Only a few short weeks ago, all Dartmouth students logged onto Banner to check their fall quarter grades. Some were greeted by an unexpected A- in the Bio 11 class that they never seemed to be able to wake up for, while a fair amount of students were met with a disappointing C in the so-called "introductory" art history class that they thought would be an easy A.
Now, go back a few years, to 2001, when Harvard students checked their grades they should be just like us, right?
Wrong.
Instead, when Harvard undergraduate looked at their fall semester grades, a staggering 91 percent of students received As, according to a December 2008 Columbia Spectator article.
And while Harvard may be one of the most infamous examples of the growing trend of grade inflation, it is certainly not the only one. But in a world where the job market is becoming tighter and admission to graduate schools is more competitive than ever, the issue of grade inflation remains at Dartmouth and its peer institutions.
The Ivies have typically been the most notorious examples of grade inflation across the board. In 2006, 80 percent of grades received by students at Yale were As or Bs, according to a January 2009 Yale Daily News article. And at Brown, a November 2008 Brown Daily Herald article reported that 50.6 percent of grades given in the 2007-2008 school year were As.
"I've definitely seen that making a good grade isn't nearly as difficult as would be expected," Andrew Murray, a freshman at Harvard said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "In my classes I would put in work I wasn't sure was deserving of a good grade, and it would usually end up with a grade higher than expected."
Many say that grade inflation in the Ivy League is simply the result of the exceptionally hard-working students who choose to attend the schools. But the low levels of inflation at equally challenging schools like Swarthmore College and the University of Chicago seem to suggest otherwise, according to a Duke University study by professor Stuart Rojstaczer. "It's actually very hard to get a 3.6 or better here," Eddie Keefe, a sophomore at the University of Chicago, said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "In my opinion every class should be curved like [at UChicago] so the average student gets a B-, but it's not like that in most schools."
He added that the harsher grading policies relative to those of other schools can be frustrating.
"I have friends at Yale and they say it's hard to get worse than a B+," he said. "I took computer science and put over 20 hours of work in a week and got a C in the class."
In the last decade, some schools decided to put policies in place to guard against grade inflation. In 2004, Princeton University became the first Ivy to cap the number of As that could be given. The quota is set at 35 percent, according to a memo sent out by the college's administration. Similarly, after Harvard came under fire for awarding so many high grades in 2001, it put in place a new rule that capped the number of As that could be given to 60 percent, according to a May 2007 Harvard Crimson article.
Stephen Lamb, a junior at Princeton, said that the new policy has elicited both hostility and increased competition among students.
"Everyone complains about the policies of grade deflation," he said. "You're competing for the As [professors] give out, and only a certain number are given out. There's not so much a vocal culture as it is tacit. Everyone's working a whole lot harder for it in the end."
Specifically, Lamb recalled an incident where he numerically received an A in a class, but received a B+ because of the grade deflation policy.
"You have a lot of people who feel like they're affected by [the policy] which creates an antagonistic atmosphere between teachers and students," he said.
To help put grades into perspective, universities like Princeton and Harvard include a letter with each student's transcript, explaining their tougher grading policies to graduate schools and employers. Cornell, like Dartmouth, publishes the median grade in each course a student takes transcripts, while Columbia publishes on transcripts the percentage of As awarded in each class.
Keefe said he prefers the harsher grading policy at his college.
"It's a challenge," he said. "It's why I wanted to come here, so I enjoy it."
Still, one cannot ignore the fact that some jobs and graduate schools have GPA minimums that fancy Harvard letterhead can't make up for.
"The big fear is that some guy from a different school is going to get your spot at a consulting firm or graduate school because their GPA was higher," Lamb said. "But that may not be reflective of their intelligence or effort."
