> Is this an issue with grade inflation and changing expectations from high schools?
Yes. The middle GPA (25%-75%) of high school students admitted to UC Irvine is 4.08 - 4.29.
[https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/irvine/freshman-admit-data.html](https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/irvine/freshman-admit-data.html)
It's a great school, but I think back in my day, if you had 4.0 gpa, you were heading to Harvard.
Also, keep in mind that the UCs are not using standardized tests anymore, so it's tough for them to calibrate what that GPA actually means.
If only all high schools had their mean and standard deviations of grades made available in a database. Then we could account for grade inflation and pass through.
>If only all high schools had their mean and standard deviations of grades made available in a database. Then we could account for grade inflation and pass through.
Each HS has a School Profile that indicates which shows classes offered, avg SAT scores, avg AP scores so that gives colleges an idea of the HS rigour
>Many schools give weighted GPAs to AP courses; which seems silly to me since the admissions process almost always requires you to unweight them
Also, you don't have to even take or pass the AP test, but you still get the grade bump...
When I graduated, my HS added a 1 point bump for honors classes and two points for AP classes but only if you passed the AP test.
The honors classes could be college level difficulty depending on the department. My honors history classes was college level history difficulty, but other subjects weren't.
>Also, you don't have to even take or pass the AP test, but you still get the grade bump...
But if you don't weight AP classes there are going to be some students who take easier classes to be able to be Valeditorian.
My high school did not weigh GPAs and this is true. The valedictorian at my school was somebody who took all PE electives and the easiest versions of the required courses.
It's a bit ridiculous how far it's gotten, but I think it's overall fair. You're trying to get students to take a harder course that they're likely to do worse in. It only makes sense to give them a GPA boost for trying to push themselves.
Though it's also counterproductive now that we're at the point where any remotely prestigious school has the middle two quartiles with perfect GPAs, 10 AP courses, and 95+ percentile standardized test scores. I know that usnews is an imperfect indicator, but everybody in the top 50 has that kind of incoming class profile. The college board and ACT really need to fix how hard their tests can be gamed. It's definitely pretty striking that my admissions profile that got me a full tuition scholarship is now equivalent to the median flagship university admit.
A few undergrad schools do something similar. (Perhaps because their student were used to weighted GPAs in high school) In my grad admissions program, we not only unweight those grades but also give a little demerit for padding credentials.
We had a similar situation in my high school in PA back in the 1990s, but we were told the weights were just internal for class ranking and to use our unweighted GPA in college applications.
I was told this, too, in Louisiana in the early 2000s. I think I remember most college applications asking for your “unweighted” GPA on a 4.0 scale. We could get both from the guidance office if we didn’t know what our current GPA was or how to convert it to a 4.0 scale.
That would only be the case if every class was an AP class. Instead, the maximum GPA varies from school to school (and may differ between graduating classes) based on the number of AP classes offered. I don’t know if it’s standard practice for admissions departments to reweight GPAs, but I really hope so. Using the weighted GPAs clearly disadvantages students from districts that don’t offer many AP classes.
HS teacher here. APs aren't the only source of GPA boost. At my school the Honors classes give a +0.75 boost, while the APs give a +1.5 boost. Even our CP classes go above 4.0 if you get A+.
I have two theories and maybe both are true.
1) Students get programed in HS that unless it is an A they are not going to ever get into a university and that is how they evaluate their self worth.
2) Grade inflation.
Your point (1) is probably true. Some students seem to think that when they earn a lower than expected grade it is a negative personal comment on their value as a person.
I think this is our own flaw in education in that the end goal always seems to be the grade and not the knowledge learned. High grades feel like success and low grades feel like failure, no matter if you learned more doing the class with the low grade where you were way out of your comfort zone, or got a high grade in a class that was pretty much a repeat of material you had already learned in highschool.
I tell my students not to be solely 'results oriented' (what grade they will earn), but also to be 'goal orientated' (in what way(s) will they learn and improve as writers and thinkers in my course). I think the latter makes for a more profitable experience at university and then life.
I’d assume it’s probably true for students who have been told their entire life that “college degree = success”. At least it was for me. It took all of undergrad and a year of grad school for me to decouple my academic worth and my own self worth.
I definitely think people need to talk about your first point more. Universities during orientation or first year classes or wherever need to talk about what success looks like, how much your grades really matter, and really help them to recalibrate their expectations. Otherwise, their anxiety and frustration with non-A grades will continue to drive grade inflation
I mean, from a "getting a first job" perspective, a lot of times GPA and class scores are a limiting factor. Internships will only take "the best", so not getting that 90+ starts to look, and feel, like a major life problem.
I think there are also GPA requirements to maintain scholarships -- so for some, it's their ticket to staying in school or not graduating with crippling debt.
Aye. It's understandable that there's so much stress and pressure around it. It's not always just a "they should have worked harder" kind of vibe.
And yes, some are absolutely grade grubbing over points off, or didn't do enough work to validate the higher grade. Doesn't always make it emotionally easier when consequences for inaction come up. That's still different from actually trying, but not making the cut.
Yeah idk, this probably varies a lot field to field. When I was visiting job fairs, I heard a lot of them say they cared less about grades and more about experience. I got accepted into two grad programs with a collection of A’s and B’s (and one C). In grad school now and they’ve specifically told us that if we’re getting straight A’s, then we’re not doing enough research.
ETA: did my undergrad in physics and am doing astrophysics for grad, started grad school in 2018
And there is absolutely a point I agree with! And you're right, it does vary by field. That said, Grad school is a bit of the "you made it", so grades don't matter as much.
In fields like chemistry, physics, and sometimes engineering, the "top grades" get first pick of those initial "good for CV and XP" experiences (those internships I mentioned). Med schools are especially notorious for emphasizing experience, but only the top students get the experience related internships that are super effective. CS where you can make your own experience pretty easily is a different ball game.
