The tweet only breaks it into 2 buckets (<500 and >500 enrollment), but the the number of students enrolled in Econ, Biology (MCDB or MB&B at Yale), History and Computer Science is about 10-50x more than the ones towards the bottom like Gender Studies or History of Science. So technically, these subjects contribute the most to grade inflation/deflation at Yale
When I was at Berkeley, the mean GPA was B- (around 2.7). It's unexpected to see 3.7 as the mean GPA in other universities. That's a whole grade point higher.
What would be some good data sources to find out this dataset for other US universities?
Weird to call out gender studies as the leader, when 1) it’s not; 2) it’s specifically in a category of low enrollments, thus larger error; and 3) even the “hardest” field gives over 50% A’s.
Also weird to call this single recent snapshot as evidence of anything related to the trend without any historical data. They have 10 years of historic GPAs which show inflation, but grade inflation was a regular complaint I heard about Ivy schools in the 1990s. How do we know which disciplines are responsible for the rising GPAs? Anyway, given the low enrollment, it actually can’t be gender studies behind the overall inflation.
In practice the principal function of college grades (as with standardized test scores) seems to be to reduce the number of students applying to grad schools - easing the workload of understaffed grad admissions departments while maintaining a "high graduate admissions rate" for the college that discourages students from applying. (This is particularly important for med schools, which sharply limit the number of slots so as to restrict the supply of physicians.)
In some cases grades provide useful feedback as far as how well students are learning the material, but that doesn't seem to be the primary goal.
I'm disappointed that UC Santa Cruz adopted a more traditional grading system and (in 2010) largely abandoned the narrative evaluation system that it pioneered when it was founded.
I mostly agree with grades as a concept. I just hated the princeton grade deflation system because it was obviously harming grad school applications for us, and the administration would gaslight us. They got rid of it and basically said that the only reason was for the mental health of students.
I disagree with grades as implemented because schools have so many diverse grading policies. I think grading systems should be improved.
I'm not really sure what the point is here, especially when +/- 500 enrolled is the only separator (actual enrollment, professor, section and scheduling are just a few other factors that I imagine would affect final grade).
Nonetheless, it makes sense that less objective learning is graded on level of effort and exploration, instead of correctness. And that effort would be more inherent in students seeking out niche courses where they want to...wait for it... explore something fuzzy and interesting.
Of course there are students looking to mail it in, but in my experience those students are looking for the lazy professors and charitable TAs for the courses that fulfill the foundational degree requirements outside of their major (this is just as true for Eng students who need a writing credit, for example, as it is for English majors who need a quant credit).
Most interestingly, if a gender studies course was graded more objectively, I'm guessing there would be push back for excluding any opinions outside of the defined parameters of success. It's a lose-lose situation that devalues gender studies but I feel that's for the customers (students, alumni, major donors) to decide.
This is missing a possible explanation: Anyone who’s not getting an “A” in Gender Studies drops it.
I don’t know if this is true generally but it was the only class I personally ever dropped in college because the workload was too high. Huge final paper with a lot of required references. I didn’t need it to graduate so it wasn’t worth finishing.
If a humanities or social science course isn't directly applicable to your major/getting a job/getting into grad school and is going to put a blemish on your transcript, I could certainly imagine that you might want to drop it.
I can think of three reasons why some fields might have higher grades than others:
1. The field is easier/has a lower "skill cap" (some business degrees might fit in here)
2.The people in the field are nice/particularly concerned with giving students positive feedback (based on stereotypes you'd expect this applies to women's studies)
3. The field isn't very prestigious and/or has low earning potential, so students don't go into the field unless they're very dedicated, so everyone in the classes works hard and performs at a high level (I could see this applying to pretty much everything on there above 75% As)
Whoa! In my undergraduate computer science program at a top US public university, each course was graded to a curve that determined the number of grades in each range. If memory serves, 27% of the class received A or A-. I knew grade inflation at private schools was real, but am still surprised to see 70% of Yale kids getting As in CS. At that point, they might as well just assign pass / fail grades.
E.g. we see data from one university – what about the others? Perhaps this grade inflation brings the grade distribution to the levels observed at other places. Or perhaps other universities are going through similar changes and Yale is no exception.
Also, the peak and a major spike happened at 2020-2021; are the pandemic, remote courses, or changes in teaching styles a factor?
