Acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell has some advice for teenagers looking into college.
"If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard," he says. Harvard is filled with the smartest people in the world, and perversely that makes it a dispiriting place to go to school.
At Harvard, the lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. However, the lower tier students get just as discouraged at Harvard as the lower tier students at an average school. The result: They don't get their degrees in math or science. The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree.
This is crazy, because as Gladwell points out, a science and math degree is the "most valuable commodity any graduate can have in today's economy." He says that "as as a rule of thumb, your odds of successfully getting a math degree fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers."
So, if you're a kid and you have a choice between, Harvard and the University of Maryland, go with Maryland because its SAT scores are 150 points lower on average. That means you have a 30% better chance at getting your degree. However, most people will still choose Harvard, even knowing this, says Gladwell. Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.
I went to Harvard (for grad school) and taught there as a TF; I also have lots of experience of other private and public schools. I don't think Harvard's lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. Let's set aside the egregious legacy or athletic admits. Is the second-lowest quintile of Harvard students smarter than the top quintile of "average school" students? More polished, yeah, sure; more cunning (not necessarily in a negative sense, but in the sense of understanding how to work the system, how to give evaluators what they want), sure. And maybe by the end, there's more difference than there was coming in, thanks to competitive motivation and other network effects. But admissions are something like a lottery, and I would say that the mean "smartness" of Harvard students is not much different from that of a generic selective private school (let's say, Harvard's second-lowest quintile would be the middle quintile at another reasonably selective private school), and that the top percentiles at a generic public school would perform quite comparably to Harvard's top quintile (even if Maryland has a lower mean, as Gladwell notes).
Are there very smart people at Harvard, and other prestigious liberal arts universities? Absolutely. But there are lots of people who are merely above average and lucky, by dint of birth or chance, and some people who aren't even above average. (FWIW MIT and Caltech have much better claims to being filled with the smartest people in the world -- rigorous standards of admission, no legacies, NCAA Div3 athletics, etc.)
I went to a mid-tier school. The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence. Being surrounded by smart people, i.e. people with novel and interesting ideas, makes you smarter. The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is itself a smart choice. So people who make that choice are likely smarter than those who don't make that choice. I was in the top-tier of my school. The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality difference. The experience permanently readjusted by aptitude scale.
I agree with that. I went to a low-ish tier school (UIC) and was not particularly motivated to do anything. My classmates just wanted to be drunk 24/7, I wanted to go build robots and stuff. It wasn't the experience I was looking for and dropped out. I wish I had at least chosen UIUC. The corn fields aren't that bad, in hindsight.
I did get to take a Unix Security Holes course with DJB. That was the first semester I was there, and that was kind of another mistake. When you're doing 400 level classes your first semester, it sucks when you have to go back to the basic 100 level classes to complete an arbitrary requirement for your degree. (Had to take "Intro to Java" taught by a chemistry professor. He did not know how to program. Huge waste of time and the state's money.) I have avoided a number of security pitfalls in my own work because of what I learned in that class, though, so it was definitely worth taking. Set me up for a career of accurate and bug-free code ;)
(Incidentally, what precipitated me dropping out was the Unix Security Holes course. The homework for the class was to find 10 security flaws in existing software. This was quite the easy task back in 2004. I found a bug in the course registration system. The vendor that made it was infinitely appreciative, patched it instantly, and sent me an iPod as a thank you. The school was very mad at me and tried to have me expelled for violating their computer use policy ("hacking"). It was a client-side XSRF issue though, so technically their computers weren't used, and I obviously investigated the flaw responsibly; the system wasn't destabilized, no production data was changed, etc. DJB fought hard for me and I didn't get expelled. Also got one of the highest grades in that class! The school did silently block me from using computers in computer labs and using the course registration system, though, after DJB's rage had blown over. I didn't have the will to fight it, so I just left.)
TL;DR: go to the best school you can get into and afford. You won't regret it.
>The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence.
You might be conflating class signaling with intelligence. I've dealt with plenty of people from Harvard that did not impress in the slightest, but oh boy were they good at getting their suits tailored.
I second this notion. I was actually super well-qualified for Harvard, because I happened to go to a feeder prep school and I took calculus, Latin, and Greek. But I had some class gaps if you will, and sometimes kids with worse grades and qualifications made me feel stupid.
One snobby rule there that some kids had was to always pretend like you know more than you do, and never show weakness. So you have to say "Whaaaat? You've never heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?" -- even though you only learned about it last week. You psych out the competition so that you don't have to compete on a level playing field.
I’m not conflating class signaling with intelligence. It says something about your worldview that you would take that away from what I said. My point was that college involves the exchange of ideas, and each student’s intelligence is a combination of their baseline intellect combined with the ideas they’re exposed to. Most of this idea exposure comes from other students. If the students you are surrounded with have good ideas, then the quality of your own ideas improves.
the few ivy league graduates i've worked with were idiots with no original thought who constantly needed handholding. they were good at parroting other people's opinions & ideas and at schmoozing with the boss so maybe those are the good ideas that students at their school had.
If you can get beyond the clickbait title - what Gladwell is really trying to say is there are likely many highly qualified students who enter top tier university as STEM majors but select themselves out of STEM majors and into a generic liberal arts degree.
He's essentially saying at a societal level/personal income level - a STEM degree from a mid tier school > generic liberal arts degree from a top tier school. Particularly if the recipient is not truly passionate about the liberal arts degree and is using it as a backup plan.
I think what you are experiencing is a bit related to survivorship bias. You are being exposed to the people who passed the gauntlet of getting into the top-tier school and graduating in presumably STEM. Of course those folks are smart and there are reasons you'd be blown away by them.
> The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is itself a smart choice.
It may be a smart choice, but not all smart people who try to make that choice get in.
> The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality difference.
I’ve worked in software engineering with Harvard, Stanford, and MIT students. The only difference I saw was during their first couple of years out of undergrad where the people who went to prestigious schools had more confidence to jump in and solve problems. After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school.
> It may be a smart choice, but not all smart people who try to make that choice get in.
But not all top students in mid-tier attempted to go to Harvard. So if you were basing the "smartness" of these two populations based on this single decision alone, then the low-tier students at Harvard would be smarter because 100% of them attempted to go to Harvard, which was a smarter choice than the choice made by some of the students at mid-tier universities who chose not to apply to Harvard.
> After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school.
In my experience, peoples' first few years out of college has a huge effect on their career trajectories. People I know who had high salaries out of school continue to have high salaries. People who didn't get good entry-level jobs continue to struggle (relative to the rest of the pack, they're not starving).
"I’ve worked in software engineering with Harvard, Stanford, and MIT students. The only difference I saw was during their first couple of years out of undergrad where the people who went to prestigious schools had more confidence to jump in and solve problems. After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school."
Have you considered that the students whom you are working with were among the bottom quartile at their alma mater? The very best tend to take unique paths.
What specific differences did you see? I was also at a mid tier school, though I did have a scholarship, and was intimidated when I got a job working alongside an MIT grad and a PHD from Yale. The MIT grad was a very good solid guy, and the Yale guy was also solid, I'd be happy to work with or hire either again, but there was no 10x difference, maybe more like a 1.3x difference at best between the team average and the MIT guy.
In general the phds I've worked with were tbh below the average- they always seemed to be big on ideas but less so on actually implementing them and following through.
This was from my days in the finance industry, working in algo trading/hft, but I will admit I was definitely in a tier below the groups that were absolutely minting money, but these were coveted jobs.
The biggest difference was that most people were interested in something. One friend was really into robotics. He introduced me to a lot of robotics concepts and he had a plan on how to pursue a career in robotics. Personally, robotics wasn’t my cup of tea, but I ended up with a lot of exposure to the subject. Another friend wanted to study AI, specifically neural networks. This was over 10 years ago, so neural nets weren’t widely deployed like they are today. Another friend was into music, and wanted to play music all the time. Even through I wasn’t super into any of these topics, each interaction was enriching to me and expanded my mind to include new and interesting aspects of computer science and software engineering.
Regarding phds, I totally agree that they are not effective workers usually. The desire to get a phd is almost like a mild form of ocd where people get obsessed with one particular problem and are willing to dedicate ungodly amounts of time to the topic. This is usually the opposite of what you want when trying to deliver something in the commercial sphere.
A lot of ivy league kids come from upper middle class families where it is kind of expected that you set high academic goals and try to attend prestigious institutions, their parents generally take an enormous amount of interest their success and continually guide them.
I went to Harvard for 2 years, and started out strongly considering CS as a major, but eventually went into the humanities. I definitely did get discouraged. I think for me the biggest part was that their intro class at the time was for both complete novices and people who'd done the computer science AP. Meaning it was SUPER fast and super stressful. And things just continued from there. The point of taking these classes was just to flail around and try not to drown, while having more coursework than my other 3 classes combined.
If they had had an "intro for beginners" and "accelerated intro", I would have probably stayed in the program. Also if their upper-level courses weren't like 60 hours of homework per week for one class. At a certain point I realized I just simply didn't have the stamina to do 60 hours for one class and all my other classes. So it was sort of like applying to be a doctor -- you know one of the prereqs is rotations where you don't sleep for 2 days straight, and if you can't do that, then for some reason, you can't be a doctor.
I worked for JPL/NASA on contract for a few months, the place is packed with Caltech grads, but most of them performed much like any science-y person in a big bureaucracy. This probably says more about what you're trained for vs what you do -- I mean, how many working programmers need to know what Bessel functions are? The answer is 0 because those analytical jobs are inevitably farmed out to experts anyway. My own interpretation is that there's a certain (middling-high) amount of capability you have to demonstrate, and once you've done that the extra doesn't matter.
Bureaucratic behavior within a government agency has little to nothing to do with an individual’s background, intent, or otherwise; but, instead, it has to do with the brutal constraints of their environment.
I used to glorify these schools until I worked in finance, where basically everyone went to a top 5 usa school. They were quick, organized, efficient with their work, on the ball, competitive. But intellectually superior? Not really. They were definitely smart, but the traits that got them into those schools werent raw intellect.
In my experience, good habits beat genius 9 times out of 10 (maybe even 99 out of 100).
That other time, genius recreates the entire playing field and good habits are left sitting around staring at each other trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
Curious on your perspective why professionalism and good work habits beat "genius" at startups.
I would have assumed the opposite. My view of startup life was that it's about managing your money, your hiring/firing, your sales, and what you focus on.
That's about good prioritization and productivity per minute.
Assuming the good faith of the poster, he or she may have worked with (a) real genius several times, or (b) with several real geniuses.
(a) is more probable. Sustainable business start-up success of the non-banal order requires high general intelligence. It does exist. But 9 times out of 10 hard work and people skills will win.
Perceived genius (or more appropriately, assumed genius) would be more accurate.
The people who are the least scrupulous, most creative, and technically competent are very successful. Startups aren't usually successful because of sweat hard work, but realizing a combination of opportunity and reach, rather than contracting as much software development labor as possible.
Ivy Leagues’ admission process rewards students who are outgoing and do a lot of different things.
You can’t tell from a high school transcript whether someone got an A because they’re brilliant and didn’t have to study at all, or whether they got an A because they studied hard.
Most of my friends who went into ivy leagues were outgoing and did tons of extracurriculars and studied hard. My friends who were naturally brilliant either stuck to the subjects they liked, and ended up getting their doctorate at a state school, or they had had their success derailed for some other reason.
