
Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities - bane
http://www.gradeinflation.com/
======
jackpirate
One possible cause not mentioned in the article is that universities
offer/require more filler courses. Last year, for example, I had to teach an
intro to HTML course at a UC school. This is a required course for all non-
engineering majors. To get an A, all you have to do is create a single html
webpage using 10 different tags and 10 different css styles.[1] These courses
are huge money makers for the university. I had 120 students in the lecture,
and each student paid about $1000 to take that course. The course was a joke
for 90% of the students, but they didn't care because they got their "easy A".
In exchange, the university got a butt ton of cash.

[1] This grading system was set by the department so that there wouldn't be
"easy" and "hard" quarters to take the course.

~~~
edtechdev
Yeah, Murray Sperber called it the “faculty-student non-aggression pact" \-
“Professors don’t ask much of their students and students don’t ask much of
their professors".

And a newer book called "Academically Adrift" found that students aren't
learning much in college.

How do they get away with all this? One explanation is the signaling theory of
education. A degree (and the prestige/selectivity/reputation of the school and
program) is a proxy (signal) for IQ plus an indicator of persistence (toughing
it out to make it through a degree program).

~~~
gavazzy
EconTalk has a great episode on this.

"ryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to
EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the value of a college education. Caplan
argues that the extra amount that college graduates earn relative to high
school graduates is misleading as a guide for attending college--it ignores
the fact that a sizable number of students don't graduate and never earn that
extra money. Caplan argues that the monetary benefits of a college education
have a large signaling component rather than representing the value of the
knowledge that's learned. Caplan closes by arguing that the subsidies to
education should be reduced rather than increased."

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html)

------
Rhapso
Teaching as a graduate student i'm seeing a pattern where my department is
swamped with students and thus has a lot of grad students teaching (a lot of
people here on student visas), then then evaluates all the teaching grad
students based on student reviews.

A lot of those out-country students are scared of angering students, getting
bad reviews and getting kicked out. End result, classes are getting easier and
grades are inflating. Students are getting less prepared for later classes

I'm a US citizen and I have a reputation for being a hard grader because my
position is a lot more stable (it is a lot easier to get funding for US
citizens).

I teach mostly upper level classes and I am failing a lot of students with
"good" grades.

~~~
Tloewald
Assistant professors are in a similar position -- student evals influence
tenure decisions. It's a fundamental problem of poorly designed incentives.

~~~
Rhapso
No, the incentives are well designed, just not for the task we perceive as
important.

We want to produce competent and educated students. Colleges and Universities
want to maximize throughput and income. _In the short term_, student reviews
do that job.

~~~
Tloewald
Right -- universities are "diluting their brand" in the long term by creating
incentives that destroy the value of college education.

------
3minus1
My wife is getting her Master's in bioinformatics from a prestigious
university. No joke on the day of the final exam her professor showed up to
class 25 minutes late and said he only had one copy of the exam because the
photo-copier wasn't working. Everyone got A's. And there is no accountability.

~~~
thearn4
I would say that graduate programs tend to be a bit more binary, i.e. you're
either passing a course or you aren't, and the professor knows exactly who
those people are. And if you aren't passing, your prof. will also quietly
suggest to you early on that you drop it and take it again a bit down the
road. This was my experience in masters & phd level math courses, at least.

~~~
eitally
Indeed. In my graduate program you were either get a B or higher, or you were
in the professor's office having a tough conversation about your future.

------
raingrove
In Singapore, all grades are normalized using the bell curve (normal
distribution), where 50% gets the "pass" grade (C+).

This means, if everyone does well, even if your exam scores are near perfect,
you could still end up with just a pass grade.

It sucks for students, but this way, grade inflation just cannot happen.

~~~
danieltillett
You need to be careful about this. When I was in high school the state
government (NSW in Australia) removed the scaling from difficult subjects.
This meant that doing a subject designed for morons (for example 2U Maths in
Practice - we used to call Maths in Space) would be normalised to the same
mean as higher level maths (4U). The smart thing to do if you had any
mathamatical ability was to enrole in moron maths since you would of course be
a star and get a very high mark. A few of my smart friends did this - the
problem was by the time we graduated the universities had rebelled and
introduced their own scaling and anyone who had done maths in space was scaled
down to nothing. More by stubbornness than genius I chose to avoid this path
and selected all hard subjects which turned out to be the smart thing to do in
the end.

