Grade Inflation at Harvard

[jon-nyc]

Harvard College is the Undergraduate Institution. Same place.

[89th]

@jon-nyc said in Grade Inflation at Harvard:

Good for you.

My first semester at Purdue I got a 3.0. All Bs, one A, one C.

At the end of the semester an older fraternity brother (I had pledged within weeks of arriving which gives you a clue as to why the 3.0), who was graduating that May gave me a rather inspirational talk about it. He talked about the various seniors leaving and what their performance and prospects were.

I got 4.0s each of the remaining 7 semesters. In EE, which took significant effort.

That's great. Similar story (pledged a fraternity a few weeks after arriving). Electrical Engineering is no joke, so that's quite impressive. How did you pivot to finances?

[Horace]

You all will be surprised to learn that even a public intellectual like myself did not do very well in college.

[Doctor Phibes]

@89th said in Grade Inflation at Harvard:

Electrical Engineering is no joke

If it is, it's certainly not a very funny one.

[George K]

I don't remember my college GPAs. They were good enough to get me into medical school. The disadvantage of being a white male might have been offset by the fact that I was the son of immigrants (though it probably didn't have the cache that it does now).

OTOH, medical school had a simpler grading system: Pass, Fail, Honors.

Either you knew the shit, or you didn't.

[Jolly]

BIL and I were laughing about getting old the other day. He was a 4.0 Chem E, but at a less prestigious school than Purdue. As a young man, he could do logarithms in his head. Those days are gone.

My day never got here.

[jon-nyc]

@89th I interviewed for engineering jobs and had a couple offers but it was a weird time - I was interviewing in fall of 89 and spring of 90 - as the Cold War was ending, and Silicon Valley was not nearly the attraction it became even 5 years later.

I took a job with a big consulting firm. I started out working across different industries but by the mid 90s had found my way into financial services. When online trading and the web took off, people that understood how to use the technology became more and more useful and more in demand. After a year at a predecessor to TD Ameritrade followed by 2 very successful years at Nasdaq I was locked in as a markets guy.

[89th]

Cool man. 89 was a very important year

[Mik]

I was a classic underachiever in high school, even though IO placed second in the state in English scholarship tests. By the time I scraped together enough money to go to college anything other than an A was essentially an F to me. Funny how that works when it's your money.

[Aqua Letifer]

@George-K said in Grade Inflation at Harvard:

I don't remember my college GPAs. They were good enough to get me into medical school. The disadvantage of being a white male might have been offset by the fact that I was the son of immigrants (though it probably didn't have the cache that it does now).

OTOH, medical school had a simpler grading system: Pass, Fail, Honors.

Either you knew the shit, or you didn't.

In undergrad... look I passed, okay? I got the degree.

I had a funny experience getting my first assignment back during my master's program. I got a D on the assignment. I asked the lecturer (better not call them professors) what it meant. She thought I was contesting the grade so she suggested I look up the university grading system without explaining further.

C was a credit. Basically it means you completed all the requirements of the assignment. Nothing to feel bad over, this was a solid grade. It just didn't set you apart.
D was credit with distinction. This is what you wanted to go for. It meant you did all that and then some: you added to the ask in some valuable way. If you want to transfer from the undergraduate program to the graduate program, for example, you need a few Ds to go with those Cs.
HD was high distinction. This basically meant mastery. You took an assignment and made something of publishable quality with it.

My grades from there on out were a 50/50 mix of D and HD. Of our entire program, there were maybe two other students who did as well or better. Ironically, I didn't give a shit. I was actually just having a ton of fun with the classes and the assignments. (Also ironically, the job market doesn't give a shit, either. They either outright discount my master's since it was outside the U.S. or they see the field of study attached to my degree and literally ask if I wiped my ass with it.)

In undergrad, where I cared very much about my GPA, I could still barely hack together something above 3.0.

[Copper]

For what they pay now, everyone should get all As.

Like Alabama football, there is no need to play the game. Just pay the invoice and collect the paper.

[xenon]

I guess the game played by colleges is to place their undergrads in good grad schools.

I went to a Canadian engineering school - they couldn't care less about your GPA. In fact, some of the old school guys wanted to weed out the weak ones early and get them to switch majors. Some of our classes had a 50-55% average.

I did a double undergrad program. My GPA in the engineering part was 3-3.5 (Canadian scale doesn't translate). Then in Econ it was an easy 4.0+ compared to the engineering.

Very glad I did the econ - else I wouldn't have gotten into the grad school I wanted to, and probably wouldn't have gone.

[Doctor Phibes]

We didn't do GPA's in England, but it's no secret that I fucked up royally with my undergraduate degree in maths and physics.

EE was something I kind of fell into accidentally, although I think it would be rather flattering to refer to what I do as actual electrical engineering.

[Aqua Letifer]

@xenon said in Grade Inflation at Harvard:

Very glad I did the econ - else I wouldn't have gotten into the grad school I wanted to, and probably wouldn't have gone.

I did the same in undergrad. My first major had the lowest grade averages, the lowest professor ratings and several of those professors made it known they had contempt for their students.

[taiwan_girl]

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/university-news/harvard-faculty-approve-a-cap-on-a-grades

PROFESSORS IN the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) have approved a proposal to cap the number of A’s awarded to Harvard College students, part of a broad proposal aimed at reducing grade inflation.

Starting in the fall of 2027, courses will limit A grades to 20 percent of enrollment, plus an additional four A’s per class. Voting was conducted by email over the past week, and the results were announced on Wednesday morning. Faculty members voted 458 to 201 to approve the grading cap, one of three provisions that were voted on separately and the central pillar of the proposed reforms.

Decisions on the other two provisions were split. By a vote of 498 to 157, faculty members approved a plan to calculate internal College honors and prizes using students’ average percentile rank instead of grade-point average. But they voted down a provision that would have allowed instructors to award a “satisfactory-plus” grade to courses that opt out of the grading cap; the vote tally was 292 for the provision versus 364 against. Those courses that opt out will be graded as “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” and will not count toward the average percentile rank.

and

Harvard’s overabundance of A’s has become an increasingly acute issue in recent years and has been a subject of formal faculty debate since 2023. An FAS report released last October found that solid A’s comprised 60 percent of all undergraduate letter grades in 2025, up from just 24 percent in 2005.

and

The approved provisions will be implemented in the 2027-28 school year. After three years, the Office of Undergraduate Education will present a review of the new policy to the faculty, although any changes to the policy would have to be done through the regular faculty legislative process.

[Andrea B]

Bring back the "Gentleman's 'C'".

[jon-nyc]

@andrea-b

Then they’d have to admit some gentlemen.

[Andrea B]

@jon-nyc said:

Then they’d have to admit some gentlemen.

You misogynist, you.