Grade inflation at UC Riverside, and institutional pressures for easier grading
schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com
schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com
Giving out unjustifiably high grades devalues them. Why should a top student apply themselves, if everyone is going to get an 'A'? A student putting in low effort needs to get a wake-up call by failing exams or assignments.
Grades tell the school how a student is doing, and may serve as a basis for admission to particular courses or projects. Grades tell the student how they are doing, and where they need to invest more effort. Grades inform potential employers where a student's strengths and weaknesses are.
Ok, stepping back: one possible reason for undeserved high grades can be found in the school administration. Students who fail too many courses must leave the school, and that costs the school money. Administrators tend to think of this year's finances, and don't care a whole lot about long-term reputation. Professors and instructors have to push back, have to insist on maintaining a level of quality. No one wants to teach for a diploma mill.
This was not my experience in a large public US research university for undergrad and masters in math and CS. So many of my STEM classes had exams that were not calibrated at all to any "bar" of minimum expectations. Often the median grade for exams (out of 100) was 30-60. So the prof fit it to a normal distribution and then put arbitrary cutoffs for what counted as an A, B, C, D, and F.
Social science and humanities was often very different grading. I had a humanities prof tell me exactly what you said when I asked about the curve: there is no curve, I do not compare you to other students, I compare you to my own standards.
Undergrads on the other hand, a bad grade means screened out of interviews.
The only one of my humanities classes that had a curve was the "Introduction to logic" (which was offered by the philosophy department). It was a rather gentle curve, but the tests were also open-book.
The other was a more open ended set of problems. That was graded on a curve, and was a lot of fun.
But yeah, every other CS class I took was on a curve.
The worst part of the modern college experience I think is the fact in many majors, you no longer learn relevant job skills and are expected to learn them in undergrad or post grad research outside of the courseload. This obviously sets up a world where more advantaged students who can afford free time to such things continue to hold the best outcomes, despite recent DEI pushes from admin to avoid these things. I’ve heard a professor actually state with pride how the lab classes in their department have not changed in over 40 years, so that grades from 40 years ago could be compared to todays grades, somehow believing that is more useful to employers than getting qualified candidates. Then on the other hand students have to take so many concurrent credit hours in different classes that they will admit to triaging their study time and giving up on certain classes, where they might have succeeded if allowed more time for focus perhaps in one of those month-mester formats, where you can get a semester’s course done in a month or so.
Colleges scoff at the idea of becoming "job training schools," but that is exactly what they need to be. The students are, overwhelming, there to "get a good job after college." Only a fraction of them will continue on to spend their entire career in academia.
If you want to argue that elite schools in particular often over-rotate on the theory and don't do enough to get students hand-on I won't really disagree with you. But there is a distinction from trade schools.
Almost no CS major will get a job that will require them to write their own programming language and compiler from scratch. But having done that, I am way better off than if I spent that semester taking a bootcamp on the latest implementation details of the newest language or framework at the time, which is now obsolete.
Hiring for theoretical knowledge, hiring for abstract-reasoning skills, and then training ... sounds good in marketing collateral, but only the Googles of the world can afford to do it, and even Google may be changing their tune. (Of course, R1 faculty have never looked for an industry job in their lives.)
If you don't believe me, look at some job listings.
And it hasn't been my experience at all. But code camps are always an option.
This is the kind of thing that sounds great within the purely abstract world of an academic bubble, but falls apart at first contact with reality.
It's important to learn the foundations, but that shouldn't be treated as mutually exclusive with learning practical skills.
The fact is modern companies don't want you to have the ability to acquire a new skill, they want you to have that skill on day one. This is even more true outside the programming realm. It's short sighted and counterproductive long term but when the next quarter's earnings are what matters, long term is but a an abstract concept.
Straight out of college, the hard truth is that you know virtually nothing, even if it sounds harsh ( and no you’re not a senior engineer after 3 years ). If I find someone who’s really good at c++ out of college, has started learning rust, wants to learn, and has good foundations, I’ll happily hire them.
The only exceptions I can think of are where you're hiring someone specifically to work on language tooling - e.g., to work on the core C++ library team at Google, you probably need some experience with specifically C++ or C and compilers thereof. Those would be very specialized senior roles, though.
For a counterexample, I hired this way for a long time.
Like you said, it works for university students because they don't have experience under their belt yet.