I guess the moral here is do what challenges you and don't worry about anyone
else.

~~~
bryondowd
I had the exact opposite situation. I was encouraged to challenge myself and
take the hard courses through high school, because it would look better on my
transcript. I finished with a rather low GPA (around a C+), while
simultaneously having a really high SAT score (770 verbal, 710 math).

Colleges here use both to determine scholarship eligibility, and it turns out
I qualified for nothing. If I had taken the easier classes and raised my GPA
to meet the threshold, I would have gotten a full ride based on my SAT.

The moral here is you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

~~~
danieltillett
The Australian system is very different in that we don't have the equivalent
of the SAT with your entire university entrance mark determined by your final
marks in your 10 best units of high school classes (there is a statewide final
exam). Each subject was normalised to a mean of 60% with only 1% of marks over
90%. The universities then rescaled these marks so the mean for moron maths
became something like 30% while 4U maths had a scaled mean of 80%. My unscaled
mark was around 80% while my scaled mark ended up a little over 90%. My smart
friends ended up with the oposite sort of mark.

~~~
bryondowd
Ultimately, you have to know your system and work it, while hoping the system
doesn't change on you in the meantime. If your system hadn't changed
dramatically, it sounds like your friends would have been the ones coming out
ahead.

But I do suppose that the person who is 'cheating' the system is more likely
to get screwed harder than someone doing the 'right' thing in the case of a
major change. I expect that if things were changed in a way that hurt people
doing what they were supposed to, there would be some transitional period,
grandfathering, etc to protect them, whereas if a change hurts people who are
gaming the system, it's more likely to just leave them hanging, since they
shouldn't have been doing that anyway.

~~~
danieltillett
I agree, but as I found out by chance it is very hard to work a dynamic system
prone to political change when you have to invest years into it. If your
exposure is only short-term you are far less likely to get caught out by
sudden changes.

The irony in all this is I ended enrolling in a science degree for which I
only needed a very low mark to get into - I could have enrolled in any of my
high school's subjects and it would not have mattered.

------
bnegreve
The scale on the first plot is a bit disingenuous. Here's the same data
replotted with a proper scale (i.e. ranging from 0 to 4 instead of 2.6 to
3.4).

[http://i.imgur.com/HxKss12.png](http://i.imgur.com/HxKss12.png)

~~~
pervycreeper
Considering that a "grade" is an artificial quantity which doesn't represent
the "mass" of anything real, the given scale is appropriate. The axes are also
labelled very prominently, so I'm not sure what kind of false impression you
think a reader would get from the first graph but not the second.

~~~
bnegreve
Grades are at least _supposed_ to reflect the quality of the students who pass
the tests with some level of linearity. If the author doesn't believe this is
the case, s-he shouldn't use them in the first place, especially not to
discuss _grade inflation_.

The kind of false impression that at least I get when I look at this graph is
that the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3 over the past 20 years when
they were only multiplied by a factor 1.06. For anyone familiar with GPA, this
is misleading.

~~~
pervycreeper
>the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3

The point is that a grade is an ordinal quantity (somewhat). You don't get
anything useful from multiplying grades by any "factor". Anyone in danger of
thinking otherwise should not blame the graph. Fast food articles such as "Top
10 secrets of misleading graphs your profs don't want you to know" are
probably more culpable in that regard.

~~~
bnegreve
> The point is that a grade is an ordinal quantity

In principle I agree, but grade inflation preserves the order so why should we
care about grade inflation if grades are only about order? I think the plot
and the rest of the article goes beyond that.

Also an histogram is a poor representation choice for ordinal data.

~~~
bryondowd
Grade inflation doesn't preserve order between the inflated and non-inflated
grades, which I think is the point. An inflated low A might actually be lower
than an original high B, but gets the shiny A that looks better on paper.

------
netcan
Like a lot of the pathologies in higher education, there's a lot of bleed from
one problem/question and its answers (like grades) into others.

So first, what are grades even for? They give students and teachers feedback,
they set goals and they enforce a certain amount of discipline, pacing,
something to enforce practice. Basically, teaching tools.

If I try to think of something analogous, a periodic fitness test as part of a
fitness program might be it.

Once grades exist, they pick up all sorts of other uses inside the system.
Admissions of various sorts. Hiring. Proof. Measures of competence.
Comparison. When this is the actual goal, the grading and testing looks
different. GMAT is designed around this "secondary" use.

I think if you roll back the history of how high schools or universities
picked up all the habits and structures they have now, grades weren't as
central as they are now. Matriculation was the main marker and that's a
binary.

Anyway….

I think this kind of focus on grades, grade inflation, deflation and such is
more about the fact that most of us were at one time or another concerned with
our grades. Any unfairness annoys us and when different generations, places or
subjects "have it easy" we get annoyed.

I don't think it matters much though. The main reason for grades is the first
part, the teaching tool. Hopefully that becomes the focus. Better grading
where better is "helps the student more." That probably means tracking and
giving feedback progress, reacting to deficits, controlling the pace and stuff
like that.

I hope grading gets completely hijacked by the technology assisted pedagogy.

------
ponderatul
What about grade deflation ? in the UK, where at least in social sciences (
Business Degree included) you are not graded against set standards but graded
against your fellow students, with whom you are supposed to collaborate with
as I understand it.

Even more, students are awarded between 0-70 max,although the documentation
says it's 0 - 100. I've also discussed with several professors that they are
encouraged to degrade the student, even if they find nothing wrong with the
paper, because otherwise the results won't be consistent with past data.

Does anyone see any problem here ?

