

Dean Says Median Grade at Harvard College Is A-, Most Common Grade Is A - mayneack
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/3/grade-inflation-mode-a/

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shalmanese
The problem is that grading serves two purposes that are at odds with each
other: comparison within a group and comparison between groups.

Harvard's grading system is useless to a student that is trying to figure out
how they are ranking among their peers or whether their studying habits are
increasing their performance. However, it's great when they're on the job
market and their 4.0 GPA is better than the 2.9 GPA of Engineering State that
still grades on a sharp curve.

The increase in grade inflation has reflected the trend of college goers
valuing extrinsic factors (get a better job) over intrinsic factors (learn
more stuff).

A solution to this problem would be to split the two grading systems apart,
having one standardized, SAT style test at the end of college that would allow
more accurate comparisons between schools while preserving GPA as a within
school measure.

In fact, it stuns me that the College Board hasn't positioned the GRE as this
kind of service and pioneered some kind of aGPA score that would combine your
college GPA with the relative performance of your college against all others.

~~~
user1239321421
I went to ETH Zurich, Switzerland for both my BSc and MSc degrees.

The undergrad program that leads up to the BSc degree is ridiculously easy to
get into (Swiss nationals even have to be accepted into the program by law
AFAIK -- I'm not Swiss) but the first year of that program is so absolutely
horrendously hard to survive (one massive set of 10 or so finals at the end of
year 1) that you literally come out of your first year with five kilos off the
scale and pale like a ghost (I'm Caucasian ... ?).

At any rate, point being at ETH Zurich in particular and other European unis
in general (again AFAIK) the goal is to survive and get your degree whichever
way you can.

Grade inflation at "top notch" American unis with their laughable grading
standards, the constant availability of extra credit to push up your final
grade at will, and the weird financial and social hurdles that applicants are
presented with utterly confuse me.

Speaking of which, tuition fees at ETH Zurich were 750 CHF per year (830 USD).

~~~
rayiner
Top notch American universities have ridiculously easy grading standards
because the filtering happens at the admissions stage. Harvard's undergrad has
something like a 5-6% acceptance rate. Admission requires being on the ball
since age 14 so you can apply with a perfect high school GPA, getting at least
in the 98th percentile on the SATs, and doing a bunch of extracurricular and
service projects while maintaining that perfect GPA.

After that, the fact of whether you're smart and hard working is presumed. The
grade inflation exists to make college a fun experience where you can try out
different sorts of classes without prejudicing your chances at jobs and
graduate school later.

~~~
Edmond
I have always found it amusing that the virtue of hard work is bestowed on
kids who make it into the most selective American colleges. Another way to
look at it is that, it is precisely hard work that these kids(or at least
their parents on their behalf)are trying to avoid.

In other words while the rest of us will have to slug it hard until the moment
of death (quite literally for many), once you enter a school like Harvard it's
all gravy for the rest of your life. Basically put in about five years of hard
work to get into Harvard and live a cushy life from then on, sweet deal
indeed.

I have meet people who went to Harvard and the kind of accommodation they get
is mind blowing to a state-school Joe like me. I dated a girl who was
interning in DC a couple years back from Harvard law school, she had the whole
summer to turn in what was a five page paper. Mean while I had to write 10+
page papers practically every week in b-school at a public school and if I
missed the due date, the penalty can be anything from losing some points to
getting no points.

~~~
rayiner
I don't think Harvard grads tend to autopilot the rest of their lives. That
said, one of the purposes of going to Harvard is to avoid risk. Harvard
students tend to come from the upper middle class (but not from "fuck you"
money), and going to Harvard helps minimize the risk of falling out of that
class. Hence the popularity of banking, consulting, federal government, etc,
among Harvard undergraduates.

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tristanz
My experience was that it's relatively easy to stack rank Harvard
undergraduates, but it often doesn't feel like it serves any educational
purpose to do so.

In the class I taught of 12, there were 10 that seemed like they deserved an A
or A-. They completed all the assignments and did their absolute best as far
as I could tell. Some were definitely better than others (A vs. A-), but
giving the hardworking but not genius students Bs just made them stressed out.
They would come to office hours to ask how they could improve. The only true
answer I could give was "there are 2-3 students in this class that are just
incredibly creative and gifted writers, they get the As."

Maybe it's the role of a teacher to stack rank students, but it's no fun. I'd
much prefer to try to get the best out of each student. The truly top students
are going to have no problem distinguishing themselves later in life anyway,
it's just so obvious how good they are.

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wnissen
Stack ranking in small groups is stupid and counterproductive because it
forces a distribution where none necessarily exists. So for any particular
class of 12 I agree with you.

