does your school grade inflate?

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nickelbackfan

nickelbackfan

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So I was wondering how you can find out if your school is known for grade inflation from an outside source? I go to a big 10 university and all my classes are graded on a strict scale
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some do. I go to an ivy, and there have been 3 instances, where I go WTF at my final grade when I get it back. (a good WTF, not a bad WTF)
 
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No.

My school is adamantly against grade inflation. Professors actually have to go to meetings where they are reminded that there is no grade inflation on our campus. Not kidding.
 
I've only been in one class where an A was anything below a 90 (it was an 85 for that class). Besides that, professors may round up an 89% or something, but I haven't been in any classes where grades are significantly inflated.
 
I went to a small private school and never heard of grade inflation until SDN. I got the grades I earned on my tests, how difficult is that :confused:. People that did bad got bad grades, sucks for them.
 
JFK90787 said:
I went to a small private school and never heard of grade inflation until SDN. I got the grades I earned on my tests, how difficult is that :confused:. People that did bad got bad grades, sucks for them.
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I'm not sure how grade inflation is done in a physical/life science course. To me, it seems like the humanities/social sciences would be most susceptible to grade inflation. Unless the professor is using a serious curve, how is a 78% going to turn into an A-? I could see a professor handing out good grades on papers or work that has a subjective component, but I'm unsure of how this would go down in organic chemistry or something similar.
 
It's hard to know because I never asked any of my classmates what their grades were. But I graduated with a 3.57 and was like 400th out of 800th in my school (College of Arts and Sciences). At my state school post-bacc, exam averages were anywhere from 45 to 80.
 
jlayers2 said:
I'm not really sure what the exact definition of grade inflation is but I wouldn't be surprised if my school did it.

For instance. In an EE class I took last semester there were 312 people taking the class and the tests were not curved. This meant that the cutoffs were made at the end of the semesters for A/B/C etc.

91 people got some sort A. (A+/A/A-) That means that they grade cutoffs were made so that 30% of the class would receive some sort of an A. Does this sound like grade inflation?
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Yup, at my big 10 ten school usually only about 10% got an A and that included A minuses.
 
Interesting, I knew my school deflates but was surprised to see the average GPA at private schools is 3.3. While my somewhat competitive state school has an average GPA below 3.0. Most public schools sit at 3.1.

Check out the inflation at UC schools. I always hear people say the UCs are known for grade deflation. Not true.
 
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^^^^ I went* to a UC, there is no grade deflation... There is generally a bell curve with the average grade curved to a C+/B- and how you stand compared to that is your grade. The A-/A is generally a standard deviation above the average.


I've personally questioned these theories of grade inflation at the top universities....

What if it was actually the students being smart?? I mean this happens at Harvard and all right?
 
With median grades in the B+ range, I'd say Cornell has some grade inflation
 
CaribbeanBlue said:
^^^^ I went* to a UC, there is no grade deflation... There is generally a bell curve with the average grade curved to a C+/B- and how you stand compared to that is your grade. The A-/A is generally a standard deviation above the average.


I've personally questioned these theories of grade inflation at the top universities....

What if it was actually the students being smart?? I mean this happens at Harvard and all right?
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Agreed. It's no mistake that 98% of the undergrads at MIT graduate for a reason. They only pick the smartest of kids... so of course they're going to be ready for UG courses.
 
This is depressing to look at. A school that feeds a lot of students into my state's med school has serious grade inflation. My school and theirs have similar student bodies. They just have an average GPA 0.3 higher.

This is making me dislike my school but it is too late to transfer.
 
pasiley said:
Yup, at my big 10 ten school usually only about 10% got an A and that included A minuses.
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Same, at my B10, there were classes where only 2-3 (of out 60-100) people got A's... most grades were about a B to B+
 
CaribbeanBlue said:
^^^^ I went* to a UC, there is no grade deflation... There is generally a bell curve with the average grade curved to a C+/B- and how you stand compared to that is your grade. The A-/A is generally a standard deviation above the average.


I've personally questioned these theories of grade inflation at the top universities....

What if it was actually the students being smart?? I mean this happens at Harvard and all right?
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I think most evidence for deflation comes from grades 30 years ago compared to grades today. Some schools chalk it up to "better student body", but the top schools really can't make this argument.

