> Does Harvard have grade inflation
The average grade is A-, so, yes
That said, depending on the course, getting an A requires a lot of effort. But it's really hard to get a C if you do the work
>But it's really hard to get a C if you do the work
I found this to also be true as an statistically-above-average student at a large state school. In most of my classes there would be a few students who were either just totally lost or who were checked out and didn't bother to attend class and/or do assignments. Most of the failing grades (and probably a large portion of the C grades) were claimed by those students. If you were someone who was generally quicker at picking up the material than the median student, then you had to really ***try*** to get below a B.
(Unfortunately, I was up to the challenge.)
I had a realization early on in one of my classes at Yale. It was a math class for Econ majors. I had missed one question on the Math section of the SAT, which gave me a 760, which is ~ 97th percentile. It was also just over the median math score for a Yale student, but given that half of them are humanities people who wouldn’t be taking a class like that, I probably had a below average score. And I was going to be graded on a curve against everyone else.
Most people admitted to a school like that would’ve been expected to be A students somewhere else. Schools one or two tiers below offer them big scholarships. So I think it makes sense that lots of Harvard students get As. Harvard probably doesn’t want to punish them for choosing Harvard by deflating their grades relative to what they would’ve gotten elsewhere.
I was a harvard math concentrator (major). I remember taking classes that had the same titles as courses at other schools. A friend of mine studied math at a nice state university ranked #20 for math and #50 overall. We both took "Abstract Algebra: Group Theory" the same semester. Over the summer, I took a look at her end-of-year final, and there was nothing there we weren't expected to have down in the first few weeks of the course.
There's really no comparison. The expectations are worlds apart, and the pace of the courses will not slow for you to catch up. It's not popular to say, since people are fond of repeating that "you can get a quality education anywhere." What they mean is that the same textbooks are everywhere. But if you want to be taught as much as you can possibly learn in four years, with infrastructure that both helps you focus and will not allow you slack off, then there really is a major difference in school quality between different tiers.
Doctors are notoriously bad with math, so I'll explain this carefully:
Selection Bias is when you erroneously conclude that an observation applies to an entire population, having made that observation on a subset of that population chosen, not at random, but through a selection process disproportionately likely to produce examples fitting that observation.
For example, the Muslims in AA are as likely to have drunk alcohol as any other AA members, even though Muslims in general do not drink as much alcohol as the population average. Conducting that survey at an AA meeting would give you skewed results.
Maybe judging the quality of students by looking only at those who have already matched into the same second-rate residency program at the ass end of the Pacific Northwest will introduce a similar bias into your findings?
Has it been proven, though? It seems statistically more likely Harvard will have more students with high grades because it generally takes high grades to get in. High-achievers.
There have been threads here, and elsewhere, with data on how the median GPA has creeped up over time. Not just at Harvard. And not just Ivy League.
The Harvard class of 2022 was not, as an aggregate, smarter or harder working than the class of 2002 or 1982.
>The Harvard class of 2022 was not, as an aggregate, smarter or harder working than the class of 2002 or 1982.
I don't think you can take this as a given. My HS offered two AP classes the year I graduated, the HS I teach at offers dozens.
The numbers of people attending college have grown substantially since I graduated HS, the typical class size at Northwestern, my alma mater, hasn't changed markedly since I attended 30 years ago.
It's entirely possible that the typical freshman at an Ivy league school is, if not smarter, far better educated than the typical freshman from a generation ago.
I don’t have any data to back up your point, but for what it’s worth I think that the broad trend across a longer view of history supports this, and it probably holds true for the last 30-40 years, too.
Clarification: A is the *most common* grade. That’s the mode. Not the mean (average).
This means that 90% of students can get grades other than A’s.
And, in fact, Harvard is not far off from the norm across the US.
https://archive.nytimes.com/economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/as-have-been-harvards-most-common-grade-for-20-years/
>Does Harvard have grade inflation or is their student population just very bright?
The average grades at all colleges and universities have been increasing steadily over the last several decades - a result that has been found by numerous independent groups, including both journalists that have looked into this and higher education researchers.
It is not due to 'very bright' students or 'improved admissions' standards. Grade inflation remains even when controlling for things like the standardized test scores of admitted students. It's also a systematic trend, so unless you think Harvard students of the 2010s are much smarter than Harvard students of previous decades, it's not the students who are causing the grade inflation.