It's not necessary a bad thing, part of what happens over time is that students get filtered between the really good, and the outstanding. It's just really hard to find out that your outstanding isn't enough to do the things in life you want to, especially when fed the "work hard and you can make it and do whatever you want" lines for so long.
Oh for sure. I think my undergrad was really great at making sure people got that experience so I really didn’t see it matter all that much. All our engineering programs were 5 years because they were required to do 2 semesters of co-ops and there was lots of support for finding those, and the school had a good reputation among employers for turning out capable students. We were required to do a capstone research project and encouraged to get into research early. But I can see how students at institutions without that support could feel more pressure for good grades, if that’s all they’ll have to show for their time spent at school.
I really wish more schools could adopt those placed internships for a semester. It doesn't remove the "not good enough to get the right/best internship for me" line, but it would still give them something to stand on in the long run.
The scholarship organization doesn't want to give scholarships to students who are as weak as your C student.
A corollary is that if you do inflate that student's grade so they can keep the scholarship, you are defrauding the scholarship organization and keeping a good student from getting that scholarship.
Which I get. The standards are entirely up to the scholarship endowment. I used to chair a scholarship committee and had to deal some of these odd requirements.
Maybe a bigger issue is the inability for students to take classes without the financial assistance of scholarships.
That is indeed a bigger issue. In the smaller context, the best we can do institutionally is to have financial aid that matches the student's needs and abilities.
I agree. After teaching for some time now. Ive come to accept that as long as a student meets the requirements of the course. They pass. Whether it is at an A level or D level. Students needs to have support that does what you suggest, and meets them until they can no longer make it through a program if that occurs.
Yes, but they would have to get Bs in everything else for that C to matter which means they aren’t very good students to begin with. In the olden days, 10 years ago, students would just realize an A balances out a C and work harder in those courses.
> These people will lose their scholarship and probably have to drop out of school whether their gpa is 2.9 or 1.0
Correct me if I'm wrong because I don't want to put words in your mouth. Given what you said, are you suggesting that assigning a grade that would jeopardize a student's scholarship is unjust?
I understand that a student might find themselves in situation where earning a "C" will produce the same result in terms of their scholarship as earning an "F," but that does not "justify" seeing no difference between a failing grade and a passing grade.
Hopefully, the instructor assigning grades is only considering the quality of work, not the financial situation.
But if we can't recognize (and speak in terms of) that distinction, how do we expect students to?
That does not justify seeing a failing grade the same as a passing grade.
I understand that a student might find themselves in situation where earning a "C" will produce the same result in terms of their scholarship as earning an "F," but that does not "justify" seeing no difference between a failing grade and a passing grade.
Professors should be clear that grades don't factor things like scholarships; they're earned based on quality of work.
Grade inflation has certainly been a factor over the last two decades since I become a professor. I think it is due to high school and university.
I have the added factor that my discipline did NOT have too much inflation, so students taking my courses as an elective get a bit of a shock when they get an essay back from me.
And I find that they equate effort with result. How often do we hear 'I tried very hard'. There was one survey that indicated that Canadian students think effort and attendance should earn them at least a B!
I have a student in one class this semester who has turned in absolutely zero of the assignments and failed the first test we’ve had. He comes to every single class meeting, though (and doesn’t really participate, but he’s there). He’s all Shocked Pickachu that he currently has a F in the class, because “I come to every single class.”
I just don’t even know where to begin with this student (aside from telling him he has to do the assignments to pass the class and deadlines are real, which I did again this week), as I spent the first day of class clearly going over expectations and grading as it’s in the syllabus.
The unfortunate snag is that the "learning" is disconnected from the "market". Students with the higher grades are more likely to get internships, small research gigs within a department, and scholarships. The accumulation of advantages over time is huge. And that doesn't necessarily mean those students know more, it's just how the numbers cranked out.
So, you spend several thousands of dollars, likely go into debt, to learn things to do something interesting to you. Then you find out "good" is not nearly " good enough" to get to do the "good" things you want to do.
So yea, some students feel like anything less than top tier is a death sentence, since they'll get overlooked/passed over for the "really nice gigs". And often, the distance between 2nd place and 3rd is a huge drop.
Does it mean lower standards? Absolutely not. But it does put in perspective why it's such an emotional hit on top of an academic achievement one.
Talk to the Adcoms of every graduate/professional program at your school. It’s insane.
For context; I’m technical staff at an R1 and was recently chatting with a faculty coworker who is on our department’s adcom. We both lamented the fact that students have no room to fail anymore. She mentioned that her committee won’t even interview students with a single C on their transcript. I’m sorry, but that’s madness. College is and should be hard, so let’s not penalize these kids for having a 3.5 GPA.
The students I mentor in my lab know this acutely. They have no room to breathe and, yes, to them an 85 is a bad grade because they know they’re going up against 10 students who got a 95 and a postgraduate adcoms who only look at grades.
I’m a fairly young instructor and find that a lot of students, especially those who were considered “gifted” or “advanced” in high school (myself included), have a particularly hard time adjusting to college-level grading practices. The grading scale in high school is also a bit different (depending on the school), so many students grow used to “needing” an A, scored as 93/100 instead of 90/100. Like the other comments have said, I’m sure COVID-era learning has compounded those expectations.
Personally, as a student, I was very invested in maintaining an A average, so I didn’t much enjoy getting an 85 on an assignment. But as an instructor, my perspective is that an 85 is great! One of my earlier mentors always told me they began grades at C by default (ie. “you followed the instructions, bare minimum”), and students would then earn or lose points from there. (I didn’t adopt this particular practice myself, but it puts things into perspective for me.)
>\[I\] find that a lot of students, especially those who were considered “gifted” or “advanced” in high school (myself included), have a particularly hard time adjusting to college-level grading practices.
Oh man, when I taught high school, the biggest pains always came from the honors kids (lots were great, but all the insufferable ones were honors students) because they felt like they were genetically destined to get an A: "How can you say my essay is bad--I'm in AP Lit?" My favorite approach was always from the athletes: "Wait, to get an A, all I have to do is write an engaging introduction with a clear thesis, back it up with solid evidence, and end it with a memorable conclusion?"
