Grade inflation is always and everywhere an admission rate problem.
The US college-applying population has grown (a lot). The Harvard class size remains the same. Harvard continues to be a (the?) top tier school. This means that Harvard classes are probably getting better year after year. Even if Harvard is evaluating performance exactly the same (no new cushiness), if the admitted are better, they’ll be getting better grades on average, and those grades will be more compressed.
The argument seems to be that there are more and more students, and the number that can go to Harvard is fixed, so Harvard is selecting for the "best and the brightest" which when they were less picky was a smaller percentage of the class but now they only get really bright and talented students. Does that more or less capture it?
If so consider that grades are against the class, not the student. If grades did not inflate, and the quality of the students had risen, then the effort to get an A would go up commensurately with the quality of the student and those who weren't up to that standard would continue to get the B's and C's.
What the article is saying is that by not grading on a curve (or letting the curve parameters creep up) the median GPA goes up and the standard deviation goes down (compression). Rather than having a consistent distribution with what ever students happen to be admitted currently.
If exam grades follow some absolute standard, then throwing better students at them would result at more As, up tp only A grades for an entire class. This is without any grade inflation: the absolute level of knowledge to get an A stays the same, but the absolute level of knowledge demonstrated by students goes up.
To the contrary, to have any B or C grades in a class full of the brightest students, one needs to either increase the absolute expected level, or to give the class grades relative to its strength, which again means raising the expected level for an A.
Exam questions from Harvard can be easily tracked 100+ years back. A researcher who'd give current Harvard graduates some of the older questions could find out if the toughness of the exams went up, down, or stayed.
> then throwing better students at them would result at more As
Also, the Flynn effect: "the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
> A researcher who'd give current Harvard graduates some of the older questions could find out if the toughness of the exams went up, down, or stayed.
I strongly suspect this wouldn't be informative. The base knowledge of what we expect students to know has shifted.
Some might be topical: "How did Harding conduct his campaign?" "Name the primary components of a steam locomotive."
(Most of the student then would have come from an upper-class prep school, where they would have a training that let them be able to answer "Bound the basin of the Po, of the Mississippi, of the St. Lawrence." and "Supply the two names left blank in the following passage from the Oration for the Manilian Law.")
Consider how calculus is now regularly taught in high school, while pre-war high school ended with solid geometry.
Or, consider how an English literature course 100 years ago (and its tests) would have focused on the literature of England and the US, while the equivalent modern English literature course would likely have drawn from the much larger Anglo-sphere.
How would you determine if the toughness of an exam from a hundred years ago matched a modern day one? The pedagogy, tools, and knowledge base differed dramatically in the past century. A question might look difficult but be intended as a take-home, be graded differently than binary right-wrong, rely on a trick of an outdated tool (ex. slide rule).
> Exam questions from Harvard can be easily tracked 100+ years back. A researcher who'd give current Harvard graduates some of the older questions could find out if the toughness of the exams went up, down, or stayed.
People often can't answer these question today because the answers are now misleading or irrelevant, except to historians.
Even math has advanced in the last 100 years. Students today would be taught pertinent math, not how to use a slide rule. Throw a question asking for manipulations of a slide rule and 98% of today's students aren't going to be able to answer it. And most of those few who can are going to have a crotchety grandparent. The remaining few will be mathematical historians.
A while ago someone mentioned an old test from an American high school somewhere. One of the questions on that test was "name the organ responsible for purification of the blood".
This question is impossible to answer because there is no organ uniquely responsible for that. It's an important function served by several organs. Most prominently:
1. The kidneys are responsible for filtering certain toxins out of the bloodstream and ultimately getting them excreted in urine.
2. The liver is responsible for filtering other toxins out of the bloodstream and ultimately getting them excreted in urine.
3. The spleen is responsible for filtering defective blood out of the bloodstream and ultimately getting it excreted in feces. (Which is why feces is brown, incidentally.)
Without having attended a 19th-century anatomy class, there's no way for me to know what the person who wrote that test was hoping I would say. It seems pretty likely that I know more than he did, but that won't get me a good score on his test. Was that an easy question? Hard?
Not if you want peer acceptance and not be dismissed as a mere CS student.
It's acceptable to download your brilliance into something such as, say, CAYLEY/MAGMA [1], [2] but, obviously, once you start grinding the organ [3] and using it algorithmically for computation you're just another monkey . . .