Do college grades even matter at all? I mean maybe for your very first job or for grad school applications, but in both cases they're still going to be a minor factor unless the grades are awful.
For most of the professional schools (medical, law, and dental school) it is by far the most important metric. Business school is a close second and might have a little more leeway but it is still the biggest blocker of attendance for most applicants. Sure you can get into some business or law school, but after a certain point the ranking of the institution does matter for most people unfortunately.
Even for grad school it is still a very important metric, especially as not all undergrads are at R1 institutions where they can participate in (non bs) research. But lets say you're really just in it for the education and don't care, even then many valuable/important jobs only recruit from the top x schools in there respective fields.
So I would say yea, it does matter. In fact it's one of the few things that matter in many of those school applications.
I would not say grades are by far the most important metric for law school admissions. They are important, but LSAT is right up there as well. And of course, the undergraduate institution matters as well. You won’t get into HLS with a 4.0 from a no-name school, unless you’ve got a 175 (out of 180) on the LSAT.
But the power of the LSAT may wane, as they are removing the logic games, which was a big differentiator.
Sure, I'll concede that the LSAT is equally as important as your gpa. In my experience adcoms (just slightly) prefer high gpa's over high test score, in the case of applicants known as splitters, as the gpa can be a stronger signal of how consistently hardworking a candidate is. But my point still stands in response to the parent comment that they're extremely important
Pretty much this - they provide student rankings for graduate and professional admissions, and practically that seems to be their primary function (rather than improving educational outcomes, which isn't served well by stack ranking/grading on a curve.)
It's funny to compare attitudes towards curve grading and stack ranking. If only 16% of a class is good enough for an A, shouldn't only 16% of employees be good enough for a raise?
Maybe the professors could take the bottom 6% of students and come up with a plan to improve their performance. If performance doesn't improve, the students would have to leave the university.
This would help prepare students for their careers.
tl;dr: it’s a real problem; it’s also one we can transcend and grades themselves and accompanying resentment are the biggest problems ime
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If you find this upsetting, I would recommend taking a moment to consider how cruel grades can be. Yes, celebrating excellence is a lovely thing. But until college, one’s life is not fully self-determined. Many bright and gifted individuals do not experience the love and gift of learning and developing the intellect; but come to be oppressed by it; feeling they must put up with it just to get to the next stage when they may finally find freedom — my current working definition of authentic ‘freedom’ being ‘loving what one is doing, being loved by others for it, and having ones needs met lovingly’.
At Yale, a rare few have this kind of ‘freedom’ already — they love what they’re studying, excel at it, and have peers, mentors, or lecturers that enjoy them. And they get great grades; sometimes they are valedictorian and they compose some of Phi Beta Kappa.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are those with exceptional potential; yet were not offered freedom — namely, they were asked to learn and engage in things from mean or unfair parents, teachers, and peers. One can find themselves stuck in this realm without escape, in part on account of the lack self-determination one has before they leave the home.
Achieving this level of freedom, once one realizes they don’t possess it — which itself can be a difficult journey; let alone then doing what it takes to free oneself — to engage in life primarily with love for what one is doing, to be loved by others for what one is doing, and have all of one’s needs met is yet a more demanding, yet tenable journey; but is very personal and there may be no guides, though there are helpers (eg for some, those who ask questions like “what brings you alive and those around you alive?” or “how can you do what others love of you in a way that you, too, love?” — and encouraging you to not give up on attempting the search for an answer for oneself and to encourage you to take care of yourself so you have the time and space and enough love to continue on the journey, its attended contemplations and experiments).
Anger at grade inflation, though, strikes me as like begrudging a prisoner that was next to you in a chain gang; being angry and upset with them — which is reasonable to a degree if they take their freedom and don’t live ‘freely’ (ie seeking to oppress others for their benefit — which except for the rare sociopath is wildly unpleasant, as attractive as the money or other benefits it comes with can look; which is not to say money is bad). As opposed to directing one’s resentment to those who are binding them; and then finding a way to transcend all that bullshit and to truly be free.
People get mad at grade inflation because GPA is used to make job/internship selections. A high GPA in Yale’s biology program mostly indicates that you were able to get into Yale, not that you’re a good biologist. That flies in the face of the idea that the job market is meritocratic as is often claimed.