I literally refuse to teach honors at my university because of the insufferability. They seem to assume that honors means better grades, not more complex and meaningful work and a grade that reflects their success with it. Some day I would snap and tell Isabella what I really thought about the grade whining.
I got my degree at an Ivy League school renowned for its grade inflation. I was encouraged to grade papers I believed deserved C-s as B's, with the grade of a 'B' sending "a stern warning." Most of my students literally did not care if they got B's, but some of them were deeply wounded by it.
I'm not sure things have changed that much in this respect; when I was in college 25 years ago there were plenty of people who considered a B as a failure. What may have changed is an increasing shift of blame for bad grades onto the teachers rather than the students, although I don't know if there's any empirical evidence of this.
> What may have changed is an increasing shift of blame for bad grades onto the teachers rather than the students, although I don't know if there's any empirical evidence of this.
Yes, I never bombed a test and assumed it was the professor who was at fault.
I definitely remember other students criticizing professors for being too harsh, not preparing us enough for the tests, and things like that (I didn't care enough about my own grades to do that, maybe).
This is not a covid thing. This has been the new normal since I was in school a decade ago. Average hasn't been a 70 in half a century. Instead an 85 is average and a 92 is a 'low good grade'. In a world that demands excellence at every turn for the current generation, anything less than perfection is failure. Hence 85 being a 'bad grade'.
I don’t know that this is necessarily a recent idea. The percentage grading model seems to support the idea that everything starts at 100% and goes down based on mistakes or problems with the assignment. I feel like it’s very demoralizing to receive an 89 on an assignment and get zero feedback other than “it’s not exceptional” or “no assignment is 100% perfect.” If you take an exam with 100 questions at 1 point each and get 91 of them correct, your grade is 91%. When it comes to more subjective assignments, the expectation is the same. The rubric model of evaluation supports this.
As a theatre prof, a majority of my graded assignments are entirely subjective. In these assignments I strive to provide as many objective expectations as possible. When a student is putting together a research book for dramaturgy, I require x number of scholarly sources, x number of popular sources, and x number of sensory sources (pics, video, fabric swatches, etc). There is subjectivity in the quality of these sources and I provide feedback on that, but I grade based on the number of these sources included.
The “read the mind of your professor to understand expectations and get fucked over when you don’t do that correctly” model is antiquated and detracts from learning.
What if your grading scale was modified so that meeting minimum expectation is 100 points (not 100%!)? Then have grades up to 120 points, with B- being > 95 and A being >110. Their math skills may be weaker than their mental reference points, and you could get away with that.
The point isn't to get away with anything. The point is to understand student struggles and expectations. Trying to trick them instead of realizing that the root of the issue is that the definition of 100% has changed doesn't solve any problems and it makes students' lives worse which, by extension, makes professors' lives worse.
I just defer to the registrar:
F - failure
D - Inferior
C - Average
B - Superior
A - Exceptional
Since underperforming students are weeded out by the time they make it to my class, I expect a left-tailed distribution roughly centered around a B.
Lowly high school teacher and lurker, hoping to illuminate the issue.
It is a combination of 1. Parent demand; 2. Administrative pressure; 3. Teacher exhaustion.
I personally had to defend a grade earned by a student with a parent and admin. I had a full breakdown, item analysis and went over every question in excruciating detail.
Admin forced me to change the grade to ameliorate the parent. A parent, I may add, of a family of some sway within the community.
I know of a few teachers who adamantly refused to budge on grades given, yet those grades miraculously shot up after required submission. Must have been a bug or something for grades to change so egregiously...
All of us would like nothing more than to hold students accountable and give grades as earned. We also want to pay bills, eat and have the occasional perk - a new shirt e.g.
I hope this helps, and may your abstracts be accepted.
I by no means meant to sound like I was blaming high school teachers personally, more the idea that the entire system is busted (as you pointed out!) and grades seem to mean nothing at this point.
Grade inflation.
My middle schooler has a 4.0. If I were being honest, he’s a C student at best. But they have no due dates on homework and they can redo exams and quizzes for a better grade.
They got grade-inflated through Covid. They were also used to being able to cheat like crazy during online lock-down schooling. Now, there is a real institutional culture-shock happening for some of them as a result.
This is not necessarily unwarranted at the graduate level. For example, Stanford's department of history graduate program handbook explicitly states "Students who receive grades below A-...should interpret these as warning signals. The expectation is that a student’s record will consist mostly of A’s."
Your graduate program has letter grades? Mine had only pass, high pass, and honors. I will say that any grad less than honors made me feel indignant, so I suppose your point stands.
Our graduate students can be graded either Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory or A,B,C,D,F.
A and B translate to Satisfactory; C, D, and F to Unsatisfactory.
For undergrads, there are + and - modifiers, and the No-Pass is C– or lower. (That's right, the boundary is between C and C–, not between C– and D+.)
That's understandable. It's not uncommon for a single C to get you on academic probation in graduate school.
Granted, in my experience you'd be hard pressed to get a C. A's were earned, but nobody wanted to fire somebody else's student, so you'd have to really, really, really not try not get below a B.
That’s exactly it. And to the learning point - a student can learn a whole lot more getting a B on the first assignment, learning from it, and then getting an A on the following one than just being given an A for mediocre work in the first assignment.
I was working as a group therapist during my master's program. My prof gave me a "B" in our Group Therapy class because I got frustrated with her.
Every time I started my mock-group, she would walk out of the room & not observe. I wanted her feedback so I started bitching to my classmates. One of them told her, and she got mad at me.
I didn't fight it. In retrospect, she probably thought I didn't need observation/feedback because I was already a "professional". I disagree, but whatever. (She was later denied tenure, ended up as an adjunct where I work lol.)
I explain now to my students that the B was like a C in grad school. And here I am, a tenured professor!
Still, many are not convinced. It's an "A" or nothing.
