What does a GPA below 3.2 mean now, and what happens to people who end up there? I graduated with an under 3 in 1972, and even then it was something that people feared and tried to avoid. I call it the Twilight Zone. Are people who graduate with lower GPAs more like the “some college” folks than like college graduates? (I was able to get a graduate degree In linguistics from the University of Texas at Arlington.)
My experience of doing an econ undergrad in the UK was that it wasn't that questions weren't that hard, but that the content wasn't deep enough in macro. For all of the classes if you studied a moderate amount you'd get a good grade, but this was fine in metrics and micro because the content was sufficiently deep that I can read ~any micro or applied micro paper just by relying on the content in the course.
For macro we just weren't taught dynamic optimisation techniques which makes it hard to read modern macro papers without teaching that stuff yourself, which wouldn't be solved by making the questions harder. For context I went to Warwick, which is known for it's technical micro courses, but I don't think anywhere else in the UK has good enough macro, expect maybe Cambridge final year year modules.
The universities may not be interested in holding their students accountable to a high standard of work, but the employers who hire top-tier jobs in well-paid professions certainly do. My daughter is nearing the completion of a STEM-related PhD in a top university and is currently going through a recruiting process with the "Big 3" consulting firms. She is almost 27 years old, and has pretty much been working on her CV since she was 11. It has taken a tremendous amount of work, and she has had to go through countless stage gates in order to get to where she is now. But, if she wasn't put into a GT class in fourth grade, she probably wouldn't be in this position..
It seems like the education system is designed to accommodate the kids who are not willing and able to put in the work that my daughter and her peers have done. And, it creates a lot of barriers for those that do. These barriers (mainly providing tuition dollars and/or indentured servitude to the academic institutions) result in a lot of wasted time for the student. Why should my daughter have to start her career at age 28 instead of 21 or 22 like the ones who chose not to work so hard did?
International football (soccer) clubs identify talent at a young age and fund academies to train and nurture them to be able to compete. They are funded by the clubs that eventually will benefit from their labor. Why not have a similar system to train other high-value professionals? Like I said, we already sort these kids out when they are nine years old. Then you can let the rest of the system do whatever it needs to survive financially while serving the larger majority it is designed for.
I did a quick scroll and surprised I didn't see what I consider a big part of grade inflation: most kids at elite schools will go to some kind of graduate/professional school and having a higher undergrad GPA helps with graduate admissions. Don't you want your students to do well in applying to elite graduate programs? Why handicap them? Just give them the A so they can go to Wharton, Yale law or Duke Medical school afterwards and increase their donations to your school someday.
"... this is connected thematically to a decline in the character of the American elite. One scene set in the Barton chapel pans across the memorials to Barton graduates who died in various wars of American history, including many alumni who perished in the world wars. But only one Barton student died in Vietnam, a Black kid who attended the school on scholarship because his mom ran the cafeteria. A kid, we learn, who wanted to go to college but didn’t have the money, so he enlisted."
This to me is the skeleton key not just to campus controversies (as this great piece notes) but to the decline of social trust in America. Contemporary campus controversies get a lot of click-bait-y coverage but aren't (imho) all that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. But our loss of social trust is a HUGE deal.
And I think this scene really nails exactly when and how it started. The world wars involved sacrifice that was genuinely widely shared across society. But elites mostly avoided Vietnam with college deferments while blue-collar kids were shipped off to die ... and not coincidentally, social trust in America started its current declining trend in the 1970s.
Matt's old piece "Meritocracy Is Bad" is a good discussion of how we need to do more to instill values of integrity, service, and sacrifice among the elite. That would go a long way towards creating a managerial elite worthy of the trust of America's hardworking blue-collar majority. And I think the widespread view that our elite is instead parasitic and self-dealing goes back to shirking the sacrifice of Vietnam.