~~~
M8
What if you infuse your papers with some minority and gender studies crap
(even if it's not related)? Wouldn't it improve your grade?

~~~
irremediable
Well, if you hadn't studied those topics in sufficient depth, the examiner
would doubtless decrease your mark for writing crap. If they weren't relevant,
your mark would be decreased for writing irrelevant things.

I suspect your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sick of humanities-
bashing. If people don't like culture, that's fine, but they don't have to go
around oozing their contempt.

~~~
logicchains
>If people don't like culture, that's fine

I thought the whole point of the modern humanities is that culture (or at
least western culture) is evil and oppressive. In my experience the average
humanities course is not concerned with "culture" in the "cultured" sense of
the word, which I assume is the definition you were using. The university I
attended recently dropped all the Greek, Latin and Classics courses, for
instance, and fired (negotiated generous early retirement packages with) all
the staff who had taught them.

~~~
irremediable
I disagree that modern humanities have abandoned those topics. I know _plenty_
of people studying Greek, Latin, Classics, etc. Especially if you count people
studying them as modules, rather than as the entire focus of their degree.

I get the impression you don't value things like anthropology, non-Western
history and gender studies. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'd disagree here as
well, though. I value and respect those disciplines, and I don't see their
growth as a bad thing.

~~~
logicchains
I suspect if you compared the relative number of people studying those topics
now to fifty years ago, there'd be significantly fewer now studying classics
etc.

I've nothing against anthropology, gender studies etc. as disciplines, just
with how they're often taught, with a focus on promoting particular ideologies
rather than detached critical thinking.

------
gonzo41
This is the result of a user pays education system. If I was dropping a 100K
on a degree then I'd expect all HD's. And those that do spend as much money
expect the same. So how do you differentiate yourself from all the others with
the same degree and same grades? go get more schooling. thus grade inflation
and degree inflation.

Down in Australia, its less of this and more "you should be thanking me for
giving you 51% in physical and computational chemistry".

edit - long day == giving up on spelling

~~~
quonn
This argument is not very convincing, since grade inflation is also real in
Germany, even though education is free here. I actually think it comes down to
the fact that everyone feel that the middle class is in decline, which creates
a more competitive environment and makes grades seem more important, so people
work harder on that (which is not to say that others were lazy before - just
maybe not optimising for good grades).

~~~
gonzo41
Well maybe I'm am just bad at physical chemistry then. It may also have some
relation to weather a university is marking its students against each other or
against criteria, if there is a bar to be passed, maybe the use of grades is
irrelevant. Its should just be pass/fail, no other metric attached.

------
commentnull
It's true - the professor awarded everyone who turned up to class that day
fifty percent, just for turning up! One student then started to question that
decision - the professor said "aha - critical reasoning! Very good, extra
marks for you!". Another then said they would write to the dean to complain,
the professor said "excellent, I will award even more marks to you in
anticipation of your written effort".

Seems like getting the grade got too easy...

~~~
tormeh
Oh boy, that's a teacher that's given up.

------
cmac2992
Ah yes.... Purdue. Almost no grade inflation. When I was there, everyone saw
this graph and it made them pissed because other schools had become 'easier'
and Purdue had not. That was back before I realized no one gives a shit about
GPA.

~~~
nsajko
Don't employers filter candidate employees by their GPA, though?

------
Dwolb
There's an underlying assumption of 'grades matter' that may no longer be
true. I think this assumption has been becoming less relevant as more people
look to see what you did rather than what marks you got. i.e. I believe more
people are interested in evaluating your body of work these days. I think this
is a good thing since it would allow students to be more rigorous in their
learnings for two reasons: 1) students are seeking true knowledge and
demonstration of mastery instead of an artificial comparisons and 2) they can
be more risky as they learn since the consequences of arriving at a wrong
conclusion are minimal.