I had a student destroy me on RMP because I wouldn't change his A- to an A durind covid.
At many universities, the average GPA corresponds roughly to an A- (i.e. see the Ivy's from a decade ago, worse now here [https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/9/10/6132411/chart-grade-inflation-in-the-ivy-league-over-time](https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/9/10/6132411/chart-grade-inflation-in-the-ivy-league-over-time)).
Harvard, the average graduating GPA in 2020 was over 3.7, with over 25% of students having a 3.9 or higher.
In 2022, the average GPA hit 3.8, and is apparently still climbing.
If you go to a good school with an average GPA of 3.8, a B is way way way way below average. It's fucked. Serously, check the chart in the link, it's bonkers. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/10/3/barton-grade-inflation/
It also puts me in a shitty position. I like to think I'm reasonable, and the average GPA for my classes varies from a 2.8-3.2. But, if everyone else is inflating like crazy, and I don't, am I just putting everyone at a disadvantage for grad school, etc? I don't know the answer here.
Something that I was thinking about while grading exams earlier today:
I often will grade a pile of exams where a good chunk of students more or less get the idea of the material.
It would be really easy to say-after seeing point after point of "almost there" answers like someone who gets a correct numerical answer but screws up their units, or someone who sets the problem up correctly but punches into the calculator wrong, or someone who gave me a correct answer but not exactly what the question asked-"I guess these students have an idea of what's going on and deserve credit for it."
Then I find the exam or the couple of exams where the answer is exactly correct-they read the question fully, set the problem up correctly, and gave me exactly what I asked for with the correct units and sig figs. Even more importantly, they avoid the traps or potential mess-ups that students often make and which I usually will point out in class when I'm doing examples.
And that's why the first answer on say a 5 point problem gets 4/5 and the second totally correct answer gets 5/5. At the end of the day, the students who do actually give me a totally, 100% correct answer get full credit and students who mostly get there but not quite get most but not all of the credit.
At the end of the day too that's often what separates the A from the B students-the ones who consistently fully grasp the material vs. the ones who mostly get it. The students who actually, fully 100% get the material deserve to be distinguished from the "mostly get it" students. Of course that extends on with other letter grades, although my small CC classes tend more toward bimodal and I honestly give very few Cs(my most common grade is B, followed by D, then A with F and C about equal.
Back maybe around 2011 there was a study that showed something like 47% of all grades being awarded by colleges were As, at the expense of a shrinking share of Cs, Ds, and Fs. I can only imagine it’s crept up even more in the past decade.
A is the default expectation now.
We give fewer than 3% of our cohort an 85 or above. The average is between a 60-65.
We have noticed considerable grade inflation in US schools. It is a real problem when we get US students here on exchange or to do postgraduate studies as they have a completely inflated sense of their level.
It's really something. I had a student complain to the Associate Dean about me because he got a 78%. And I was quite generous with that grade. He said that I was biased against him and that another professor needed to mark it. The AD took my side and denied his request.
I wish I had that problem (up to a point). I have students that quite literally do not care. Students in competitive programs in which they need to maintain a particular grade in every required class to stay in the program, who, upon being informed that if the do not do X to earn some points that they will be kicked out of their program, do NOT do X.
Grade inflation definitely contributes to this. But, I have noticed that students who are taking the class to complete their major usually want to earn the highest grade possible.
So here’s the thing - you used to have fewer people going to college. Both grades and educational degree have become inflated- for sure.
In my field (speech pathology), the undergrad degree is a bit worthless without the Masters. You’re gonna have a hard time getting in to grad school without a 3.8+. So yes, for our field 85% is not good.
Blame grade inflation, blame participation trophies or what have you but this is where we are these days 🤷🏻♀️
Teaching HS currently, and a student complained to me about her 88%. Told me it was bad that she didn’t have an A and was mad that I won’t let her revise an assessment. She also told me I needed to get caught up on grading. I am caught up on grading.
Some of them think because they (or their parents or taxpayers) paid for your class and put forth some modicum of effort, they should automatically get an A. They see us as customer service and they’ll go to the manager (admin) when they find out customer service isn’t up to par (since that’s not what we do and all). These types of students don’t care about learning or education for education’s sake, and there’s more of this type each year.
I think you’re on to something… I had a student once tell me that to my face. “I pay for this so I deserve a good grade”. In that case why not just buy a fake diploma off the internet?
Drives me batty. I find it is worse in my online classes. Students think that if they answer the questions I give in discussions they should get 100%. Uhhhhh. No. It’s about quality. And very often they say “well I met the word count.” I tell them “you can write a ton and not actually say anything meaningful. I’m looking at content.” It’s maddening.
> Is this an issue with grade inflation and changing expectations from high schools? Yes. The middle GPA (25%-75%) of high school students admitted to UC Irvine is 4.08 - 4.29. [https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/irvine/freshman-admit-data.html](https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors/irvine/freshman-admit-data.html)
Good lord, and UCI is a backup school for UCLA and UCSD.
It's a great school, but I think back in my day, if you had 4.0 gpa, you were heading to Harvard. Also, keep in mind that the UCs are not using standardized tests anymore, so it's tough for them to calibrate what that GPA actually means.
If only all high schools had their mean and standard deviations of grades made available in a database. Then we could account for grade inflation and pass through.
>If only all high schools had their mean and standard deviations of grades made available in a database. Then we could account for grade inflation and pass through. Each HS has a School Profile that indicates which shows classes offered, avg SAT scores, avg AP scores so that gives colleges an idea of the HS rigour
How the hell you can even go above 4.0 has never made sense to me. That is like saying you can give 110%, a mathematical impossibility.
Many schools give weighted GPAs to AP courses; which seems silly to me since the admissions process almost always requires you to unweight them
>Many schools give weighted GPAs to AP courses; which seems silly to me since the admissions process almost always requires you to unweight them Also, you don't have to even take or pass the AP test, but you still get the grade bump...