This is really interesting, because it feels like it lines up with my own experience but I'd like to see how someone else quantifies it. What do you mean by "intellectually superior"? What does "raw intellect" even mean? What are these nebulous not-intellect-but-contributing-to-GI-score traits?
I once did an online IQ test and then got interrupted by someone else after five minutes and I quit the test, my score was apparently 88. I don't trust online IQ tests, I only did it because someone annoyed me into taking it and someone annoyed me out of taking it.
I honestly think IQ scores primarily measure how much you want to score well on an IQ test. You can improve your scores by 10 points according to scientific papers just by being more motivated and not quitting, not being distracted and so on.
I don't trust online IQ tests because the scores I get on them range from 110ish to 180ish and despite my robust self-esteem I don't see a score of 160+ as especially credible. :P
Real (ie. official medical) IQ scores seem to be heavily skewed around age and speed. So the same performance would get you a super high score in a 5-year-old and a mediocre score in a 10-year-old, which is weird because the questions are explicitly trying not to test language/knowledge type stuff that would change a lot between those ages. And the same answers would get a far higher score if you bashed them out in 15 minutes than if you took 2 hours on them. I haven't gone back to re-examine it but I remember thinking that you were way better off smashing through the questions as fast as possible and getting a few right than carefully considering the questions... which is an odd way to define intelligence.
hard work can compensate for a lot when you are solving problems that have already been solved with known answers (e.g. school) . When you are solving totally novel problems with no known solutions things get much harder and you start to be able to separate high performers.
99.99% of everything is (re-)solving problems that have already been solved with known answers. It's those curly edge cases that have to involve us weirdos.
I think the only point Gladwell is making is that the Harvard test scores are higher. I.e. 50th percentile of SAT scores of Harvard students is equal to the 90th percentile at state schools and such
This is really interesting! I started my Stanford undergrad as an engineer. After my first Calculus class, I switched to American Studies because it was one of the least engineering-y majors available. Then I dropped out in my Junior year. That was over 10 years ago. Now, ironically, I work at Google as a software engineer — the only one on my team without an engineering degree, let alone without a degree at all.
I never thought of my disillusionment with engineering in the context of other students, but rather just as an absolute: "Engineering is too hard for me." Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result.
Having watched the Gladwell talk a couple of times now - I think your experience is really the most indicative of what he was trying to say. Many self weed themselves out of Engineering and into generic liberal arts studies - even though they were top of their high school class in STEM and specifically chose the highly selective school for STEM.
And perhaps not all have the mental fortitude to stick with it in the background like you did - which is a net loss for society.
anecdote: I took Multivariate calculus and differential equations while in high school at the University of Nevada. I was easily the top student in my classes. I had to retake them at Stanford (figuring out how to transfer the credit was too complicated). Despite having "taken" the "same" material before and the fact that the average grade in the class was probably a B or B+, I was below the median in the class on the exams and got worse grades in the classes at Stanford. Of course this is anecdotal, and the University of Nevada is not that great of a school, but no doubt my GPA would have been much higher at a school like that...
I think that's sort of what he's talking about. Had you not had the experience of calculus and diff eq at a university and your only exposure to it was at Stanford with middling grades - perhaps it'd probably lead to more existential questions of whether you really wanted to do STEM in the first place.
Right, I quickly made peace with being a mediocre student at Stanford (and, still ended up getting into MIT for a physics PhD, where I was also a mediocre student but by then I didn't care :) ). I think the people who probably suffer the most at are probably premeds, where it really might be easier to get into med school by going to an "easier" school.
In the grand scheme of things, I was probably pretty good at math as I got through a rigorous Mech E program. But I struggled with the more math intensive classes (Fluids/Navier-Stokes) and I'm pretty sure I could have dealt with an undergrad in physics/math--much less a grad program--about as well as I could have flown by flapping my arms in the air. But things ended up fine.
Should be mentioned that classes within the same school can vary from year to year, completely depends on the person at charge. The first time I took Calculus 3, I got a D. IIRC, the fail rate was over 50%, and average grade was a weak C.
Two years later, I re-took the class to improve my grade. Ended up with a B - and the class average was round B at that time, with only around 15% of class failing the final exam.
Hah, no, I took 51H and suffered through it for some reason, but just took normal 52 and 53. (And I think I slept at your place when I was visiting MIT as a prospective grad student).
> Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result.
Thomas Sowell, in Inside American Education, argues that promoting students to more difficult colleges while ignoring SATs is not doing those students any favor. A firehose-pedagogy accepted by those with SAT scores 200-300 points higher can completely demoralize someone who could have done perfectly well at a moderately-paced school. However, the competition to practice AA leads, he argues, those more advanced schools to ignore SAT scores in admission for the schools' benefits, but not the benefit of the students so admitted.
> Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result.
I doubt it. As my professor used to say, math is math. Plus, intro-level undergrad math courses are pretty standardized across the US. Similar textbooks, similar problem sets, and similar past exams.
There's nothing wrong to feel calculus is hard even if you're the top of your high school class. Most people hit a wall at certain abstraction level. Malcolm wrote in his book about smart people simply not being able to grok organic chemistry. Some of my smart classmates could not really understand the concept of limit intuitively. Some of them dropped out of abstract algebra course. I myself dropped out of model theory as I couldn't get why I should even bother with the course. None of these failures prevent people from finding success in other areas.
Unfortunately many ostensibly good schools also have notoriously poorly taught introductory math and science courses.
Stanford's introductory CS sequence has a good reputation however. Consider this course (for example) which teaches students bare-metal programming (and real-world interfacing) on a raspberry pi: https://cs107e.github.io/schedule/
Advanced freshman math, the kind for the top few students, varies extremely widely. As far as I can tell, if you made it all the way through the series at Harvard or Stanford, then you are an excellent student regardless of whether you get a good grade. I’m sure a couple other schools are like that. Many schools that you might expect to have similar classes don’t.
Sadly the universities with courses like this seem to me mediocre at advertising that, no, if you are not specifically very very good at math (and very very good at following a very fast paced course and you don’t have a strong background), then that’s not the class for you and you should be in the other honors math class.
Do you have any actual empirical evidence? In my undergrad, even different STEM departments (e.g., math, EE) had differing rigor and workload based on the average scores they required of admissions. Almost all grading was done relative to other students anyway, so even with the exact same course, things would be very different.
As an example, we had to prove all continuous functions on a closed interval are monotonically continuous on that interval, in Calculus I. Which we had in our first semester with no choice. I doubt this level of rigor is at all common.
I used limit as an example. It could be other concepts, simple or sophisticated.
I don’t think it’s about how professors teach, but about that people simply can’t get some abstractions. Have you seen kids in high school who can’t do algebra even if you find the best teachers for them?
1. How do you even express the idea of continuity if not through limits? (Sure, there's the topological definition and the epsilon-delta criterion but those are merely an abstraction or a different way of phrasing the same idea.)
2. The key difference between the rationals and the reals is that the latter are Cauchy-complete. How do you even define (in an intuitive way) what that means without referring to limits?
3. The reals are typically constructed as (equivalence classes of) Cauchy sequences, i.e. by their very definition they are the limits of their Cauchy sequences.
i think, for the purpose of introducing the continuity of the reals, for the purpose of introducing limits, one could skip any discussion that involves constructing the rationals or building the reals from them, at least to start.
instead go directly from integers to reals by introducing countable vs. uncountable infinities.
sure. and despite all the trouble people have, their definition is quite simple. the crux of the problem is understanding continuity. if you truly understand the continuity of the reals (which is the "real" invention), limits can be derived almost effortlessly.
in most calculus teaching, continuity is quickly stated and then there's a bunch of rules and these seemingly contradictory discussions involving delta and epsilon. they're not contradictory if continuity is understood and internalized.
Do you prefer the Dedekind cut construction of the real numbers over the identification of Cauchy sequences of rational numbers with common limit? In ZFC, they coincide, but in constructive mathematics, one can build a model wherein they differ (see https://mathoverflow.net/questions/128569/a-model-where-dede... ).
I think a contributing factor for organic chemistry is not everyone teaches the mindset needed to do well. Good teachers will help students explicitly build a heuristic mental model for what the electrons might do in a particular bonding environment. Not everyone thinks naturally that way, but I think it’s a lot more effective than the raw pattern matching approach many people seem to bring to organic chemistry
I feel like Stanford is a little different. Despite being as selective as Harvardm Harvard has a very unique international reputation as the world's best university (or at least america's best university for the oxbridge lovers)
Anecdotally, degrees from the Ivy Leagues are not nearly as indicative of intelligence and aptitude as they used to be. They still function as great signals for prestige and networking ability, but they no longer translate to "this person must be a genius, they went to Harvard/Yale".
The source of my anecdote are the discussions I've had with the the recruiters at my company. They've also told me that Harvard/Yale graduates are way more likely to be prima donnas and leave the company after a short time in order to advance somewhere else.
Ivy's aren't the top schools for stem. MIT/Stanford/CMU are where the stem geniuses want to be, and after that the top public schools are probably more desirable than ivys because they're so much cheaper. I went to UIUC cs over uchicago and northwestern because of the price differential. By far the largest value ad ivys provide is networking with the soon to be rich and powerful. Seems like aspiring stem students realize that's not as important in their field.
This isn't true, it's a strange assumption often perpetuated online. Looking at cross-admit numbers actually published by Stanford's Faculty Senate, for example, Stanford's biggest overlap is with Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton, in that order. It's a matter of pedigree - for undergrad, where grad school subject-specific rankings do not matter, there are an high concentration of very good STEM students at HYP; Harvard likely has the biggest concentration of excellent STEM students out of any university in America based on Olympiad winner matriculants and grad school outcomes, other than MIT. HYPSM lose virtually no students to universities other than between themselves, looking at the cross-admit numbers.
Schools like CMU, Berkeley, UIUC, etc. have different overlaps.
edit: This is just cold, hard data. Undergrads do not choose CMU/Berkeley/UIUC and whatnot over Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Despite higher grad school rankings.
Are you counting stanford and MIT as ivy? If so then sure, but at least based off my experience, cs students that were accepted to ivy as well as stanford/mit/cmu always choose stanford/mit/cmu.
I'd love to see your data about whether students choose ivy vs. top state. I wasn't aware that existed so was just speaking from my experience knowing > 10 people choose U of I over ivys, including harvard.
"must be a genius"? Did people ever think this? While I went to university many decades ago, the whole "he went to Harvard, he must be a genius" would have seemed like a bad TV sitcom trope, when I was young. And still today.
Are students at top tier schools like that smarter than the average bear? Sure. Geniuses? I guess a few are, but most of them are just pretty smart + hard working + reasonably disciplined. Which is a pretty good combination that will help most people in their life.
Sometimes I get the feeling that some people expect that if they meet someone who went to an ivy/stanford/mit/chicago and that someone doesn't blow them away with their uber-genius greatness, that those schools' reputations must be total BS. IMO, that's unreasonable.
The smartest undergrads in the county are still at your HYPSM universities.
However, the median intelligence at these schools has definitely dropped drastically as these schools are putting less of an emphasis on SAT scores and the like.
This has been obvious since 1865. We only have a United States because self-educated Abraham Lincoln picked up the pieces left by elite New Englanders like Buchanan and the justices who decided Dred Scott.
Of Buchanan and the nine justices involved in Dred Scott, only one was a New Englander and he was one of the two dissenters. Both dissenters were educated in New England but only one from the majority. On the other hand, the list includes five Southerners, two Pennsylvanians and three from Dickinson College.