However, Harvard enrolls over 1500 frosh next year. Is there really so little
daylight between them that they should all get an A or A-? Graduation is
supposed to ensure the minimum fulfillment of standards, GPA is for ranking.
Given that you're seeing kids on the far end of the tail, I would expect more
variance, not less.

Let's be honest here: grade inflation is not something we do for a reason, but
rather something that happens because no one has any particular interest in
preventing it.

Full disclosure: I attended a demanding college whose 2007 median GPA was 3.35
(the average was less). Of the 150-ish annual graduates, only 7 have ever
achieved a 4.0 since its founding in 1955.

~~~
tristanz
The overall GPA can still be used to rank, even at Harvard. The latin honors
are fixed at top 5, 20, and 50 percent of graduating classes.

I don't really care about grade inflation overall because I don't think more
competition for grades would improve Harvard as an educational institution.

I do think grading norms/curves may be important to standardize the
distribution across majors. It's absolutely the case that some students avoid
difficult courses. This is very unfortunate.

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chatmasta
I go to Yale where the average GPA is a 3.6. So we suffer from a similar
"problem." But honestly, I do not think it _is_ a problem. Kids here put an
absurd amount of work into their classes. It's not surprising that the average
GPA is a 3.6, because the average assignment actually is A- level work. The
obvious argument against this is that the grades should be curved so that the
average level of work receives a C... but what do you do when most kids are
getting the same top grades on tests, or writing the same high quality papers?
It's a hard problem to solve, and as long as other colleges have grade
inflation, it would be disadvantageous to your students to not have it.

The problem I have is differing GPA distributions between majors. History
majors have a much easier time getting in the 3.6-4.0 range than CS majors,
because history teachers will rarely give anything less than a B. So when a CS
major applies to jobs that other majors are also applying to (say, finance),
he can look bad in comparison.

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jayd16
No one gives a shit about GPA in the real world.

~~~
chatmasta
Right, and then there's this. But employers do give a shit about GPA when
recruiting college seniors, because it represents one of the only available
metrics for quality of work. In my experience, providing employers with other
metrics reduces the value they place on GPA.

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eitally
Perhaps schools should adopt the IIHS ratings scale: Good, Acceptable,
Marginal, Poor. Doing away with letter grades that have strong historical bias
and cultural signaling might be useful.

Example:
[http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/toyota/4runner](http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/toyota/4runner)

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codex
Grade inflation stepped up a notch during the Vietnam War, when professions
were reluctant to fail students out of college an into the draft. Now it's
done to protect a college's graduation rate, which affects rankings.

Elite Ivy League institutions admit bright, motivated high school graduates
and produce bright, motivated college graduates. The institution's value add
is mainly networking and branding--kind of like YC.

~~~
nether
It's also due to the fact that easier grading brings more positive student
evaluations of profs, which are taken into account with salaries and
tenureship.

~~~
greenburger
I assure you that at a Research I university like Harvard, student evaluations
have _at best_ a pro-forma impact on tenureship, and probably salary as well.
Faculty at Harvard are tenured and compensated on their abilities to publish
high profile research and attract major grants, showing up to lectures is
about all that is expected of them teaching-wise.

~~~
impendia
Maybe Harvard. But I am employed as a math professor at a Research I state
school, in which context you are quite mistaken. Research is most important,
but good teaching is also important.

"Universities don't care about teaching" is a fun meme to kick around, and
there are anecdotes to support this, but by and large it is not true.

~~~
greenburger
My comment was directed more specifically to Harvard and narrow set of top
tier schools, I do not believe that universities don't care about teaching.
The list of "very high research activity" (apparently research 1 is no longer
used) includes 108 schools [1] of which Harvard is at one extreme end.

That said, my father recently retired after 33 years with his department at a
"high research activity", the second tier, and he can't recall a single case
when someone was denied tenure where teaching performance was an issue.
Research, and increasingly grant acquisition were always the issues.

Personally, I went to a small liberal arts school. Having taught at two top
universities, private and public, I'm happy I went where I did. Undergrad
teaching was the top priority and the difference is stark.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_in_the_United_States)

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HorizonXP
I always hated this about other schools. While I will be the first to admit
that I could probably have tried harder in school, I blame this practice in
Ontario for part of why I could never get an interview for medical school.
Waterloo engineering was definitely one of the tougher programs, and an 80
average was actually tough to attain. It seems that my friends at other
schools or programs had an easier time getting 80s and 90s.

~~~
hyperbovine
PhD programs are well aware of grade inflation at different universities and
take this into account when conducting admissions. No idea if med schools do
the same but I'd be surprised if they didn't. Your difficulty getting into med
school could also have been because engineering not a typical "pre-med"
degree.