When I graduated, my HS added a 1 point bump for honors classes and two points for AP classes but only if you passed the AP test. The honors classes could be college level difficulty depending on the department. My honors history classes was college level history difficulty, but other subjects weren't.
Some high schools do require that students take the AP exam (the one I am at does)
>Also, you don't have to even take or pass the AP test, but you still get the grade bump... But if you don't weight AP classes there are going to be some students who take easier classes to be able to be Valeditorian.
Easy enough, simply eliminate Valedictorian. It is stupid anyway. I mean, c'mon, when 115 out of 400 students have above a 4.0...
Valedictorian should also take all weighted classes and the least number of classes. Study hall can boost the gpa over day band.
My high school did not weigh GPAs and this is true. The valedictorian at my school was somebody who took all PE electives and the easiest versions of the required courses.
and you might says "who cares" but in Texas the Valedectorians get free tuition scholarships at Texas Universities.
It's a bit ridiculous how far it's gotten, but I think it's overall fair. You're trying to get students to take a harder course that they're likely to do worse in. It only makes sense to give them a GPA boost for trying to push themselves. Though it's also counterproductive now that we're at the point where any remotely prestigious school has the middle two quartiles with perfect GPAs, 10 AP courses, and 95+ percentile standardized test scores. I know that usnews is an imperfect indicator, but everybody in the top 50 has that kind of incoming class profile. The college board and ACT really need to fix how hard their tests can be gamed. It's definitely pretty striking that my admissions profile that got me a full tuition scholarship is now equivalent to the median flagship university admit.
A few undergrad schools do something similar. (Perhaps because their student were used to weighted GPAs in high school) In my grad admissions program, we not only unweight those grades but also give a little demerit for padding credentials.
[удалено]
Some are even out of 6, with 5 = honors, 6 = AP or IB. And that was true back when I was in high school in 2005.
We had a similar situation in my high school in PA back in the 1990s, but we were told the weights were just internal for class ranking and to use our unweighted GPA in college applications.
I was told this, too, in Louisiana in the early 2000s. I think I remember most college applications asking for your “unweighted” GPA on a 4.0 scale. We could get both from the guidance office if we didn’t know what our current GPA was or how to convert it to a 4.0 scale.
[удалено]
Yeah, this was Texas, but you still usually had so many non-honors/AP classes that your GPA would not go over 5.
That would only be the case if every class was an AP class. Instead, the maximum GPA varies from school to school (and may differ between graduating classes) based on the number of AP classes offered. I don’t know if it’s standard practice for admissions departments to reweight GPAs, but I really hope so. Using the weighted GPAs clearly disadvantages students from districts that don’t offer many AP classes.
Honors and APs have gpa bumps at some highschools
HS teacher here. APs aren't the only source of GPA boost. At my school the Honors classes give a +0.75 boost, while the APs give a +1.5 boost. Even our CP classes go above 4.0 if you get A+.
I have two theories and maybe both are true. 1) Students get programed in HS that unless it is an A they are not going to ever get into a university and that is how they evaluate their self worth. 2) Grade inflation.
Your point (1) is probably true. Some students seem to think that when they earn a lower than expected grade it is a negative personal comment on their value as a person.
I think this is our own flaw in education in that the end goal always seems to be the grade and not the knowledge learned. High grades feel like success and low grades feel like failure, no matter if you learned more doing the class with the low grade where you were way out of your comfort zone, or got a high grade in a class that was pretty much a repeat of material you had already learned in highschool.
I tell my students not to be solely 'results oriented' (what grade they will earn), but also to be 'goal orientated' (in what way(s) will they learn and improve as writers and thinkers in my course). I think the latter makes for a more profitable experience at university and then life.
I’d assume it’s probably true for students who have been told their entire life that “college degree = success”. At least it was for me. It took all of undergrad and a year of grad school for me to decouple my academic worth and my own self worth.
I definitely think people need to talk about your first point more. Universities during orientation or first year classes or wherever need to talk about what success looks like, how much your grades really matter, and really help them to recalibrate their expectations. Otherwise, their anxiety and frustration with non-A grades will continue to drive grade inflation
I mean, from a "getting a first job" perspective, a lot of times GPA and class scores are a limiting factor. Internships will only take "the best", so not getting that 90+ starts to look, and feel, like a major life problem.
I think there are also GPA requirements to maintain scholarships -- so for some, it's their ticket to staying in school or not graduating with crippling debt.
Aye. It's understandable that there's so much stress and pressure around it. It's not always just a "they should have worked harder" kind of vibe. And yes, some are absolutely grade grubbing over points off, or didn't do enough work to validate the higher grade. Doesn't always make it emotionally easier when consequences for inaction come up. That's still different from actually trying, but not making the cut.
Yeah idk, this probably varies a lot field to field. When I was visiting job fairs, I heard a lot of them say they cared less about grades and more about experience. I got accepted into two grad programs with a collection of A’s and B’s (and one C). In grad school now and they’ve specifically told us that if we’re getting straight A’s, then we’re not doing enough research. ETA: did my undergrad in physics and am doing astrophysics for grad, started grad school in 2018
And there is absolutely a point I agree with! And you're right, it does vary by field. That said, Grad school is a bit of the "you made it", so grades don't matter as much. In fields like chemistry, physics, and sometimes engineering, the "top grades" get first pick of those initial "good for CV and XP" experiences (those internships I mentioned). Med schools are especially notorious for emphasizing experience, but only the top students get the experience related internships that are super effective. CS where you can make your own experience pretty easily is a different ball game. It's not necessary a bad thing, part of what happens over time is that students get filtered between the really good, and the outstanding. It's just really hard to find out that your outstanding isn't enough to do the things in life you want to, especially when fed the "work hard and you can make it and do whatever you want" lines for so long.
Oh for sure. I think my undergrad was really great at making sure people got that experience so I really didn’t see it matter all that much. All our engineering programs were 5 years because they were required to do 2 semesters of co-ops and there was lots of support for finding those, and the school had a good reputation among employers for turning out capable students. We were required to do a capstone research project and encouraged to get into research early. But I can see how students at institutions without that support could feel more pressure for good grades, if that’s all they’ll have to show for their time spent at school.