* James Buchanan - Pennsylvania, educated at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania
Majority from Dred Scott:
* Roger B. Taney - Maryland, Dickinson
* James Moore Wayne - Georgia, educated at what later became Princeton in New Jersey
* John Catron - Tennessee, self-educated
* Peter V. Daniel - Virginia, one year at Princeton, then self-educated
* Samuel Nelson - New York, Middlebury College in Vermont
* Robert Cooper Grier - Pennsylvania, Dickinson
* John Archibald Campbell - Georgia/Alabama, University of Georgia
Dissenters in Dred Scott:
* John McLean - Ohio, Harvard
* Benjamin Robbins Curtis - Massachusetts, Harvard
Ivys have always prioritized diversity over merit. The diversity they valued used to be wealth and power instead of just merit, now they've expanded that to include cultural diversity too. But make no mistake, these universities were never just looking to accept the smartest students.
View from the faculty POV: I taught mathematics as an Assistant Professor at Harvard for five years (2000-2005), and this advice seems wrong. It’s very generic and abstract, whereas the actual mathematics department (students, faculty, preceptors) at Harvard at any point in time is made up of real people, most of whom are really interesting fun and genuine math loving human beings. I guided dozens of students in seminars, interesting math research projects, and much more, and many of them really benefited from the environment and went on to truly love mathematics as a long term career.
If you can get beyond the clickbait title - I think what you'll find is that Gladwell is really talking about the very real STEM people, most of who are really interesting fun and genuine math loving human beings - who were weeded out in Freshman Calc BC or Differential Equations because the bar is so tremendously high if everything is graded on a curve at a extremely selective university - before you had a chance to meet them.
I agree, even as OP. Malcom Gladwell's writings on elite universities have gone viral, and even though some good points are sometimes made, many are just stretching the truth for clicks.
As for the general grade inflation problem: It is confusing that Harvard's grade distribution is so different than schools with similarly strong student bodies like Princeton, Columbia, UChicago, Berkeley, etc. Especially very, very large portion of students are legacy / recruited athletes / very wealthy donor parents. According to the affirmative action lawsuit, over 10% of the student body alone was on the "Dean's interest list," a very elite group of autoadmits, for example.
No, its because 10-20 years after you graduate, no one asks you for your GPA at Harvard but they certainly think you are a genius just because you went there (you could graduate with a 2.0 GPA). As opposed to average state school guy with a 4.0 GPA. Many years after you graduate, you regularly get asked where you went to school but rarely asked "what was your GPA". This isn't even mentioning the type of whiz kids or socially powerful people you can befriend at these type of institutions. Steve Ballmer is smart but if he didn't meet Bill Gates, i doubt he would ever have become a multi billionare.
Harvard and Yale have 10x horrible negative character connotations compared to MIT or UChicago, and it gets worse all the time.
McNamara (Vietnam), Kissinger (illegal bombing of Laos), Clinton (impeached), Bush (WMD lies), Ted Cruz and other senators who literally can't pass 7th grade science. I can continue for an hour.
For even the "elite", character connotations take a back seat to "ability and drive", which neither of those people mentioned are lacking. To the average person, most of them probably don't even know too much about who Henry Kissinger was or what he did, the see Harvard and think "ohhh smart"
Whether to go to an Ivy or not depends on what you're looking for.
I went to Iowa State for undergrad and then did a masters at Princeton immediately afterwards. I greatly appreciate both schools.
At Iowa State, most of my classes were easy. But I pushed myself with the sheer quantity of classes I took. I was super involved in extracurriculars and still went out multiple nights per week. I was one class short of a double major and I spent a semester abroad. My only regret is not spending 2 semesters abroad. It was an incredible time.
Princeton also did not disappoint. The Graduate School is for sure the most intellectually rich environment I've ever been in. Academically, it was far more demanding, and pushed me to a much deeper level of engagement with my studies. I also know that Princeton would have been a way too intense environment for me at 18. At 22, it was what I was looking for.
I also went to NYU for another masters program, which was in many ways even more different from the first two universities. Some people just go there to be at university in NYC, but it's a sprawling school with tons to offer and feels physically and socially much more integrated with the real world than campus-centric universities.
I don't think there's a one size fits all answer for whether to go to Harvard or any other school.
This seems to be a pretty pragmatic approach - it avoids spending a lot of high tuition dollars and effort on the freshman/sophomore generic weeder courses and focuses the high return on effort/investment upper level courses that are specific to your area of study.
I wish I could say it was my plan all along, but it just kind of happened.
But yes, from a credential standpoint, a masters program can upgrade your prestige, for sure. Although it would be important to note that there are social aspects of the Ivy League in undergrad experience that aren't the same in grad school (and vice versa), if that's what someone is looking for.
> The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree.
In the context of grade inflation, this sounds like Harvard is actually one of the better choices and that grade inflation is a desirable property of an elite university
It depends, but probably not as much as you would think.
With a grade curve that high, a B usually means one of the following:
1. Tough weeder course.
2. The person does not really understand the material, especially for upper division courses.
3. Something personal (illness, family issues, personal issues, etc.).
For folks who care about grades, like hiring officials or graduate admissions folks, they typically know about the grade inflation.
It might be a benefit in law school admissions that mostly use a strict formula with gpa as part of that formula.
Anyway, if someone is choosing Harvard over another school due to GPA inflation, then I have a feeling that they won’t gain that much at Harvard or the other school(s) that admitted them. That seems to be optimizing for something fairly minor in the scheme of things.
I went to a mid tier undergrad and was easily among the smartest. I went to mit for grad school and was… still among the smartest although the bar was much higher. Luck factors into a lot of things. But the top decile of every school is probably great. The bottom decile is probably totally uninterested in learning.
It’s the median that’s interesting. My undergrad median was deeply disappointing. Couldn’t write a simple paper. Literally did not understand how to construct an argument.
Having worked with many top tier graduates from many top schools, I think we need to dispense with the idea that academic performance is determined by intelligence.
In my experience it was highly correlated with work ethic, many top tier graduates would come in with a push to work exceptionally hard. Sometimes they’d come in with an attititude that they’d “made it” and not work hard enough.
I don't think that is what science agrees with. IQ correlates pretty strongly with educational achievement. You can disagree with IQ all you but one thing it pretty surely doesn't measure is work ethic.
I went to a top tier high school and a top tier university. At a top tier university, in STEM at least, the fraction of students who had both high IQ and could work incredibly hard was noticeable. The fraction of STEM people who could get an A without working hard was low to nonexistent.
I went to an Ivy League (recently, graduated in last 5 years). This describes me to a T. Started out in CS, dropped to a libarts major because I felt like I couldn't keep up with my peers.
I still work in SWE, and began doing it in HS when I was 17.
Partner and I discuss frequently that I would have been better off somewhere else.
I know loads of SWEs who dropped out of CS degrees outright or changed majors and graduated with a liberal arts degree (I myself am a SWE but a liberal arts grad; I never took a single CS course but worked as a sysadmin for the I/O department at my school). I can't think of a single one of them that regrets dropping out or switching. It certainly doesn't seem to have hurt their career opportunities or their compensation.
The only thing I've found that they do regret is spending the tuition money and walking away without a degree.
I've heard this as a reason why HBCU's are so great. Basically a lot of African American's come from schools that don't prepare them as well for science and math as their peers who went to more expensive elite schools. They have to work twice as hard because they're playing catch up and thus many transfer out of math/science/pre-chem and into less rigorous subjects.
This is one theory as to why HBCU's do such a better job at preparing the next generation of black scientists, engineers, doctors, and lawyers then other comparable schools.
You don't go to Harvard for an education, you go there for the network you will build. Grades mean nothing when you are friends with a guy who's Dad owns billion dollar companies.
I agree - I think that the employers in STEM themselves have figured it out and combine convenience of proximity/quality of STEM as the decision point/size of recruitable pool. In fact the secret hack is probably to figure out the university recruiting schedules of your target companies and work backwards. [0]
I do think society in general and finance/medicine/law (which are harder to analyze based on test scores/leetcode and have more fuzzy needs for network effects) still uses legacy measurement techniques for "worthiness".
The report identified the following universities as having the most graduates become employees at major tech companies, along with the number of employees.
University of Washington (16,786 employees)
University of California–Berkeley (13,260 employees)
Stanford University (12,973 employees)
University of Texas–Austin (11,049 employees)
University of Southern California (9,071 employees)
Arizona State University–Tempe (8,320 employees)
Carnegie Mellon University (8,274 employees)
Georgia Institute of Technology (7,961 employees)
University of California–Los Angeles (7,829 employees)
University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign (7,671 employees)
Even with that definition it may still be irrational as a student, or at least short-sighted. The further you get in your career, the less it matters which school you went to.
Employers may be interested in your schooling if you're fresh out of school, but after that, they're much more interested in your work experience.
I went to community college and then transferred to an fairly inexpensive 4-year college. In my first job I got a huge amount of work experience and leveled-up to the senior software developer title.
Maybe an employer after that first job would look at me suspiciously for my choice of schools, but they really shouldn't.
> Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.
Do good employers recruit from Maryland? Will you find FAANG and all the investment banks there? How tight is the Maryland alumni network?
I didn't go to a school anywhere near as prestigious as Harvard, but I did go to one with a strong reputation and it means that there is a strong community and good employers recruit from there.
I had a choice between University of Maryland and a much more prestigious institution. It should have been a no brained because of the tuition alone but I struggled with it at the time. Being around people who care about things besides school was super healthy for me and I’m so thankful I made the right choice. (Go Terps!)
The top scorers for my university's entrance exams had the option to go for the CSE course. I had the option to go for the CSE course as well, but ultimately I decided to go for the IT course which was below the CSE course in terms of desirability. The course material was almost the same, placements opportunities were the same, and I would have had to work much harder to get good grades in CSE because all the top scorers would be in it.
In my IT batch, even when I didn't study a lot, there were semesters where I got academic awards. And with my remaining free time, I was able to focus on things I was interested in. No stress. I don't have any regrets, but I just wonder how my life would have turned out had I taken CSE. I would have most definitely landed somewhere else, doing something else in life. Better or worse, I don't know.
Apply a rule of thumb to outliers generally isn't appropriate. While it might be true that generally success rises 2% for every 10 SAT points, that doesn't necessarily mean it applies to Harvard and U Maryland. Especially due to grade inflation. 15 years ago, flagship state schools still harshly curved science/engineering classes to weed people out. While Harvard give you a gentleman's B+.
My kid is attending a flagship state school now. His school still very much uses a harsh curve to weed out. A B- keeps you on the track to success in your major.
If he decides to go to grad school, he'll be screwed even though he's been on the plus side of the curve in all of his classes so far.
Grad admissions committees vary quite a lot from program to program, in terms of how they value different admissions criteria. if your kid is interested in research don’t let grades faze them. Demonstrated ability to think independently and write clearly is much more important IMO, at least for PhD work
I wouldn't say someone should choose the University of MD over Harvard, since many potential employers would not know how to map a 4.0 MD GPA onto a Harvard scale. If you're between Harvard and Penn, and Penn gave you a great scholarship, that's a bit easier. Maybe for UC Berkeley even. But if you get too far out of the ballpark people will (1) assume you didn't get into any top-notch schools, and (2) not know how to compare your success at a lower-ranked school to moderate success of your peers at top-rated schools.
