What do you think about grade deflation and grading on a curve at colleges?
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Anonymous
| Question in title. |
Anonymous
| Went to Princeton during grade deflation era. No more than 30% could get in A in humanities courses. Personally, I liked it. An A meant something and although my gpa is lower than most- it at least means something and for those who had high Gpas, it really meant that they were super stars. |
Anonymous
| Cornell is known for low grades. They put the class average on transcripts for reference. It's fine but did take my straight A MCPS kid a semester to get over her gpa. She knew the straight As were inflated. |
Anonymous
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My undergrad engineering school curved to a 2.7/4.0. Most 100 person classes had 3-4 As (4.0) at most, with B+ (3.5), B (3.0) and C+ (2.5) grades making up the bulk of the class. It definitely meant that As were hard won and meant something. To keep your merit scholarship you needed a 3.25 GPA, which wasn't easy.
I submitted an addendum to law schools to explain our curve, even though I managed a good GPA. |
Anonymous
Cornell needs low gpa cuz it accepts HS students in the top 1-10% range. Typical ivies accept top 1-2% so these schools don’t need to deflate. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia are already academic performers. |
Anonymous
None of the ivys have an acceptance rate that high but even discounting that I have no idea why you think that means they need to deflate grades. https://www.thoughtco.com/ivy-league-schools-class-of-2020-4122267 |
Anonymous
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Needed big time. Medicore/average work is a C+/-.
Back when I was in high school, our math teacher graded in a brutal 7 point scale. 93 was an A-. You didn't get an A+ unless you got above abut a 97. You were already a D student at 70. Grade inflaltion is the single biggest problem in universities today. It is time we go back to demanding excellence. Hardwork is nice, but students need to be taught that that isn't enough. Hardwork also needs to be accurate and precise. If someone works hard but constantly makes mistakes, we shouldn't reward them for it. |
Anonymous
Not talking acceptance rate. I am talking HS ranking from which students are selected. Cornell selects top 1-10% HS kids. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia probably accept top 1-2% HS kids in the country. With H, Y, P, C, students are presumed to be top students no matter what their college GPA is. Not so with Cornell. This could be one reason why they need to show the “rigor” of their GPA. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
My high school didn't give letter grades at all. Everything was on a 100 point scale. |
Anonymous
| Don’t all high school transcripts have numerical final grades? |
Anonymous
The thing is that all schools need to be doing this, or kids who go to schools with grade deflation may be at a disadvantage relative to students at schools with grade inflation. |
Anonymous
| Not when those kids go to college. College is an expensive place to learn that your A in HS was meaningless. |
Anonymous
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"Back when I was in high school, our math teacher graded in a brutal 7 point scale. 93 was an A-. You didn't get an A+ unless you got above abut a 97. You were already a D student at 70. Grade inflaltion is the single biggest problem in universities today. It is time we go back to demanding excellence. Hardwork is nice, but students need to be taught that that isn't enough. Hardwork also needs to be accurate and precise. If someone works hard but constantly makes mistakes, we shouldn't reward them for it."
Yeah, my HS had that grade scale as well. But back then they didn't do it because they knew what they were doing. The point of today's grading is that everyone, across even huge school districts, should learn the same thing/same amount to get an A. Back in the day my HS had 60 students in the top track for English. About 30 of us took Chemistry and Calculus as seniors so we all had the same English class. The other 30 in the top English track took European History and Sociology. Because we were graded against each other rather than to the same standard, both classes had the same number of As. If you look at the distributions of our AP English scores, the Calc group got twentyfive 5s and 4s and the Sociology group got five 5s and 4s. Demanding excellence is hard because very few teachers can teach actual excellent students. |
Anonymous
| I will discourage my kids from going to schools with grade deflation if they are interested in med school. My cousin and his best friend were both in the top 10 of students at their high school and both had SAT scores over 1500. My cousin got into Princeton but knew he wanted to go to medical school so went to Brown, while his friend chose Princeton. Cousin got straight A's at brown, went to med school and is now a doctor. His friend struggled to get B's in pre-med at Princeton and realized his gpa was too low to apply to med school. I think it was around 3.4. Cousin said his friend told him he regretted going to Princeton. |