slightly, from the depths of the depression. But there was another factor. Schools had expanded to accomodate the GIs, but that had passed by 1954. So schools, including the ivy I went to had excess capacity and relatively few applicants. So it was really easy to get in. My SAT scores were good but nowhere near the 1500s that seemed de rigeur for the likes of Harvard and Yale these days. IIRC, my scores were 619 and 694, for a total of 1313 (they didn’t round those days).
I think I have mentioned this before, or maybe in another thread. We found that American students with AP calculus, even 5, really didn’t understand calculus and we put them in a special section with one less hour a week, but the same syllabus as calculus 101. They had learned a cookbook course, but didn’t understand the ideas.
Yes, i hate the idea that “90% is an A”. An A should represent some level of mastery, and that might be 95% or it might be 50%, depending on what kind of questions are asked.
I took a chemistry class meant for people who had never had it before and weren’t planning on taking more. He ended up having to grade on a curve because I think everyone would have flunked. I was getting 20 or 25 out of 100 on tests. Those were Cs. By the end of the semester an A was, IIRC, a 52 out of a hundred. At least one test there were 3 As. The class probably had 100 people.
Do you think this might be because of the expansion of AP classes? My first year of college (over 50 years ago) half the freshman class started with Calculus 2 thanks to AP tests, and it didn’t seem to be a problem.
I have no idea why, but I did not get the impression that these students came in prepared for Calc 2 and certainly not for advanced Calc. They really didn’t undertand–most of them–limits, which are the heart of calculus.
FWIW, at the Canadian University I attended, this forgiveness does exist. In my third year my father passed and I experienced a significant depression, causing me to fail two courses (the first time I had ever gotten less than a B). As someone who did in some way define and measure themselves by grades and was interested in graduate studies, it was significantly demotivating. However, I spoke with the registrar and was told that in light of the circumstances if I completed the courses the following semester my first grade would be expunged from my transcript. I retook the course and passed, and indeed my first mark disappeared. It was probably a factor in my getting into graduate school, ironically in the exact subspecialty that I had failed the course in.
Not sure about the grade distribution at Yale College, but at the Yale School of Management, the highest grade is “High honors” and it is limited to 10% of the class. The next highest grade is “Honors” is limited to 25% (or actually 35% limit on High honors plus honors). There is also a presumption that 10% of students in each core class will receive a grade of “Pass” roughly equivalent to a D in that getting a Pass in too many courses will not let you graduate with a degree.
Well, it’s like the old joke:
“Q: What do you call the guy who graduated at the bottom of his med school class?
A: Doctor!”
As someone else alluded to, Harvard receives 50,000 applicants of which it accepts around 4%. 60% of those applicants are qualified in terms of grades and standardized tests and whatnot. That basically means that even for top students, getting into an Ivy League school is effectively “random”.
I’m sure this is a typo, but I still think “evaluative teat” is an apt description of the higher academic system. 
I’m not an academic (or a particularly good student, truth be told). But I don’t really understand all the controversy or complexity around grades with “curves” and all that other bullshit. A course contains a body of material the students are expected to learn. Through a collection of tests, quizzes, homework, projects, presentations, papers, and other work, I would expect the student to demonstrate their mastery of the material. If everyone attending the class earns an A, they should all get an A IMHO.
There is also the question of ultimately who are all these multitudes of rankings and grades actually for? Sure, certain companies in certain industries want very elite academic backgrounds - top tier law firms, investment banks, strategy consulting firms like Mckinsey, Bain, and BCG, NASA, etc. But plenty of really smart people don’t want to kill themselves to work 100 hours a week as an overpaid corporate drone.
Considering that Yale is going to be attended by valedictorians, or at least people who were potentially capable of that, it shouldn’t be too surprising.
Having pursued a major where, once I got to O-chem, I found myself treading water in a sea of them, not getting A’s can be a real shock for a lot of them.
Who are the grades for? Ideally, for the student, to let them know how well they are performing relative to expectations. In practice, they’re a multivalent mess.
Grades serve multiple purposes:
For academics to find candidates for grad school, or for scholarships or other awards.
For potentiao employers to assess how much of what the candidate was supposed to have learned they actually learned.
To show enough ability to warrant allowing you to take the next course in series without wasting everyone’s time and your money.
To act as a filter for being accepting into programs with high demand and quotas.
If there is a distribution in abiity in class but everyone gets an ‘A’ in the course, you have destroyed information. It’s no longer possible to tell the truly exceptional from the merely good. To the extent that it’s valuable for various actors in society to be able to sort people by that characteristic, grade inflation does real damage to the economy and to the lives of the sturents. And eventually, to the reputation of the school as people realize that a Harvard ‘A’ isn’t all that.