A 1923 student is not going to have read "The Gulag Archipelago" or "Things Fall Apart" or other works published after 1923, so would fail any modern questions which require having read those works.
But even if you look to contemporaneous 1923 literature, I strongly suspect a modern Harvard student is more likely to have read black literature from 100+ years ago than a 1923 student. (For examples see https://histlit.fas.harvard.edu/files/histlit/files/america_... with "Sample Oral Exam Questions" from a modern Harvard exam section on "Being Black After Reconstruction".)
If the 1923 student didn't have to read 75% of what modern literature courses cover, and instead read a different 75%, perhaps with a stronger emphasis on British literature, then of course a 2023 student won't test so well on a 1923 test. But then, a 1923 student wouldn't test so well on a 2023 test.
You can see the math part requires details that aren't taught now:
"Find the amount of £50 12s. 5d. at simple interest at 8 per cent., at the end of 5 years 2 months and 3 days."
"From 1 sq. rod 5 sq. ft. subtract 7 sq yd. 139 sq. in."
The Brits decimalized a half century ago, so kids aren't taught there are 20 shillings in a pound and 12 pennies in a shilling. Only surveyors use rods these days, and it's defined as 16 1/2 US survey feet - which is slightly smaller than the international foot defined in 1959.
Or, "Find the cube root of 0.0093". By hand. We no longer consider that something worthwhile to teach.
They aren't hard, but without that small bit of knowledge or training, modern students are very unlikely to get the right answer.
Or, "State and prove the proportion which exists between the parts of two chords which cut each other in a circle. State what proportion exists when two secants are drawn from a point without the circle." I don't know about you, but my plane geometry isn't good enough to answer that question.
That's due to post-war educational policy changes that de-emphasized classical geometry in favor of calculus.
In the History and Geography section of the 1869 test I'm struck by the emphasis on rivers. Rivers are still important for transportation of commodities, but not nearly as much. I can't see them being emphasized in a college entrance exam today. I might be able to bound the basin of the Mississippi, and state the source of the Amazon and Ganges (if I guess correctly, and have a labeled map). The rest, no chance.
> I also succeeded in passing the preliminary examination for the Army while still almost at the bottom of the school. This examination seemed to have called forth a very special effort on my part, for many boys far above me in the school failed in it. I also had a piece of good luck. We knew that among other questions we should be asked to draw from memory a map of some country or other. The night before by way of final preparation I put the names of all the maps in the atlas into a hat and drew out New Zealand. I applied my good memory to the geography of that Dominion. Sure enough the first question in the paper was: ‘Draw a map of New Zealand.’
I can well imagine that a military officer may need to have that knowledge at hand faster than consulting a map. ("I am the very model of a modern major general!" and all.) For upper-class U.S. Harvard students, trade knowledge may be more important, thought that doesn't explain needing to know the source of the Amazon.
In any day and age, education for the elites is only in part about what's actually useful. The other part is there to segregate itself from the hoi polloi - and it actually makes more sense for it to be something not immediately useful precisely so that it's a clear marker of status: "I have time and money to learn this, of all things".
- Even if Harvard didn’t have a legacy admission policy, the ability to select the best possible students is limited (admissions is full of mistakes).
- Incoming students often know that they can get a near equal education at other schools, even if they are admitted to Harvard.
- Anecdotes from Harvard graduates suggest that performance of students at Harvard is not significantly different from other good schools.
- Grade inflation affects nearly all US schools.
Travel back in time to 1960 or earlier. You’ll find that the A grade in the US is reserved for the highest performing students, the top 15% or so. 30-35% would get a B, another 30-35% would get a C, and the remainder would get Ds and Fs.
Today, more than 40% of all students get an A.
If you think the explanation for why this happens at Harvard is different for the explanation for why this happens to most of the rest of the US, then you would want to explain what makes Harvard different.
I'd argue that an equivalent education isn't that meaningful of a statement though. Top schools come with a lot more opportunities. Connections is a big one. My undergrad didn't do research and several top schools require a publication for admission to graduate school. An opportunity I never even had (a common lack of opportunity for many university students. There's only so many R1 unis). I definitely agree that you'll get a similar education at a large number of schools (after all, there are only so many professorships available and it is extremely competitive), but I think it would also be a mistake to believe that there is an equal outcome between schools. Prestige may be a confounder, but it is unfortunately a meaningful metric and students know this.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here—should Harvard students get better grades because they are getting a better value out of their education than peers who are performing at the same level? I don’t think that’s a reasonable way for grades to work.