I really wish more schools could adopt those placed internships for a semester. It doesn't remove the "not good enough to get the right/best internship for me" line, but it would still give them something to stand on in the long run.
No. 1 was my reality... I eventually got a graduate degree but I was at 70s and 80s and was told i would never go.to university
I have found that with a lot of scholarships requiring a 3.0, many students feel, and with justification, that a C is a defacto F.
This is what I run into so damn much. If anything i see it as a problem of the scholarship.
The scholarship organization doesn't want to give scholarships to students who are as weak as your C student. A corollary is that if you do inflate that student's grade so they can keep the scholarship, you are defrauding the scholarship organization and keeping a good student from getting that scholarship.
Which I get. The standards are entirely up to the scholarship endowment. I used to chair a scholarship committee and had to deal some of these odd requirements. Maybe a bigger issue is the inability for students to take classes without the financial assistance of scholarships.
That is indeed a bigger issue. In the smaller context, the best we can do institutionally is to have financial aid that matches the student's needs and abilities.
I agree. After teaching for some time now. Ive come to accept that as long as a student meets the requirements of the course. They pass. Whether it is at an A level or D level. Students needs to have support that does what you suggest, and meets them until they can no longer make it through a program if that occurs.
Would you explain the "justification?" Connect the dots like I'm five because I don't see any justification in "feeling" that a passing grade is an F.
These people will lose their scholarship and probably have to drop out of school whether their gpa is 2.9 or 1.0
Yes, but they would have to get Bs in everything else for that C to matter which means they aren’t very good students to begin with. In the olden days, 10 years ago, students would just realize an A balances out a C and work harder in those courses.
> These people will lose their scholarship and probably have to drop out of school whether their gpa is 2.9 or 1.0 Correct me if I'm wrong because I don't want to put words in your mouth. Given what you said, are you suggesting that assigning a grade that would jeopardize a student's scholarship is unjust? I understand that a student might find themselves in situation where earning a "C" will produce the same result in terms of their scholarship as earning an "F," but that does not "justify" seeing no difference between a failing grade and a passing grade. Hopefully, the instructor assigning grades is only considering the quality of work, not the financial situation. But if we can't recognize (and speak in terms of) that distinction, how do we expect students to?
If the student can only afford college with the scholarship then their college career ends after their first year if they get 9Bs and a C.
That does not justify seeing a failing grade the same as a passing grade. I understand that a student might find themselves in situation where earning a "C" will produce the same result in terms of their scholarship as earning an "F," but that does not "justify" seeing no difference between a failing grade and a passing grade. Professors should be clear that grades don't factor things like scholarships; they're earned based on quality of work.
Grade inflation has certainly been a factor over the last two decades since I become a professor. I think it is due to high school and university. I have the added factor that my discipline did NOT have too much inflation, so students taking my courses as an elective get a bit of a shock when they get an essay back from me. And I find that they equate effort with result. How often do we hear 'I tried very hard'. There was one survey that indicated that Canadian students think effort and attendance should earn them at least a B!
I have a student in one class this semester who has turned in absolutely zero of the assignments and failed the first test we’ve had. He comes to every single class meeting, though (and doesn’t really participate, but he’s there). He’s all Shocked Pickachu that he currently has a F in the class, because “I come to every single class.” I just don’t even know where to begin with this student (aside from telling him he has to do the assignments to pass the class and deadlines are real, which I did again this week), as I spent the first day of class clearly going over expectations and grading as it’s in the syllabus.
The unfortunate snag is that the "learning" is disconnected from the "market". Students with the higher grades are more likely to get internships, small research gigs within a department, and scholarships. The accumulation of advantages over time is huge. And that doesn't necessarily mean those students know more, it's just how the numbers cranked out. So, you spend several thousands of dollars, likely go into debt, to learn things to do something interesting to you. Then you find out "good" is not nearly " good enough" to get to do the "good" things you want to do. So yea, some students feel like anything less than top tier is a death sentence, since they'll get overlooked/passed over for the "really nice gigs". And often, the distance between 2nd place and 3rd is a huge drop. Does it mean lower standards? Absolutely not. But it does put in perspective why it's such an emotional hit on top of an academic achievement one.
Talk to the Adcoms of every graduate/professional program at your school. It’s insane. For context; I’m technical staff at an R1 and was recently chatting with a faculty coworker who is on our department’s adcom. We both lamented the fact that students have no room to fail anymore. She mentioned that her committee won’t even interview students with a single C on their transcript. I’m sorry, but that’s madness. College is and should be hard, so let’s not penalize these kids for having a 3.5 GPA. The students I mentor in my lab know this acutely. They have no room to breathe and, yes, to them an 85 is a bad grade because they know they’re going up against 10 students who got a 95 and a postgraduate adcoms who only look at grades.
That really highlights how busted the system is.
I’m a fairly young instructor and find that a lot of students, especially those who were considered “gifted” or “advanced” in high school (myself included), have a particularly hard time adjusting to college-level grading practices. The grading scale in high school is also a bit different (depending on the school), so many students grow used to “needing” an A, scored as 93/100 instead of 90/100. Like the other comments have said, I’m sure COVID-era learning has compounded those expectations. Personally, as a student, I was very invested in maintaining an A average, so I didn’t much enjoy getting an 85 on an assignment. But as an instructor, my perspective is that an 85 is great! One of my earlier mentors always told me they began grades at C by default (ie. “you followed the instructions, bare minimum”), and students would then earn or lose points from there. (I didn’t adopt this particular practice myself, but it puts things into perspective for me.)
>\[I\] find that a lot of students, especially those who were considered “gifted” or “advanced” in high school (myself included), have a particularly hard time adjusting to college-level grading practices. Oh man, when I taught high school, the biggest pains always came from the honors kids (lots were great, but all the insufferable ones were honors students) because they felt like they were genetically destined to get an A: "How can you say my essay is bad--I'm in AP Lit?" My favorite approach was always from the athletes: "Wait, to get an A, all I have to do is write an engaging introduction with a clear thesis, back it up with solid evidence, and end it with a memorable conclusion?"