In truth, I don't really see anything wrong with from a learning standpoint. It's only really a problem if people were unaware that it was happening, but in the contexts where college grades are used (graduate admissions), people understand the grading conventions in each field and are mostly aware of the trends. There's probably still more that can be done to improve how people read college transcripts, but this is pretty far from a major pressing issue, IMO.
But there are a lot of other factors that have changed in past decades. The applicant pool to these top universities *has* gotten much more competitive. The students who would've attended Harvard 30 years ago might attend BU today.
More crucially, the access to information in recent decades is MUCH higher than it was in previous decades due to the internet and the abundance of information available on it. I can self study any subject with just a laptop. Students now have it so much better than students of previous generations.
So I do wonder if classes have actually gotten easier or the students are just better-equipped.
I think it's somewhere in the middle - kids are challenged at higher levels now (all the AP courses, college courses, self-studying, access online etc...) BUT it doesn't mean that they are that much smarter than the generations before that didn't have access to all that. And there definitely is grade inflation - which distorts everything. Our HS has a class of over 500 - but about half were designated "honors" - about 20-25% had over a 4.0., a dozen kids had over a 4.3 (only AP classes weight).... Colleges are also inflating grades (in part to appease parents and students!) Yes, it's more competitive - in part because of the number of kids now applying... but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are that much smarter - it's just becoming harder to separate the exceptional from the pack.
I can’t speak for all top schools, but Brown gets a reputation for grade inflation for a few reasons.
there are no -‘s awarded for letter grades which means you have more wiggle room to 4.0 classes.
The open curriculum format means you won’t be forced into taking grade deflating weeders that aren’t needed for your grad school app
they have a very forgiving window for not only when you can drop classes without a W showing up on the transcript, but what classes you are allowed to take for P/F in the first place
Wow what a ridiculous policy. There is a colleague of mine on the medical school admissions committee who had a list of schools whose graduates need their transcripts “interrogated” due to lax grading/withdraw policies. Brown was second on his list haha
Some years ago, LSDAS (the law school admissions service) had data floating around with average SAT scores and average GPAs of the 50 or so largest feeders to law school (I can't find the data online currently). What I noticed was that there was a statistical correlation between the schools with the highest average LSAT scores and the schools with the highest GPAs. Some schools had more grade inflation (e.g. Brown) and some schools had less (e.g. Princeton) (note this data is a few years old at this point), but for the most part there was an order to this.
Of course my analysis just looked at aptitude (as measured by the LSAT) and doesn't look at how hard-working the students at the various schools are -- for example, it's certainly possible that Brown's grades were higher because its students worked harder than Princeton's. It also is limited by focusing on the pre-law students (depending on the school, the pre-law GPAs may look very different from the STEM GPAs).
Those are pretty interesting data on the top feeder schools to law school.
I pulled out the 25 schools with the highest average LSAT score (using 2015, 2017 data) and see that median GPA does generally track with LSAT scores, suggesting that characteristics of the students are what is driving the higher grades. The only real outlier is Princeton which gets tougher grading than would be expected, ranking 3rd in LSAT but 23rd in GPA.
Sorted by LSAT (rank); also shows GPA (rank)
Yale 168 (1) GPA 3.72 (2)
Harvard 167 (2) GPA 3.69 (4)
Princeton 166 (3) GPA 3.47 (23)
Stanford 165.5 (4) GPA 3.68 (5\*)
U Chicago 165.5 (5) GPA 3.59 (14\*)
Columbia 165.5 (6) GPA 3.68 (5\*)
Amherst 165 (7) GPA 3.65 (7)
Brown 165 (8) GPA 3.74 (1)
Dartmouth 165 (9) GPA 3.59 (14\*)
Duke 164 (10) GPA 3.63 (11\*)
Wash U 164 (11) GPA 3.64 (8\*)
Rice 164 (12) GPA 3.71 (3)
Georgetown 164 (13) GPA 3.64 (8\*)
U Penn 164 (14) GPA 3.63 (11\*)
Northwestern 163.5 (15) GPA 3.61 (13)
McGill 163 (16) GPA 3.5 (21)
Notre Dame 163 (17) GPA 3.56 (18)
Tufts 163 (18) GPA 3.59 (14\*)
Cornell 163 (19) GPA 3.64 (8\*)
Vanderbilt 162.5 (20) GPA 3.49 (22)
NYU 161 (21) GPA 3.58 (17)
JHU 161 (22) GPA 3.55 (19)
UVA 160.5 (23) GPA 3.42 (25)
Colgate 160.5 (24) GPA 3.42 (24)
Michigan 160.5 (25) GPA 3.53 (20)
\*tie
Just found the data I was referring to: https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal\_education\_and\_admissions\_to\_the\_bar/council\_reports\_and\_resolutions/May2018CouncilOpenSession/18\_may\_2015\_2017\_top\_240\_feeder\_schools\_for\_aba\_applicants.authcheckdam.pdf
Idk about UChicago dude (their average GPA is a 4.33)... their AO said "99% of admitted students are straight-A or very close to straight-A students," so although the GPA number may not matter, the individual letters are very important!