Full disclosure: I went to the top-rated college I got into, and purposely chose not to go to the top-ranked law school that I got into. The difference wasn't huge (UCLA vs Michigan), but it did mean I wasn't in the top-10. But I saved a bunch in tuition, and that allowed me to have the flexibility to leave the law several years later and bootstrap a startup. OTOH, maybe I would have had an amazing legal career had I gone to Michigan!
Pair it with the idea that the primary filtering signal of top tier schools is in the admission, not the graduation.
Something like 99% of Harvard end up graduating, so simply having a Harvard degree doesn't tell me much more about you than simply having an admission letter. If you were admitted, then it's almost certain that you'll get a degree.
So, if instead you hold onto your admission letter, as proof of ability, and then go to a lower tier school where you can be more certain to be one of the biggest fish in the pond, you get the best of both worlds. Hell, even include a list of "universities admitted to" on you resume to signal the brand name to employers that aren't smart enough to realize the brand doesn't matter much anymore.
Then again, why would you want to work for an employer that still puts stock in college brand names over individual ability?
I did consider the possibility that one could say "I got into Harvard but went to X because..."
This could have made sense before Harvard's financial aid became so generous, but now they give loads of aid to middle- and low-income students.
It would sound a bit weird to keep saying "I got into Harvard...", likely for the same reason you mention at the end. Who wants to be an eliteness snob? Unfortunately there are many such people in the world, which is part of the reason their cachet persists.
I have known multiple Stanford students who still bring up the fact that they "also got into Harvard." It seems that if you get into Harvard, you should just go. The brand name is too powerful.
But GPAs have almost no value, and people don’t go to such schools for grades. It’s all about networking and prestige, and wanting to be around accomplished or ambitious people.
Disclaimer: I don’t necessarily agree with these views, just summarising what I’ve seen.
My Mom went to an Prestigious University, when my Mom went back to work after the kids got old enough to take care of themselves (to some extent..), that degree opened doors. She was explicitly told, hey great university when she went for an interview. We had a friend in our peer group didn't go to state school like us but another "Prestigious University", he was a history major (we were engineers), but he never had trouble finding work.
I know someone who graduated summa cum laude at Harvard. I'm not usually one for ranking people by intellect, but she's not one of the smartest people I know by a long shot.
Meticulous? Sure. Does she present herself as if she's a Harvard grad with the economic status that usually entails? Absolutely. But I know several people who graduated from a small directional university who are absolutely smarter than she is. Same with grads I know from Cornell, Penn, and Yale. Maybe the mystical "school where everyone is actually super-intelligent" exists somewhere, but if so, I don't know the name of it.
Unless your professors are so lazy that they're grading on a bell curve, there's no need to be afraid of any class. Test scores and project grades are based on rote knowledge and level of effort, not innate talent... and Harvard educators are usually vastly superior to those of "lesser" schools.
Agree. I have worked with developers from well known prestigious universities from all over the world. And they were not smarter than other people I have worked with from less known universities. Just more in debt :)
Is this more about ivy league schools being the most prestigious or is it about finance and law fields causing a brain drain of the smartest people in the country?
I could make more money right NOW with a BS in gender studies from Harvard, than I ever could all things being equal with my CS BS from a no name public university.
Anyone who takes this advice is indeed self selecting and I suppose that's good, because anyone who can't see that obviously shouldn't go to harvard in the first place!
This is awful advice. Go to the highest ranked university[1] you can get into and afford because for the rest of your life, people will assume a lot about you based on that choice. It will open more doors than you expect. Your friends will be smarter and more successful too.
[1] Not literally THE highest ranked. There’s reasons to go to UPenn instead of Harvard, but if you get into Harvard and go to a state school instead, you might be screwing up.
On the flipside, nowadays the school matters more than the degree. Saying you "went to Harvard" is far more prestigious than having a bachelors degree from some forgettable school. And most employers don't care about whether or not you have a specific degree from any school, they care about whether you have any degree from a prestigious school.
I'd wait a few years on Chicago -- my impression is that they've been undergoing some pretty profound cultural shifts regarding admissions and grading, i.e. their rigor is getting more performative and less real (and it was always at least a little performative, or at least, rooted in being just a little gratuitously mean).
EDIT: Not coincidentally, it was an admin brought in from Yale who got this ball rolling.
When I was at Princeton they had strict anti-grade inflation policy, with no more than 35% of students getting an A per department.
It was really demoralizing, and to be honest it's had a negative impact on my life. My public high school didn't have a great math and science program so I started behind my classmates freshman year. It felt like the As basically went to the kids who had covered the material before in AP classes.
By junior year I was hovering around a 3.0, and I made the gut-wrenching decision that I couldn't go to medical school or pursue a PhD in biology because my grades weren't high enough. I decided I needed to set my sights lower. Even law school was out, basically business school was the only graduate school that would take me. I switched my major to economics.
It was devastating to give up on my dream, and I have to admit it still stings 20 years later. I adore biochemistry and would have loved to pursue research as a profession.
My main problem is I didn't know how to effectively study in college. I cruised through high school without ever really needing to learn from a book. I didn't really learn how to study correctly until a year or two after college, when I took the CFA exams.
Let me tell you, learning how to study (at 24) was an eye-opener for me, and it still feels like a superpower. I ended up becoming the valedictorian of my business school class a few years later.
I've had a very successful career as an investment banker, so I ended up fine. But I do think these grade deflation policies can be really harmful to the psyche of young students. Sure, there are benefits to getting humbled, hitting a wall and needing to grind it out, but students come into school with all sorts of different levels of preparation and there's a big risk that some will flounder.
I don't like relative grading. I think there should be objective standards of what you should know, and if you meet those standards you get an A. As long as you make those standards sufficiently rigorous, it shouldn't matter whether 30% or 80% of the class gets an A. Relative grading pits students against each other and creates an unhealthy learning environment.
It's insane to me that there are people like you who went to a school like _princeton_ and ended up being cut out of your dream to pursue medical school or a PhD in bio, where if you had maybe just gone to a mid-tier 4-year university you could have easily scored top of your class and probably been accepted to those same programs.
To me, grades in general seem to have little bearing on how driven or knowledgeable someone is on a topic. To limit someone's future based on a somewhat subjective measurement is just.. wrong.
If you are lucky enough to be in a financially sound situation, why not consider a career change and try to pursue that which you've wanted?
My wife retook foundational courses for med school -- physics, biology, chemistry, etc. to pass the prerequisites, and then the MCAT. You can take classes at (any?) university, telling them they are "non-degree credits" which makes it easier for you to enroll.
For a PhD you're never too old. For medical school, likely as a "non-traditional" student, you'd have better luck at gaining admissions to a DO school than an MD school, despite the latter claiming they adore that class of student.
I've actually been seriously considering it over the past year or two. It's really daunting though.
Career-wise it would probably be a one-way trip. Investment banks are notoriously narrow-minded in their hiring process, and I doubt I'd be able to break back in once I left the industry for a year or two.
I also have three kids under 6 who I like to spend time with, including a newborn, and I'm geographically limited to this area because my wife owns a business that has deep local roots. We have 3-4 good schools within an hour, but if I don't get into their programs I'm kind of out of luck.
The grad schools nearby have minimum undergraduate GPA requirements of 3.0, and I ended up with a 2.9. I assume they'd waive the requirement if I had great grades in a post-bac science program and a great GRE, along with my 4.0 from business school, but it's unnerving to have so much riding on the whims of an admissions department. Plus even if I did manage to get in, I worry about how hard it would be to get a post-doc position as a 50 year old.
I realize it sounds like I'm just making excuses, and maybe I am. I have a comfortable, happy life, and there's a level of irreducible risk on this alternate path. As of now I've decided I'll start taking some science classes in the evenings at the local university next year, once my baby is a little older, and see where that takes me.
As you get older, if you have a good career the opportunity cost of going back to school is just too high. As I have aged I also realize that the value of pursuing dreams is not quite as important as I previously thought. If I am providing for my family and have some money left over and my job is good, I’m not going back to school just so I can have a different career that in the end isn’t going to make me that much happier.
I don't know about that. I left civil engineering for finance a couple of years ago. Changing was actually a lot less painful than I thought it would be (I might even say it was fun), and I'm way happier now. There was a couple of years as I found my feet where the pay wasn't quite as good, but that reversed pretty quickly and I'm ahead now again.
Transferable skills are a real thing. Also, the amount of people who can do the everyday work in any industry is endless, so don't worry too much about that. It's the ability to come at things from a different perspective that's rare and it really sets you apart.
medicine is like being a mechanic for the human body. You are mostly doing the same thing every single day and the rate of change/innovation is extremely slow.
Science also moves extremely slowly. You can spend your whole life studying one aspect of one molecule.
Investment banking might be soulless, but happiness ultimately comes from relationships - friends, family, and community. The most precious commodity we have is time and making a lot of money can generate a lot of free time.
Very relatable story. I think I've had similar experiences throughout my life. I never fit the academic mold very well. But whenever I was given the freedom to explore a topic of interest without a lot of pressure, I think I always excelled. It was fortunate that computer programming classes at my high school were basically like study hall. The teachers didn't make you do anything. That meant that the handful of us who were motivated out of personal interest could take things as far as we wanted to go. We weren't constrained by a curriculum. When I got to university, I felt like I was way ahead of the game and had already learned a lot of the things that were covered in freshman comp sci courses.
I think I understand in theory what the point of grades is. It's hard to imagine a perfect way of deciding who gets access to limited opportunities and who is best fit to take advantage of them. However, I know from deep down that my life would have gone very differently if I hadn't been given those critical chances to wander. Competition can filter out the people who are less innately talented, but just as often filters out people who just don't like having to talk over everyone and fight for everything all the time. If you're just a shy kid or are starting out with a weaker self-image for some reason, you can fall to the bottom of the pile really quickly regardless of whether or not you're smart or worthy of good things in life. That's why I tend to think a certain amount of grade inflation is alright; because it unlocks hidden potential in people who don't look the part. Maybe in a sense it also penalizes people who game the system by chasing grades while missing the real point of getting an education.
This resonates with me as well. I went to a school with similar grade structure. Exams were hard. And when I saw exams for the exact same science classes at MIT and Harvard, I was shocked how easy they were. For this reason, I still refuse to contribute a single dime to my undergraduate.
Also curious about GP's experience. Meanwhile I can
share my own: until age 25 I was unable to study at all. I couldn't even concentrate for ten minutes.
So for me the hardest part was developing the habit of just sitting down and studying every day, which I didn't develop until years after failing university.
My key insight came from hearing the idea that discipline is like a muscle, and as with strength training you must start at the appropriate "weight" for you. In my case, that was a painfully low 5 minutes of work a day.
I wrote a script to generate a schedule for me, starting with 5 minutes of studying (for the whole day!) and increasing the time by 2% every day.
By starting with 5 minutes and working 2% longer every day, I worked my way up to 5 hours a day this way. The fact that I was able to work for 5 hours absolutely blew my mind, because when I started I could barely focus for 15 minutes.
I might add that a year of manual labor did wonders for my motivation to study. (Perhaps that is what is meant by "it builds character?" ;)
Haha, I am happy to share. I basically switched from a lecture-centric approach to a practice-question-centric one.
When I need to learn a new topic, I will first read the materials once thoroughly, taking notes with a paper and pencil. Then I spend the rest of my time drilling practice questions. 75%+ of my study time is drills. I just do question after question until I start getting most of them right. When I'm done and getting 80%+ right (or I run out of questions), I go back and re-do all the questions I got wrong the first time around.