I will also admit to being a huge part of the problem myself. I was 12 on 9/11 and 14 when we invaded Iraq - and I ended up going to college on a scholarship, but if I had been a halfway decent person, I would have dropped out of school the day I turned 18 and enlisted. Not because I supported the war (I didn't) but because that's my duty as a citizen, even moreso as a citizen with the incredible good luck of being able to go to college. I like to think that my work has been useful to society, but the fact that other people died in Iraq and I didn't is to my eternal shame and has absolutely contribute to social mistrust.
My experience comports totally with the notion that private "Ivy" universities are bastions of grade inflation. At 18 in 1985, I was poor and could not afford an Ivy out of high school even though I probably had the grades to get into one. I went to Ohio State University for both my undergrad and first grad degree. The grading in most classes was based on a normally distributed curve where a C was average. It was BRUTAL and highly competitive. I barely got into graduate school at OSU after my 3.1 point grade average even with good GRE scores. Fast forward 7 years and I applied to Columbia Business School and was accepted after being waitlisted. My experience at Columbia was totally different. Theoretically, I was competing against "smarter" or better prepared students at an elite university. But, although I did the work, I also was totally ill prepared for the Finance curriculum since I was trained as an engineer at OSU and had zero knowledge about Finance and Accounting.
My work was totally sub par to my peers who mostly came from Wall Street and had a lot more domain knowledge than I did. It was so bad, I almost dropped out. However, I never got lower than a "B". Astounding.
the same thing is happening in medicine. ever get a survey on how your visit to your Dr or ER went. This leads to all kinds of problems like unnecessary tests and prescriptions that the patient deems necessary. unintended negative consequences everywhere.
Funny you should mention recitation in particular as a sign of learning. I was a double major in theatre (acting) and political science. I finished my degree with a 3.3 GPA in theatre classes and a 3.9 in poly sci, yet I really felt like I spent way, way more hours outside of class doing theatre work than political science. A couple of hypotheses in line with your essay:
1. You can't BS memorizing all of those lines and actually working through the logical progression of a scene. It takes real time and effort. Whereas I can crank out an essay about the internal factions of the two parties between the hours of 1am and 4am without doing a lick of the reading.
2. Theatre people generally didn't care as much about GPA, so our professors were much more willing to grade us harshly. The same situation could not be said about our political science professors even though there were some true numbskulls who did none of the reading and walked away with A's.
So I guess the lesson here is that my political science curriculum should actually take some notes from my theatre curriculum. I should have felt the need to channel the same level energy into my poly sci coursework as my theatre work and I would have learned quite a lot more as a result.
This whole grade inflation thing is deeply silly. You want to fix it -- easy. Allow professors to give unbounded grades (any double preciscion float) and then publish:
The first three moments (mean, std dev and skew) of the grade distribution and the average class rank (or other measure of school wide comparison.. ultimately u can fit this using a regression and class overlaps) of the students who took the class.
A college degree became a commodity to be acquired like a fancy car. I worked with two people that paid others to do their research for their master's/doctorate. I thought, um, why did you go to grad school if you didn't want to do research? Fill in your own answer, but they were all talk and no action, and terrible to work with.
Probably not a clear either/or - if you are a “great teacher” but boring, your message is probably not going to get across very well. If you are fun and entertaining but superficial, at least you would have the class’ attention for what you do teach. I think that’s really my point - you can’t be “capable of teaching” without some ability to connect.
I feel society in general has gotten pretty far away from the idea of school being about learning or grades reflecting mastery. The message my high school daughter seems to get from teachers and other families is that the purpose of grades is help you get into a "good school" and that to get into that "good school" the grades must be perfect. Our public high school has an app that informs parents of a students grade on every exam and allows one retake on every subject. Some parents monitor it like crazy and make sure their kid retakes everything for the highest possible score.
We have told her that we don't think getting into a super elite college is important or something we want to pay for. We think she can get a good education at a state school by working hard but without perfect grades. We tell her that what we care about in terms of her geometry class or world history class or Spanish class is that she (1) learn something new and (2) learn how to work hard, study, and (3) learn how to risk mistakes learn from them. If she does that we don't care if she gets an A or B. But that is apparently so insanely counter cultural and she has a lot of trouble hearing us vs. freaking out if she has an A- in any subject that might ruin her GPA. It is crazy.
