Go to a private university = Winning, Grade Inflation rampant

[Covertibility]

GradeInflation.com

Picture time

No wonder why private costs more than public, you essentially buy your grade.

Links at the end of that page to a few schools with GPA scores over the years.

 

[nazzdack]

Quote from Covertibility:
----private....
----public....
----GPA....

Everybody at Harvard graduates atleast "cum laude"!

 

[drsteph]

Quote from Covertibility:

GradeInflation.com

Picture time

No wonder why private costs more than public, you essentially buy your grade.

Links at the end of that page to a few schools with GPA scores over the years.

And I, of course, was one of the shmucks who went to a school on the left side of the graph.

 

[Arnie]

Or maybe the more motivated students end up at private?

 

[denner]

Funny, but the grade inflation looks like a mirror image of overall inflation. Would make for an interesting research paper. i.e. Do universities feel the need to "make it easier on students" when asking parents to pay annual 6-8% tuition increases year after year? Do they implicitly guarantee good grades if a parent is willing to shell out $50,000 per year?

When college cost little and the cost of running a university was likewise more manageable, were these universities more concerned with educating and less concerned with retaining and/or attracting students whose primary qualification was parent's who had the wherewithal to foot the tuition costs?

 

[peilthetraveler]

I think you also need to look at the fact that over the years student population has increased, but has population increased in the colleges?

For instance....lets say 50 years ago a top notch school would take 10,000 students. 50 years later, are they still taking only 10,000 students? If say you have 1 million students per year graduating (just a random #) and 1% of them have 4.0 GPAs or higher, then thats 10,000 people. But 50 years later, you have 3 million students graduating per year and say 1% of them have 4.0 GPAs or higher and thats 30,000 people. Well the top schools are going to take the people who did all the extra credit and left school with a 4.2 GPA, so the people with 4.1s or 4.0 get left behind and go to a lesser school.

This would account for grade inflation just by schools not keeping up with population increases.

 

[nazzdack]

Quote from drsteph:
----shmucks....
----a school on the left side of the graph.

Go Aggies?
Go Jayhawks? :eek:

 

[nazzdack]

Quote from peilthetraveler:
----This would account for grade inflation....

Is grading done on a 4-point or 5-point scale now?

 

[denner]

Quote from peilthetraveler:

I think you also need to look at the fact that over the years student population has increased, but has population increased in the colleges?

For instance....lets say 50 years ago a top notch school would take 10,000 students. 50 years later, are they still taking only 10,000 students? If say you have 1 million students per year graduating (just a random #) and 1% of them have 4.0 GPAs or higher, then thats 10,000 people. But 50 years later, you have 3 million students graduating per year and say 1% of them have 4.0 GPAs or higher and thats 30,000 people. Well the top schools are going to take the people who did all the extra credit and left school with a 4.2 GPA, so the people with 4.1s or 4.0 get left behind and go to a lesser school.

This would account for grade inflation just by schools not keeping up with population increases.

Considering that there is a great deal of subjectivity towards grading, I don't agree with this statement. I firmly believe that in the "old days" professors established a baseline for grading students, i.e. C is average and grade accordingly.

At private schools, the percentage of students enrolled in lib arts majors sways the grading even more towards a subjective set of grading standards. i.e. grading essays, term papers, etc...

Even when I was in college over 20 years ago, students had discussions about grade inflation. I can still remember a conversation with one student who seemed to have some inside knowledge about which undergrad schools were most known for it and which weren't. He was applying to grad schools and understood that some admissions departments were using an adjusted GPA to balance out the amount of inflation in some schools.

(with regards to the 4.0 vs 5.0 scale, most schools still use 4.0, you usually can't have cumulative GPA higher than 4.0 in universities unless they are using a weighted average. It is common in high schools though for honors and advanced placement courses).

 

[ChkitOut]

I wonder if they grade on a curve back in the day like they do so much now.