It becomes less effective as you get into more complicated languages/frameworks and you have less time to ramp people up.
In the worst case, we'd invest a lot of time mentoring people in a new language or framework and 6 months later they'd decide they preferred their old language/framework. They'd either leave the company to find a job that fit their preferences, or they'd become disgruntled and spend their days complaining about our language choice or trying to persuade us to rewrite in their preferences.
In other cases, people would try to write everything in the style of their previous language, even if it doesn't match the new language or framework.
It happened enough times that I now prefer candidates who already have proven experience in the language we're using. I won't exclude candidates who don't have experience in it yet, but it's rare that I'll pick a decades-long Python programmer for a Rust position, no matter how much of a Python wizard they are, as long as we have good Rust candidates in the pipeline.
I was expected to learn and become proficient in things like CSS and Javascript and HTML as well despite never taking a class on any of them.
My degree taught me how computing works, from the theory to the logic gates to the math needed to interact with basics in the field.
You know, companies used to spend money "training" their employees to do the things they needed to do. When computers first came around companies had to turn a mountain of secretaries into the very first programmers and computer administrators, and those mostly women bootstrapped the entire information economy. But that investment into human resources could better be spent on the CEOs private plane so they've spent the past 40 years bitching that "waaah waaah higher education doesn't make me cheap little worker bees waaah" as if you are entitled to free labor just because you "run" a business
The skills you actually need are manuscript writing. Being able to read a dozen scientific articles a day and gleam what they are saying accurately. Being able to convert that into presentations for other people. Using existing knowledge to develop a research proposal that’s actually topical or relevant to the field today.
People don’t get that experience, at most a training wheels on sort of manuscript project in undergrad where you cite 5 things and only your TA is reading it, not peer review. As such for most people, the first few years of PhD are basically spent spinning your wheels in the mud until you gather enough of these untaught soft skills to actually produce work.
So if you consider the whole undergrad plus these first few years lost in the wilderness in gradschool, its like 7 of your best years gone down the drain because the training system for decades has been “figure it out.” Even as bad as today is, its still a little bit better than a few decades ago when people were spending even longer faffing about in PhD programs on average.
You might not realize this yet, but occasionally overloading students with coursework is actually a positive. I attended an academically rigorous college and as an average student there was just no way I could finish everything on time in a high quality way. This taught me effective time management, ruthless prioritization, and the pointlessness of perfectionism. Those lessons were more valuable than the content of any particular course.
If that’s the case then we shouldn’t be funding them as such. Virtually all the support for public funding of post-secondary education is helping people get good jobs and get upward mobility. This is obvious from listening to how politicians speak about educational funding.
I don’t really think anything in college is particularly helpful for entry level white collar work, it’s just what the employers are asking for.
Of course, long term many of those entry level white-collar jobs are likely to be eliminated altogether by automation and offshoring.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-degree-job-requirement/
That being said, it is going to take more than one year of labor crunch for this to be reflected in the choices of students to go to school for a job years later. And I've heard of employers who have tightened the screws on older employees without credentials.
Mobbed how? I have had students protest their grades - there's a process for that. If the grade is somehow a mistake, or unfair, it gets corrected. If not, and if the grading is demonstrably fair, what are they going to do?
FWIW, although I am a hard grader, the student ratings indicate that they appreciate it.
The best defence against this I suspect is to have a clearly communicated, unambiguous grading scheme, but this can be difficult to do in an even handed way.
I had one undergrad prof whose policy was this: All incorrect answers get 0, no exceptions. Correct answers lose points for all steps not shown the way he had demonstrated.
There wasn't a lot to argue about, but none of us felt his approach was entirely fair.
I've definitely encountered some professors are just terrible educators that take pride in failing as many students as possible... Not that I'd claim this is the case for you, but I always wonder when people bring up these massive rates of failure.
University must not be easy for slackers. Slackers must fail in class, or they will not learn the real-world lesson that underlies it all.
As an undergrad, I was a keen student. I listened, learned, and put hours into my homework to really make sure I learned it. I took three courses where around 75% of the class failed or dropped out. I learned an incredible amount of material in those classes, and I aced each of them. I observed my classmates treating the classes like any other, phoning in the homework and getting slaughtered in exams. Each instructor had a prepared speech for day 1 setting expectations for the difficulty of the course.