------
SeanLuke
> It is commonly said that there is more grade inflation in the sciences than
> in the humanities. This isn't exactly correct. What is true is that both the
> humanities and the sciences have witnessed rising grades since the 1960s,
> but it appears that the starting points for the rise were different.

I am confused by this statement, because the Y axis label on the accompanying
chart says the exact opposite: that both the average GPA and the average
change in GPA is higher for humanities than for natural sciences.

~~~
davidgrenier
It's higher, but the line is flat... i.e. it started with a higher baseline
but stayed stable. So the rise over time of sciences has been similar to
humanities.

~~~
SeanLuke
This still doesn't explain why the author is quasi-agreeing with the claim
that the sciences has higher grade inflation.

------
lukasm
Is it true that you cannot default on a collage loan in US? How is it legal?
Isn't it the root cause of the problem.

(I'm not American, my knowledge is limited)

~~~
Happydayz
You can't discharge a student loan in bankruptcy. This makes sense. If you
borrow money to purchase a car or a home the lender always has the option of
repossessing the goods as a last resort.

You cannot legally repossess someone's human capital. So the current law is
set to avoid the moral hazard of someone borrowing $100k in student loans and
then declaring bankruptcy right after graduation.

~~~
analog31
But it promotes the moral hazard of the bank offering you a loan when they
know that the human capital is likely to be worthless.

------
dataker
People tend to believe this isn't bad, as "other qualities" would be more
important.

These qualities often are not creativity or diligence(hard to be quantified
now), but family connections or social status.

Showing personal skills in an interview assumes you got one in the first
place.

------
usmeteora
I am sure, as 3minus1 mentioned, there are many instances of grade inflation
but it seems to vary by major and school. The overall rise in GPA over the
years though could be influenced by other things I wonder.

1\. jackpirate mentioned more filler courses

2\. The internet? If you had a bad professor and a poorly written textbook
back in the day, you were kind of screwed outside of working with friends.
Today the internet offers pieces of courses and HW examples from all over the
world, and things like Coursera and MIT opencourse software are available.

3\. MORE AP and IB classes allow students to take college level courses but
alot of kids at my college for example, in stead of carrying over the credits,
chose to retake Calc I & II, even though they had ACED the AP exams, giving
them a freshman year filler of courses that were relatively a breeze for them.
I don't believe as many students took AP and IB classes back then. It seems to
be the norm nowadays to use this AP/IB edge to actually help yourself ease
into college courses be essentially retaking them. Besides, graduating early
from a 4 year university is not encouraged, most kids at that level also want
the full 4 year experience so their motivation to transfer the credits goes
down.

If you think about it, this gives the private universities grades a double
edge. you are more likely to be accepted into a competitive private university
if you are smart enough to be acing college level courses in highschool, and
once you get to the private university, you breeze through those courses by
essentially retaking them.

Most students used a combination of all three of these things and obtained
3.8-4.0 Freshman year, allowing for more slack when the harder courses started
to come in.

4\. Lets not forget aderall meds are handed out like candy these days to help
kids work harder longer. Use of these drugs at top private universities is
rampant. In many cases, parents seek out medication for their kids claiming
ADHD when really what they are saying is "my kid is not working hard enough to
meet up to my standards and because he must be as smart as I am that must be
because he is distracted with video games, and therefore has ADHD". Many kids
seek it out for themselves. Roughly 1/3rd of the kids I knew were taking
aderall regularly (either with or without prescription) to pull all nighters
on a regular basis to keep up in school.

one of many easily googled sources:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-
academic...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic-
edge-teenagers-abuse-stimulants.html?_r=0)

5\. As for the difference between public and private schools, competitiveness
and cheating (illegal use of adderall included) is contagious and I definitely
think competition, cheating, use of drugs to work harder longer (as opposed to
enjoyment and recreation), seems to exponentiate itself amongst more
competitiveness students, which statistically, are more likely to end up at
more competitive schools.

6\. Overall, more and more kids are going to college each year, but
interestingly, the applicant pools for public universities does increase, the
applicant pool for top private universities is exponential each year, allowing
private schools to choose the cream of the crop, potentially creating more of
a gap between the general caliber of students between private and public
universities.

