We recently discussed the runaway grade inflation at Harvard where roughly 80 percent of grades were As. Now the Yale Daily News is reporting the same percentage of As. Indeed, the percentage is virtually identical. Harvard is handing out 79 percent agrees where Yale is apparently more rigorous at 78.9.The report is apparently an embarrassment to the university since the dean of Yale College said that professors are not adhering to guidelines for grading.Yet, this could hardly be a surprise to the dean since these grades are reported and issued by the records office.
Indeed, this average is reportedly down from the prior year where 81.97 percent of students were given As. So not getting an A at Yale meant that you were in the bottom 20 percent of the class.
That means that for virtually all of the students at Yale there was a three-grade system that runs from A+, A, and A-.
The percentage was higher in the African American Studies department at 82.21 percent. However, it was the Gender Students department that showed that 92.6 percent of grades were in the A range. So only 7 % of students did not receive an A in gender studies.
For employers and other universities, it renders the grades from Yale meaningless in judging the capabilities and record of students.
They are not apparently alone.
At Spellman College, economics professor Kendrick Morales was fired after objecting to the school raising his grades without his consent, even after massively increasing the grades.
Morales worked for two years at Spellman and taught two upper-level courses. In one class, he added a 28-point grade bump for one test at the request of his department chair.
When students overall bombed the final, Morales “pre-emptively” raised them 36 points so that a student receiving a 57 would receive an A. Yet, even with that increase, 44 percent of that class would still fail. Indeed, they had failed, but Morales says that Undergraduate Studies Dean Desiree Pedescleaux bumped up the students’ grades again without his approval.
He was later fired.
The allegations not only raise questions over the academic standards at Spellman, but the violation of academic freedom.
Grade inflation is only the latest sign of how school administrators have lost control of universities and colleges. It also reflects a growing expectation of students in terms of higher GPAs.
It is easy to say that this is the byproduct of the “trophy generation,” but this is not their fault. Years ago, I had an interesting conversation with one of my classes over this negative image and one student said that they never wanted participation trophies. She noted it was my generation that wanted them to have them, not the kids. Another student said that she would routinely throw away trophies as meaningless and insulting.
The same could well prove true for grades that they will become worthless and discarded if this trend continues. That will undermine a critical role of universities in evaluating the performance of students. That role not only helps future employers. It is even more important in offering students a true appraisal of their work. Often students will pursue degrees for the wrong reasons and not consider other fields that may be better suited to their talents and interests. If you are getting nothing but As in your economics or gender studies course, there is little reason to consider alternatives.
When John F. Kennedy was given an honorary degree at Yale, he quipped “it might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.” It turns out that both now come with the same 80 percent likelihood of receiving an A. The question is not the degree but the education at either school with such grade inflation.
“Yale is apparently more rigorous at 78.9.” 🤣 The same people who graduated from these institutions are the ones supporting all this participation trophy nonsense. So, as a state school grad, with lots of scholarships but no loans and and no whining about how somebody else should pay the debt I didn’t incur for my useless degree, my response is : nyah nyah!! Also, a note to the proofreader, the word “apparently” is used a lot of times in a short post. Maybe try “evidently, seemingly, it would appear, it seems.”
It’s important that Yale and Harvard see the need for more woke American janitors. In the future community colleges will prove to be the providers for science and technology based on hard work and merit.
@Margot
That’s the thing – they won’t be janitors, they will be the ones doing the hiring. The days of, ‘Would you like fries with that?’, are over. It is older and more responsible people with common sense and actual education and experience that will be, and to an extent already are, being ostracized.
@James – in that event there’s going to be a whole lot of unhappy shareholders. Thus far those hired with the same mindset have cost firms millions. Let’s hope if hired they’re delegated to more appropriate Spin Mops.
Drunk posting?
In a healthy trend, it is reported that some companies, such as Walmart, are dropping the requirement of a college degree for management positions.
Grading is always difficult, especially in disciplines that are not ‘exact,’ like literature, history or the social sciences, and some students have always felt that they deserved better grades. I was not particularly hard on my students, but I can recall having one who told me to GFM because his grade was a 3.0 rather than a 3.5, and another who told me that I was not qualified to teach because I had criticized her term paper. After I had spent the better part of an hour with one irate parent, explaining why his son had received a low grade, he said he would have me fired, and several students in one course complained to my chair that I was responsible for their low grades because I had not told them exactly what would be on their exam. There are a lot of wonderful aspects to teaching, but grading is not one of them.
The easy way out was to assign higher grades, but that only worked if the grade was what the student or the parent expected. From my experience, and what I could glean from conversations with colleagues, part of the problem was that administrators, particularly those in private institutions, tended to prefer to avoid confrontation with students and their parents because the latter paid their salaries and those of the teaching staff as well.
Tuition and fees at Harvard for 2023 total $79,450; at Yale, they are $83,880. In 2022, the median household income in the United States was $74,580, a decline from $76,330 in 2021. Median individual income was $40,480, making the fees at Yale equivalent to a bit more than the gross earnings of the average worker for two years.
Just sayin’ . . . .
Thanks for sharing your teaching experience. To clarify, what grade level were the students you were teaching?
Part-time at community college, and both part- and full-time at both public and private universities (undergraduate and graduate courses). At one private university, the administrators were terrified of the parents, who apparently sued when their off-spring received less than stellar grades. The problem at most places that I taught was the administration. The Greeks are right; the fish
rots from the head.