You get out what you put in. Yes, bad and ineffective teachers exist, but in my experience those teachers are the most generous with grades. The tough ones, willing to fail anybody who doesn't know the material, have the highest standards for themselves as well as the students.
If you really want to know how effective a teacher is, you can't just look at the grades in their class. You also need to track their students to the classes which depend on that material.
That tracks with both my personal experience as an undergrad at a major state university, and my wife's experience with her colleagues teaching at a smaller state college.
As an administrator for an Extension school (at a major university), I inherited a set of Accounting instructors who failed most of their students in intro courses, and took pride in doing so! In their view, they bore no responsibility for their students' success, or lack thereof. The students needed to work harder.
I replaced all of them with instructors (men and women) who had much better professional credentials ... whose students earned mostly A's and B's. There's no evidence that the second set of instructors lowered the standard in any way - their students continued to do well in the program. The new instructors just taught better, and cared more.
Unless admissions massively screwed up and people who can't do algebra are suddenly taking quantum physics, it's almost always the instructor's fault. But being an instructor (in US HCOL areas) is such a poorly paid and ill-respected profession, it often doesn't attract the best and brightest.
When I was a student, the old "the university is not a school" culture was still strong in my university. The idea was that universities were places of learning, not teaching. Formal teaching was a supporting activity rather than a core part of education. The university made a honest effort to support you to the extent its resources allowed, but the responsibility to learn was 100% yours. If you failed a mandatory exam because the university could not offer the corresponding class that year, it was your fault.
While we are bringing up this point, it doesn't have to be quantum mechanics. The invention of algebra based physics classes (which is Mechanics and EM) without calculus is the same thing. Instructors mostly are teaching trust me these are the formulas to use them and this how to use them.
That's an extraordinary rise in grades. It seems like part of the conscientious discharge of your job would be to compile the evidence that these instructors did _not_.
I think "only a poor teacher blames their students" is a pretty tempting companion to "only a poor craftsman blames their tools," but, at least from my motivated thinking as a teacher, I don't find it completely true.
The structuring of universities as businesses means that there's a strong, if seldom explicitly acknowledged, tendency to view a degree as something that is purchased, rather than earned. This means that there is a lot of pressure from administration to make sure that a large proportion of an increasingly large population of students—students whom the faculty had no voice in choosing—eventually get their way to a degree. The students who are interested in their education still work sincerely towards that goal, but the ones who view a degree as a credential they are purchasing can fall, intentionally or unintentionally, into the trap of relying on this institutional pressure to shepherd them through as long as they play the system correctly. And then, as a teacher, your choice is to connive at this "go along to get along" mentality, or to be stuck in a situation where there is no reasonable way to get students who came to you unprepared—for societal and educational reasons—to a point where one can honestly say that they have mastered this course's material and are ready for the next.
The prerequisite courses are grade inflated so the incoming students lack fundamentals. The only way you can then run the course is to either grade inflate as well and pass students who don't have a clue about the topic or you fail like 3/4 of the class.
If the prerequisite courses weren't grade inflated and the incoming students actually knew what their grades says they should know then it wouldn't be a problem.
Part of the issue with poor grades in this remedial class is a failure by students to take it seriously. They're incredulous that they need to take it; after all, they got all As and Bs in high school, and completed through calculus! One would think that bombing the placement exam and failing the first exam in the remedial class would be a wake-up call, but apparently not.
So, yes, actual grade inflation must be a problem, at least some of the time.
I attended my public school just as CS was becoming a hot subject. My entering class had 300 CS students; by the time I graduated there were 900 incoming students into CS and many more clamoring to get in, and the program was struggling with such a fast expansion; but telling voters that we are expanding CS education sells well. On top of that the university had also been decreasing the amount of remedial core classes for students struggling as well.
Intro to Stats: it's vastly vastly more likely that the 0-5% failure professor is not doing their job and is just passing every student regardless of the quality of their work.
I graduated in 2016 and never once had an employer concerned about my grades. It would be a red flag if I had.
Half my time in college was spent working in the dining center cleaning dishes to help pay for my education. I didn’t have the luxury of studying as much as others did.
All the best employers had 3.5 or bust.
IIRC he was above average at Caltech, but GPA was abysmally low compared to applicants from Stanford, Harvard, Pomona, and other egregiously inflating schools.