But I also think about her friends and cohort and I could easily see them thinking that what mattered in college was getting good grades and that if those good grades could be had with minimal effort by picking easy teachers and doing the minimum that would seem rational rather than entirely missing the point that college is this exceptional period in life when you have the chance to learn and master all kinds of challenging subjects.
I half-way blame Gilmore Girls. I don't think there has been a teen show since where there hasn't been an assumption that a child going anywhere but an Ivy is the end of the fucking world and I think that actually impacts kids sense of what success and failure looks like.
I generally think that a mastery based grading system makes more sense than a bell curve. You need to know X and/or perform at Y level and if you go you get an A. If the teacher is great and you all work hard and all get As. Great. Lots of learning. I think part of the grade inflation problem is that we are doing that in some places but still acting like it is a curve. It may also be that we are reducing the expectation for mastery too for lots of self interested reasons like keeping "customers" happy and helping our students get into the next level of admissions screening, whether that is employment or grad school. But I think we may need to parse those two apart a bit and decide if we want bell curve or mastery and if mastery how we can more standardize or define what mastery is.
I went a highly ranked public law school with a odd grading system that was negotiated during Vietnam and never changed. If you knew enough on the test to be competent in that area of law you got a Pass. If you were close but not there, you got a low pass. If you missed the mark altogether you failed. The top 5 percent got a Distinguished and the next 5% down got Excellent. It made for a funky transcript but it didn't allow much inflation and seemed to both allow for mastery with a smattering of high lighting the best of the bunch which seems useful.
What does a GPA below 3.2 mean now, and what happens to people who end up there? I graduated with an under 3 in 1972, and even then it was something that people feared and tried to avoid. I call it the Twilight Zone. Are people who graduate with lower GPAs more like the “some college” folks than like college graduates? (I was able to get a graduate degree In linguistics from the University of Texas at Arlington.)
My experience of doing an econ undergrad in the UK was that it wasn't that questions weren't that hard, but that the content wasn't deep enough in macro. For all of the classes if you studied a moderate amount you'd get a good grade, but this was fine in metrics and micro because the content was sufficiently deep that I can read ~any micro or applied micro paper just by relying on the content in the course.
For macro we just weren't taught dynamic optimisation techniques which makes it hard to read modern macro papers without teaching that stuff yourself, which wouldn't be solved by making the questions harder. For context I went to Warwick, which is known for it's technical micro courses, but I don't think anywhere else in the UK has good enough macro, expect maybe Cambridge final year year modules.
Dude, just recognize that we're back to being an aristocracy...
The universities may not be interested in holding their students accountable to a high standard of work, but the employers who hire top-tier jobs in well-paid professions certainly do. My daughter is nearing the completion of a STEM-related PhD in a top university and is currently going through a recruiting process with the "Big 3" consulting firms. She is almost 27 years old, and has pretty much been working on her CV since she was 11. It has taken a tremendous amount of work, and she has had to go through countless stage gates in order to get to where she is now. But, if she wasn't put into a GT class in fourth grade, she probably wouldn't be in this position..
It seems like the education system is designed to accommodate the kids who are not willing and able to put in the work that my daughter and her peers have done. And, it creates a lot of barriers for those that do. These barriers (mainly providing tuition dollars and/or indentured servitude to the academic institutions) result in a lot of wasted time for the student. Why should my daughter have to start her career at age 28 instead of 21 or 22 like the ones who chose not to work so hard did?
International football (soccer) clubs identify talent at a young age and fund academies to train and nurture them to be able to compete. They are funded by the clubs that eventually will benefit from their labor. Why not have a similar system to train other high-value professionals? Like I said, we already sort these kids out when they are nine years old. Then you can let the rest of the system do whatever it needs to survive financially while serving the larger majority it is designed for.
