The author says that students won't take science courses because the average GPA is lower. Well that isn't the reason -- this is merely a consequence of students perceiving science classes as harder and requiring more work.<p>The solution should not be to make science classes easier or less work, but to increase the difficulty of humanities courses. The <i>culture</i> of hard work is important to establish, whether you are a humanities student OR a sciences student.
Being from the UK I've always been rather puzzled by GPA - we don't mark degrees that way at all. Traditionally there are only <i>four</i> possible values for a honours degree (3 years in England 4 in Scotland) - First, Upper Second, Lower Second and Third. And the bias in most courses is usually to have this based largely on what you do in the final year.<p>The idea of being evaluated as an average of every class for the length of the entire course would fill most people here with absolute horror - it being fairly common for people to scrape through the first year of a course and then do really well in the later years.<p>[NB Degrees in Scotland are 4 years because entrance is based on exams that are done a year earlier than in England, either that or to allow for the extra drinking that is required].
Other things being equal, I bet smarter and/or harder-working kids end up at private schools. So I'd expect the "grade inflation" (I hate that term * ) effect to be amplified there.<p>* I hate the term because it is so often used as if to imply that if the students at a university do too well, the explanation cannot be the merit of the students, but that the courses are necessarily too easy. If getting 95% on an exam represents a high level of learning/knowledge/work, and all of the students score 95%, they should all get A's. Professors sometimes attempt to combat "grade inflation" by giving ridiculously hard exams (<i>cough</i>Andrew Ng<i>cough</i>), but IMO all this does is bring to the fore uninteresting factors like how well one performs under time pressure, or how quickly one can perform arithmetic, or whether one has a photographic memory.
Money can do almost anything, because people can do almost anything,, and people want money. Therefore, if you have money to spend, you can have whatever you want done.
GPA in general is a rather baseless measure. Taking a class and getting an "A" means nothing; it's impossible for an outside evaluator to know whether that indicates a great effort in a tough class or an average effort in an easy class. I think we'd be better served with simply issuing z-scores and normalizing grades completely, so there's some real context.
Well, I was interested in how they got their data from my undergrad, Cornell, so I went looking...<p>Cornell publishes <i>median</i> grades, and they "estimated" the mean GPA from the medians. As far as I know, there's no statistically valid way to do that. You would have to assume a normal distribution, and I know for a fact that many of the courses do not have one.<p>There could be a systemic bias if private schools differ in the way they report their data. For instance, are public schools required to report mean GPAs, whereas private schools can cherry pick their data?
Anyone have any guesses for why the curve looks like it does? I can understand it going up in the long term, but why do private and public schools seem to follow the same basic curve? What causes a decline in GPA?
I would like to see the change in the enrollment of both types of schools. Maybe the enrollment of public schools increased faster than at private schools, so demand for private schools went up and thus they have better students than they used to.