From a distance, I think highly of Harvey Mudd, but I don't know their grading policies. I doubt they grade harder than Caltech, since HMC's branding is all about "we want to help you succeed" and Caltech is more of "we're going to beat you up [intellectually]."
However the graduation rate tells perhaps a (slightly) more nuanced story about rigor. HMC, despite beimg more expensive to attend than Caltech, had a lower 2023 graduation rate of 91.5% vs Caltech at 93.7%
it's not that different, and probably you can construct error bars that enclose both of these bounds within plausible parameters, but it suggests that there is a somewhat higher premium for failure of those actually accepted at HMC than even the mighty Caltech, and a greater willingness to uphold standards at the expense of angering (relatively) wealthy parents.
The high tier companies told everyone before they stood on line that unless you have a minimum of 3.0, you were better off going somewhere else.
Not sure about that. Don't know any faang companies that care about your grade.
Five years into your career, yeah, they just want to know whether you have a degree and your work experience. Grades certainly matter when first starting out however.
Pretty much anything above a 3.0 for a STEM degree is just a measure of how much you cared, or how much free time you had anyway.
Not really, even half a year of internship in a average software shop/your own software project/working experience in any software position is enough to win over a great student with 0 experience to score you a chance of interview. And the interview experience is the same for everyone.
The school experience frankly doesn't account for anything except whether the candidate has the fortitute. You learn on the job anyway. It's like how they use leetcode where they just want to see how hard you want the job.
Source: I am in faang.
Of course, sometimes 50% of a class fails because the teaching is shoddy, or the grading is unfair, or the prerequisites weren't properly set or enforced. It isn't always a failure on the part of the students. Failing grades are inherently a failure of the system to prepare and guide a student through material. A common symptom of that systemic failure? Lazy, unmotivated students.
The answer is obvious to any student but eludes employed academics - the schooling system from the 1950's does not solve 2020's problems. Educational orgs were founded by motivated people with specific vision that fit their time. Those people are long gone and now they are grand beiracraucies that have tried and failed to systemize knowledge and responsibilities. They are endlessly trying to recapture magic because the orgs evolve into many non cohesive groups.
Grand systems with many abstractions work when an org is for profit and owns enough fundamental intellectual property and market share that their relevance is by market force. If they didn't have that then a startup could replace them tomorrow.
Education on the other hand is propped up by welfare. It is effecticely the law that only accredited institutions can be "education". Yet we know for a fact that a 10 minute YouTube video has significantly better effects on learning than a semester of classes.
The market of education needs to be disrupted in order for students to succeed.
If an instructor plays a video in class, it doesn't work well. "Why are we here again?".
If the video is assigned, then its ignored because students have to pay on the private loans that pay you. They have to optimize their life because late stage capitalism and government obesity is squeezing the life out of the younger generation. It's human nature but it's often ignored in favor of easy explanations. If you disagree then simply listen to the conversations students have when they think nobody is listening.
The solution, which can be gained by asking any successfully educator (rarely professors), is this - you are a content creator. If you don't know how to play that role, then you can't educate well.
The whole purpose of an instructor is to take difficult concepts and make them easier for the human ape brain to understand. We do this by leveraging visual recognition, memory, and social behaviors.
For example an instructor that presents good information with a poor performance will result in poor communication of that information. This is so common I could walk into a classroom and example it right now.
The problem can only be solved by competition with the existing orgs. There are far better methods, and you can find them if you search.
Citation needed. As somebody who just wasn’t compatible with the school and academic system, eventually dropping out because it took a mental toll on me, doing engineering research in the industry nowadays and considered to be a high performer at work, I’m lucky my employer didn’t care about my grades but looked at my private projects instead.
As a potential employer, I would prefer to know where the student landed relative to their peers rather than an absolute score.
Maybe in addition to the absolute score we could know the students percentile score in the class.
It's not impressive to get an A at Harvard, all that says is they aren't in the bottom 21% of the class. Being in the top 10% of the class is impressive.
Everything about going to college is to a stamp of approval that you are “better” than others. Better than people from other schools and better than people within your class.
The entire academic system is also “stack ranked”. Promotions depend on getting published in journals, winning awards, and getting grants that others cannot get.
You're in the very small minority. Virtually every professor I had in college employed scale adjustments to grades based on class averages.
New topics are added, new teachers, new academic plans defining which courses are required and when. New initiatives, programs, and policies are created all the time that change how people move through the education system. Even someone teaching the same course for 30 years is going to experience their own ups and downs that they may, inadvertently, project onto their students in different ways at different times.
