Many years ago, when I used to hire programmers, someone told me that a CS degree from an Ivy league was less of a reliable predictor of engineering talent than a CS degree from a University of California school (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB etc.)<p>The logic of this was that the engineering schools of UCs had a serious "weed out" process. If you went to an Ivy and made your major CS, because it was fashionable, you got through no matter what.<p>I don't have anecdotes to verify this-- much less data-- but I thought it was an interesting observation.
The interesting question is, is this happening only at the Ivies or across the board?<p>I haven't seen any data on grade inflation from non-top-tier universities. I would wager that if we're looking at second-tier (non-Ivy but still very restrictive), top-tier technical (engineering, etc.) and art/music schools, we would be seeing significantly less grade inflation.<p>Does anyone know if there is any data on this?
Ivy league students today are on average much smarter than ivy league students in 1950.<p>If the point of grades is to sort students then sure, grades are "inflated" in that they don't accurately reflect increasingly fine distinctions in intelligence or effort. But if grades are supposed to reflect how well students understand the material on some sort of remotely absolute scale then we should expect to see average grades going up over time.