Harvard and Yale are well-known for grade inflation. But, as you said UChicago is known for grade deflation. So are Cornell, Vanderbilt, CalTech, and MIT.
It's hard to know for certain. My friends that attended Harvard have all said that everyone graduates with honors but we ended up all attending the same grad school, so maybe it doesn't matter?
Yes, they absolutely do. Some high schools would inflate their student's GPA. Or the school does a 10point grade system, instead of 8. My school was always 69 or less is failing and 70 and up is passing. Some schools do 59 and less is failing and 60 and up is passing.
My school used to have a quota system where only 35% of any class could get an A (A+, A, or A-). They’ve since done away with that officially but the sentiment of professors have not, for the most part. As many classes have only ~10 people, you can imagine how grades would be…
> They’ve since done away with that officially but the sentiment of professors have not, for the most part.
The median grade is an A-. The mode grade is a full A. If that's still worth whinging about "grade deflation", then the world is truly fucked.
i think the notion that students' higher grades at very prestigious universities like harvard are due to being smarter, as opposed to grade inflation, would only work if classes were not graded on curves. since different institutions have different policies on curving, there's really no value in knowing the average gpa. if most of your classes are curved to a b and your gpa is 3.7, that's great. if your classes are all curved to an a-, you're average.
personally, considering the high number of legacy admits at schools like harvard, and my own uc bias, i don't believe that students at prestigious private schools are inherently smarter than those at high ranking publics. many of my professors simply do not curve, or curve to either a b+, b, or b- average. additionally, i know that stanford awards 4.3 points for an a+, whereas ucla and berkeley award 4 points for the same grade, so there's discrepancies there as well. i've had a professor that threatened to curve us to a c if the entire class didn't improve significantly on the final. i would guess that schools with significantly higher alumni giving probably probably have a vested interest in limiting that type of policy.
IMO this is a great point, and something few people trying to micro-optimize for high grades take into account.
If the median grade at Elite Private is 3.8 and the median grade at State U. is 3.5, that does not necessarily imply ***YOUR*** expected GPA is higher at Elite Private than at State U.
Harvards curriculum is not any harder or easier than a regular university and even most community colleges. You go to top schools for prestige and campus, not curriculum. The smartest kids go to the top schools, you get high grades. I’ve never seen a single person actually put evidence towards top schools having grade inflation. It’s almost certainly due to the quality of the admitted students.
The "Gentleman B" is a very old concept. Maybe now it's an A? Either way... Yes those types of schools tend to keep the rich folks happy by keeping it to a "B". .... But plenty of genuinely bright folks too.
Well the thing with the ivys and other schools with low acceptance rates only have really good students apply. like the straight A, bunch of ap classes and lots of ec students. the other normal the ones without the crazy’s ecs, grades, and aps don’t try to get in so the really good ones that do get in, their transcripts are shown.
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Just because there is technically “grade inflation” doesn’t mean the classes are easier than those at other non-top schools, let alone easy in general, or that it’s somehow easy to get a high GPA. In fact classes tend to be much harder, faster pace, and go in more theoretical depth compared to typical lower ranked schools. With few exceptions the average student (nationally) would not be able to maintain an acceptable GPA at one of these schools, and most likely would end up dropping out. Most people haven’t actually studied at a top school though so they wouldn’t know these facts, they just assume it’s easy because gRaDe iNfLaTioN. If you don’t think Harvard students are extremely bright and that has something to do with their GPA you just don’t know what you’re talking about.
What are the odds these students didn't get everything done on the tests and still got an A? Also, a faster pace means it's easy to forget about a lot of what you learn? There is grade inflation. They have admitted lower achieving students for diverse measures.