I'm not saying you should hand out undeserved grades. I agree with your perspective that grades have to mean something and high grades need to be earned. My personal take is that as a society we just need to get comfortable with C's, because that's where the average should be. (Sure, who wants to hire a Writer who's only average at writing? But by letting them know they are only average in writing you can now give them opportunities to _measurably_ improve, or highlight that they are above average in math and might be more successful there.)
But if 3/4 of the class failed then _something went wrong_, and I would hope that our educators are able to reflect on that a little more then, "because they deserved to."
The only thing those students got out of that class was an F. And the one thing the school administration has got right is that giving out F's is a failure of the institution. The problem is that right now their incentives are to reduce the number of F's rather than improve the teaching and learning. If those students had learned something or got your wake up-call, they would have done better.
I'm not blaming you. There's a whole institution behind you, and several more over a student's education, with all sorts of problems and not enough of them having anything to do with actually educating people.
But solutions have to start somewhere, so I would still look to you to talk to your fellow faculty and leadership; tell them that 3/4 of your class couldn't even hit average marks compared to every other time you've taught the course, and that we have got to do better to prepare incoming students for the material they are about to learn.
Education isn't about regurgitating the same things over and over and keeping up the same bell curve until you retire. It's about teaching and learning and creating new opportunities for people to grow. That won't always work for everyone. You'll have to give out a an F here and there. But just like high grades should mean something, low grades should too. A student putting in low effort but grokking the material should be getting a C. An F is an indicator that something is wrong and the student isn't where they need to be.
The difference between an A and an A- is not one of mastery but of minor errors and lapses in focus.
Teachers don’t have the ability to meaningfully measure top performance. Imo grading should have a lower ceiling for an A but no curve.
So much anxiety would be lost if everyone just chilled out and said, look, if you generally understand all the material, you get the top mark.
"Student transcripts, too, might be better understood in the context of institutions' and departments' grading standards."
Students don't want As for the sake of As. They want As to increase the likelihood that they can get a good job or get into grad school. More employers care about GPA than looking at transcripts. If schools are able to adopt a consistent way to measure student achievement across majors and schools that takes into account difficulty, then there would be less demand for grade inflation. If everyone gets an A, then that isn't a signal of student achievement.
But that attitude starts in high school. As a parent of kids there now, rampant grade inflation and an "infinite re-do" approach to assignments and tests really sets the tone for kids to feel quite bad about themselves for a B+.
I'm bullish on standardized tests becoming more, rather than less, important for admissions to competitive (or more honestly, limited-number-of-student-slots) universities at the undergrad and graduate level.
A thing that I feel is VERY true is that most "highly selective" colleges and universities probably get a relatively small percentage of "instant admit" applicants and a much larger number of "probably will be successful here" applicants. A higher standardized test score (ignoring some nuance here) is a useful tool for entering the admissions lottery in that second group. It isn't all there is - I see high school grads with good standardized test scores, the default high GPA, and not much or any interesting things otherwise struggle to gain admission at over-subscribed schools.
Switching to actual college coursework, when I have taught undergrad students, I use demanding individual projects (evaluated by oral presentation, demo, and questioning) as a significant part of the course. It mostly doesn't scale as an approach but my (biased) feeling is that for the "middle 50%" of students, it is a valuable and worthwhile effort.
All of this gets really murky and nuanced depending on what your real goals are. Those goals are often quite different depending on perspective.
It was also normal for a double digit % of the students to fail the exam and retake the course (me included).
Its not exactly what people think of as a standardized test, but it ensured all students in the school had the same acceptable level of comprehension on the subject.
That isn't very specific, 10% failing a technical course is very low, 99% extremely high.
In a normally competitive college market, students are pressured to do well academically. If they do not, they receive low grades, then get put on academic probation, then get dismissed from the college and are replaced by a more academically capable student.
For top level schools (MIT, Berkeley, etc), there will always be more students. But for state level universities and community colleges, there is not always another student to take their place due to factors above.
So, grade inflation seems like a natural solution to the immediate number of enrolled students problem, however the long-term tradeoff is that it devalues the institution's image by not holding new graduates to the same standard that graduates 5-10 years ago were held to.
