Can money buy you a higher GPA? | Hacker News Reader

Can money buy you a higher GPA?

economix.blogs.nytimes.com

28 pointssharadgopal29 comments

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.

The solution should not be to make science classes easier or less work, but to increase the difficulty of humanities courses. The culture of hard work is important to establish, whether you are a humanities student OR a sciences student.

The solution should also include making classes more interesting. That's another reason to avoid a class: it sounds boring. And what doesn't sound boring when it's in the context of signing away your time at specific hours every week for half a year and committing yourself to homework assignments and exams? I realize this isn't directly relevant to the trends in sciences vs. humanities, but it may be that when the whole paradigm is so dull people feel more incentivized to just choose the easiest path.

I suppose so, but frankly humanities classes will always be more interesting than science courses to many people because they relate more to our everyday lives (as ironic as that sounds, since science is all around us).

As a science student, I routinely loaded my schedule with humanities courses and hardly had to spend time on them (for the most part). There is no good reason why these courses were so easy in comparison to science courses, in my opinion.

Science classes require more work because the average GPA is lower. To get the same GPA in a science class as a humanities class, you have to do better than more people than you would otherwise, which means more work.

And yes, I agree that decreasing the average GPA in humanities classes is better, but you're ignoring one thing; students are horrible complainers. If you give them a poor grade, they will whine and wheedle. If it's on a test, and their answers are demonstratively false, they have no room to argue. If it's a paper, they will plead and annoy you until the cows come home.

Simply put, poor grades in a science class are much more defensible because science isn't as subjective. It's hard to grade hard in a humanities course.

That's why, just as in science courses, you need to be tough on grading throughout all of the student's courses. Of course, if one class grades harder, then students will complain. However, if grading is tough all-around, then that is what students will come to expect.

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 four 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.

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.

[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].

A lot of students suffer under it. I know I did, spent the final 2 years trying to bring my GPA back to something respectable. A lot of departments now list your overall and in-major GPAs. The in-major holds more importance unless they are the laziest recruiters. In general, you'll take more foundational courses that don't count against your major GPA for the first year. By the time you're a senior most of your courses will be in your major and count accordingly.

I will say, that one of the major differences between the US and the UK is no one really gives a toss about where you went to school and what you studied in the US. On my CV I still list my school and major, but it's a footnote, right above my interest in photography and basketball. American recruiters rarely ask me about it, and UK recruiters think it's almost as important as my javascript knowledge.

When you say "school" there, do you mean university? As far I can see, people are equally interested in the US as the UK as to which university you went to - at least for the institutions that have strong brands.

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.

* 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 (coughAndrew Ngcough), 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.

>Professors sometimes attempt to combat "grade inflation" by giving ridiculously hard exams (coughAndrew Ngcough), but IMO all this does is bring to the fore uninteresting factors

Agreed. I am not a fan of the testing strategy where the average is a whopping 30% and a curve is used to bring scores back within the normal letter grade buckets. Testing relative performance at this level encourages students to study exclusively "to the test". It reaches the point where gaining inside knowledge about the possible contents of the next exam by hounding professors/TA's or analyzing a friend's exams from last semester takes precedence over comprehensive learning, since the difference between a C and an A can be as tiny as predicting the presence of one particular question and nailing it from rote memorization. Such a deep curve also discourages students from studying collaboratively, since getting a good grade relies on X other students getting a worse score.

While your statement is most likely true, the study controlled for this effect by comparing students with comparable SAT scores.

Ah, thanks, I missed that. However, while I'll agree that controls for "smarter", I would point out that by the test's very purpose, it shouldn't control for "harder-working".

How is the SAT relevant? They should be looking at the GRE exclusively. This is one of the biggest problems with the US education system (and education in general.) The assumption is made that certain people cannot learn based on the fact that they know nothing.

Having been to a private liberal arts college, the environment is extremely rigorous. You can get the same sort of thing at state schools, but you have to be in the honors programs. I'd be interested to see if there are honors-track programs at the larger public schools that show the same "grade inflation." But because the public school is self-contained, the effect, that students in some classes consistently receive higher GPAs, is hidden.

Other things being equal, I bet smarter and/or harder-working kids end up at private schools.

I would bet differently, having checked the evidence.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0621.pdf

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg-affacti...

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510012

http://www.equaleducation.org/commentary.asp?opedid=1240

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html

The most disadvantageous position to be in, in United States college admission, is to have little money. Low-ability, high-income college applicants fare much better in the application process (they end up with more and better choices of colleges) than high-ability, low-income students.

P.S. The submitted article, contrary to the HN submission title, refers only to grade averages at college, but I think there is also considerable evidence, for which I have fewer convenient citations,

http://www.amazon.com/Wad-Ja-Get-Grading-Game-American-Educa...

that higher-income, lower-ability high school students tend to enjoy better grades than their lower-income, higher-ability classmates. Teachers respond to signs of wealth.

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.

The problem with this is how to decide which students fail and which pass a course. If you just use a cutoff on the z-score you will be consistently failing a certain proportion of the students, which might sound reasonable but completely ignores the fact that one is supposed to pass only the students that display knowledge on a minimal amount of the material. Theoretically, and A student completely knows the material, a B student mostly knows, with some less important parts missing, etc, and completely relativizing grades will lose this validation.

Another problem is that being a slightly-less-crappy student in a crappy class will give you a better z-score than being a great student in an excellent class.

> I think we'd be better served with simply issuing z-scores and normalizing grades completely, so there's some real context.

So should we punish people based on who happened to be in their class with them? That makes sense if you're picking cofounders or sports teammates or something else that probably doesn't really matter, but the entire point of school is to teach. It is not merely preparation for the job market, although some jobs still require a modicum of education. It is not a social club where you network your way into a startup. It is not a way to display your superior intelligence.

Schools are good or bad based on how well they teach material, not on how well they thin the herd or propel their students towards some illusory goal.

Well, I was interested in how they got their data from my undergrad, Cornell, so I went looking...

Cornell publishes median 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.

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?

Schools made grading easier during the Vietnam war because the students who flunked out were eligible to be drafted.

I would love a cite for this. It seems plausible, but if there's a cite, I'd be very grateful.

In _Excellence Without a Soul_, Harry Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College (and comp sci prof) gives the grade inflation theories a drubbing.

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.

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