Why on earth would this be remotely noteworthy to Tyler Cowen, an economist? Set aside the cultural stuff -- it's obviously just market dynamics at its core. Humanities degrees are -- rightly or wrongly -- not considered to benefit one's future livelihood, so a priori, they are not seen as being as valuable as others in a financial sense, which drives down enrollments in humanities classes. When enrollments go down, it becomes more difficult to make the case to resource-constrained universities that the department deserves the funding used to recruit and retain faculty and graduate students, etc. (It's already a hard case given that humanities departments are less likely to bring in lucrative outside grants than STEM departments.) So, the faculty sing a song, they do a dance -- that is, they make the class as fun and entertaining as possible -- and they give everyone A's afterward. Word gets out (sometimes in a very structured way, via student social network groups), and students enroll (sometimes whole sports teams will swarm a single humanities class). The classes don't get cancelled, and more sections are created, which creates jobs for the grad students as TAs. Some professors are extra eager to inflate grades, because they like the attention and/or they want a following, which boosts their prestige (merit being more subjective in the humanities than STEM, too), and who knows, maybe one day they'll get a book deal or an NPR interview because they taught a famously big class. Some professors don't really want to do it, but the department chair really needs to keep that enrollment up so the provost doesn't axe the whole department in next year's budget, and the grad students have to eat, and what they study is important, so they bear up and do it anyway, and just feel guilty afterward.
It's a real phenomenon, and not good, but c'mon -- let's not pretend to be so shocked.
(EDIT: And the students will be extra disappointed if they don't get that A that was all but advertised to them, so it's all the harder to ever right the ship. And at prestigious institutions, there's always that facile argument that "If you're smart enough to get into this school, of course you're going to be smart enough to get A's at this school!" And all universities want to keep their future alumni donors happy...)
I don't see any evidence that Tyler is surprised by this. If you read his blog, it's wide ranging and the fact that he's linking something doesn't imply surprise. To me, the surprising thing here isn't the humanities. It's Math (52%) and Physics (67%).
That aside, I don't think your explanation is good. There are many forces behind grade inflation. Some of them are safetyism, suspicion of inequality, cheating via the internet, widespread subjectivism (who's to say who's right or wrong?), and so on. Probably the biggest factor is affirmative action. Having accepted a large number of students for reasons other than their academic performance, it's not possible to simply give them worse grades. It would look bad. The result is high grades for everyone and the creation of pseudeo-academic disciplines where everyone gets an A.
One problem though, humanities and social/behavioral science still dominate the overall enrollment. STEM enrollment although increasing recently, still has relatively been constant through the years. You could argue more people are going towards business majors, but business majors end up having to take those courses anyway. That still should not explain the difference in rigor when it comes to STEM vs humanities/social/behavioral sciences.
How does that make it STEM? If I study social science and use math does that make social science stem? Or does it mean you used a lot of modelling in a non stem subject?
you can name anything anything. Rename astrology as future science and that doesn't make it science. Social science is science like or science-y, but not science. Same with economics. They are heavy in math. They are math adjacent. They are not the study of math. They are a not a science. They are not engineering. economics is not STEM and grouping it with stem is weird.
So-called 'standards' are socially constructed by a euro-centric phallo-centric white-supremacist colonialist patriarchal dialect, and they are constructed specifically to otherize the marginalized, the non-cisgendered, and all the BIPOCs except asians.
Thats a pretty strong statement. Can you elaborate on that a bit? Im not familiar with the US university standards, and while what you write seems like intuitively it could be true, based on the history of US, I'd be curious about specific examples of standards that cater to a particular race and gender.
I saw this earlier via Paul Graham's Twitter, when I was foolishly venturing into the algorithmic feed. He'd gone with the same takeaway, specifically pointing out gender studies.
Bit of an odd choice given that it clearly shows History of Science and History of Medicine as slightly "worse" in this regard and with higher enrollment.
I mean, that kind of makes sense, since those are likely just required humanities courses for the "more difficult" science majors. Assuming those students are used to working harder for their A's, they'd have a competitive advantage in the more lenient humanities grading.
I’d think exactly the contrary: science majors would approach a history of science course expecting a history of discoveries leading from the Days o’ Ignorance to the Present, the Frontier of Knowledge. Or at the very least they’ll expect the course to be an internal history: history as told by scientists, not historians. But any history of science class that’s history is likely to be looking at questions of interest to historians, which are squishy, interpretive and don’t automatically privilege the Present state of knowledge as inevitable because it’s correct and science finds correct answers.