Anecdotal sure but to give you an idea, my friend who went to Johns Hopkins
told me stories of kids ripping pages out of textbooks in the libraries so
other students had no access, and I've heard this happens at top law schools
as well. I witnessed in my private university even as a freshman. In many
cases these are kids whose entire identities and their parents value of them
depend on acing through ivy league schools, and failure (failure in these case
being Bs)is not an option. I can't speak for the average public school, but I
feel as if this mindset is less likely to be the norm here.

one of many sources to help support pt 5 & 6:
[http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions-
ma...](http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions-madness-of-
rich-penthouse-parents/)

7\. Someone else mentioned visa students who are TAs are pressured to give
good grades for good reviews. With underclassmen on student visas, the
competition seems to go up and they are in my experience more likely to engage
in competitive behavior or cheating or aderall abuse because the stakes of
failing out are also alot higher for them, but it seems to have the opposite
effect if you are an undergrad versus be a grad grading TA trying to get good
reviews from undergrads.

Anecdotal story, but proves that not all private schools use grade inflation
liberally:

At my college, which is a private university ranked top 50, goes up and down
each year by 20 or so in rankings, we are not top 5 but usually in top 25,
grading is really tough and we were actually ranked top 3 toughest graders
lumped in with MIT, except MIT exempts students from their entire freshman GPA
(I've heard) to help with suicide and other such issues. Twice I was curved
down because grades were so good we were suspected of cheating. The average
GPA at my college was 2.7 when I graduated in 2012 and that is after 10% of
students fail out. I wish I experienced more grade inflation at my school!

In the three cases of severe grade inflation during my undergrad career, the
averages on the exams were 20/100 or 40/100, and they had to curve up 30-40
pts just get a third of the class to pass, and still that meant most kids got
Bs or Cs. I'll never forget when we got 18/100 average for 64 kids in a class
and we were all Engineering Majors. Different topic but I believe that results
from hiring Professors who are better at research (brings in funding) than
they are at teaching. Theres no reason statstically why the average of 64
students junior year of one of the hardest Engineering Majors at a top
Engineering School should all be failing unless of course the Professor sucks
at teaching.

So in this case, there was severe grade inflation, but that did not results in
higher GPAs overall relative to other schools, it just helped A Professor not
get in trouble for being responsible for causing the entire Electrical
Engineering Department to fail and have to retake her course, which would have
definitely put this Professor under review...

~~~
hga
MIT doesn't really have "tough" grading per se, it has a lot of tough courses
that are graded by mastery of the material. If you've chosen an appropriate
major for yourself, you'll be getting mostly As and Bs. This eliminates dire
competitive stresses that prompt sabotage in other schools, and encourages
helping out each other. There's also a committee watching out for abuses by
professors that would go so far as taking a class away from one if he thought
there was cheating and decided to punitively grade as a result (although
they're more focused on demanding too much, e.g. too lengthy finals, or
otherwise too much required stuff at the end of term).

For freshman, it was graded pass-fail for the first year when I attended back
in the '80s, now just for the first semester; that's more to ease the
transition than anything else, and "hidden", unofficial grades are kept in
case you need them for e.g. medical school applications. And the reported GPAs
treat an A as 5.0.

Some figures for applications, as of some years ago, I think more people are
applying now: 13,000 applications, but MIT has a high bar in terms of being
able to do the general requirements of a semester of math past the AP Calculus
BC sequence, one term each of mechanics and E&M calculus based physics, and
other stuff like chemistry and a lab. So no legacy admits per se, instead the
admissions office identified 3,000 applicants who they thought could "do the
work", then constructed a class of ~1,100.

~~~
usmeteora
Interesting. It is silly that articles come out with tough grading rankings,
based on what? I was just stating an article to further prove the point that
not all schools are just a breeze and hand out As, and the higher grades are
more likely attributed to having higher performing students, the trends of
which become more obvious as competition for college acceptance goes up every
year.

I think for my school people did choose the right majors but the Professors
were hired based on their ability to bring in research/grant money and had no
interest/some even acted disgusted at having to bother to teach a class,
therefore alot of the class, despite being high performers in general, found
that alot of classes, almost 100% consistent with the Professors mainly
focused on research as opposed to teaching, caused lower grades overall. We
have a very low endowment and overall much less money than MIT, so the
pressure/incentive to hire Professors based on their ability to bring money in
the school always trumps their ability to teach or produce a stimulating
curriculum in general.