You see this all the time in FinTech - some firms only hire from Stanford, Yale, etc because those colleges are great at creating students with a certain baseline standard of education. The amount of time it takes to ramp up students from those universities compared to others is significantly less.
So in general, grade inflation is a short-term fix that might have long term consequences.
1) Grades where artificially inflated for some students that couldn't keep up for social or political reasons and to help with their economic future. The idea being that in a "real" job, it isn't about always being exactly right and you can always research any info you need in quasi-real-time, not to mention most of your actual job requirements will be taught to you on the job. So a can-do attitude and good communication skills are adequate and a bad grade should not stop your progress.
2) Students were just smarter and better prepared each successive year. If a student makes an A, you give them the A! And if the school is very selective a lot of students will make A's. They are not there by accident after all! As an example, the average GPA in my school was a 4.1! (And I mean my university, not my high-school where AP "tweaks" GPAs)
I was even in a class where one of our projects was to research and write about this. At the time, there was no one right answer, it seemed.
Ime, in 2010-2013, it wasn't that difficult to get admitted into UC Berkeley or UCLA or an Ivy League if you were in the top 25% of your class, but by 2015-2019 it shrank to the top 1-5%.
This had a downstream effect on admissions for other UCs and CSUs as well, as everyone ended up joining their backup/safety school.
The student base became much more rigorous at lower tier UCs, but grading practices haven't changed in 10 years, especially given the fact that most UCs excluding UCB don't grade on a bell curve.
A program like UC Riverside is now much more competitive in 2023 than it was in 2013.
2013 -https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/CDS-2013-14.p...
2019 - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors...
Of course, and this is the point - it had made college freshman more college ready.
AP Coursework is equivalent to the content taught in the 101 course of just about every UC or CC. Doesn't matter if it's AP Chem/Chem101, AP Calc ABC/Calc1-2, AP US History/US101, etc.
The fact that it has become normalized for high schoolers to take first-year level coursework in high school points to younger high schoolers cohorts being better prepared for 4 year programs compared to older cohorts.
> the student from 2023 actually more prepared than the one from 2013 for college
There is a direct correlation between High School performance and College performance [0][1].
And UCs do take into account high school level variability [2]
[0] - https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/northwest/Public...
[1] - https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/high-school-GPA...
[2] - https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/how-to-apply/ap...
You need to take the AP Exam and score a 5 to get full credit for these classes at the college level.
If you did not a score a 5 on the AP Exam, you aren't getting out of the intro class at the UC or occasionally CSU level.
> the 50% marks like candy
I don't think you're American based on that statement alone. It sounds Indian or British - especially because in the US a D- is 60%, a C- is 70%, and so on, and we don't use the word "marks", and you need a C- average to graduate from a UC.
> even this is still removed from learning how to actually work in the field, experience you can’t really get unless you can get a professor to let you work under them
Idk about where you are in the Commonwealth, but internships have been normalized in the US since the 2010s.
Almost everyone in a decent program (aka every UC - even Merced) can land an internship or research experience after finishing lower div requirements
At some UCs, and in some subjects, you can get more credit for a 5, but in some subjects you get full credit for a 3, even at Berkeley. It depends on whether the test is relevant to the main topic of your university studies, or tangential to them. A 3, 4, or 5 on either AP Calculus exam will get you entirely out of having to study math at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Sciences.
Fair point!
That said, you get full credit but it won't exempt you from major related coursework in most cases. Circa a few years ago, I think AP Lit had the best RoI for AP Class to Cal Class Credit as they took you out of the intro writing classes in LAS.
> A 3, 4, or 5 on either AP Calculus exam will get you entirely out of having to study math at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Sciences.
Quant Reasoning/Math1a (intro calc) yes, but you'd still need to take Math1b/53/54/55 depending on your major in L&S.
If you're an English major it probably doesn't make sense to do anything beyond 1a, but if you're a STEM major then 53/54/55 are de facto requirements and they will require 1b.
Every other AP required a 4 minimum at Cal
My high school was definitely far from typical, but it did have an Intro to Organic Chemistry that did provide some extra practice for the gruntwork of organic chemistry (especially organic nomenclature).
ACT scores have been falling since at least 2017 but possibly earlier [0]. GPAs in the US have gone up because of grade inflation (in large part due to NCLB and schools being rewarded for passing more students). In many schools 50% is now the lowest score you can receive (even for work not submitted).