I used to just pay attention in class and read the textbook, but I'd get in trouble when I needed to apply the concepts on an exam. I realized exams often tested application and mastery, not understanding, so I needed to anticipate what questions would be asked and practice all the different iterations.
Instead of relying on lectures to teach me materials, I started treating them as a nice-to-have intro or review, with the expectation that my real learning would come from drills and reading.
I also switched up my approach to classwork. I started sitting in the front row, taking notes with a pencil and paper. I was often the only one without a laptop. I'd never really look at my notes again, it was more the act of taking notes by hand that helped me with retention and staying engaged.
When I had a syllabus or learning objectives I would read it closely multiple times and use it to make sure I was meeting all the goals. I'd also write a list of the assignments in Excel and try to score 100% on each one. It was a challenge I'd set for myself.
> I don't like relative grading. I think there should be objective standards of what you should know, and if you meet those standards you get an A.
That’s what external exams are for. The CFA, accounting exams, APs, English A Levels all have those. There’s very limited demand for them at university level. No demand leads to no supply.
If everyone inflated their grades then how would getting a PhD get any easier? Your uni can grade you on a curve or grade you flat, but for a PhD you will have to be stack ranked
Most PhD admissions committees would probably be fine with the 3.0 too if you had a few years of undergrad research experience under your belt. Even better if you spend a year or two working after undergrad as a lab technician or something. That tells potential professors you can start working immediately 40 hours a week in the lab on assays you already know how to do. Straight A students with no research experience are going to be a net drain on productivity for months if not longer while they put in the time you've already put in learning how to work in a research environment. The classes you take in many STEM PhDs are often rubber stamp classes anyhow, the focus is on working on research outlined in grants.
Largely agree, but I wouldn’t say grad classes are rubber stamped. In the program I was in, the courses were rigorous, but the encouraged attitude was “B’s get degrees.” If you had a 4.0, you weren’t focused enough on research
Didn’t see this response while the thread was active, but the degree in question is the Ph.D. — in my department you needed a B average to stay in the program, and we were explicitly encouraged not to optimize for straight As in grad classes.
As a professor, I'll put out there how I'm currently thinking about grade inflation in my case.
Classes of let's say "Type 1" have lots of students and very specific learning objectives. I need to make sure everyone who passes the class is proficient in those objectives. So I focus on teaching the baseline expectations. I give assessments where, if you understand the material, you get it right. Therefore, most students who have the prereqs and try hard get A's. The median grade is pretty high along with a tail of people who mostly aren't trying that hard. But you don't need special aptitude to get an A. Unfortunately that can make the class pretty easy for top students, and I'm working on ways to challenge them. But I don't need to knock the whole class down to a B just to challenge top students.
The other "type 2" classes are upper level where people are there to learn hard material and are self motivated. Here students may face tougher challenges and experience more failure even when they put in lots of time and effort. But I usually give As pretty easily. The fact that they're trying hard in a difficult upper level class already shows they're ahead of 95% of their classmates, why would I punish their GPA for that? And most of these students don't need the threat of a bad grade to motivate them, they put in the effort because they're interested. Of course some students will get bad grades in the class but the median is again usually pretty high.
So I find myself a contributor to grade inflation. Employers, look less at GPA and more at what courses a person challenged themselves with!
Unhappiness about grades can also be transmuted into complaints and eventually investigations about other matters—a thing I've seen happen. There is something to the "They pretend to learn, and we pretend to teach" line, in many situations.
(That I am observing this situation doesn't mean I approve of it.)
>
Unfortunately that can make the class pretty easy for top students, and I'm working on ways to challenge them. But I don't need to knock the whole class down to a B just to challenge top students.
Why not? What's wrong with a B? You said it yourself, most people in your class are average, although there are a few top people. Why would you assign them the same grade when the whole point of grading is to assess how well a student is doing? (Why grade anything at all then?) And why rob the average students of the honest but very useful feedback that "You're doing fine but there are still ways for you to improve"?
For instance, back when I was TA'ing a lab course for some introductory physics class, I remember a student coming over to ask me why I hadn't given her full points on her lab report. She said now she might no longer be getting an A for the overall class. …which, from my POV, would have been entirely justified: She had had no clue what she was doing and had not understood the experiments at all (no surprise given that she hardly paid attention in class), and her lab reports very clearly reflected that. How could I ever give her full points? How would I have justified that in front of those of her peers who were doing better than her because they were working much harder (or were at least paying attention in class)?
Obviously, that student had come to live under the impression that A's were the norm and that her performance, no matter how bad, demanded an A.
But even if one disregards the argument that grades (should) provide a measuring stick and feedback mechanism for average students as to where they stand, one should still ask the question, Why rob the top students of their reward (an outstanding grade) when they truly excel? Very good performance typically comes with very high costs for the students (lots of time is spent on studying), and rewards or at least recognition of what they've achieved are therefore absolutely necessary, I'd say.
So have you considered that, by makng A's your default grade, you might be demotivating some of your top students?
> And most of these students don't need the threat of a bad grade to motivate them
Again, since when has a B been a bad grade? It's obviously a rhetorical question: B's have gained the connotation of being bad grades ever since everyone and their dog have been getting A's without having to put in much effort. Grade inflation leads to further grade inflation.
I'm afraid, though, your reasoning just confirms (and reinforces) this usual catch 22 but it doesn't really justify it.
Maybe I should clarify that students in my classes only get As if they fully earn it on the assessments. Bad performance doesn't get As, grade grubbing doesn't work, etc. However, I find myself capping the difficulty level of assessments in type 1 classes, which makes As very accessible to almost anyone who puts in the work. The philosophy is, here's what I expect you to know, if you demonstrate that you know all of it, you can get an A. (Of course, the student in your story shouldn't get an A or maybe even a C if they don't know the material!)
I think a philosophical difference might be that I'm thinking about type 1 classes like a set of weights students have to learn to lift. If you can lift all the weights, you've accomplished the goals of the class and I have no problem giving you an A. If you struggle here or there but can mostly lift them, you can get a B or C. I'll still be okay passing you up to a class that needs you to lift objects to accomplish more complex tasks.
I'm getting the sense that your approach is more like a race, where people who finish way ahead of others should be rewarded with higher grades. Just a different approach.
Yeah, I worry about demotivating top students. If I get any extra time for adjusting my class prep I'll spend it on extra challenges or resources for them. But that's also what type 2 classes are for.
personally i think that most all coursework should be pass/fail and exams should be designed to test if the material has been internalized or not and that's it. no little bits of trickery to try and differentiate between students, as it's just too noisy and small of a space to do that sort of differentiation.
instead, rely on project work to differentiate students. ask them to apply the knowledge in a realistic setting in a practical way and demonstrate their mastery of the subject.
this whole idea of making the exam harder than the material in order to open up a spread in performance is kinda silly if you ask me. it often just reflects pre-course preparation and literally noise (who happened to remember some obscure identity or whatever on that particular day).
The population in general continues to grow much faster than the number of people admitted to Ivy League schools. So it stands to reason that the few who manage to get in are going to uncharacteristically intelligent and driven, even compared to previous Ivy League cohorts. Which will drive up GPAs.
Honestly, if the median GPA at Harvard was less than a 3.5, then that would raise questions. Because it means that either grading is unfair -- i.e., grading on a curve, rather than on an understanding of the material -- or that students aren't as capable as the school's reputation implies.
Harvard students of today are enormously more effective and likely intelligent than those of before. Some of that is due to technology making schoolwork easier, but also because of population growth like you said. In the 1950s, you could get into Harvard with one AP course scoring a 3: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2...
Today you might have 5's on a dozen AP courses and be fully rejected (not waitlisted).
After you land your first job, does your GPA even matter? In every recent promotion opportunity for me or potential new position at another employer, what my college GPA was has never been relevant. What seems to be much more relevant is my experience, accomplishments, and whether I am a good fit for the position.
The GPA doesn't matter once you are mid-career, but I'm amazed at how a prestigious university brand helps marginal candidates get through the filter to an on-site interview 20+ years after graduation. I was helping a company scale their solution architect team last year, and the CEO said of one candidate with a resume full of huge red flags, "why would we not interview him? He went to MIT!"
Is there evidence for it being a strong signal in the first place?
Once you have work experience, either from your first few jobs, or for some from internships, then your school rarely matters. It's not like you learned some revolutionary thing that is exclusive to MIT 20 years ago, or that whatever you learned is even applicable for that matter.
I'll raise my hand as a data point. MIT, about 20 years out. It still seems to carry significant weight. I don't even work in the field I studied, so it's definitely not about any particular material I may have learned there. My conjecture is that association with the MIT brand implies that I must be a sharp cookie and someone worth paying attention to.
One trick savvy folk do, and this is beyond effective.
They take these two week courses at these universities. And then they put it at the top of the "education" section of their resume.
It's like $99.99 prices.
Against all human logic, people just cannot look past the magic words "Harvard University." And people aren't dumb, they know it's a two week, meaningless course.
... then your gpa rarely matters. But your school always matters. Not only in terms of network, but in terms of reputation, prestige and even camaraderie. Especially the higher you go up the ladder when more and more people tend to be graduates of top schools.
Nobody will ask about your GPA as you get further along in your career. But everyone will ask about your alma mater. You eventually stop putting your GPA on your resume, even if you had a 4.0. But you always put the college you graduated from.
I've been out of uni for a few years and have forgotten a stunning amount of material that I worked hard to learn during my time there. In 10 years time, anything you haven't been using, you forget.
For engineers, if you have a good internship or two under your belt when you graduate, I'm not sure your GPA really matters even for your first job. But, GPA definitely matters for what internships you can even apply for. So having a good GPA certainly makes it easier to get a good internship, and having a good internship on your resume makes it easier to get a good first full time job, which make it easier to get your second job, etc.
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive. I've written this comment on mobile, in a short time, which proved to be a bad idea.
I wanted to say "I don't believe GPA to be a good indicator regarding capabilities and intelligence of a person". That dismissive sounding "No" was a direct answer to
> I'm not sure your GPA really matters even for your first job.
And, I tried to say "No, it doesn't matter from my perspective".
> I don't think your experience is representative.
It's certainly possible. I was not an ordinary student when I was an undergrad due to both my past and my interest in computers.
If you ever want to go to e.g. law school, yes it does.
Part of the reason for grade inflation is that it helps with those sorts of admissions down-the-line. US News looks at median GPA when evaluating law schools, which has a bunch of trickle-down effects, one of the major ones being that law schools weigh GPA very strongly.
It's kind of laughable that we still rely on GPAs. The solution would be to convert college grades into a kind of item response theory measure of fitness for each student (equivalent to like the degree of difficulty of test questions). You could do it within a school so that you can create a better measure of ability that controls for difficulty of majors or individual classes.
You could create one nationally as well, though getting data combined together would be a pain. Something like SAT/ACT/GRE scores might help when comparing between schools. Or grades of students who transfer schools.
They say that, but they don't. When someone is rejected they will say it was because of a low GPA. But people are accepted based on their LSAT scores. Do well on the LSAT and your undergrad GPA is almost meaningless.
During my three years of working in law school admissions, GPA was a primary factor at my school and all the peer schools I knew about.
Each school would set a target median LSAT and GPA for the year's class because they were weighted heavily in the US News rankings. Applicants with both scores at or above the target median would get scholarships, applicants with one number at or above the median would be presumptively admitted, diverse applicants with solid numbers were admitted to fill out the class once LSAT and GPA were set, and then there would be a half-dozen or fewer judges' kids, politicians' kids, etc.