I am surprised that parents get involved with student grades and other issues in college — I didn’t communicate with teachers or administrators after high school.
This reminds me of the movie Clueless. Terminally-fetching Alicia Silverstone’s father is a lawyer and she has learned that grades are merely an opening to negotiation. Ultimately she gets them all increased and her father says, “I couldn’t be more proud if you had actually earned these grades!” My daughter and I always got a big laugh about that.
Yup. They’re going to get what they’ve paid for, amirite? After all, that’s how most of them get into the institution in the first place, isn’t it?
A good system gives students grades that accurately reflect their objective mastery of the course material, NOT the degree to which they exceed or underperform their classmates. Tests and other graded assignments should be structured with that goal in mind. ‘Curving’ the results really doesn’t make logical sense, but is employed as a simple, inexpensive band-aid, either to make up for deficiencies in the teaching/testing, or to avoid the repercussions of producing too low a grade average. A class of high-performing students is given inaccurately low grades by a standard curve, and a class of poorly performing students is given higher grades than they deserve. Either type of error is harmful to the students. If a student, or all students in a class, do not demonstrate a minimally acceptable mastery, then they should not receive a passing grade – even if the fault lies with the teacher or test. But in those cases where the fault does not seem to be the student’s, the school should expunge the grade from the records, refund any student born expenses, and provide an opportunity to re-take the class.
Unfortunately, most schools grade on a curve, as curving by definition produces metrics/results which are in an expected range and APPEAR acceptable to those funding the school.
2+3 =5 A+
2+3 =4 A
2+3= 17 A-
Congratulations, Yale students. You are all genius’s
As an aside, 2022-2023 reporting shows that white/Caucasian students are now a minority at the school, –with 60.1% identifying as non-white. Moreover, there has been a significant jump in faculty representation, a whopping 68% of tenure-track faculty are “Women, Non-Binary, and/or People of Color.”
https://faculty.harvard.edu/current-annual-report
https://admissionsight.com/harvard-diversity-statistics/
According to the Cleveland Clinic, “non-binary” is defined as “in simple terms, being nonbinary means that you do not identify (solely or at all) with the idea of being a man or a woman.” (limited to two hyperlinks, look it up).
(Why in the world would Harvard be tracking how many “non-binary” faculty members?)
(Apologies, this relates to Harvard, not Yale. I accidentally said, “the school,” implying that I was referring to Yale)
(I just looked up Yale. “With a White university-wide enrollment of 35.6%, Yale is diverse.”
https://blog.collegevine.com/yale-university-diversity-statistics/ )
Diverse and stunningly stupid.
There is a (very) old saying that no one ever gets hired because of what they learned at Harvard. Rather, they are hired because they got admitted to Harvard.
Harvard should sell a secondary certification “Could have been admitted” for $50K to qualified applicants who were eventually rejected for non-academic reasons.
One of my classmates recently quoted his Harvard rejection letter: “The greater loss was ours.” They oughta know!
Horse bolted this barn decades ago, professor. Started in the Schools of Education. It spread rapidly from there across the K-12 and college systems. Progessivism, you know. I fought some of the grades I gave (earned actually) through review boards, due process for students, for as long as eighteen months; my wife faced threats. “I will not let your grade influence my GPA!” Who needs that? Giv’em an “A”.
As the student body became more progressive, or woke perhaps, my evals went down down down…Good time to retire.
Maybe Mike Judge and Etan Cohen will write the prequel to Idiocracy based on US (elite) colleges.
It’s time for employers to tell Yalies and Harvard grads to not let the door hit them in the ass after an employment interview. In fact the resumes of those applicants should wind up in the cylindrical file. ( that’s the wastebasket for you Yalies and Harvard grads who don’t understand)
time to END federal funding and loans to Colleges
let Democrats fund their failure!
They all get A+ in Fascism!
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of the 18th congressional district (Houston) has a degree from Yale University.
That’s all one needs to say!
Joy Reid has a degree from Harvard and she claimed her homophobic emails were hacked. Not exactly Henry Kissinger (Harvard) and W. F. Buckley (Yale).
The Ivies have “woked” themselves out of relevancy. Mean it.
Wow, just wow. Way back when, in the 1970s/80s, the very first thing we’d hear at the start of each semester in college was what the professor’s grading system was. And the system was either a numerical range (90-100, 80-89, 70-79, etc) or a bell curve in which we were advised that most would get a C because that’s what a bell curve looks like. (They meant it, too.) Sounds like I got a more rigorous education at my state university than students are getting at elite institutions now.
Comment of a recent graduate of Yale or Harvard:
“I just graduated and now I are a millionaire.”
It’s not grade inflation if all the Yalies are secretly from Lake Wobegon.
Well Jonathan, millions of students across the United States are demanding the firing of any professor who dares to state that the October 7th attack of Hamas at a music festival was provoked by Israel. Given that, why shouldn’t they expect to be given A’s when they demand those ???
Sky, I believe it is the opposite of what you said. You will get fired if you support Israel, not if you blame Israel.
The professor that states that the murder and rape of over a thousand innocents is the fault of the victim will become famous and more popular. A professor that RIGHTLY says raping, torturing and killing innocents is an act of terrorism will be called to task by the powers that be, the students and the media.
Good. If they are so smart, they can figure out how to pay back their student loans that the rest of us are being forced to pay off for them, even though we paid our loans off.
Don’t let your kids major in any field that ends in the word “studies.” Such a field is worthless.