Well, but that depends on what you are looking for in a Harvard/Yale grad, doesn’t it? Most organizations looking for the datum “Yale Honors Grad” may not be looking for the awesomest researcher alive, they are looking for someone whose aptitude and temperament were suited to get into Yale and perform above average for Yale, AND, perhaps even more so, for the sort of person who fits that particular kind of socioacademic ecosystem very well, because the organization is or aspires to be part of it or at least in its orbit.
I know at least that I would not push a child of mine to that s/he MUST go to an Ivy, unless that is what THEY want.
…
Also when we see these discussions I can’t help but be reminded of the often repeated whining in the political field about wanting to look at the SAT/LSAT/GMAT scores, GPAs, transcripts, etc of nominees and candidates. It’s reductionistic.
When I was in pharmacy and med school (back in the Stone Age), most classes were graded on an A-F scale (<60=F, 60-70=D, 70-80=C, 80-90=B, >90=A). A few classes were Pass/Fail. I never liked the Pass/Fail classes because they didn’t motivate me to learn the subjects to the best of my ability, unless they were exceptionally interesting. I’d just learn them well enough to pass, then go out partying or do something equally unproductive. Why should I spend many hours studying a subject only to get the same grade as Bob, who put in minimal effort and spent the remainder of his night goofing off?
My MOA for studying for a Pass/Fail test was 3 steps: 1) Skim the material (class notes, textbook) quickly to familiarize myself with the subject matter. 2) Read the material again a little slower to understand the subject matter. 3) Study the material again, more slowly, to memorize the subject matter. At that point, I could get a Pass grade.
If I was studying for an A-F test, I’d add a 4th step: Re-read the material once again, even slower, to gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter. This almost always resulted in an A, and the subject was more likely to embed in my long-term memory. If I stopped at Step 3, the subject would more likely just embed in my short-term memory—long enough to pass the test.
My motivation for getting high grades was primarily practical: to secure a top residency program post-graduation (they are fiercely competitive). But, the dopamine rush from a high class ranking (out-competing fellow classmates) was also a factor, as well as simply liking the look of A’s on my report card. A’s are attractive and sublime. C’s and below are ugly and embarrassing.
That’s you, though. Maybe that’s how most people are, I don’t know, but it’s not how I am. I got As in classes I couldn’t give a damn about by doing exactly the same thing in classes I was interested in. I didn’t do any extra review or anything. When I was in learning mode, it didn’t matter what the subject was – I just soaked up everything I needed to. The amount of effort in a pass-fail class would have been the same for me. (Though, as I mentioned before, maybe a three-tier system would be a happy medium, with an F, P, and P+, say.)
At my college, the feedback wasn’t a grade but a narrative evaluation. If we were coasting, it would be very obvious to anyone who read the evaluation. I always (usually) put in optimal effort, knowing I would be evaluated on my work and mastery of the material. No grades, and as far as I know, no one failed anything.
I agree that narrative evaluations are ideal, and that’s how we were assessed during clinical rounds and labs. But, for didactic courses, it was letter grades, or Pass/Fail.
At my undergraduate school, it was also a narrative evaluation system. It worked very well. It had a very good reputation for getting its graduates into good graduate and professional schools and getting things like Fulbright Scholarships to pay for that. My undergraduate school was New College in Sarasota, Florida. This was before DeSantis decided to destroy the college in the past two years, basically just for the fun of it.
I did this in college. I was hospitalized for suicidal ideation in Fall of my sophomore year and I was able to get medical withdrawals - which don’t affect your grades - and the following Winter when my grades dropped (I got a C in something - Astronomy, I think) it became apparent that I needed serious psychological help before I could get through school. I was so overwhelmed I wasn’t even thinking of the potential ramifications of withdrawing without some kind of medical explanation. In the end I had to petition the academic board for a retroactive medical withdrawal and a bunch of other stuff. Between this and piecing my life back together, it took fully a year of my time - not counting the two semesters I had tried to struggle through. I started in the same class as my husband. I graduated two years after he did.
People thought I was giving up, but what I was really doing was making a strategic decision to take time off rather than risk my GPA. And it was a reasonably effective strategy. I don’t think my cumulative grades fully reflected my academic capabilities, but I managed to graduate cum laude with all As and one A+ my senior year. And it was a hard fucking year, as I was severely depressed and anxious for most of it, but at least this time around I had some skills to cope.
It really frustrates me when people say grades don’t matter. For me they were a North Star, motivating me to keep going through the kind of hardship that would have made other people quit.
I recently brought my diploma out of the closet and put it on my dresser (near my home office) so that I can look at it and remember how I’m capable of doing hard things. Sometimes I forget what I’m capable of.
Thank you for sharing that. They can matter to us for a lot of reasons even if they often don’t matter much to third parties.