Grade Inflation

While reading through a NY Times article on Law Schools retroactively raising their students’ GPAs to make them more competitive job market candidates, I stumbled upon this site. It’s all about grade inflation, put together by Stuart Rojstaczer, “a former geophysics professor at Duke who now studies grade inflation.” It’s a highly recommended read. This graph also confirms that some of our Ivy League peers are getting off the bell curve hook a little easy:

One thing to note, though, is that it’s not clear whether these grades are reflective of Arts and Sciences schools/colleges or entire universities. And even if this is just Arts and Sciences, the figures seem a bit high. According to these Cornell-specific data, the “mean GPA” for A&S in 2006 was a 3.36. I remember that during freshman orientation week (2008) the advising Deans told us that the average GPA of an A&S student was around a 3.1– this actually seems pretty reasonable to me, and I’m not sure why they would lie about this figure to a group of 1000+ new freshmen.

There is one aspect of the calculations that may be responsible for these discrepancies, and it’s the same issue that I highlighted in my recent post on median A&S GPAs for different majors. The 3.34 figure represents the average of mean grades awarded, not the average grade point average of a student in A&S.

Consider a stylized example: Cornell A&S offers 10 classes, one of which has 100 students and a median grade of a C, and the other 9 have 5 students each and the median grade is an A. It’s easy to see how the average student’s GPA would be much lower than the average of mean grades awarded.

Throw in A&S students taking engineering courses and you have a bigger mess on your hands.