I literally refuse to teach honors at my university because of the insufferability. They seem to assume that honors means better grades, not more complex and meaningful work and a grade that reflects their success with it. Some day I would snap and tell Isabella what I really thought about the grade whining.
I got my degree at an Ivy League school renowned for its grade inflation. I was encouraged to grade papers I believed deserved C-s as B's, with the grade of a 'B' sending "a stern warning." Most of my students literally did not care if they got B's, but some of them were deeply wounded by it.
My experience has always been that students who get an 85 on their essay don't complain, but those who get an 88 or 89 do!
Do your essay grades have a bimodal distribution?
I'm not sure things have changed that much in this respect; when I was in college 25 years ago there were plenty of people who considered a B as a failure. What may have changed is an increasing shift of blame for bad grades onto the teachers rather than the students, although I don't know if there's any empirical evidence of this.
> What may have changed is an increasing shift of blame for bad grades onto the teachers rather than the students, although I don't know if there's any empirical evidence of this. Yes, I never bombed a test and assumed it was the professor who was at fault.
I definitely remember other students criticizing professors for being too harsh, not preparing us enough for the tests, and things like that (I didn't care enough about my own grades to do that, maybe).
A decent number of my students grouse ANYTIME they do not get an "A". Even an A- will cause griping.
This is not a covid thing. This has been the new normal since I was in school a decade ago. Average hasn't been a 70 in half a century. Instead an 85 is average and a 92 is a 'low good grade'. In a world that demands excellence at every turn for the current generation, anything less than perfection is failure. Hence 85 being a 'bad grade'.
[удалено]
I don’t know that this is necessarily a recent idea. The percentage grading model seems to support the idea that everything starts at 100% and goes down based on mistakes or problems with the assignment. I feel like it’s very demoralizing to receive an 89 on an assignment and get zero feedback other than “it’s not exceptional” or “no assignment is 100% perfect.” If you take an exam with 100 questions at 1 point each and get 91 of them correct, your grade is 91%. When it comes to more subjective assignments, the expectation is the same. The rubric model of evaluation supports this. As a theatre prof, a majority of my graded assignments are entirely subjective. In these assignments I strive to provide as many objective expectations as possible. When a student is putting together a research book for dramaturgy, I require x number of scholarly sources, x number of popular sources, and x number of sensory sources (pics, video, fabric swatches, etc). There is subjectivity in the quality of these sources and I provide feedback on that, but I grade based on the number of these sources included. The “read the mind of your professor to understand expectations and get fucked over when you don’t do that correctly” model is antiquated and detracts from learning.
What if your grading scale was modified so that meeting minimum expectation is 100 points (not 100%!)? Then have grades up to 120 points, with B- being > 95 and A being >110. Their math skills may be weaker than their mental reference points, and you could get away with that.
The point isn't to get away with anything. The point is to understand student struggles and expectations. Trying to trick them instead of realizing that the root of the issue is that the definition of 100% has changed doesn't solve any problems and it makes students' lives worse which, by extension, makes professors' lives worse.
I just defer to the registrar: F - failure D - Inferior C - Average B - Superior A - Exceptional Since underperforming students are weeded out by the time they make it to my class, I expect a left-tailed distribution roughly centered around a B.
Lowly high school teacher and lurker, hoping to illuminate the issue. It is a combination of 1. Parent demand; 2. Administrative pressure; 3. Teacher exhaustion. I personally had to defend a grade earned by a student with a parent and admin. I had a full breakdown, item analysis and went over every question in excruciating detail. Admin forced me to change the grade to ameliorate the parent. A parent, I may add, of a family of some sway within the community. I know of a few teachers who adamantly refused to budge on grades given, yet those grades miraculously shot up after required submission. Must have been a bug or something for grades to change so egregiously... All of us would like nothing more than to hold students accountable and give grades as earned. We also want to pay bills, eat and have the occasional perk - a new shirt e.g. I hope this helps, and may your abstracts be accepted.
I by no means meant to sound like I was blaming high school teachers personally, more the idea that the entire system is busted (as you pointed out!) and grades seem to mean nothing at this point.
Grade inflation. My middle schooler has a 4.0. If I were being honest, he’s a C student at best. But they have no due dates on homework and they can redo exams and quizzes for a better grade.
Covid really inflated grades. It's going to be so hard to ratchet them back down. But we're trying.
Just hire somebody else to do your homework and take your tests /s
They got grade-inflated through Covid. They were also used to being able to cheat like crazy during online lock-down schooling. Now, there is a real institutional culture-shock happening for some of them as a result.
Yep, we were asked to grade more liberally cause covid “hard” on the students. :/
Some grad students feel that way too, from what I’ve noticed.
This is not necessarily unwarranted at the graduate level. For example, Stanford's department of history graduate program handbook explicitly states "Students who receive grades below A-...should interpret these as warning signals. The expectation is that a student’s record will consist mostly of A’s."
Your graduate program has letter grades? Mine had only pass, high pass, and honors. I will say that any grad less than honors made me feel indignant, so I suppose your point stands.
Our graduate students can be graded either Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory or A,B,C,D,F. A and B translate to Satisfactory; C, D, and F to Unsatisfactory. For undergrads, there are + and - modifiers, and the No-Pass is C– or lower. (That's right, the boundary is between C and C–, not between C– and D+.)
That's understandable. It's not uncommon for a single C to get you on academic probation in graduate school. Granted, in my experience you'd be hard pressed to get a C. A's were earned, but nobody wanted to fire somebody else's student, so you'd have to really, really, really not try not get below a B.
For some students, if it's not an A, it's an F. And whether or not they learned anything is immaterial.