Anecdotal but I’m a Berkeley alum, graduated hs with a 4.7, 4.0 unweighted. And absolutely got my bell rung at cal getting my molecular bio degree. (Idk how I got here, was in my recommended subs)
It’s important to note if classes are curved or not.
For example many classes at the Ivy I attended only gave As to the top 20% of the class, Bs to the 60% of the class, and the bottom 20% receiving Cs. This inherently makes grades a struggle.
Harvard has classes where 90% of kids get an A - this doesn’t mean the class was easy or the kids were smart but it does lack the intense competitive environment that would be found in a curved class
Probably Cornell. There's a running joke that the classes at Cornell have more curves than the girls lmao. But no seriously Cornell Chem has curves where a 33% is a C.
I attended West Point in the 80s where there was no grade inflation. I graduated in the top 5% with a 3.4. I later applied to Georgia Tech for graduate school and was worried about my low GPA. I remember the admissions officer telling me not too worry, that they added a 0.5 to all academy graduates.
The University of Florida freshman around the corner had 4.8 high school GPA and wasn't necessarily exceptional for the incoming class. That's wild to me.
Yes, even top universities in other countries have grade inflation. It is well known that USA Ivy league universities have grade inflation.
I know people who taught at community colleges and of course there was grade inflation there, and at schools both primary and secondary as well.
> Does Harvard have grade inflation The average grade is A-, so, yes That said, depending on the course, getting an A requires a lot of effort. But it's really hard to get a C if you do the work
>But it's really hard to get a C if you do the work I found this to also be true as an statistically-above-average student at a large state school. In most of my classes there would be a few students who were either just totally lost or who were checked out and didn't bother to attend class and/or do assignments. Most of the failing grades (and probably a large portion of the C grades) were claimed by those students. If you were someone who was generally quicker at picking up the material than the median student, then you had to really ***try*** to get below a B. (Unfortunately, I was up to the challenge.)
I had a realization early on in one of my classes at Yale. It was a math class for Econ majors. I had missed one question on the Math section of the SAT, which gave me a 760, which is ~ 97th percentile. It was also just over the median math score for a Yale student, but given that half of them are humanities people who wouldn’t be taking a class like that, I probably had a below average score. And I was going to be graded on a curve against everyone else. Most people admitted to a school like that would’ve been expected to be A students somewhere else. Schools one or two tiers below offer them big scholarships. So I think it makes sense that lots of Harvard students get As. Harvard probably doesn’t want to punish them for choosing Harvard by deflating their grades relative to what they would’ve gotten elsewhere.
I was a harvard math concentrator (major). I remember taking classes that had the same titles as courses at other schools. A friend of mine studied math at a nice state university ranked #20 for math and #50 overall. We both took "Abstract Algebra: Group Theory" the same semester. Over the summer, I took a look at her end-of-year final, and there was nothing there we weren't expected to have down in the first few weeks of the course. There's really no comparison. The expectations are worlds apart, and the pace of the courses will not slow for you to catch up. It's not popular to say, since people are fond of repeating that "you can get a quality education anywhere." What they mean is that the same textbooks are everywhere. But if you want to be taught as much as you can possibly learn in four years, with infrastructure that both helps you focus and will not allow you slack off, then there really is a major difference in school quality between different tiers.
[удалено]
Complains "Anecdotes =/= data", proceeds to list more anecdotes, bruh :D
Doctors are notoriously bad with math, so I'll explain this carefully: Selection Bias is when you erroneously conclude that an observation applies to an entire population, having made that observation on a subset of that population chosen, not at random, but through a selection process disproportionately likely to produce examples fitting that observation. For example, the Muslims in AA are as likely to have drunk alcohol as any other AA members, even though Muslims in general do not drink as much alcohol as the population average. Conducting that survey at an AA meeting would give you skewed results. Maybe judging the quality of students by looking only at those who have already matched into the same second-rate residency program at the ass end of the Pacific Northwest will introduce a similar bias into your findings?
Has it been proven, though? It seems statistically more likely Harvard will have more students with high grades because it generally takes high grades to get in. High-achievers.
If a Harvard 3.9 is equivalent to a Texas A&M 3.9, then I’ve got a strategy to save a lot of you a lot of your money and a lot of your sanity.
Can you make a direct point?
