Grade Inflation

hotvette

My daughter is a senior in High School (local public, not private) and just found out her GPA (4.0 unadjusted, ~4.4 adjusted for AP classes) ranks her 44 out of 450 seniors in her school.

While I'm delighted she is in the top 10% of the class, I think it's absurd that 43 seniors have better than 4.0/4.4 GPA. I'm aware of one major U.S. university (Princeton) that is engaged in an active program of grade de-flation. I sure hope the movement grows. It ultimately does a dis-service to the kids (yeah, parents too) to have such high grades resulting in a perhaps distorted perception of their standing against their peers.

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Evo

Congratulations to your daughter!! The major universities are deflating the grades as many of them do not take AP scores into consideration, from what I've been told.

G037H3

I agree. It's mainly an issue of lowered standards though, so that for a serious topic, a C student from the 50's likely knew much more than an A student in the present.

Mech_Engineer

Proof?

G037H3

Just compare the rigour of New Math textbooks with the ones widely used today. I'm pretty sure that mathwonk would agree with me on this.

Mech_Engineer

All I'm asking for is proof of your claim. Excerpts from two text books showing the disparity in rigor might be a start.

My point is that your claim isn't actually defensible. There are plenty of very smart A-students today that would run circles around a 1950's C-student.

fss

It'll most likely just be viewed as a 4.0 in the admissions office. Higher than 4.0 is fairly meaningless, at least in my experience dealing with admissions.

On the flip side, higher grades- no matter how artificially inflated the grades are- tend to bring more funding and more recognition to a school just based on how performance is evaluated. It's a shame that the system puts so much emphasis on numbers, but it's hard to otherwise quantify educational ability.

G037H3

You're free to not believe me. But from the end of WWII until the late 1960's, when the Civil Rights Act made it an impossibility, the US government and academia had a very different attitude towards developing education than the egalitarian model seen today.

jtbell

When I graduated from a 2000-student high school in 1971, the valedictorian had something like a 3.96 GPA. (It wasn't me... I came in a smidgen behind her.)

This was in a steel-mill town where education wasn't a high priority for a lot of students, but even in a rich big-city suburb I don't think there would have been more than one or two graduates per year with a 4.0.

CRGreathouse

I went to a talk at a math conference that showed textbook excerpts and syllabi from the 50s, 70s, and 00s at that university. I was shocked at how easy the material was -- you could take Calculus III for 400-level credit, or an introductory astronomy class for 300-level credit. In fact, in the 50s at this (good) university, you could graduate with a math degree (B.A., not B.S.) without taking Calc III. Now it's extremely rare for a math major to take the class later than freshman year! Also, a math major could get college credit for taking Algebra II...

So I would disagree with G037H3 on this one.

Now in fairness, because there were fewer of what we would call "advanced" classes required (or available), the students did get good with what they were taught. The person giving the talk (actually, one of my past professors) made a comment to that effect, at least.

ƒ(x)

Theres a school, Thomas Jefferson High school for Science and Technology, near D.C. for the "smart and gifted"--not that they aren't. I know someone who goes there and is brilliant--students. But, I was talking to him about GPA's, and he said he had a 4.6 or something because kids at TJ automatically get .5 added onto there grades. Then they get the +1 from AP courses

and...for my opinion, these days the general public has limited intelligence.

zomgwtf

I agree completely with this.

In grade 12 I took calculus as one math course and functions/vectors (I think) as another. My dad who took all 'advanced courses (we don't have that here anymore) doesn't know the first thing about calculus. It's not because he doesn't remember either, he's not particularly old... he never took courses involving this and they were never offered.

I think the level of work has gone up considerably from the 60s. I also think that kids now days are 100000x more intelligent than their parents are today let alone back in their prime!

As well at my school for consideration for admission you sometimes got your marks inflated by the university to make you on par.

rootX

I heard they reduced the Grade 12 Math curriculum to something like Grade 6 in Ontario ..

I believe it's more like 1/100000x looking at exams from 10 years ago and now for my courses :)

airborne18

At my daughter's high school she never had to take trig. Her AP classes were probably what we had at my high school in the 80's. But they didn't have the normal progression. She had to learn trig on her own.

Evo

Wow, trig and calculus are middle school subjects. (introductory level)

airborne18

To her credit she did extremely well on the SAT's. The school didn't even have AP courses until she was a junior.

It is hurting her now. She is a Comp Eng major at UofDel and she has to fill the gaps on her own.

The odd thing is that the high school was very strong in science, but they never had the math to back it up. Physics with a weak Calculus program is almost pointless.

I actually think the school's curriculum is what killed her chances for some programs that were interested due to her SAT's and GPA, but I think the transcripts killed the opportunity.

G01

Calculus as a middle school subject, even in intro form, is pushing it a bit, don't you think? I can see trig being covered in middle school, but calculus? The area I grew up in is not known for they're amazing public school system however, so maybe things are different elsewhere.