If you’re not talking about grade inflation, if you’re just talking about whether it’s meaningful to compare education—I’d still say that it’s meaningful to compare the education you get at different universities. There’s plenty of room for cynicism, but I think people are sometimes too cynical about the value of the actual education that college provides. It’s well-known that people who are knowledgeable in a particular subject overestimate how easy the subject is to learn and overestimate the general public’s knowledge of that subject. In short, a chemistry major will think that chemistry is not so hard, and maybe conclude that they didn’t get much of an education in college. You can think of this as the flipside to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Ignorant people overestimate their abilities, and knowledgeable people also overestimate the abilities of ignorant people. Rephrased—smart people undervalue knowledge!
I’m not going to try and make the case that the world is some kind of meritocracy, but I’d still place my bets on a 10% better student than on a student going to a 10% more prestigious school.
I would guess the point of the other poster might be that even if students accepted to Harvard know that they can get an equivalent education elsewhere that they would still be motivated to go to Harvard over the other schools regardless. Unless there was a specific reason to go to the other schools (such as Cal Tech being a better science and engineering school than Harvard).
Perhaps an inference which could be drawn from this is that Harvard, as an institution itself, doesn't need to inflate grades in order to get and retain students. It could more harshly grade to no ill effect to itself. Whereas most other schools can't.
Harvard can also afford to annoy a significant number of the legacy donor class. Why they don't is not fully explained by comparison to other schools (who often actually need the money to stay open). A guess as to why they avoid annoying the donor class is camaraderie and opportunities (for themselves, and possibly also for students). The opportunities is a reason they would mostly share with other schools, the camaraderie, less so.
"If you think the explanation for why this happens at Harvard is different for the explanation for why this happens to most of the rest of the US, then you would want to explain what makes Harvard different."
Edit to add: On a tangent I would guess that harsh grading at Harvard (and other elite schools) would be net beneficial to students. I've read of students who made it all the way through elite structures and then, when hit with a failure or blowback in the real world, either can't cope (suicide), or cope poorly (FTX/Alameda Research). School seems seriously serious when you're a young student, but it's primary purpose is to train for the adult world. Schools need to follow this policy of training, and they need to let their students know that failure is expected, and okay, even if it can't be 'pivoted' away from.
Yes, this is more in line with my thinking. To put part of what you said more simply: businesses care more about the Harvard name than the Harvard grade. Meaning you could have lower grades than other people you're competing with in the job market (especially if Harvard publicized that they were reducing grade inflation).
Here in EU the solution we have is to simply have formal rules that a university can only give 10% As, 25% Bs, etcetera.
This isn't enforced per class, but should prevent grade inflation. It might get weird in competition with people from US schools though, when someone with straight As is found to be a C+ student.
This was reasonably common about three generations ago in the US, and the one thing I can say for certain, is that such a system is bad pedagogy.
The purpose of grades should be to inform students of their performance relative to expectations / benchmarks. It should not be used to rank students against each other.
Yes, but in the US grades are used for selection, so it seems reasonable to keep them comparable.
Since we in the EU have the Bologna system French and Italian students will come to Sweden and Swedish students go to French universities, and if some universities are just handing out As or others grade properly it will become strange.
I think it's actually useful to be able to see the people able to perform at the 10% level in hard classes. For example, suppose that a student in a less prestigious subject takes a hard class in a more prestigious subject, and performs at the top 10% level-- it seems reasonable that he should be able to show that off with a grade that is genuinely high.
Furthermore, top 10% performance is something to strive for. Top 40% performance, it's not very good. It means you've maybe understood most of the course, but it doesn't mean the ability to creatively apply the material, which top 10% in fact can.
The US college-applying population has grown (a lot). The Harvard class size remains the same. Harvard continues to be a (the?) top tier school. This means that Harvard classes are probably getting better year after year. Even if Harvard is evaluating performance exactly the same (no new cushiness), if the admitted are better, they’ll be getting better grades on average, and those grades will be more compressed.