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Grade Inflation

inspectah said:
Grades are inflated at Wake too, just not to the extent that they are at some other schools. Before they changed the GPA cutoffs for Latin honors about fifteen years ago well over half of each class was graduating with distinction.

A cum laude degree from Wake in the 70s and 80s was truly an achievement. Not so much in the 90s and 2000s (and I say that as someone belonging in that latter category).
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1986 "Work Forest" Magna Cum Laude with Honors graduate- I over achieved academically and, unfortunately, have under achieved economically.

When I grow up I want to be just like Bzzz- suck at a job while making 7 figures!
 
PhDeac said:
Yeah. My philosophy is "B is for buddy." Getting a B shouldn't be considered a let down. B is your friend.

Try selling that to millennials who had a 3.95 high school GPA, 5.7 adjusted or something like that.
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I have this problem every semester. Not only is it easy to get a 3.75+ at HS, but most of these kids have little or no experience studying or completing out of class assignments. Plus, they're young and millennial - many feel entitled to good grades despite their objective performance.

awaken said:
Here, too. It was tough when Wake was a regional school, and its rep was not well known.

I recall an associate professor at Wake who clearly resented student evaluations. While passing out the evals, he said that we were not qualified to evaluate him: we were ignorant on the subject when we started, and had no idea whether he covered the subject in the correct depth or breadth. At the time, I thought he made a pretty good point. When you start knowing 0 about a subject, should you end the semester knowing 1,2, 5, or 10 about it? I suppose/hope the department has an idea on the curriculum and test scores.

A friend was asked to continue guitar lessons to a kid who had been taught for two years. He sat with him to determine what he could and could not play. Turns out he could play two chords. Two chords in two years. Of course the student had no idea if that was good or bad, but he had an opinion about whether he liked his teacher or not.

I think the root of the problem is that schools have fallen into model where students are customers (see High Point U as an excessive example) who must be satisfied (placated with inflated grades).
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Yeah, HPU is the epitome of the for-profit business model - they cater to clients, not students.

inspectah said:
Grades are inflated at Wake too, just not to the extent that they are at some other schools. Before they changed the GPA cutoffs for Latin honors about fifteen years ago well over half of each class was graduating with distinction.

A cum laude degree from Wake in the 70s and 80s was truly an achievement. Not so much in the 90s and 2000s (and I say that as someone belonging in that latter category).
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I'd be interested to see the recent numbers. It felt like cum laude and higher was somewhat uncommon when I graduated 5 years ago.
 
Keep in mind cum laude was 3.0 and above back in the late 90s. I think it went up to 3.3 or so in the 00s.
 
sailordeac said:
When I arrived at Wake, I was told, "Whatever your average was in high school, expect your average at Wake to be one grade lower." And that was pretty accurate for many of us.
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HS GPA out of 4.0 was virtually identically to my Wake GPA.

FWIW, for class of 12, there were 55 Summa graduates, 124 Magna, and 213 Cum Laude. Not 100% sure how many graduated, but I think 1100. So that's top 5%, top 16%, and top 36%.

For reference, Vandy targets top 5% for Summa (3.9 GPA vs 3.8 for Wake), top 13% for Magna (3.8 vs 3.6 for Wake), and top 25% for Cum Laude (3.7 vs 3.4). Duke is 5%, 15%, 25%.

Wake's % of Summa graduates seems pretty consistent with other institutions (Duke also targets the top 5%), but the % of students with other distinctions is higher. If one applied the Vandy GPAs though (which are set every year, based on the prev. year I believe), Wake would likely have significantly fewer students receiving distinction. Of course, there are two obvious and opposing potential drivers of that (difficulty of grading vs quality of students).
 
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From a business perspective, there is little downside to grade inflation especially at elite institutions.
 
PhDeac said:
From a business perspective, there is little downside to grade inflation especially at elite institutions.
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Absolutely true.

I work at a fairly elite employer and when I help with recruiting all the resumes I see are ridiculous. A sub 3.9 is rare (and we basically recruit from Ivy's, Stanford, Duke, two local national private universities, and two local, highly regarded flagship publics). I consider myself to be a very good student, but a 3.9 was never really in the cards for me at Wake (thanks language requirement).
 
And by the time a 3.9 from Stanford puts in 2.9 work for your employer it doesn't hurt Stanford because they got a great placement for an alum and nothing counts against them. Your employer isn't going to blindly turn away kids with a 3.9 from Stanford.

Higher education is more and more turning into a way to turn socioeconomic, social, and geographic advantages into prestige and credentials. Little actual learning required.
 
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