I think that the average MCAT vs GPA for each school would be more telling.
 
The old Boalt Law's 2007 chart that was depositioned has a lot of pretty useful info (http://web.archive.org/web/20000829094953/http://www.pcmagic.net/abe/gradeadj.htm)

For B1G (in order of deflationary to inflationary)

1. Northwestern (82)
2. Michigan (81.5)
3. Illinois (78)
4. Wisconsin (77)
5. Michigan State (75)
6. Penn State (74)
7. Purdue, Iowa (73.5)
9. tOSU, Minnesota (73)
11. Indiana (72)

Northwestern and Michigan are considered deflationary. The rest of the B1G are neutral.
 
pkwraith said:
The old Boalt Law's 2007 chart that was depositioned has a lot of pretty useful info (http://web.archive.org/web/20000829094953/http://www.pcmagic.net/abe/gradeadj.htm)

For B1G (in order of deflationary to inflationary)

1. Northwestern (82)
2. Michigan (81.5)
3. Illinois (78)
4. Wisconsin (77)
5. Michigan State (75)
6. Penn State (74)
7. Purdue, Iowa (73.5)
9. tOSU, Minnesota (73)
11. Indiana (72)

Northwestern and Michigan are considered deflationary. The rest of the B1G are neutral.
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Those figures are derived from the average GPA and LSAT scores for pre-law students. :rolleyes:

If you take the average GPA for all undergraduate students, NW and UM have the highest grade inflation of all the Big-Ten schools.*

Michigan ~3.27 (2008)**
Northwestern ~3.41 (2008)**

For reference, PSU is ~3.08 (2012).

*Big Ten schools don't really inflate grades, so the most grade-inflated B10 school pales in comparison to, say, Brown or Yale.
**Average GPAs increase by year at most institutions, so I assume the average grade-point is higher now than it was in 2008.
 
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Charles Darwin said:
Those figures are derived from the average GPA and LSAT scores for pre-law students. :rolleyes:

If you take the average GPA for all undergraduate students, NW and UM have the highest grade inflation of all the Big-Ten schools.*

Michigan ~3.27 (2008)**
Northwestern ~3.41 (2008)**

For reference, PSU is ~3.08 (2012).

*Big Ten schools don't really inflate grades, so the most grade-inflated B10 school pales in comparison to, say, Brown or Yale.
**Average GPAs increase by year at most institutions, so I assume the average grade-point is higher now than it was in 2008.
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Great, you think you can compare average gpa across different institutions without any normalization. That's nonsensical and does not seem to justify your snark. But thanks for explaining that it is normalized by LSAT since it obviously wasn't stated by the article.
 
pkwraith said:
Great, you think you can compare average gpa across different institutions without any normalization. That's nonsensical and does not seem to justify your snark. But thanks for explaining that it is normalized by LSAT since it obviously wasn't stated by the article.
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Just as you tried to compare average GPAs across entirely difference disciplines. In your source, are GPAs normalized? Somewhat. Are those statistics at all indicative of grade inflation/deflation in the sciences at a particular school? No, absolutely not. Last time I checked this is a pre-med forum where the majority of students here are science majors. I think you're looking for this board.
 
With the exception of Michigan and Northwestern. The student bodies (especially in the sciences) of the rest of the big 10 schools are pretty similar.

I would hope Michigan and Northwestern would have higher average GPAs because their student body is more competitive. It is interesting that Wisconsin which does not have the same type of student body as the other two has such a high average GPA. Maybe I should have been a Badger ;)
 
figure3.gif


Source: http://gradeinflation.com/
 
It's a bit useless to look at those figures people. I went to a top 20 university that will look inflated if you look at the data, but that's because it's inflated in the non-science majors. Yeah, sociology majors get good grades, but have fun trying to get a 3.5+ in Molecular Bio, Neuro, or Chem. All but two science majors I know that got a 3.2+ broke 30 on the MCAT, and those that got 3.6+ usually broke 35.
 
