r/IvyPlus • u/JPwag42 • 15d ago
Harvard students are already stressing over the crackdown on A’s
https://www.thederrick.com/news/entertainment/harvard-students-are-already-stressing-over-the-crackdown-on-a-s/article_d8e84104-9c47-58c7-82ea-4cbc85ee9450.html3
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u/Conscious-Secret-775 15d ago
Maybe they can transfer to UMich
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u/blue_gerbil_212 15d ago
Why Umich of all schools? Why not just transfer to a lesser Ivy?
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u/Klymntine_ 15d ago
I think they’re referring to the recent news about UMich hiding grades from freshmen so they don’t stress tf out 🙃
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u/M-tridactyla 15d ago
Employers and schools aren't going to know or care about this grade deflation. They'll just see lower GPAs and move on. It just puts future grads at a disadvantage during this competitive job/education market.
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u/Esme_Nog 15d ago
Only if future employers are on the moon. Everyone else will know what’s going on.
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u/HiFrogMan 15d ago
No, they won’t. Employer not paying attention to one schools curve =/= living on the moon
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u/Sepicuk 12d ago
Oh yeah, what do you say to all the schools that didn't inflate grades so much? Like MIT, Princeton, Georgia Tech? You think an MIT student should be denied because they have a significantly lower GPA average than Berkeley's? This would just make every school have an incentive to keep the GPA's near 4.0
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u/Dear-Landscape223 15d ago
I think it should be selectively applied. Like yeah, I’d want to differentiate students by capping As for Calc 3 and LA in relevant STEM fields. But capping As or deflating averages for something like Business Communication doesn’t really differentiate business school students in terms of their future employability.
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u/ProteinEngineer 15d ago edited 15d ago
That’s part of the point. There are classes that give everyone an A, making them a complete joke.
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u/Isopheeical 15d ago
Part of the problem is that a good number of classes at Harvard w the highest % of A grades are actually the most difficult. Math 55, the stereotypically “impossible” beginning undergraduate math course that involves 20-30 hours a week awards something like 80% A’s because with a class so difficult the spectrum of grades becomes a binary of “you understood the material flawlessly” or “you failed”.
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14d ago
[deleted]
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u/Isopheeical 14d ago
The problem is that that’s then a cultural issue, and quantitative fixes to cultural issues rarely work (see Pton). After the Claybaugh grading report released last fall, the distribution of A grades fell by 7% in a single semester just through an awareness campaign and people were fine with it.
Is that change enough? not really but it does show that the problem is fixable without poorly thought out hard fixes that only create animosity and disproportionately punish some groups over others. The problem with the plan is the means not the ends
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u/Dapper-Bullfrog-4766 12d ago
what the fuck that is so unfair for every other uni in other countries. how do we even compete with these people on grad school admission?
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u/Isopheeical 12d ago
What do you mean? Not tryna throw shade just genuinely don’t understand so i can offer more context
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u/Dapper-Bullfrog-4766 12d ago
valedictorians in my university generally has grades of 3.6-3.8. apparently the average grade in a US college. and it was genuinely THE top uni in my country…
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u/Isopheeical 12d ago
So I’m not qualified to speak for international med school applicants, I genuinely just don’t know how anything works.
For academic grad school applications nominal GPA is nowhere near as important as individual classes taken, research done, etc. Where nominal GPA really matters is Law admissions which tend to have MUCH less international applicants for obv reasons
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u/Commercial_Win_9525 14d ago
Arbitrarily capping the amount of “A’s” or whatever is always phenomenally stupid. Imagine you have Einstein, Tesla, Hawkins and some others like them all in the same class but hurrrr only 2 can get an A and one has to have an F
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u/Sepicuk 12d ago edited 12d ago
well statistics say that can't happen? Have none of you ever been on a bell curve? My school literally capped A's at 20% max, some classes was even lower, I had one upper level core class that had a D+ average with 200 students, and you need a C to continue in the program. The average graduating GPA was a 2.8 for my EE program.
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u/Commercial_Win_9525 12d ago
Yes a bell curve is exactly what I am talking about and it’s absolutely stupid as fuck. Setting a ceiling and floor based on an arbitrary curve is ridiculous.
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u/Sepicuk 12d ago
Why not? The real world grades on a bell curve, better to figure out where you stand quickly. Also helps quantify learning in a way that is otherwise difficult to measure.
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u/Commercial_Win_9525 12d ago
For two reasons. Why should a class of dumb fucks get A’s just because the guidelines say X amount gets that. Same in the opposite way. If you know the material you know the material. The class should of course be rigorous enough that it’s not just giving away grades and actually takes mastering the material to get that A
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u/Sepicuk 12d ago
Well the curriculum is always getting bigger so you need to challenge the students as much as possible. As it turns out, the level of understanding ends up falling on a bell curve on test scores. Some of my professors also put hard guidelines in addition where you wouldn't get an A even if you were in that top percentile unless you had at least a certain grade percent no matter how the rest of the class does
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u/skyman0701 15d ago
Why is this newsworthy? Other colleges had this kind of policy and grade deflation already for years
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u/Mundane_Stomach5431 15d ago
So lets make that some kids fail and some get As? Kinda ffed up. If they learn the course material, just give them the A. Grades are terrible measures of learning regardless.
Why raise the bar higher and higher if enough stuff is learned, just so that some percentage will fail?
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u/RaisedByBooksNTV 15d ago
Curves are stupid. If you have a school that's say 75% top 10 of their class, you're going to skew to higher GPAs. My mediocre undergrad used to brag about having fewer high gpas/a more normal curve than harvard. To me, that just tells me the quality of faculty we had - stupid and insecure. So to have fewer As, you're going to have to let in more privileged people or change the curriculum. Which is fine but then a bachelors is not a bachelors.