> Ime, in 2010-2013, it wasn't that difficult to get admitted into UC Berkeley or UCLA or an Ivy League if you were in the top 25% of your class, but by 2015-2019 it shrank to the top 1-5%.
Nowhere but an elite prep school would the top 25% of the class be admitted to an Ivy. Even 5% would be a very good school, not typical.
[0] https://prepmaven.com/blog/test-prep/average-act-scores/
Unlikely, as grade inflation would imply less need to take AP Classes, but proportion of students who have taken AP classes and tests has risen from 2013 [0] to 2021 [1].
Also, GPA is based on UC HS A-G classes, which are regulated at the state level.
> ACTs (maybe)
Unlikely, it's the same damn test (source: took it in the early 2010s, and helped prep family friends in 2021-22).
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The main difference is California had a baby boom in the 1990s-early 2000s due to tech and immigration from Asia+Latin America [2][3].
In the 2009-11 period you wouldn't see portable trailer classrooms in top Californian HSes, but by 2011-15 they were everywhere, as the 1995-2005 cohort began entering middle and high school.
By 2020-21, the glut was largely over, and Californian school districts began shutting down elementary schools due to low attendance.
California in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2021 had a TFR of 2.5, 2.0, 1.95, and 1.5 respectively.
[0] - https://www.dailynews.com/2013/02/20/numbers-taking-passing-...
[1] - https://reports.collegeboard.org/ap-program-results/class-of...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/02/national/population-growt...
[3] - https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/california-sees-sl...
AP Classes act as a GPA and Admissions booster in UC admissions.
The traditional scale is 0-4, but if you take AP Classes, your GPA can be modified to a 0-5 scale as long as you pass the exam and/or maintain at least a B average in the class.
Anyone with a GPA >4.0 means they took at least 2-3 APs with an A-B average along with an A average in general classes.
The fact that the 75th percentile HS GPA at UCR in 2019 is 4.11 compared to it being in the mid 3s in 2012 implies that the student body has changed.
In 2010-13 you could get accepted in UCR without having ever taken an AP course - that doesn't happen anymore since 2019 onwards.
Heck, in the 2019 freshman class 32% of incoming freshman had a 4.0 GPA (aka straight As) [0]. Education standards in CA at the high school level didn't change between 2012 and 2019, nor was there remote education.
Even bottom tier UC admissions have become extremely competitive nowadays, and any parent or current student can attest to that.
Most HNers seem to have finished HS around the early 2010s at the latest based on the kind of commentary I've seen on here, so I think they don't have experience with how much more impacted admissions in UCs have become since 2018-19.
[0] - https://ir.ucr.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/cds_2019-2020...
Or it implies that grades are inflated, including the grades for AP classes. Not sure why you think that such grade inflation is impossible.
A student with a low grade really needs to consider upping their game or dialing back on their class load. People forget that the results of grades don't necessarily reflect the quality of the student. A student taking 6 classes is going to have a rougher time than one that's taking 1 class. A working single working mother is going to have less time to devote than a 20 year old living with her parents and only going to school.
If your students are doing well enough on the tests that it's hard to not give them all A's you need to increase the level of material your teaching. Because really your wasting their time otherwise. If they're all failing you need to reevaluate the level of material and how you're teaching the class.
adjacent: My kids and I ace tests w/o studying. It's an ability we never had to work for. Afterward, the material was forgotten.
Our good and bad grades both poorly reflect what we know.
I’ve met too many first year college students who breezed through high school but never learned how to study. When the first calculus exam comes around they all tend to fail then get very anxious/depressed. Sometimes they’ll drop out entirely.
I’m sure this story isn’t uncommon for others either.
I have always enjoyed tests. My son does too...
Honestly it helps in other pursuits in life where you're evaluated under pressure (like interviewing). So its not a terrible thing.
It depends. It doesn't do much to overcome social challenges.
ex: Son #1 studied for nothing but freezes hard in job interviews. Conversely, I've talked my way into a number positions for which I wasn't a good candidate.
We've learned that interview-skills are more highly prized than being qualified. Usually far more.
k-12, college. College was more mixed for me; learning happened in my C D and F subjects. I'd remember material trivially or w/ brutal difficulty. Always one or the other. I retained the latter.
The hardest for me in college was simply having zero strategies to deal with my diagnosed ADHD. "Oh I'm so lazy and procrastinator but I get everything done well" doesn't work so well for your 400 level CS project.
