As for employers, most were are blind when weighing majors and grades. In the early 80′s I was a physics major and ended with a 2.9 GPA with the tougher curriculum. Though I didn’t stay in the science field I noticed that some of my friends who had BA or liberal arts majors and to their credit ended with a very high 3.3+ GPA and fared much better getting jobs in the business world due to their better GPA. Others in a similar boat as me agreed that if we had to do it again would pick an easier major and would cruise in college with a higher GPA given the opportunity. I can see the pressure for higher grades on all counts. Jobs are so difficult to come by today.
Jason

In many college ranking schemes, colleges get more ‘points’ for students going directly on to grad school than they do for students going on to jobs. This was explained to me when I asked my professors why my college’s curriculum seemed to *only* prepare me for grad school and not employment. Whenever the number of students attending colleges goes up, the number of students applying to grad schools goes up. So colleges have to find a different way to make their students stand out. If you want your students to stand out to grad schools you give them exciting research opportunities (which costs major $), help them test better (not something you can guarantee), and give them better grades.

So if a college wants to improve its ranking without costly construction projects, grade inflation is the easiest route. It could spend a lot of money on cooler research gigs – which everyone else is trying to do (and if a school doesn’t have the most money, how can it win that competition?) – or it could just tell the professors to grade the students more gently.

With a curve, the arithmetic is a little more complex, but you can arrange it so the number who pass is most anywhere you want less than 100%(by varying the “shape” of the “curve”), and remember the “average grade” on a curve is not necessarily the median on which the curve is based.

So when we talk about grade inflation being the result of ensuring that some given percentage of the class passes, it ain’t necessarily so.

It’s actually worse (or better) than the article suggests, when you consider how much more of the population (per captia) goes to college now than in 1940. If you’re of the “grades as an absolute” persuasion, you’d expect grade *deflation,* as we’ve seen with SAT scores (and which has happened solely for that reason, not because Americans are getting dumber as certain Conservatives have suggested…which shows if nothing else, that they majored in Calumniation instead of Statistics).

Even if grading on a curve, the median, of course, ought not to’ve changed.

More interesting to me is that that the net inflation over 70 years is just about 20% overall, but while it’s 17.5% for public institutions, it’s a whopping 27% (!) among private schools.

This in turn suggests that since the main reason for the existence of private colleges is provide a mantle of superiority for the children of the privileged classes, that their grade inflation as a function of actual student accomplishment (prime example, our former president) is far higher.

But since the graph didn’t track grade performance on a per capita basis, we may never know. And of course, since the curricula are so different now than 70 years ago, it’s all pretty much meaningless anyway.

My personal theory is that the introduction of women and minorities to the cathedrals of the rich simply means that college students are now 17% smarter (if not more so ) overall than they were in 1940, and that the change in grades is not evidence of inflation at all. A rising tide, after all, lifts all boats.

The only thing that’s actually getting stupider is the media-consuming public.

Secondly, schools that refuse to differentiate between students are harming everyone. 20 years ago, I interviewed five engineers from the University of Illinois all of whom had a 4.0. We rejected all of them and took UofI off of our annual campus tour.

Which brings me to my third point. Good companies hire from good schools. Back in the day, IBM would take every engineer who graduated from Lehigh. GPA was not a factor. Yes, they were that good and no, I did not go there.

There were rumors of a “normalization function” among graduate schools (medical school, in particular was mentioned), and it was said that the multiplier/primary coefficient for our school was the highest among all. I had no way of verifying that, and, frankly, I doubted there was one shared among med schools. But I do remember some disturbing job interviews…one who actually said to me “gee, you’ve got a 3.5. But I’ve got another applicant with a 3.6, from (tier 4 state school), so my comparison’s actually pretty easy, and I’m not sure I even need to interview you.

It’s a vicious, socially induced cycle, this grade inflation, as evidenced by both my apocryphal story, and my personal anecdote.