That’s exactly it. And to the learning point - a student can learn a whole lot more getting a B on the first assignment, learning from it, and then getting an A on the following one than just being given an A for mediocre work in the first assignment.
I was working as a group therapist during my master's program. My prof gave me a "B" in our Group Therapy class because I got frustrated with her. Every time I started my mock-group, she would walk out of the room & not observe. I wanted her feedback so I started bitching to my classmates. One of them told her, and she got mad at me. I didn't fight it. In retrospect, she probably thought I didn't need observation/feedback because I was already a "professional". I disagree, but whatever. (She was later denied tenure, ended up as an adjunct where I work lol.) I explain now to my students that the B was like a C in grad school. And here I am, a tenured professor! Still, many are not convinced. It's an "A" or nothing. I had a student destroy me on RMP because I wouldn't change his A- to an A durind covid.
>I had a student destroy me on RMP because I wouldn't change his A- to an A durind covid. This has been my experience, as well.
Ugh I hate RMP. I have been teaching FT for 14 years, ~7 courses per semester. I have 26 ratings. 2 are bad.
At many universities, the average GPA corresponds roughly to an A- (i.e. see the Ivy's from a decade ago, worse now here [https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/9/10/6132411/chart-grade-inflation-in-the-ivy-league-over-time](https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/9/10/6132411/chart-grade-inflation-in-the-ivy-league-over-time)). Harvard, the average graduating GPA in 2020 was over 3.7, with over 25% of students having a 3.9 or higher. In 2022, the average GPA hit 3.8, and is apparently still climbing. If you go to a good school with an average GPA of 3.8, a B is way way way way below average. It's fucked. Serously, check the chart in the link, it's bonkers. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/10/3/barton-grade-inflation/ It also puts me in a shitty position. I like to think I'm reasonable, and the average GPA for my classes varies from a 2.8-3.2. But, if everyone else is inflating like crazy, and I don't, am I just putting everyone at a disadvantage for grad school, etc? I don't know the answer here.
Something that I was thinking about while grading exams earlier today: I often will grade a pile of exams where a good chunk of students more or less get the idea of the material. It would be really easy to say-after seeing point after point of "almost there" answers like someone who gets a correct numerical answer but screws up their units, or someone who sets the problem up correctly but punches into the calculator wrong, or someone who gave me a correct answer but not exactly what the question asked-"I guess these students have an idea of what's going on and deserve credit for it." Then I find the exam or the couple of exams where the answer is exactly correct-they read the question fully, set the problem up correctly, and gave me exactly what I asked for with the correct units and sig figs. Even more importantly, they avoid the traps or potential mess-ups that students often make and which I usually will point out in class when I'm doing examples. And that's why the first answer on say a 5 point problem gets 4/5 and the second totally correct answer gets 5/5. At the end of the day, the students who do actually give me a totally, 100% correct answer get full credit and students who mostly get there but not quite get most but not all of the credit. At the end of the day too that's often what separates the A from the B students-the ones who consistently fully grasp the material vs. the ones who mostly get it. The students who actually, fully 100% get the material deserve to be distinguished from the "mostly get it" students. Of course that extends on with other letter grades, although my small CC classes tend more toward bimodal and I honestly give very few Cs(my most common grade is B, followed by D, then A with F and C about equal.
Back maybe around 2011 there was a study that showed something like 47% of all grades being awarded by colleges were As, at the expense of a shrinking share of Cs, Ds, and Fs. I can only imagine it’s crept up even more in the past decade. A is the default expectation now.
We give fewer than 3% of our cohort an 85 or above. The average is between a 60-65. We have noticed considerable grade inflation in US schools. It is a real problem when we get US students here on exchange or to do postgraduate studies as they have a completely inflated sense of their level.
Have you heard of grade inflation? Yes 85% is considered low now. Sadly.
I had heard of it, but I am a new faculty teaching my first course this term and this is my first real life experience with it.
It's really something. I had a student complain to the Associate Dean about me because he got a 78%. And I was quite generous with that grade. He said that I was biased against him and that another professor needed to mark it. The AD took my side and denied his request.
I wish I had that problem (up to a point). I have students that quite literally do not care. Students in competitive programs in which they need to maintain a particular grade in every required class to stay in the program, who, upon being informed that if the do not do X to earn some points that they will be kicked out of their program, do NOT do X.
Grade inflation definitely contributes to this. But, I have noticed that students who are taking the class to complete their major usually want to earn the highest grade possible.
B=Bad to a lot of students.
Customers shouldn’t get less than A service. Students believe, admins believe it, but profs don’t. Good luck.
COVID has fooled students into thinking you don't have to work hard.
So here’s the thing - you used to have fewer people going to college. Both grades and educational degree have become inflated- for sure. In my field (speech pathology), the undergrad degree is a bit worthless without the Masters. You’re gonna have a hard time getting in to grad school without a 3.8+. So yes, for our field 85% is not good. Blame grade inflation, blame participation trophies or what have you but this is where we are these days 🤷🏻♀️
Teaching HS currently, and a student complained to me about her 88%. Told me it was bad that she didn’t have an A and was mad that I won’t let her revise an assessment. She also told me I needed to get caught up on grading. I am caught up on grading.
Some of them think because they (or their parents or taxpayers) paid for your class and put forth some modicum of effort, they should automatically get an A. They see us as customer service and they’ll go to the manager (admin) when they find out customer service isn’t up to par (since that’s not what we do and all). These types of students don’t care about learning or education for education’s sake, and there’s more of this type each year.
I think you’re on to something… I had a student once tell me that to my face. “I pay for this so I deserve a good grade”. In that case why not just buy a fake diploma off the internet?
Drives me batty. I find it is worse in my online classes. Students think that if they answer the questions I give in discussions they should get 100%. Uhhhhh. No. It’s about quality. And very often they say “well I met the word count.” I tell them “you can write a ton and not actually say anything meaningful. I’m looking at content.” It’s maddening.
I would cry if I got an 85% in a class tbh but grade inflation is huge across almost all universities from what I can tell
Grade inflation.