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What's new here? Below is from 2019 and cites an article from 2010. grade inflation began at the college level in the late 1960s and kept getting worse.
How much of this is due to degraded admissions based on wealth, vibe, and DEI factors as opposed to harder and more reliable measures like SATs, AP scores, Olympiads, national competitions, etc? I get the sense that pre 2010 and esp pre 2000 Harvard grads are much better than
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Back in my day, a professor would hand you a final, light a cigarette, and say “figure out the Louisiana Purchase” in 10,000 words. No curves, no “A-minus for effort.” You either passed or you ended up selling encyclopedias.
Now you’ve got students complaining because their A in
You don't seem to understand why it is rational for Harvard students to demand As. Because grades are subjective metrics that are used in objective measures. GPA and LSAT are the only thing used in law school.
Grades became a metric as a way to thwart affirmative action bans.
Excellent piece - I think the only missing part is that in large part (at least at my elite college), the push for grade inflation was driven by "anti-racism" and decreasing the gap. (constant reminders that students from minoritized groups might be too busy to check their
As someone who finished college just a few years before both grade inflation - and tuition inflation - started, I feel we need Congressional legislation mandating that all college transcripts from the 70s and early 80s now be changed so every B becomes an A, every C a B, etc.
Its all torture because now profit is the motivation. Good research or talented people are presented as an outcome but thats just accidental.
Conveniently left out is even the faintest acknowledgement that grade inflation is a left wing phenomenon driven by the same perverse thinking that normalized participation trophies and the idea that intense exercise is bad for you.
cc not sure if grade inflation is precisely your wheelhouse but you may find this interesting anyway
Maybe they need to take more liberal arts courses where you have to write papers instead of business and stem where you don't. They aren't learning critical thinking.
Pinker seems too arrogant to consider the possibility that Psych and his courses in particular don’t attract as many strong students as before. For example Neuroscience has exploded at Harvard. Doubtless that has come at the expense for Psych of losing what would have once been
Reading your article I am reminded of this quote below from . Over achieving kids become over achieving adults with all the associated mental health issues that brings.
Quote
Andrew Wilkinson
@awilkinson
Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.
This seems like a problem confined to certain elite ivy league schools. Harvard, Yale, and Columbia all have 4 year graduation rates of about 90%. UT Austin it's only 75%, Texas Tech is 65%. The top-tier Ivies are very hard to get into, but once in, seems like you can just coast.
The problem is that colleges have often become more focused on credentials rather than actual learning.
Would like to see a grade level analysis of writing in senior theses in humanities subjects every ten years over the past 50-80 years. Up? Down? Constant over time?
Chinese grads know that already as it seems far and far less are now attracted by western universities
We are clearly trending towards an eventual pass/fail future. It's essentially a de facto pass fail system already. And a pass/fail system is a more ecologically valid representation of real world systems anyway. You either wrote an article with sufficient quality or you didn't
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I went to college in the late 80s and intellectualism was the exception rather than the rule even then. And if we want to talk about a lack of rigor, look at what college was like when it was a province of only the wealthy before World War II.
Are you surprised that a cadre of students specifically drawn from the academic elite then goes on to get good grades in university? The reality is that since 1985 admissions have emphasized excellence rather than family ties and the size of parents’ pocketbooks
Have you seen any correlation between grade inflation and increases in "proficiencies" and "outcomes assessment" regimes/bureaucracy?
It's rich that Pinker is complaining about rigor when he's giving multiple choice exams. That's the lazy professor's crutch.
A Philosophy professors at another University told me that he had cut the logic test to half of the length it was when I was a student there in 2000.
Your metric is biased to understate the problem! Because no more than 100% of students can get an A, the maximum possible multiplier is 3. Look instead at the ratio of students not getting As: 67/21 = 3.2...and that statistic goes to infinity when absolutely everyone gets A.
More proof college is a scam, even at the most prestigious institutions.
Then they “graduate” and join the Republican Party and make jackasses of themselves evermore,