<-- This is exactly the process. I've seen scatter plots of LSAT and GPA for admitted students to many law schools, and discussed the process with people in admissions.
I get the comments about better processes for admitting better / more diverse / healthier / whatever students, and it's trivial to come with them, but so long as US News wags the dog, that ain't happening.
Corollary: If your LSAT score is good enough, GPA is irrelevant for admissions. If your GPA is good enough, LSAT is irrelevant for admissions. Both need to be high for scholarships.
Yes. Elite hedge funds, private equity firms, etc. all care about academic credentials. Even within quant firms lots of Harvard grads will look to see if a candidate is a "Math 55er" and the grade received in the course if so.
"Elite" wall street guys just hire their pals from Yale, and their kids, and their friends kids, as long as they went to Yale. Even if they are as dumb as rocks.
The only thing less objectively "elite" than the American investment firm is the American House of Representatives.
I think you're overestimating the fraction of the wall street population that is on the algorithmic or technical side of the game compared to the traditional side that simply provides no value to their clients.
The Yale crowd owns private equity and investment banking. Why? Because private equity and investment banking involve "literally talking to rich old white people" for a living.
Hence they hire the sons of the friends of said old white relics to powwow with them.
However, you can be absolutely sure that the quants pull in the big bucks.
This is true. It is simultaneously true that many of these people have excellent credentials from a signaling standpoint. e.g. Shaw loves their Rhodes Scholars
I've never put it on a resume and I've never been asked. After the 1st job, (at least in the tech world) it seems to be 95% experience and the accomplishments you can point to. Ymmv.
It matters for grad school and for teaching jobs (transcripts are part of the application packet for K-12 and post-secondary teaching positions), but otherwise it doesn't matter.
If you are a professor at an Ivy League school, your life will be much easier if you go along with grade inflation - i.e. don't create tests and assignments that are too difficult or challenging. Otherwise it'll be a constant battle over points on assignments and tests.
The kids going to such elite institutions (similar to the British public school program for the posh) probably mostly came out of private high schools that also inflated grades, and if SATs are used, they probably had SAT tutors - so they're going to be used to getting top scores on everything, and will complain mightily if that changes.
I don't really think the point of those schools is to really get a top-notch education, anyway - as with the British system, the point is to network with other children from wealthy elite families, which is a launchpad into the upper circles of government, business and media. The Atlantic spelled it out recently:
The answer lies in the specific nature of Ivy League elitism, which is an aristocracy of networks. Ivy League graduates make up 0.4 percent of the country. They are significantly overrepresented in Fortune 500 C-suites, in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, in academia, and in the media.
As far as anyone who wants a useful education in technology/science/math/engineering, you really want to go to a research-centric school that's small enough to allow you a chance to work directly with active research groups - even in a menial position. If you want to go onto graduate school, that experience is more valuable than anything else. Grades and GRE scores also matter, and will help with things like paid fellowships, but not nearly as much as hands-on experience with a real research group. Also, always take the harder series - a C grade in an advanced physics course for physics majors will mean more than an A grade in the softer version for non-majors, for example.
most students at harvard and other elite universities come from american public schools, for the record. very high concentration of rich preppy private school kids, yes, but majority is still public.
How many of those public school students are coming from exclusive suburban districts that may as well be private given the cost of living within the district's boundaries? I would guess the majority. Sure the random star from small-town Illinois will get in alongside 20 kids from a Chicago suburban high school.
That would be my thought as well. I'm originally from NZ so there's negligible private schooling, the curriculum is standardized, and obviously the country does a much better job at looking after people on lower rungs of the social ladder.
Public schools in NZ are also forbidden from what NZ calls "zoning" which I think in the US is explicit and mandatory through school districts - e.g. the exact opposite.
Despite that, public schools get some reasonable portion of their funding from the council/city/region/district/etc so a public school in a rich neighborhood generally has more funding. The next biggest source of funding is community/parent groups doing fund raising and what not - school fund raisers are common in NZ - but that again means a school in a richer area ends up having more resources.
The end result is that even in a country where there's negligible private school, schools are explicitly prohibited from restricting enrollment geographically, there's a significant difference in outcomes for rich neighborhood school vs poor.
This hasn’t really been my experience at all. I find students at my university (an ivy) to be pretty reasonable and only complain if there is a mistake during grading. In that case they are absolutely entitled to do so. They also seem to really enjoy challenging classes.
I read actually here on HN some years back (or was is Slashdot?), a good explanation of how Japanese undergrad programs have a similar problem about inflation, manifested by contrast in why they are very focused on taking attendance at college courses.
Anyone who gets into a top Japanese university by definition has done well up to that point. And the university has an obvious interest in maintaining (or making it seem to outsiders / employers / future students) that their graduates are top ranked. So it would not be good to be having 1/2 your class "underperforming". Therefore grades are inflated and as a result students often just phone it in. (also knowing that their careers ahead are mostly set if they minimally apply themselves and show up)
So at that point, all they can do is mostly grade people on the small differences in performance, monitor their attendance to catch and flunk out the worst behaviors (completely skipping class), and live with the system they have.
I would be glad to find/read that post again but I think I've lost where it came from...
Honestly, I can't blame 'em. Expecting full effort always is re-testing the students you already know to be smart over and over so the bean-counters know how to rank them. Once you have your certification of "in the top of the smart bucket", classes should mostly be pass/fail past that point instead of monitoring for minute differences in behavior.
Is Grade Inflation really a problem at a top school? Why is it surprising that driven students at an elite institution are probably going to do well most of the time? I'd take this over moronic experiments like grade deflation at Princeton -- imagine being mandated to give only a small proportion of your students an A in, say, a Calc I class.
I'm slightly annoyed at this discourse because I went to Columbia, an institution that seemed hellbent at enforcing some vague sense of rigor at the expense of the sanity of most of its students. I certainly want to be challenged, and don't want top Universities to be glorified country clubs masquerading as academic environments, but I also think that what a defines substantive and rigorous eduction is at the highest level is actually quite hard to pin down.
> Why is it surprising that driven students at an elite institution are probably going to do well most of the time?
This only makes sense if you assume that Harvard students are unusually academically driven.
Given that Harvard has historical been very eager to accept students that have personal relationships with Harvard alumni, I wouldn’t make the assumption that these students are more academically driven than average. A lot of these students will see success because of their connections, rather than their academic aptitude
> Because there should still be a natural distribution. Even if you are evaluating the cream of the crop.
Why should there be? Let's say all students in the class are A students, and would get an A in any other class, then some now get a B or C just because their classmates happen to be even better?
It seems to me that doesn't really reflect student ability very accurately.
The game theory around grades is interesting. I went to a well regarded US CS school for a masters, and we were told essentially that "Being good enough to get in here means you're smart and capable, and being middle of the pack here is still doing very well. In order to communicate that to companies doing hiring, the minimum allowed average is a B".
I don't know for sure, but I expect most of my decent, but not truly exceptional cohort had GPAs much above a B. There were a couple courses that bucked the trend. Which ones theses were was well known, and many folks, looking to work at FAANG, dodged them because of it. I already had employment figured out, and optimized for things besides GPA. I was a bit too ambitious, receiving a number of Bs, but also learned a ton. Maybe that will bit me if someone cares to look back 5+ years at my grades, but that's a separate problem.
If you're a professor assigning grades, with little ability to communicate the intricacies of your grades to those looking at them, what do you do? Accurately assigning grades hurts your students, and getting everyone to change is a collective action problem.
After even 2 years post-graduation those grades will only be inspected for McKinsey/Bain/BCG consulting positions and maybe some corporate executive-track / future C-suite-potential type roles.
Almost no one will ever use them for hiring decisions.
But also curious how much of the grade inflation is driven by increasing selection bias. With the bar to get into top schools is raised higher and higher, maybe most of the students really are earning their inflated grades?
It's very easy for the school to fix this.
- The average grade is a B, class grades will not be accepted until compliant.
- Publish this policy so employers know this. For a school like Harvard they'll trouble themselves to find out. Employers will quickly learn that a B, or even a C, still indicates a pretty capable person.
Princeton tried exactly this while I went there ("grade deflation"), and it didn't go well. They sent a letter to places like med school admissions alongside transcripts, but it wasn't enough. Ultimately, they abandoned the practice in 2014: employers, law schools, med schools often have minimum GPA requirements that are not school specific.
Students also didn't like it because they felt it made the environment more competitive and less collaborative than at other schools, because an A for your peer means one less A for you.
Somewhere else in this comment section someone mentioned how going to Princeton during grade deflation era stopped them from becoming a doctor, and I'd say that's accurate.
It's not Dilbert, but one of those 90's geeky newspaper comic strips had a gag about this, where the guided tour of Harvard takes them to the class room where the last B was given.
I reckon grades inflation is going to keep following tuition inflation. Can't blame Harvard for this one, most schools have to balance the financial impact that academic exigence has on families. Going to study in Boston requires enormous effort - time-wise and financially.
Given the amount of sacrifice required to get there in the first place (in my case, I got half-tuition scholarship to a Boston school after a three-year prep, my parents sold their appartment to help me pay, I took a loan on top of that and still ran out of money mid-undergrad), tough-grading and failing assignments can definitely put a lower-income student at risk of failing to graduate.
If professors start playing tough-graders and put a student a risk, the school will appear as extorting money tuition while failing to keep its promise of providing an education and a future to the kid.
I definitely had some heated discussions with older generation liberal arts professors who couldn't understand why it wasn't OK to "F" me for some stupid petty deadline. They couldn't fathom that from a student's perspective, the money at stake increases over the duration of the degree, in turn growing the potential cost of academic failure (or under-performance).
Harvard is also subject to the problem, it just seems to deal with it in its usual magazine-cover-first-in-class-student way.
Same with high schools: some weight an A+ in an AP class as a 5.0, which means HS GPA needs to be normalized by each university's admissions committee.
In the department, at an Indian university where I studied, the professor wouldn't even give anyone A grade even if the whole class struggled. It was supposed to be a relative grading. You had to score certain minimum percent of score. Our whole department's median grade was C.
tbf in gradschool a C is basically an F. In my program you could get 2 Cs before you were kicked out on your third. Anything lower than a C was basically a huge red flag and would warrant a meeting about the future of the student in the department.
My experience as well. It was pretty stupid since it was basically pass+/pass/fail.
On the flip side of that red flag is when the midterm average was a 20% which means whoever taught the class didn’t do their job, didn’t care and definitely wasn’t going to take shit for it so everyone passed.
A friend who got his MS at Penn State then went to get his PHD at American University was told by his boss when grading students, that he had to give "Genteleman's Cs" to people because their "parents paid a ton of $ to get them here." He/She was used to giving out real grades at state schools.
I have a related observation from the perspective of graduate programs in the US.
One surprising, and sensible thing, that I noticed in working in the UK was that PhD defenses of students were conducted by professors from other universities. In that sense, there was an external standard that prevented simply passing students for "sentimental" reasons or lowering the bar unilaterally by the student's own department. And I certainly knew of cases in the US in my department where people got passed much more leniently, and it's hard for your own professor to tell you that you're not fit for a PhD. (ironically (?) when it does happen, it seems the bad news comes at the last step, rather than along the way, much to the publicized and frustrating feedback about grad programs that appears in discussion often).