~~~
HorizonXP
Medical schools specifically stated that they did not adjust grades. There was
some different weighting mechanisms employed for certain schools, but that was
at the school level, not program level.

Furthermore, medical schools here typically encourage students _not_ to pursue
"pre-med" degrees. They want students that pursue challenging programs, in
order to demonstrate their abilities and to have a backup if medical school
doesn't work out.

I don't have any regrets about engineering, it's the best decision I ever
made, and I'm sure I'll have an impact in other ways. It's just still a
bitter/sore spot for me.

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impendia
I taught an upper-level undergraduate course in math (combinatorics) at
Stanford a few years ago. There were 18 students, and I gave all of them A's
or B's.

They deserved it. I was inspired by what they accomplished. I would have felt
uncomfortable if I had been asked to make sure the average was around a C.
(And all of this is very typical of the experience of people teaching math at
Stanford.)

~~~
secstate
That's all well and good, but the whole point of a scale is that students fall
somewhere on it and it reflects work done in comparison to something. If not
other students, then just patting ourselves on the back for a job well done.

Would you need a some slacker half-following directions to earn an Average?
No, you'd need the Average of the students in the course to earn an Average.
Otherwise the distinction is meaningless.

Then again, I've just spent some time re-reading Covey's Seven Habits of
Highly Effective people, and I've given up caring too much about grades per-
se. They discourage cooperation and encourage competition amongst peers. And
in doing that strongly bias their adherents to win-lose scenarios when we
should all strive for win-win scenarios.

If you think that's bunk, I encourage you to read Covey's book. Coming at it
with an open-mind can truly be life-changing in a positive way.

~~~
Smudge
> If not other students, then just patting ourselves on the back for a job
> well done.

Or, for the win-win version, how about an objective measure of correct
answers/solutions. Grade inflation never bothered me in math and computer
science courses, because what were they going to do when the students knew the
material? Make 1 point the difference between a A and an C? I remember a
midterm where a professor did exactly that (forced a grade-lowering curve on a
group that had earned mostly 19 or 20 out of 20). It just didn't really
work... A few kids even dropped the course, despite the fact that they
basically knew all of the material (and had slipped up on only one or two
answers).

Of course, they could just make the material impossibly hard so that only 2-3
students could get the A (after weeks of all-nighters and likely trading off
good grades in other courses) but to me that is counterproductive to the whole
reason the students are there -- to learn!

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ianferrel
Old joke: What do you call a guy who gets straight C-minuses at Harvard?

A Harvard Graduate.

Harvard is effectively graded pass/fail. I'm not convinced that's actually a
bad thing.

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rayiner
I never understood the complaints about grade inflation at top schools. The
people who care to make distinctions among graduates at Harvard (investment
banks, consulting companies, graduate schools), already know how to do so.
Everyone else just cares about the "Harvard" on the resume. So who cares what
the median grade is? They could hand out degrees "magna cum fruitcake" and
nobody would blink.

~~~
sp332
I went to a liberal arts college that didn't do grade inflation. The average
grade was nominally a C. The campus bookstore sold t-shirts with "C+: Better
than average!" on them. Oh, and our diplomas are comically large :)

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avolcano
I have to imagine that the long-term solution for this is for employers to
find better criteria to judge candidates on than a GPA. There's too much
variance in schools and classes to really consider it an accurate judge of
ability. It's a measure of how well you did in school, not how well you will
be able to do your job.

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mjmahone17
I am convinced the best way to deal with classes is to make failing a non-
factor, i.e. if you fail a class, it doesn't affect anything, and no one
really "knows" outside of your school. Then, make all classes graded on a
pass-fail basis, perhaps with a professor's ability to note that a few
students went above and beyond expectations.

This way, you can actually say "This person knows x and is capable of doing y
at z standards. See, they passed the course that required you to do all that."
And you don't end up with weird situations like the "gentleman's" C, where
you've passed a course but gained next to nothing from it. If you've passed an
intro physics course with a C, what does that mean? Can you calculate vector
forces? Or are your diagrams sometimes OK looking, but you can't crunch
numbers?

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chris_mahan
So a 4.0 at Harvard is equivalent to a 2.0 at a community college. Niiiiice!

~~~
jjoonathan
In high school I took number theory at the local community college. We stopped
right before the chapter on quadratic reciprocity. Later, I found the Harvard
midterm for their undergrad number theory class online. I took a look out of
curiosity. The first question was on quadratic reciprocity, and I had no clue
what the other 9 (or 14, maybe) were about. They were moving >2x as fast and
doing 3x as much homework (the homework was online too).