There's no real appropriate way to "normalize" GPA across institutions. There's no reference measure that's not without bias, be it HSGPA, GRE, SAT, whatever, and none of them can be shown to correlate very well with anything meaningful. Everything is mixed up between individual professors, departments, majors, required courses, average credit load, personal aptitude, extracurricular involvement, etc etc.

It's really difficult to know who deflates/inflates simply from average GPA's. The entire concept of deflation is "Someone with a certain intellectual potential is getting a lower grade than they should, given how hard they worked/how smart they are/what they would have gotten at another institution".

How does anyone know what kind of grades I deserved or was capable of receiving? Not from my HS grades, how I did in HS is not an indicator of how I decide to perform in college. My SAT? Correlation between SAT and college GPA (or anything of use actually) is drastically low. What is it telling you? Unless someone does a thorough analysis on my g factor, hours spent working/studying, etc etc, there's little way to know who deflates and inflates because each school is composed of very different students who have been collected using very different admissions philosophy.

People are way too obsessed with this stuff. You made a choice when you chose your college. Just live with it and move on. We're chasing a question that we are completely unequipped to answer.
 
So do ADCOMS try to take into account grade inflation? If they do, how do they know what schools inflate...
 
They don't take into account grade inflation. Easy as that. You shouldn't have been naive enough to go to a grade deflated school.
 
Mountaineer12 said:
I've only been in one class where an A was anything below a 90 (it was an 85 for that class). Besides that, professors may round up an 89% or something, but I haven't been in any classes where grades are significantly inflated.
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I don't understand this -- what is the typical course average (in %) if an A is 90+?

At my school (and most schools in the area), an 80+ is an A- and an 85 is an A. This is true for every course at my institution. Nonetheless, averages in first year courses are in the 60's (Cs) and the average GPA at my school is below 3.0.
 
jjesque said:
I don't understand this -- what is the typical course average (in %) if an A is 90+?

At my school (and most schools in the area), an 80+ is an A- and an 85 is an A. This is true for every course at my institution. Nonetheless, averages in first year courses are in the 60's (Cs) and the average GPA at my school is below 3.0.
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At my school (a small private school) in most of the science classes that I've taken (and most non-science classes, for that matter) an A is generally 94 or 93. The A- cutoff is usually a 90. One class I had a 95 was an A. It was Ecology and lest you think it was because it was an easy class (it wasn't what I would call easy) I think it may just be the way that particular professor sets his grading scale. When he taught my brother's General Biology class, he set an A at 95 as well.

As you might imagine I was happy when I took Physics at one of my state's schools over the summer and found that an A was a 90. Granted, they didn't have A- at that school (just A,B,C etc).
 
Boerboel said:
At my school (a small private school) in most of the science classes that I've taken (and most non-science classes, for that matter) an A is generally 94 or 93. The A- cutoff is usually a 90. One class I had a 95 was an A. It was Ecology and lest you think it was because it was an easy class (it wasn't what I would call easy) I think it may just be the way that particular professor sets his grading scale. When he taught my brother's General Biology class, he set an A at 95 as well.

As you might imagine I was happy when I took Physics at one of my state's schools over the summer and found that an A was a 90. Granted, they didn't have A- at that school (just A,B,C etc).
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What are your course averages? If an A is a 95 but the course average is a 75, that seems pretty equivalent to the courses at my school where an A is an 85 and the average is 65. Not sure if using these grade cutoffs is an accurate way to measure "difficulty".
 
JFK90787 said:
I went to a small private school and never heard of grade inflation until SDN. I got the grades I earned on my tests, how difficult is that :confused:. People that did bad got bad grades, sucks for them.
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That doesn't really make sense. People who get good grades in a institution that inflates grades "earns" them as well.
 
I feel like there should be a grade inflation/deflation statistics for BCPM courses and social science courses and then the deflators/inflators will become more obvious. I think.
 
The average high school GPA for incoming students at my college is a 4.0. After one semester, the average freshman GPA is a 2.97. Average GPA for graduates is ~3.2

I consider my school to be neutral.
 
TipToad said:
The average high school GPA for incoming students at my college is a 4.0. After one semester, the average freshman GPA is a 2.97. Average GPA for graduates is ~3.2

I consider my school to be neutral.
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What school do you go to, man?? Caltech? :eek:
 
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