Of course in the US there is no way that you could coordinate, or have universities be incentivized, to have external examiners evaluate and pass/fail their students.
It probably all relates (in some tangential way) to the waning desire to engage in standards-setting for admission or graduation.
UK universities also have 'external examiners', who are academics from the same subject area in other universities. They're tasked with providing moderation feedback to try to keep standards for each (taught) degree classification roughly comparable between institutions. (They also provide input into course design, warn university highers-up if the programme is going off the rails, and other things).
It's far from perfect, and standards do vary from course to course and institution to institution, but it's better than nothing. And not all in one direction, either: after the first year of the MSc programme I (later) took, the external examiners' report said that our department had marked very harshly, and several excellent students deserving of distinctions (and who would have got them in other universities) had been denied. The recommendation was to actually award the highest marks in the future.
I'm directing my own new MA programme next year, and I'm curious to see what feedback I get. Marking, where there's no established disciplinary body of knowledge to get through and assess, is decidedly non-trivial to get right.
My wife was an undergrad at MIT (course 5.) When she went to apply to med school she had a ton of explaining to do because MIT in those days - maybe now too I don’t know - graded on a curve. Not in some verkakte inflate-everyone mode but fitting everyone to a desired distribution. Every other university was already inflating grades.
While the college admissions process is by no means a perfect system, if you're accepted to Harvard, you're probably a pretty darn good student.
If Harvard graded on a curve, such that half of their students—who presumably got straight A's in high school—received a C or below, would that be more fair? Would it be a better representation of student performance?
I suppose the answer depends on the purpose of giving grades. If the goal is to see who outperformed who, Harvard's average GPA is a major problem. If the goal is to see who learned the material, then Harvard is providing an excellent education.
This is always a fun question, and a lot of it depends on the material/subject matter, but why not both?
For things like math, science, and engineering--where the possible depth of knowledge and understanding far exceeds what could be learned in a semester course--I personally think exam grades should center around 50. If you've got 100 points to play with, why not use them?
A lot of my classes did, and I always found the challenge exciting: what stuff did I not learn about this subject? This also gives you the ability to differentiate student performance, should that be of importance.
At the end of the semester, things were usually (non-linearly) curved up to average around B. The instructors (well, most of them) knew what "absolute score" represented enough understanding to move on, and anything below that would not get curved into a passing grade.
This is totally right. There are two kinds of classes: those with a specific set of learning outcomes to meet (eg. a prerequisite course) and those where by the end the in-scope knowledge is essentially unlimited (eg. courses where it's not unreasonable to prove named theorems on homework or exams). The former should be graded with 100% being all the knowledge, the latter in a way that gives a fair distribution and then scales.
Of course, my fellow university students always push back on me when I support the latter :) At the risk of armchair psychoanalyzing, I think a lot of them don't want to reckon with the fact that there's such an overwhelming amount of information out there and so many perspectives to explore it from that "100%" in say introductory topology is almost completely meaningless as a measure of how much topology one actually knows.
UK unis are a lot better at using the full grading scale, in my experience. 70% gets you a 'first class' [0], but there's a lot of room in the 70-100 range to differentiate performance. It was a nice system because there's almost always space for able students to really push the boundary. The idea is that getting >80% is for students doing really exceptional / original work.
[0] A "1st" (A) is between 70-100%, "2:1" (B) is 60-69%, "2:2" (C) is 50-59%, and "3rd" (D, lowest passing grade) is 40-49%. UK degrees are awarded one final grade at the end, rather than a GPA, usually based on your last two years of study only.
The term "grade inflation" includes an underlying presumption that GPAs are fungible and as a gentle reminder: they are not.
You can't directly compare the GPAs between schools or between course loads. Like so many other metrics in our lives, just because you can get a numerical output doesn't mean the metric is universally applicable or "objectively quantifiable" or "objectively comparable".
Yes. That's what happens if you tell every child they are the best through their childhood. Now suddenly nobody want their bubble burst.
The other side of the same coin is this: I TA'ed college physics (more like high school physics) when I was working on my PhD. The school was not the best, but it was like top-10 in medical and pharmacy. And a lot of my students were from these departments.
We had to give them a pre-test before final. The final would reuse the same problems. And there were people failing the tests. I didn't understand why; I still don't. I mean it's an A for free, why not take it? Why fail...?
I guess you could say that's because it's not their major, so they don't pay attention. But it's still a required course. They had to retake it and pay real money for it. I also knew for a fact that they did care. Some of them cried when we told them we would not give them "bonus credits".
It's Harvard. They go way out of their way to ensure that they only select students who will succeed at their school.
Perhaps it's not grade inflation that's the issue. Perhaps it's time to set aside the outdated ideology that grades must always adhere to a bell curve where some percentage of the class must be failed and some percentage must be passed even if the class is comprised of 35 perfect clones of Albert Einstein.
Even further, what an asinine system to begin with. What good does a grading system based on the success of one's immediate peers do anyone? What information does that offer anyone? Maybe I got a 4.0 from Harvard but, if we using a bell curve system of grading, that may tell you that I was in a particularly weak class or that I actually was the strongest student in Harvard history. You'll never know.
Dunno how Harvard works but where I work in the UK, in the unlikely event we had a cohort full of Einsteins they would all get firsts (hoping we're smart enough to recognise genius when we see it lol). We have an absolute sense of what each level of attainment should look like, and don't grade to a bell curve.
Right, but it makes no sense that Harvard's grade distribution is so different than schools with similarly strong student bodies like Princeton, Columbia, UChicago, Berkeley, etc.
Also keep in mind that a very, very large portion of students are legacy / recruited athletes / very wealthy donor parents.
You don’t have to fail with a curve. You can set it so only outliers fail or get an A. That means most people will be getting a B, but it is still more useful.
More useful for what? The goal isn't necessarily to identify the strongest student. The goal is to teach them material. The grade should represent mastery of the material. Some material can be mastered by every student.
I'm a college drop out and such so maybe I don't know.
But I've never been in a situation where anyone asked / cared about someone else's college grades. IF they graduated or not they cared about... but that's it.
Is anyone asked this / had experience where it mattered?
Even the if they graduated didn't really matter. My last semester of college I could have failed every class except a survey of American lit and still graduated.
I failed the survey of American lit¹ (didn't finish the final paper).
For the next three years, I circumlocuted my way around the fact that I didn't actually graduate² until I finally got credit for that last class and got my diploma through an independent study with my academic advisor. Nobody actually checked to see if I graduated and the presence or absence of a BA wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't gone to grad school.
⸻
1. I was working full time while taking classes full time which is not a recipe for academic success. I passed the other classes I was taking, at least.
2. For the record, this was my second of four droppings out of college in my checkered academic career.
I was thinking of what to tell my Parent about my University grade because I failed woefully not until I search for a solution and I saw a lot of testimony posts about this Hacker Wizard Web Recovery, I contact him and I explain my problem to him and he promise to help me change my grade so after he asks me some few questions and collected my details he asks me to message him after 6 hours so I did then he told me to go and check my grade in the school portal I was amazed at what I saw and I can proudly tell my parent about my grades, you can also contact him if you need such help, his work is swift and very affordable Contact Him Through Email: wizardwebrecoveryprogrammer@gmail.com or WhatsApp: +1 (917) 725-3296)
There's no way to know what a grade average means anyway, eg if you're employing someone. You don't know if they took easy courses or hard courses, you don't know if they were ill or if they cheated.
All you can actually do is bring them in for interview and see if they can do a reasonable chat about why they want to work for you.
Someone who has gotten into Harvard has already bagged a rather big prize, but the signalling can't be much more informative than that.
I just finished a Masters program at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), where this is very much not the case! Unlike the American system (Im from the US), at TCD a 70% is considered "First Class Honors" i.e. the highest grade possible. Getting a 80% in any of the classes I took (a MSc in High Performance Computing) was very nearly impossible, the grading for assignments and exams is very harsh (but fair I think!).
This is not just Harvard, right? Elite schools, especially the so called ivy schools, have been inflating GPAs for years. In the meantime, they have been putting more weight on "holistic" admission over academic performance. So the US has been so advanced that academic performance is of secondary importance? Leadership is what matters most? Do I understand it correctly?
Most of the students admitted have top percentile grades/test scores as well. But the competition at the very top is based in leadership rather than minuscule differences in testing, yes.
I got my MSc in Computer Science from a top University in Europe. 50% of students at the University dropped out within 6 months because of how hard it was. The University didn’t care because it wasn’t paid per student. It set a high bar and if you couldn’t handle it too bad for you. A few friends from my University studied computer science at MIT for a year. They reported back that MIT was way easier than our University. So I concluded that at least some prestigious well known Universities are simply better at marketing themselves than others :) And hey my University degree was free. Which was nice. It probably also explains the high bar: No pressure to make sure everybody graduates. If you can’t handle the heat then you are out.
In spring 2020 I was a Harvard TA for organic chemistry lab (well, actually "teaching fellow" because Harvard is pretentious). The grading was extremely lenient, basically everyone got >90%.
(Although in this case it didn't affect GPA because everyone got "emergency satisfactory" grades . . .)
edit:
actually as an addendum to this (don't want to hide dumb statements). I realize my problem is not the high proportion of high grades, or the high average GPA, however you look at it.
If you have a group of student who for various reasons are very capable - there's lots of nonsense with Ivy's, but they do have entry grade filtering - you should expect more of them to get higher grades. The problem is, I don't think there's alternate evidence that each year is inherently more capable than the prior year. Assuming same entry restrictions, and so presumable capability, you should expect on the whole the average GPA to hover at a consistent level, sometimes going a little up, sometimes a little down, but generally hovering around the same place.
In that situation it would still be completely possible for one school to have a significantly higher average GPA than a /different/ school. The idea of grade is to measure capability, and for the sake of argument lets pretend every university/college used the same end of year tests for math, physics, law, whathaveyou. In such a case if you compared the average GPA from two schools where one was a community college in a remote rural america, and the other was something like MIT, an Ivy, ICs, etc you would absolutely expect a significant gap in those averages.
So the problem isn't what the average is, its that the average is moving in a consistent direction year after year, and that is an indication of grade inflation.
Growing up in NZ the national standardized tests, and university courses, had this concept called "scaling". The goal of scaling was to recognize than from year to year there may simply be unintentional variations in assessment difficulty. So what happened is at the end of a year/course, the average % score of the students is calculated, and compared to the prior, if the difference is significant every % grade is essentially scaled by some factor of the difference. That has the effect of pulling this years average grade closer to prior years, and ideally compensating for assessment variation.
Shocking. Here's something to compare it to. It is rumored that engineering courses at University of Toronto never have an average above 70, and if they do everybody gets curved down. Confirmed by my probability professor who showed us the effects of the curve on everyone's grades.
As a recent college graduate (I graduated last year), I can tell that you part of this is definitely due the easiness of cheating on exams after school started remote classes cuz of Covid. Every class i took in my senior year, there was at least one discord group that would share answers during exams. Answers to assignments were also frequently shared. I was part of it and I don’t feel no regrets because college sucks and 90% of my engineering knowledge is from me doing my personal hobby projects or working in industry.
Stanford has grade inflation, but not at the level at Harvard. Faculty senate said median GPA is 3.69 (so less than 50% have at least a 3.7, despite being just as selective as Harvard). And this is after taking into account that Stanford A+ is 4.3.
I mean don't they get 10000 applications already from a preselected group of mostly very good and smart students and then filter for the top 3 percent? Most of those kids are going to show up to class and do the work. I'm not saying that there is no grade inflation going on but they have created a system designed to select academic freaks(yeah I know, and a bunch of rich kids) who value grades above all else.