I suspect the worst student in the Harvard class would have been competitive
with the best student in the CC class. If 20% of the kids in the CC class get
As, it's not a stretch to believe that 100% of the Harvard kids would have
gotten As had they taken the same class.

Obviously this holds for some classes more than others, but the point is that
variation in difficulty between classes, professors, and peer-groups can
easily dominate variation in difficulty imposed by the grading scale.

~~~
chris_mahan
You're saying, then, that a 4.0 at a community college is not even a 2.0 at
Harvard? But how could it be? It's the opposite! 4 > 2! Those universities are
trying to redefine numbers... Or maybe it's in the units! Ohhh, now I get it:
Given CC=Commmunity College, then 4.0 GPA CC < 2.0 GPA Harvard. This implies:
2.0 GPA CC < 2.0 GPA Harvard. Now we drop 2.0 GPA from both sides and we get
CC < Harvard, or Harvard > CC. But wait, is that true for every community
college and for every class and for every course at Harvard and at all those
community colleges? So maybe it's not 100%, so maybe 4.0 GPA CC > 2.0 GPA
Harvard in some cases. so, the answer, as usual, is "it depends".

What does it depend on? It depends on how things are measured.

Woooooooooooo, wait a minute there Sherlock. Harvard is Expensive man! And
hard to get into... How can there possibly be cases when Harvard < CC? Since
Harvard is so 1337, there's no way that Harvard < CC, right (in some cases)?
But then since it's impossible to measure (accurately and without bias) all of
the community colleges out there, it's theoretically possible for CC >
Harvard, especially when taking into consideration the tuition paid. So, in
some cases, (CC+small_tuition) > (Harvard+expensive_tuition), and thus CC >
(Harvard + expensive_tuition - small_tuition), so then one could say that CC -
expensive_tuition > Harvard - small_tuition in some cases.

So, when you wrote "it's not a stretch to believe that 100% of the Harvard
kids would have gotten As had they taken the same class." You're actually
trying to disprove that "CC - expensive_tuition > Harvard - small_tuition in
some cases", but that can't be, because there's no way to measure all. Thus
your statement "it's not a stretch to believe" has to be incorrect (since
can't be verified as correct). Anyway, 100% gotten A? Really? Are you a
betting man? What if one student had a bad day that day and got an 89?

Be careful making generalizations, man. You can't know until you measure; and
then you can't know until many other people have also measured, and then you
can't know until many years have passed and nobody had come forward with
substantial allegations of study bias in your field of study.

Find those

~~~
jjoonathan
How did this:

> variation in difficulty between classes, professors, and peer-groups can
> easily dominate variation in difficulty imposed by the grading scale

Become this:

> 4.0 GPA CC < 2.0 GPA Harvard. This implies: 2.0 GPA CC < 2.0 GPA Harvard.
> Now we drop 2.0 GPA from both sides and we get CC < Harvard, or Harvard >
> CC. ... Harvard is so 1337, there's no way that Harvard < CC, right (in some
> cases)?

And why do you think I'm performing a cost/benefit analysis? I relayed an
anecdote about a single class that had to do with course material, not
finances or overall GPA comparisons.

> You're actually trying to disprove that "CC - expensive_tuition > Harvard -
> small_tuition in some cases"

No.

I'll admit that I made a slightly hyperbolic statement when I made a claim
about kids in a class I never attended, but you belabor this point to such
excess that I have no trouble calling it "nitpicking."

> Are you a betting man? What if one student had a bad day that day and got an
> 89?

Then my conclusion would not change in the slightest.

> Be careful making generalizations, man.

Right back at you. Slight hyperbole is one thing, straw men are another.

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phren0logy
I would imagine there's a significant selection bias at work here. This is not
a random sample of students, and I don't think it's super odd that many of
them get As.

Perhaps more get As than should, but I'd look at the grade distribution of a
less discriminating institution if I wanted to get huffy about grade
inflation. Especially with no meaningful data in the article about historic
grade distributions at Harvard.

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727374
The problem is that law (and other professional) schools are incentivized to
largely disregard the institution of applicants and instead base most of their
admissions decisions on GPA and LSAT so they can get high US News rankings. An
elite undergrad institution can best serve it's students by making sure high
GPA's are achievable to hard working, smart students who want to go to
professional schools.

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aliston
Unless you're planning on applying to grad school, GPA really doesn't really
matter for anything after about 6 months out of school.

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dba7dba
Preferred admission to kids of alumni at top private school. And easy As that
will pave way to other grad schools.

I don't want to believe US is a class based society but ...