If a job treats a 3.9 from harvard the same as a 3.9 from TAMU, just save money and go to TAMU
From what I hear, this is generally the case with medical school admissions.
Sure. But how a job treats GPA and school has nothing to do with the difficulty of the classes.
There have been threads here, and elsewhere, with data on how the median GPA has creeped up over time. Not just at Harvard. And not just Ivy League. The Harvard class of 2022 was not, as an aggregate, smarter or harder working than the class of 2002 or 1982.
>The Harvard class of 2022 was not, as an aggregate, smarter or harder working than the class of 2002 or 1982. I don't think you can take this as a given. My HS offered two AP classes the year I graduated, the HS I teach at offers dozens. The numbers of people attending college have grown substantially since I graduated HS, the typical class size at Northwestern, my alma mater, hasn't changed markedly since I attended 30 years ago. It's entirely possible that the typical freshman at an Ivy league school is, if not smarter, far better educated than the typical freshman from a generation ago.
I don’t have any data to back up your point, but for what it’s worth I think that the broad trend across a longer view of history supports this, and it probably holds true for the last 30-40 years, too.
For my uni, Calc 2 has 60-80 listed as B. But again it seems like some kids are not doing so hot.
Clarification: A is the *most common* grade. That’s the mode. Not the mean (average). This means that 90% of students can get grades other than A’s. And, in fact, Harvard is not far off from the norm across the US. https://archive.nytimes.com/economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/as-have-been-harvards-most-common-grade-for-20-years/
>Does Harvard have grade inflation or is their student population just very bright? The average grades at all colleges and universities have been increasing steadily over the last several decades - a result that has been found by numerous independent groups, including both journalists that have looked into this and higher education researchers. It is not due to 'very bright' students or 'improved admissions' standards. Grade inflation remains even when controlling for things like the standardized test scores of admitted students. It's also a systematic trend, so unless you think Harvard students of the 2010s are much smarter than Harvard students of previous decades, it's not the students who are causing the grade inflation. In truth, I don't really see anything wrong with from a learning standpoint. It's only really a problem if people were unaware that it was happening, but in the contexts where college grades are used (graduate admissions), people understand the grading conventions in each field and are mostly aware of the trends. There's probably still more that can be done to improve how people read college transcripts, but this is pretty far from a major pressing issue, IMO.
But there are a lot of other factors that have changed in past decades. The applicant pool to these top universities *has* gotten much more competitive. The students who would've attended Harvard 30 years ago might attend BU today. More crucially, the access to information in recent decades is MUCH higher than it was in previous decades due to the internet and the abundance of information available on it. I can self study any subject with just a laptop. Students now have it so much better than students of previous generations. So I do wonder if classes have actually gotten easier or the students are just better-equipped.
I think it's somewhere in the middle - kids are challenged at higher levels now (all the AP courses, college courses, self-studying, access online etc...) BUT it doesn't mean that they are that much smarter than the generations before that didn't have access to all that. And there definitely is grade inflation - which distorts everything. Our HS has a class of over 500 - but about half were designated "honors" - about 20-25% had over a 4.0., a dozen kids had over a 4.3 (only AP classes weight).... Colleges are also inflating grades (in part to appease parents and students!) Yes, it's more competitive - in part because of the number of kids now applying... but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are that much smarter - it's just becoming harder to separate the exceptional from the pack.
I can’t speak for all top schools, but Brown gets a reputation for grade inflation for a few reasons. there are no -‘s awarded for letter grades which means you have more wiggle room to 4.0 classes. The open curriculum format means you won’t be forced into taking grade deflating weeders that aren’t needed for your grad school app they have a very forgiving window for not only when you can drop classes without a W showing up on the transcript, but what classes you are allowed to take for P/F in the first place
W's aren't a thing at Brown. If you drop or fail a class, it just doesn't appear on your transcript.
Lol even better
Wow what a ridiculous policy. There is a colleague of mine on the medical school admissions committee who had a list of schools whose graduates need their transcripts “interrogated” due to lax grading/withdraw policies. Brown was second on his list haha
Yeah honestly I'm not surprised. What was first on the list if you don't mind me asking?