When that single cheat might have resulted in expulsion if it were caught, it implies a pretty significant effect on the grade.
It wouldn’t actually change the result of the metric (because survivorship bias: you don’t count students who never graduated in the graduated student population), but it changes the believability of and the ethic behind the metric. Now we can say that at least 10% of the folks who graduated didn’t earn their grades, and the school’s reputation is less for it.
My experience is that in recent years, cheating is ubiquitous in many elite schools. This goes all the way to the top. Fake research data. Self-enriching financial schemes by faculty. Conflicts-of-interest. Etc.
Cheating may be a rational thing to do, on an individual level, if we ignore ethics. Outside of that it breaks down. I wouldn't say "best" without a lot of qualifiers.
My current university has a different problem, namely that there is no grade curving even though they are supposed to curve and adjust the distributions.
The grades get mapped to ECTS, but the ECTS distribution does not match the actual distribution of the courses. I have a 'D' that's in the 80th percentile, and a B that is in the 95th percentile.
The problem is such behavior is very heavily disincentivized. I am not sure what the main factor at Harvard is but at public schools the funding of the university depends most heavily on retention. At our university, we are penalized (both in salary and other ways) for students that get Ds and Fs as well as students who withdraw(with no penalty for the student!) from the class. In addition, student evaluations play a huge role in this process and the easiest way to get a good evaluation is to give easy grades. Guess what kind of grading policy this promotes...
By the way, the reason retention, as opposed to the quality is valued is also simple. The ranking of the state 'in education' is measured by the number of diplomas given out by the institutions in the state. So more diplomas---better education ratings of the state. Thus encouraging faculty to pass students is a rational strategy. I am surprised we are not just giving students all As without any tests whatsoever. Would make my life so much easier. For a while ...
It's hard to blame any one piece of the system for inflating grades - everyone "wins" short term, and that's all this country cares about, from top to bottom. Students get their piece of paper so they can have at least a not-hopeless life, schools get their way overpriced tuition, administrators get their raises, companies get to pretend they hire smart people, etc. Governments know everyone wants their kid to go to college, so they make it easier to get people degrees.
If college continues to be a requirement for most of the basic jobs people receive then this will continue. Most of the workforce doesn't need a college degree. The things they learn in college they will never, ever use, and most of the jobs don't actually require critical thinking like is constantly waved about whenever these conversations come up.
Well put. Grade inflation is one of those emerging behaviors that is reinforced by the system as a whole as opposed to individual players. I think one major problem is we equate education with 'college education' which is probably quite harmful.
I teach at a community college. We’ve had declining enrollment for 10 years or so. I need a job and these days it’s easy to acquire a reputation and easy to look up someone’s reputation. Retention of students is very important since it lowers the cost of client acquisition to have a student body that doesn’t drop out. All of these factors have led to me, more or less, passing everyone who takes the final exam. A person has to actively try to fail my classes now.
I don't its not so much, these students are the elite of elite from around the world (academically). How hard can you make something before it starts to become contradictory to actual learning.
A bit over 40% of white kids admitted to Harvard are ALDC admits: legacy, donors, etc. Folks like George W Bush (Yale) look smart by association with the intellectual elite, while smart kids gain access to networks to money and power.
It's a good scheme for everyone involved.
(Note: I do have a lot of insider knowledge about Harvard, specifically, but I'm only citing public information)
The 40% number can be a bit misleading because most are not George Bush types. In the 21st century, they mostly tend to be smart and ambitious students who are children of Ivy league educated professionals. These kids have been raised in an environment that prioritizes achievement and professional success.
Source: Anecdotal experience from the legacies I met during college. I don't have hard numbers to back me up, but you can look at the 25th percentile SAT scores and they aren't too low.
The teachers are often rated on how well their students do, so they're incentivized to make sure they do "well" and since they control how "well" is measured you have a conflict of interest.
Combined with actually trying to fail someone often getting overturned (even my college 20 years ago famously had a "hard grader" who would often get her fails overturned), you get grade inflation.
At research universities perhaps, but at liberal arts colleges (not a liberal arts program within a big university - that's different) professors actually are there for the teaching.
The modern Ivy League campus is a popularity contest amongst professors. Universities are filled with a growing cadre of administrators, and the administrators focus on appeasing student complaints, always taking the side of students against faculty.
Professors are afraid of upsetting students, or being called bigots if a person in some protected identity group gets a bad grade and complains about bias. This is an inevitable consequence of campus culture having a strong belief in guilt-by-accusation.
This is absolutely not why. There is no incentive for universities to tell employers what they think of the students attending them, and the intercollegiate talent transfer is 99% recommendations and research experience. Students don't want it, professors don't care, and the general public doesn't pay them to. Universities make their money from students and research, not from employers hoping for them to report statistics on the people attending. It is only their accreditation process which cares, and it doesn't care very much.
I think you just want your story to be true, honestly.
And put the future of growing Harvard’s endowment at risk?! Besides, do you really want a US Senator or a Fortune 500 CEO calling you up to scream at you and make your life hell, or do you just want to get back to your research?
Grade inflation, review inflation. It's rampant. No wonder people graduate and then have a meltdown when their poor or mediocre performance on the job gets called out.
People are too dumb to understand what "excellent" means, now. Why should I feel like an asshole if I don't give EVERY Lyft driver FIVE STARS, BEST EVAR!!!111!!!
At least in the context of Lyft, the problem is that The Algorithm (tm) punishes drivers disproportionately: a handful of bad reviews (which could amount to a couple of passengers in bad moods on a single day) might mean being permanently banned from your source of income.
(The entire idea of "reviewing" a rideshare is ridiculous to begin with: you can't select the driver you're matched with, so the it's not as much a "review" as it is a way to algorithmically punish non-employees.)
Amusingly enough, in a mass-review situation like with the Lyft driver, there really are only two options, 5 star or 0 star (or whatever the lowest is) - as everything else is sub-optimal in actually affecting the rating.
They should switch to a "would you ride again y/n" instead.
I will note that Harvard extension school weeds out prospective students based on whether they get a 3.0, and they will kick you out if you fail to maintain that gpa. So at least part of the university's grades have a hard floor that prevents people with poor grades from getting accepted or graduating.
In order to maintain an exclusive and elite image it has to surpress skills and talent to only promote its top performers, even in a place where its top performers out pace the brightest of a normal college.
Elitism at its finest. We could get so many amazing people if Harvard didn't cut people short.
wat? we already have a myriad of amazing people everywhere, and these elite certificate mills are largely irrelevant for making the world better anyway.
I guess professors just want their students to succeed after graduating and award everyone straight A's. Especially because assignments in senior years are fuzzier, not like "you solved 4 out of 5 equations, here's B for you" in a junior year.
Funny thing: in many of the Ivy's, it's well known that the "A"s in Harvard are not the same as the "A"s in the other Ivy's, so we joke that if you want to get an A, you should go to Harvard.
I didn’t go to Harvard. I studied maths at Cambridge in the U.K. and grade inflation was definitely a topic there. The university felt that their purpose was to produce good researchers and grades (in the U.K. you get a ‘class’ for your degree – 1, 2:1, 2:2, or 3 – rather than a GPA/transcript) at the end of undergraduate degrees reflected how good a researcher the university thought you might make. In maths they would give about 30% of people a first (it was important to control this number as it roughly corresponded to the cutoff for doing the fourth year masters degree which was, of course, called part III), about 30% a 2:2 or 3rd (mostly 2:2s), and the rest a 2:1. In humanities subjects a far higher proportion would receive a 2:1 with a smaller percentage receiving firsts and a select few receiving ‘starred firsts’.
The issue was basically that the university did not want to do grade inflation and students felt that they were ignoring the fact the the grades they chose had a large influence on the lives of the majority of students who did not go on to become researchers. Students felt disadvantaged compared to their peers at other universities where they felt they would more easily get higher grades (either due to a higher proportion set by the university or some sense of superior ability).
I guess one big reason for feeling disadvantaged is not really knowing how employers work (or, more importantly, how good employers work). Lots of common seeming options claimed to be ‘institution blind’ in hiring new graduates which meant that they would look at the degree class and assume that a 1st class degree meant the same at any university and that a 2:1 was the minimum standard. This also meant totally absurd recruiting pipelines (because you can’t easily filter out applicants based on their CVs you need to add bullshit tests like ‘how many times can you click your mouse in a minute’ to reduce the size of the pool before interviewing).
Obviously the trick would be to find the places that knew more about the system at Cambridge and not tipex that name off your CV, or especially those who would consider it a stronger signal than it should have been. But this also has disadvantages; it seems not great to end up at a company working with many people with a similar background.
The other main point of contention I remember was whether it was easier to get more alphas (or good marks) by studying pure maths or applied maths.
Perhaps a good thing about the system was that grades were not really assessed per-course and homework was not assessed so it was mostly designed to be pedagogical rather than doable without much imagination.
Some schools, like The University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business, have taken aggressive measures in the past to fight grade inflation.
They implemented a "hard average" at each grade level. So freshmen business course, the average had to be a C-. Soph: C, Jr: C+, Sr: B-.
It certainly achieved the goal for the school, as a whole, to fight grade inflation... but..
For students, it was very important to be above the mean... otherwise your grade would typically get moved down. Which isn't the worst, since they compared it to competition in the job world... but hard to say that when students are paying an obscene amount of money to attend.
The other challenge was the smaller courses, with ~10-15 students... very difficult to get an A+ in those courses as you had to be the top 1-3 in the class.
I think they have since abandoned this grade inflation policy..
But yes, GPA is basically irrelevant now in comparing across schools...
If I was an employer, I would only hire people with demonstrated skills in the thing I was hiring them for. No piece of paper would ever convince me otherwise.
I don't see where this statistic controls for people who didn't graduate or for people who didn't take classes for which they would not be successful.
This average GPA could represent grade inflation. Or it could represent increased information symmetry between the difficulty of classes and the students themselves, paired with the students' interests, determination, and aptitude.
Harvard admits a lot of people not actually capable of doing the work. Rigorous grades would expose those people. The patterns among those people would embarrass the policies driving those admissions, and expose the school to criticisms, probably unfair, that it prefers to avoid.
Better to give everyone an A and avoid all the controversy.
This is almost certainly deteriorating the overall quality of the education available at Harvard -- why kill yourself to get the same A as everyone else? Even if professors want to encourage excellence, how can they signal it?
When I graduated in the mid-80s, Ivy League grads were distinctly more capable than those from my pretty good school. From what I see this is no longer the case.
Why You Shouldn't Go to Harvard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo&t=12s
Acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell has some advice for teenagers looking into college.
"If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard," he says. Harvard is filled with the smartest people in the world, and perversely that makes it a dispiriting place to go to school.
At Harvard, the lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. However, the lower tier students get just as discouraged at Harvard as the lower tier students at an average school. The result: They don't get their degrees in math or science. The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree.
This is crazy, because as Gladwell points out, a science and math degree is the "most valuable commodity any graduate can have in today's economy." He says that "as as a rule of thumb, your odds of successfully getting a math degree fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers."
So, if you're a kid and you have a choice between, Harvard and the University of Maryland, go with Maryland because its SAT scores are 150 points lower on average. That means you have a 30% better chance at getting your degree. However, most people will still choose Harvard, even knowing this, says Gladwell. Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.