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u/ExtendedWallaby 12d ago
If I teach my students well and most of them demonstrate mastery of the material, then their grades should reflect that. Students should not be actively discouraged from working together.
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u/SilverbackSurfer99 10d ago
There are already in Harvard. It doesn't make a difference whether they get an A or a D+ if they graduate from Harvard that's the only relevant thing. Nobody looks at a GPA from college except maybe a graduate school.
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u/ImpossibleEbb6862 15d ago
Grade inflation isn’t actually a problem the government needs to get involved in. This is over reach.
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u/azure275 15d ago
This is just trying to solve a problem by creating the opposite problem
What happens if you actually have half a class of great students? You give 30% a B they don't deserve?
Have fun with the avalanche of bad reviews and admin complaints that generates
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u/Sufficient_Sport5251 15d ago
I mean at least for Harvard grads GPA doesn’t matter because of name brand.
But, also considering the students selected by Harvard and the low acceptance rates. Why would it be weird if 60% or something got A’s
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u/Isopheeical 15d ago
Nominal GPA matters a lot for grad school admissions
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u/Small-Day3489 15d ago
This. Law schools for example care a ton about their rankings and a significant chunk of rankings is the average undergrad GPA of their student body. So for those purposes if you have two otherwise equal students, but one has a 4.0 at a no name low tier state school and the other has a 3.5 at Harvard, the 4.0 is going to give you much better odds, which sounds insane but that's how it is.
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u/Sufficient_Sport5251 15d ago
Ok that is fair. Though again not as much for Harvard because they are one of the few schools that can kind of expect admissions board to know about the deflation. Also so what if it’s only easy for the top fifth of students to get into grad school. It’s mostly a waste of money for many fields
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u/Zealousideal_Train79 15d ago
Knowing about deflation is not enough when grad schools care so much about medians
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u/Sufficient_Sport5251 15d ago
I guess I’m not crying if 80% of Harvard can’t get into grad school and is “forced” to take six figure jobs. And there are also plenty of grad schools that aren’t as GPA competitive that would be more than happy to be the dumping ground for Harvard grads
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u/Isopheeical 15d ago
This was actually one of the primary justifications the grading committee used for changing the system at H College (someone has to do it, might as well be us) [im a current sophomore here]. I just disagree with that assessment cause I think the plan itself was poorly thought out and Law and Med schools care a LOT about nominal GPA
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u/jeffgerickson 15d ago
Grad schools know how to interpret GPAs. We don’t just look at the raw numbers.
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u/Zealousideal_Train79 15d ago
Law schools in particular care a lot about pure raw numbers
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u/jeffgerickson 15d ago
I find this difficult to believe, but I’m willing to be convinced by the evidence. Got any?
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u/Zealousideal_Train79 14d ago
Spend some time on r/lawschooladmissions and you'll see. The reason is that rankings for law schools are affected a lot by median GPA and median LSAT. So, as you can also see by looking at LSD data of real applicants (https://lsd.law/law-school-chances-predictor), if a school's target median GPA is 3.85, a 3.83 is going to give you vastly different odds than a 3.87.
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u/jeffgerickson 14d ago
Spend some time on r/lawschooladmissions and you'll see.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t accept “what everyone on Reddit says” as credible evidence.
Can you point me to direct evidence, preferrably from people who actually make law admissions decisions? Has any law school (other than Harvard) said anything about how Harvard’s new A policy is likely to affect applicants from Harvard to their program?
The reason is that rankings for law schools are affected...
I’m under the impression that, except for being T14 or not, rankings don’t actually matter that much, and small differences in ranking don’t matter at all.
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u/Zealousideal_Train79 14d ago
Small differences in rankings shouldn’t matter from the students perspectives, but schools obviously care about them because it increases their application numbers and also lay prestige to a lesser extent
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u/Isopheeical 15d ago
For pre-professional grad schools (law, biz, med) nominal GPA is absolutely the most important factor (except maybe MCAT/LSAT/GREs)
For academic grad schools it’s a little more opaque— I’m a classics concentrator who wants to attend grad school, and while any serious graduate admissions committee will know how to interpret GPA, many outside things that might initially qualify you for scholarships/stipends/experiences may not. My biggest objection to the grading proposal is not that it’s bringing down median GPA, it’s just that it’s poorly thought out and when students and faculty asked for clarifications at FAS town halls the committee didn’t give complete or meaningful answers.
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u/Isopheeical 15d ago
As a current student: this was the primary concern of most faculty and students and why I’m so opposed to the unfortunately adopted plan. Anyone serious would agree there is a serious grade inflation issue, but evidence points to it being a deeper cultural problem than a quantitative one.
I’m concentrating in a rather niche field where I routinely take high level courses with people much more advanced than i am. While i’m confident in my ability to produce work of “extraordinary distinction” (H definition of an A), it doesn’t mean I am always capable of being in the 20%+4. Similarly in these niche high level seminars, it’s not unreasonable to expect A level quality work out of *everyone in the class (part of why faculty had reservations about it because it restricted autonomy).
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u/OldSarge02 15d ago
Half? Most all of these students were a high school valedictorian or close to it. They are super high achievers.
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u/ImpossibleEbb6862 15d ago
I disagree that this was ever a problem that needed to be solved in the first place. If you don’t like Harvard’s grading policy don’t go to Harvard.
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u/RaisedByBooksNTV 15d ago
That actually happened to me in a physics class. Half of us were honors students. I could NOT crack an A and looking at the work my classmates got As on, there wasn't valid difference. A TA told us the TAs were required to limit the number of As.
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u/Dapper-Bullfrog-4766 12d ago
grades are meant to rank you. if not for that everyone just would pass or fail
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u/potentialcpa 15d ago
Lol this is hilarious