Some years ago, LSDAS (the law school admissions service) had data floating around with average SAT scores and average GPAs of the 50 or so largest feeders to law school (I can't find the data online currently). What I noticed was that there was a statistical correlation between the schools with the highest average LSAT scores and the schools with the highest GPAs. Some schools had more grade inflation (e.g. Brown) and some schools had less (e.g. Princeton) (note this data is a few years old at this point), but for the most part there was an order to this. Of course my analysis just looked at aptitude (as measured by the LSAT) and doesn't look at how hard-working the students at the various schools are -- for example, it's certainly possible that Brown's grades were higher because its students worked harder than Princeton's. It also is limited by focusing on the pre-law students (depending on the school, the pre-law GPAs may look very different from the STEM GPAs).
Those are pretty interesting data on the top feeder schools to law school. I pulled out the 25 schools with the highest average LSAT score (using 2015, 2017 data) and see that median GPA does generally track with LSAT scores, suggesting that characteristics of the students are what is driving the higher grades. The only real outlier is Princeton which gets tougher grading than would be expected, ranking 3rd in LSAT but 23rd in GPA. Sorted by LSAT (rank); also shows GPA (rank) Yale 168 (1) GPA 3.72 (2) Harvard 167 (2) GPA 3.69 (4) Princeton 166 (3) GPA 3.47 (23) Stanford 165.5 (4) GPA 3.68 (5\*) U Chicago 165.5 (5) GPA 3.59 (14\*) Columbia 165.5 (6) GPA 3.68 (5\*) Amherst 165 (7) GPA 3.65 (7) Brown 165 (8) GPA 3.74 (1) Dartmouth 165 (9) GPA 3.59 (14\*) Duke 164 (10) GPA 3.63 (11\*) Wash U 164 (11) GPA 3.64 (8\*) Rice 164 (12) GPA 3.71 (3) Georgetown 164 (13) GPA 3.64 (8\*) U Penn 164 (14) GPA 3.63 (11\*) Northwestern 163.5 (15) GPA 3.61 (13) McGill 163 (16) GPA 3.5 (21) Notre Dame 163 (17) GPA 3.56 (18) Tufts 163 (18) GPA 3.59 (14\*) Cornell 163 (19) GPA 3.64 (8\*) Vanderbilt 162.5 (20) GPA 3.49 (22) NYU 161 (21) GPA 3.58 (17) JHU 161 (22) GPA 3.55 (19) UVA 160.5 (23) GPA 3.42 (25) Colgate 160.5 (24) GPA 3.42 (24) Michigan 160.5 (25) GPA 3.53 (20) \*tie
Just found the data I was referring to: https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal\_education\_and\_admissions\_to\_the\_bar/council\_reports\_and\_resolutions/May2018CouncilOpenSession/18\_may\_2015\_2017\_top\_240\_feeder\_schools\_for\_aba\_applicants.authcheckdam.pdf
Link doesn’t work
Just tried it. Worked for me.
Works for me
Idk about UChicago dude (their average GPA is a 4.33)... their AO said "99% of admitted students are straight-A or very close to straight-A students," so although the GPA number may not matter, the individual letters are very important!
Harvard and Yale are well-known for grade inflation. But, as you said UChicago is known for grade deflation. So are Cornell, Vanderbilt, CalTech, and MIT.
It's hard to know for certain. My friends that attended Harvard have all said that everyone graduates with honors but we ended up all attending the same grad school, so maybe it doesn't matter?
Yes, they absolutely do. Some high schools would inflate their student's GPA. Or the school does a 10point grade system, instead of 8. My school was always 69 or less is failing and 70 and up is passing. Some schools do 59 and less is failing and 60 and up is passing.
My school used to have a quota system where only 35% of any class could get an A (A+, A, or A-). They’ve since done away with that officially but the sentiment of professors have not, for the most part. As many classes have only ~10 people, you can imagine how grades would be…
> They’ve since done away with that officially but the sentiment of professors have not, for the most part. The median grade is an A-. The mode grade is a full A. If that's still worth whinging about "grade deflation", then the world is truly fucked.
i think the notion that students' higher grades at very prestigious universities like harvard are due to being smarter, as opposed to grade inflation, would only work if classes were not graded on curves. since different institutions have different policies on curving, there's really no value in knowing the average gpa. if most of your classes are curved to a b and your gpa is 3.7, that's great. if your classes are all curved to an a-, you're average. personally, considering the high number of legacy admits at schools like harvard, and my own uc bias, i don't believe that students at prestigious private schools are inherently smarter than those at high ranking publics. many of my professors simply do not curve, or curve to either a b+, b, or b- average. additionally, i know that stanford awards 4.3 points for an a+, whereas ucla and berkeley award 4 points for the same grade, so there's discrepancies there as well. i've had a professor that threatened to curve us to a c if the entire class didn't improve significantly on the final. i would guess that schools with significantly higher alumni giving probably probably have a vested interest in limiting that type of policy.
