

Can money buy you a higher GPA? - sharadgopal
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/want-a-higher-g-p-a-go-to-a-private-college/?ref=education

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psyklic
The author says that students won't take science courses because the average
GPA is lower. Well that isn't the reason -- this is merely a consequence of
students perceiving science classes as harder and requiring more work.

The solution should not be to make science classes easier or less work, but to
increase the difficulty of humanities courses. The _culture_ of hard work is
important to establish, whether you are a humanities student OR a sciences
student.

~~~
evanrmurphy
The solution should also include making classes more interesting. That's
another reason to avoid a class: it sounds boring. And what doesn't sound
boring when it's in the context of signing away your time at specific hours
every week for half a year and committing yourself to homework assignments and
exams? I realize this isn't directly relevant to the trends in sciences vs.
humanities, but it may be that when the whole paradigm is so dull people feel
more incentivized to just choose the easiest path.

~~~
psyklic
I suppose so, but frankly humanities classes will always be more interesting
than science courses to many people because they relate more to our everyday
lives (as ironic as that sounds, since science is all around us).

As a science student, I routinely loaded my schedule with humanities courses
and hardly had to spend time on them (for the most part). There is no good
reason why these courses were so easy in comparison to science courses, in my
opinion.

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arethuza
Being from the UK I've always been rather puzzled by GPA - we don't mark
degrees that way at all. Traditionally there are only _four_ possible values
for a honours degree (3 years in England 4 in Scotland) - First, Upper Second,
Lower Second and Third. And the bias in most courses is usually to have this
based largely on what you do in the final year.

The idea of being evaluated as an average of every class for the length of the
entire course would fill most people here with absolute horror - it being
fairly common for people to scrape through the first year of a course and then
do really well in the later years.

[NB Degrees in Scotland are 4 years because entrance is based on exams that
are done a year earlier than in England, either that or to allow for the extra
drinking that is required].

~~~
yardie
A lot of students suffer under it. I know I did, spent the final 2 years
trying to bring my GPA back to something respectable. A lot of departments now
list your overall and in-major GPAs. The in-major holds more importance unless
they are the laziest recruiters. In general, you'll take more foundational
courses that don't count against your major GPA for the first year. By the
time you're a senior most of your courses will be in your major and count
accordingly.

I will say, that one of the major differences between the US and the UK is no
one really gives a toss about where you went to school and what you studied in
the US. On my CV I still list my school and major, but it's a footnote, right
above my interest in photography and basketball. American recruiters rarely
ask me about it, and UK recruiters think it's almost as important as my
javascript knowledge.

~~~
arethuza
When you say "school" there, do you mean university? As far I can see, people
are equally interested in the US as the UK as to which university you went to
- at least for the institutions that have strong brands.

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endtime
Other things being equal, I bet smarter and/or harder-working kids end up at
private schools. So I'd expect the "grade inflation" (I hate that term * )
effect to be amplified there.

* I hate the term because it is so often used as if to imply that if the students at a university do too well, the explanation cannot be the merit of the students, but that the courses are necessarily too easy. If getting 95% on an exam represents a high level of learning/knowledge/work, and all of the students score 95%, they should all get A's. Professors sometimes attempt to combat "grade inflation" by giving ridiculously hard exams ( _cough_ Andrew Ng _cough_ ), but IMO all this does is bring to the fore uninteresting factors like how well one performs under time pressure, or how quickly one can perform arithmetic, or whether one has a photographic memory.

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piguy314
While your statement is most likely true, the study controlled for this effect
by comparing students with comparable SAT scores.

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DrSprout
How is the SAT relevant? They should be looking at the GRE exclusively. This
is one of the biggest problems with the US education system (and education in
general.) The assumption is made that certain people cannot learn based on the
fact that they know nothing.

Having been to a private liberal arts college, the environment is extremely
rigorous. You can get the same sort of thing at state schools, but you have to
be in the honors programs. I'd be interested to see if there are honors-track
programs at the larger public schools that show the same "grade inflation."
But because the public school is self-contained, the effect, that students in
some classes consistently receive higher GPAs, is hidden.

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PostOnce
Money can do almost anything, because people can do almost anything,, and
people want money. Therefore, if you have money to spend, you can have
whatever you want done.

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rparikh
GPA in general is a rather baseless measure. Taking a class and getting an "A"
means nothing; it's impossible for an outside evaluator to know whether that
indicates a great effort in a tough class or an average effort in an easy
class. I think we'd be better served with simply issuing z-scores and
normalizing grades completely, so there's some real context.

~~~
alextp
The problem with this is how to decide which students fail and which pass a
course. If you just use a cutoff on the z-score you will be consistently
failing a certain proportion of the students, which might sound reasonable but
completely ignores the fact that one is supposed to pass only the students
that display knowledge on a minimal amount of the material. Theoretically, and
A student completely knows the material, a B student mostly knows, with some
less important parts missing, etc, and completely relativizing grades will
lose this validation.

Another problem is that being a slightly-less-crappy student in a crappy class
will give you a better z-score than being a great student in an excellent
class.

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araneae
Well, I was interested in how they got their data from my undergrad, Cornell,
so I went looking...

Cornell publishes _median_ grades, and they "estimated" the mean GPA from the
medians. As far as I know, there's no statistically valid way to do that. You
would have to assume a normal distribution, and I know for a fact that many of
the courses do not have one.

There could be a systemic bias if private schools differ in the way they
report their data. For instance, are public schools required to report mean
GPAs, whereas private schools can cherry pick their data?

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johnswamps
Anyone have any guesses for why the curve looks like it does? I can understand
it going up in the long term, but why do private and public schools seem to
follow the same basic curve? What causes a decline in GPA?

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Alex3917
Schools made grading easier during the Vietnam war because the students who
flunked out were eligible to be drafted.

~~~
sachinag
I would _love_ a cite for this. It seems plausible, but if there's a cite, I'd
be very grateful.

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balding_n_tired
In _Excellence Without a Soul_, Harry Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College
(and comp sci prof) gives the grade inflation theories a drubbing.

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moultano
I would like to see the change in the enrollment of both types of schools.
Maybe the enrollment of public schools increased faster than at private
schools, so demand for private schools went up and thus they have better
students than they used to.