"professors who privately had a bit of Hunham in them felt that they would be backed-up if they got a little harsher"
I've taught English to undergrads off and on since 2008, and the overwhelming message I've gotten is: "Don't rock the boat:" https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-professors-to-grade-honestly-nothing/
Obviously no one comes right out and says: "Grade easy." But grading below a "B" for pure incompetence or inability is strongly discouraged.
I did a quick scroll and surprised I didn't see what I consider a big part of grade inflation: most kids at elite schools will go to some kind of graduate/professional school and having a higher undergrad GPA helps with graduate admissions. Don't you want your students to do well in applying to elite graduate programs? Why handicap them? Just give them the A so they can go to Wharton, Yale law or Duke Medical school afterwards and increase their donations to your school someday.
"... this is connected thematically to a decline in the character of the American elite. One scene set in the Barton chapel pans across the memorials to Barton graduates who died in various wars of American history, including many alumni who perished in the world wars. But only one Barton student died in Vietnam, a Black kid who attended the school on scholarship because his mom ran the cafeteria. A kid, we learn, who wanted to go to college but didn’t have the money, so he enlisted."
This to me is the skeleton key not just to campus controversies (as this great piece notes) but to the decline of social trust in America. Contemporary campus controversies get a lot of click-bait-y coverage but aren't (imho) all that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. But our loss of social trust is a HUGE deal.
And I think this scene really nails exactly when and how it started. The world wars involved sacrifice that was genuinely widely shared across society. But elites mostly avoided Vietnam with college deferments while blue-collar kids were shipped off to die ... and not coincidentally, social trust in America started its current declining trend in the 1970s.
Matt's old piece "Meritocracy Is Bad" is a good discussion of how we need to do more to instill values of integrity, service, and sacrifice among the elite. That would go a long way towards creating a managerial elite worthy of the trust of America's hardworking blue-collar majority. And I think the widespread view that our elite is instead parasitic and self-dealing goes back to shirking the sacrifice of Vietnam.
I will also admit to being a huge part of the problem myself. I was 12 on 9/11 and 14 when we invaded Iraq - and I ended up going to college on a scholarship, but if I had been a halfway decent person, I would have dropped out of school the day I turned 18 and enlisted. Not because I supported the war (I didn't) but because that's my duty as a citizen, even moreso as a citizen with the incredible good luck of being able to go to college. I like to think that my work has been useful to society, but the fact that other people died in Iraq and I didn't is to my eternal shame and has absolutely contribute to social mistrust.
My experience comports totally with the notion that private "Ivy" universities are bastions of grade inflation. At 18 in 1985, I was poor and could not afford an Ivy out of high school even though I probably had the grades to get into one. I went to Ohio State University for both my undergrad and first grad degree. The grading in most classes was based on a normally distributed curve where a C was average. It was BRUTAL and highly competitive. I barely got into graduate school at OSU after my 3.1 point grade average even with good GRE scores. Fast forward 7 years and I applied to Columbia Business School and was accepted after being waitlisted. My experience at Columbia was totally different. Theoretically, I was competing against "smarter" or better prepared students at an elite university. But, although I did the work, I also was totally ill prepared for the Finance curriculum since I was trained as an engineer at OSU and had zero knowledge about Finance and Accounting.
My work was totally sub par to my peers who mostly came from Wall Street and had a lot more domain knowledge than I did. It was so bad, I almost dropped out. However, I never got lower than a "B". Astounding.
My son is a senior (business/osych) at NE, daughter a sophomore at UMD (engineering). This is spot on.
the same thing is happening in medicine. ever get a survey on how your visit to your Dr or ER went. This leads to all kinds of problems like unnecessary tests and prescriptions that the patient deems necessary. unintended negative consequences everywhere.
