Reply to Should LACs no longer be considered the model of excellence?

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[quote=Anonymous]I suggest people who are genuinely interested look at the papers themselves.  Here, for example, is the authors' summary of the first chart:

Private and public schools graded similarly until the 1950s when grading practices for these schools began to bifurcate. The reasons for this bifurcation are not fully understood, but it was during this time that quantitative measures of
undergraduates took hold in graduate school and professional school admissions. It appears that sometime in the 1950s to 1960s, the major purpose of grading at colleges and universities changed from an internal measure and motivator of student performance to a measure principally used for external evaluation of graduates. As a Yale dean noted about Yale’s abandonment of their traditional qualitative assessments in favor of the common four point grading system, “We wanted to force graduate schools to look at the student, not at a grade point average. But to a large extent, our effort has been frustrated” (Polan, 1970).

In response, private schools – more so than public schools – raised their grades. In the words of one late faculty member from Dartmouth, “we began systematically to inflate grades, so that our graduates would have more A's to wave around” (Perrin, 1998). The GPA gap between the private and public schools widened through the 1970s, and has stabilized since the 1980s....
 
The above two equations suggest that private schools are grading 0.1 to 0.2 higher on a 4.0 scale for a given talent level of student. Since the evidence indicates that private schools in general educate students no better than public schools (Perscarella and Ternzini, 1991), private schools are apparently conferring small but measurable advantages to their students by more generous grading. Private schools also have on average students from wealthier families, and the effect of our nation’s ad hoc grading policy is to confer unfair advantages to those with the most money.

It is perhaps easy to see why graduates from certain private schools dominate placement in top medical schools, law schools, business schools, and why certain private schools are overrepresented in Ph.D. study (E. Bernstein, 2003; J. Burrelli et al., 2008). They grade easier and there is a tendency for graduate schools, professional schools, and some employers to confer extra stature to those who have attended selective private schools. Also, the fact that students from private schools tend to come from wealthier homes means they can stay in school longer.[/quote]

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