I would say this results in higher curves due to lower test performance in
classes, that do not actually result in curving everyone up to an A, and thus
is perceived by the outside world as "tough grading" but I think the students
are of high caliber, but really it is a result of poor teaching. If the 64
students who have made it through the first two years of a college with high
grades, all go into one class, and suddenly the average is 18/100 on an exam,
and the 4.0 student makes a 55/100 and also gets an F without a curve, then we
could say, maybe this is an issue with the a construct of incentivizing
Professors to actually bother teaching and not so much that the students
werent cut out for the major.

To add more stats, according to 2013, there were 16,000 undergraduate
applicants to my school with an incoming freshman class of 1,204 so similar.

But on the more general point, I don't think the main driver for the disparity
between high grades in private schools is due to a scandal or grade inflation,
as most of my points support, in general higher performing students get into
higher performing schools and those more competitive schools are good,
especially with a large applicant pool, at deciding who is capable of doing
well there, though I would say MIT is much better at this than my school was.

~~~
hga
Hmmm; while MIT doesn't have a truly huge endowment (its management of all
that sort of thing was downright criminal until the '90s, details on request,
and it then managed to benefit from the following financial bubbles), it can
get away with hiring those sorts of research professors. With exceptions that
prove the rule, like SF author Joe Haldeman, all professors are tenured or
tenure track, they only get tenure by being #1 or #2 in their field ( _very_
occasionally #3, and this is strongly enforced in multiple ways), and that of
course means they're able to support themselves with grant money (plus one day
a week to otherwise earn money). _And_ they must be _adequate_ teachers, and I
came across/knew of very few who weren't serious and sincere about education,
although of course their ability varied.

And this is enforced a whole bunch of ways post-tenure, e.g. I witnessed a
case where a professor a lot of us have heard about was sat down by the head
of his department (who I worked for at the time) and forced to read all the
student evaluations of a course he'd just taught, which were all strongly
negative except for another exception that proved the rule (we'd read them
prior to the confrontation), and was then told he'd never teach that course
again, he'd screwed up so badly.

Anyway, yeah, I can see all your points, which reinforce what I've been
reading and occasionally witnessing starting in the '70s. One might more
broadly correlate it with caviler way colleges and universities let students
take on massive debt with all too often little chance of repaying it in a
reasonable amount of time, the massive bloat of administrators, and how the
latter are wresting more control from the faculty ... too many of these
institutions just aren't all that serious about undergraduate education.

------
jkw
Or a reason GPA has gone is because it's also become more competitive as
acceptance rates have gone down. Who knows.

~~~
chisleu
They have not. Acceptance rates are increases. The school makes more money by
having more students.

~~~
usmeteora
While this may be true for public universities, private maintain their
prestige by student faculty ratios and keeping their incoming classes between
1000-1300 students. You will see most private universities have kept their
class size constant in the passed decade while public ones have increased,
further supporting the graph shown in this article attesting to the disparity
in grades between public and private schools.

------
Dewie3
I'm not an American. I think it's funny when I see people writing about a "C
student" being a loser/slacker, a B student either being good or an
underachiever, and a _straight A_ student as the point where you finally have
your shit together and are doing well.

~~~
stegosaurus
Winner takes all.

The same exists in the UK. Because if you don't get an A, you won't get into
the high end universities, you won't get a high paying job, and that's you
done. Life of serfdom.

Exceptions to the rule exist but our society is based on small amounts of
winners compared to many losers.

~~~
Dewie3
I was talking about grade inflation, not winner takes all. So getting straight
As over there might be the equivalent of getting straight Bs over here. And
this doesn't say anything about which place is harder to study or to get
respectable results; obviously people's expectations rise with the inflation.
But there _is_ a downside to inflation though, namely that it is easier to get
straight As, which means that you can't differentiate the academically gifted
from the academically brilliant. Not unless you bring in other metrics, but I
guess having other metrics is healthy according to some opinions.

Life is probably less _winner takes all_ over here, but I don't think it has
anything to do with grade inflation or lack thereof in high school or college.

For that matter; where you are accepted into higher education over here tends
to be determined by a _score_ which is your average grade plus some points for
age (maybe for "life experience"?), and other things. Which ends up meaning
that if you don't have near perfect grades out of "high school", you won't get
into medical school (I guess this is the hardest one to get into). It is my
impression that since the US has more privatization, you can at least find
some university/college if you have money or connections even if you don't
have stellar grades.

~~~
hga
Med schools are a particular problem because the pipeline that starts with
them is constricted by the number of residents the society/government is
willing and able to support (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_\(medicine\))
). So as long as it's an attractive field (getting much less so in the US)
there will be significantly more med school applicants than slots.