Funny you should mention recitation in particular as a sign of learning. I was a double major in theatre (acting) and political science. I finished my degree with a 3.3 GPA in theatre classes and a 3.9 in poly sci, yet I really felt like I spent way, way more hours outside of class doing theatre work than political science. A couple of hypotheses in line with your essay:
1. You can't BS memorizing all of those lines and actually working through the logical progression of a scene. It takes real time and effort. Whereas I can crank out an essay about the internal factions of the two parties between the hours of 1am and 4am without doing a lick of the reading.
2. Theatre people generally didn't care as much about GPA, so our professors were much more willing to grade us harshly. The same situation could not be said about our political science professors even though there were some true numbskulls who did none of the reading and walked away with A's.
So I guess the lesson here is that my political science curriculum should actually take some notes from my theatre curriculum. I should have felt the need to channel the same level energy into my poly sci coursework as my theatre work and I would have learned quite a lot more as a result.
This whole grade inflation thing is deeply silly. You want to fix it -- easy. Allow professors to give unbounded grades (any double preciscion float) and then publish:
The first three moments (mean, std dev and skew) of the grade distribution and the average class rank (or other measure of school wide comparison.. ultimately u can fit this using a regression and class overlaps) of the students who took the class.
A college degree became a commodity to be acquired like a fancy car. I worked with two people that paid others to do their research for their master's/doctorate. I thought, um, why did you go to grad school if you didn't want to do research? Fill in your own answer, but they were all talk and no action, and terrible to work with.
Probably not a clear either/or - if you are a “great teacher” but boring, your message is probably not going to get across very well. If you are fun and entertaining but superficial, at least you would have the class’ attention for what you do teach. I think that’s really my point - you can’t be “capable of teaching” without some ability to connect.
I feel society in general has gotten pretty far away from the idea of school being about learning or grades reflecting mastery. The message my high school daughter seems to get from teachers and other families is that the purpose of grades is help you get into a "good school" and that to get into that "good school" the grades must be perfect. Our public high school has an app that informs parents of a students grade on every exam and allows one retake on every subject. Some parents monitor it like crazy and make sure their kid retakes everything for the highest possible score.
We have told her that we don't think getting into a super elite college is important or something we want to pay for. We think she can get a good education at a state school by working hard but without perfect grades. We tell her that what we care about in terms of her geometry class or world history class or Spanish class is that she (1) learn something new and (2) learn how to work hard, study, and (3) learn how to risk mistakes learn from them. If she does that we don't care if she gets an A or B. But that is apparently so insanely counter cultural and she has a lot of trouble hearing us vs. freaking out if she has an A- in any subject that might ruin her GPA. It is crazy.
But I also think about her friends and cohort and I could easily see them thinking that what mattered in college was getting good grades and that if those good grades could be had with minimal effort by picking easy teachers and doing the minimum that would seem rational rather than entirely missing the point that college is this exceptional period in life when you have the chance to learn and master all kinds of challenging subjects.
I half-way blame Gilmore Girls. I don't think there has been a teen show since where there hasn't been an assumption that a child going anywhere but an Ivy is the end of the fucking world and I think that actually impacts kids sense of what success and failure looks like.
I generally think that a mastery based grading system makes more sense than a bell curve. You need to know X and/or perform at Y level and if you go you get an A. If the teacher is great and you all work hard and all get As. Great. Lots of learning. I think part of the grade inflation problem is that we are doing that in some places but still acting like it is a curve. It may also be that we are reducing the expectation for mastery too for lots of self interested reasons like keeping "customers" happy and helping our students get into the next level of admissions screening, whether that is employment or grad school. But I think we may need to parse those two apart a bit and decide if we want bell curve or mastery and if mastery how we can more standardize or define what mastery is.
I went a highly ranked public law school with a odd grading system that was negotiated during Vietnam and never changed. If you knew enough on the test to be competent in that area of law you got a Pass. If you were close but not there, you got a low pass. If you missed the mark altogether you failed. The top 5 percent got a Distinguished and the next 5% down got Excellent. It made for a funky transcript but it didn't allow much inflation and seemed to both allow for mastery with a smattering of high lighting the best of the bunch which seems useful.