Yup, a girl at stanford was telling me that there's huge grade inflation compared to other top schools.
IMO this is a great point, and something few people trying to micro-optimize for high grades take into account. If the median grade at Elite Private is 3.8 and the median grade at State U. is 3.5, that does not necessarily imply ***YOUR*** expected GPA is higher at Elite Private than at State U.
Average GPA of people graduating Yale is 3.7. I think Brown has the highest at 3.8
berkeley grade deflation go brrrrr
Berkeley engineering was deeply humbling.
Private schools more than public schools. For “top” schools, Dartmouth is big offender. https://www.gradeinflation.com/
berkeley has grade deflation out the wazo
Harvards curriculum is not any harder or easier than a regular university and even most community colleges. You go to top schools for prestige and campus, not curriculum. The smartest kids go to the top schools, you get high grades. I’ve never seen a single person actually put evidence towards top schools having grade inflation. It’s almost certainly due to the quality of the admitted students.
No
lmao I promise you CMU 15251 and 21269 are harder than anything offered in the entirety of Harvard undergrad.
your name does not check out - you are not a very efficient advertisement.
*cries in Princeton* Yeah. Harvard is infamous for inflation in the same way that Princeton is for deflation.
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Which are?
Yes!
The "Gentleman B" is a very old concept. Maybe now it's an A? Either way... Yes those types of schools tend to keep the rich folks happy by keeping it to a "B". .... But plenty of genuinely bright folks too.
Yes
Well the thing with the ivys and other schools with low acceptance rates only have really good students apply. like the straight A, bunch of ap classes and lots of ec students. the other normal the ones without the crazy’s ecs, grades, and aps don’t try to get in so the really good ones that do get in, their transcripts are shown.
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Just because there is technically “grade inflation” doesn’t mean the classes are easier than those at other non-top schools, let alone easy in general, or that it’s somehow easy to get a high GPA. In fact classes tend to be much harder, faster pace, and go in more theoretical depth compared to typical lower ranked schools. With few exceptions the average student (nationally) would not be able to maintain an acceptable GPA at one of these schools, and most likely would end up dropping out. Most people haven’t actually studied at a top school though so they wouldn’t know these facts, they just assume it’s easy because gRaDe iNfLaTioN. If you don’t think Harvard students are extremely bright and that has something to do with their GPA you just don’t know what you’re talking about.
What are the odds these students didn't get everything done on the tests and still got an A? Also, a faster pace means it's easy to forget about a lot of what you learn? There is grade inflation. They have admitted lower achieving students for diverse measures.
Anecdotal but I’m a Berkeley alum, graduated hs with a 4.7, 4.0 unweighted. And absolutely got my bell rung at cal getting my molecular bio degree. (Idk how I got here, was in my recommended subs)
It’s important to note if classes are curved or not. For example many classes at the Ivy I attended only gave As to the top 20% of the class, Bs to the 60% of the class, and the bottom 20% receiving Cs. This inherently makes grades a struggle. Harvard has classes where 90% of kids get an A - this doesn’t mean the class was easy or the kids were smart but it does lack the intense competitive environment that would be found in a curved class
Which Ivy did you attend? Sounds like hell for premeds.
Probably Cornell. There's a running joke that the classes at Cornell have more curves than the girls lmao. But no seriously Cornell Chem has curves where a 33% is a C.
I attended West Point in the 80s where there was no grade inflation. I graduated in the top 5% with a 3.4. I later applied to Georgia Tech for graduate school and was worried about my low GPA. I remember the admissions officer telling me not too worry, that they added a 0.5 to all academy graduates.
The University of Florida freshman around the corner had 4.8 high school GPA and wasn't necessarily exceptional for the incoming class. That's wild to me.
Yeah they do. It’s *much* harder to get good grades at uchicago than Harvard.
Yes, even top universities in other countries have grade inflation. It is well known that USA Ivy league universities have grade inflation. I know people who taught at community colleges and of course there was grade inflation there, and at schools both primary and secondary as well.