It sure is humbling going from "everyone believes you are literally a genius and teachers gossip about your standardized test scores that you max out the scale on" to "well I might at least be average intelligence". Internally I wish I could "unlock" that kind of just knowing things again, but the reality is that this is probably my actual potential and it was just easy for me to reach. The one counterpoint is that the 400 level algorithms class that started with the professor spending an hour explaining that most of the class fails every year and we need to take this seriously was super easy and fun and was nearly an A for me despite having no time management and project management skills.
Ah yeah. Mine wasn't diagnosed (yet) but I wound up on Ritalin during my last year. Doing college with a job, 2 young kids and a disabled wife had it's own demands.
It was always a nursery + learn basic skills like reading and math + creating habits like showing up on time (creating effective factory workers while their parents work in a factory).
Later we added an extra level that prepares for higher education, and here all you are doing is jockeying for a spot in university. Cramming details for a big test so you can be graded vs you peers when applying for university. That's the whole point really. Was majority of knowledge gained in secondary school is lost by the end of your 1st year of university.
The whole idea of school being a place that inspires young people is romanticized propaganda.
At best a teacher might pick a student or two that shows promise and guide them a bit. But they can do it for all kids in every class. They cannot make physics interesting for all kids and make them get all 100% at final test.
If Harvard or anyone else wants to maintain a student body with a GPA of 3.5 at the 25th percentile, they will need to either cut students or inflate grades to reach that point. Cutting students was a popular tactic when university was a summers wage - not so much when students are indebting themselves for 10 years to get a degree. Hence we have grade inflation.
My wife is a mature student doing her PhD, she was negotiating grades as part of her TA duties with a professor and his number one priority was avoiding student complaints. Legitimate lines i listened to them say:
“That student did a terrible job, they should only get 8/10”
“This kid is going to complain, let’s give them 9. I don’t think they deserve to pass but i don’t want to answer their emails.”
I think grades are very much an indication of performance, more generally a valuable part of the student experience and growing as an adult, if you can't be bothered grading...step aside, plenty of other people want your job and are willing to work for it.
Outside of a handful of “elite” schools, I literally could not tell you anything about the quality of most schools.
I care far more that you can actually deliver value.
This is it right here. All it takes is for there to be no countervailing incentive for rigor, and for maintaining high standards to be a lot of extra work. For all that we occasionally moan about slipping standards in education, nobody's calling the school administration on their 20-year-old kid's behalf to complain about an undeserved A.
Internships have almost completely replaced this imo, but i think that mostly speaks volumes to overall disappointing performance of education in recent decades.
30 femtoseconds into thinking about how to approach the task I realized that it was and always had been impossible to compare grades across institutions, across courses taught by different faculty within the same institution, and even across different revisions of a course taught by the same faculty within the same institution. Did the TA in the fall 2020 Aerospace Flight Mechanics class post good review guides or did they hang the class out to dry just to watch the carnage?
As far as I'm concerned, every course in every degree program should be pass/fail.
You either met the standard or you did not. It has been my experience that 10x'ers don't exist, rockstars fizzle out, and the best coworker is one who is easy to work with, meets the standard, is eager to learn, and is willing to help out no matter how big or small the ask.
My director of engineering, my direct and only supervisor, and a 40-year aerospace veteran who sits at the top of a 300-man org chart will sweep up the lab and take out the trash if we're all busy. (muttering "FOD FOD FOD" the entire time but still) That kind of mentality is more important than a 4.0 (or is the school a 5 or 6 point institution?) transcript.
And now we know why the bolts keep coming out of Boeing plans :P
Joking aside, I agree, this (very untestable) skill / attitude is the key thing I look for too. But it really depends on the role, I'm mostly concerned with getting a reference I trust.
They still had to grind out the work. Actually, some of the BS in academics is not that different from the BS in the corporate world. They're going to have some BS metric, and depending where you work, they just thumb their scales for developers they want to keep (or lose).
In my experience, there are many "developers developers", and outside of software, engineering geniuses with poor grades. That said, these developers often seemed to have other issues, and frankly might be wrong for like 80% of gigs.
If someone is genuinely talented, but thinks there's zero value in demonstrating that with more abstract, academic pursuits that tells you something about them. Perhaps more of a problem for stuffy corporate jobs.
I remember as a TA I caught a student cheating (very blatant, included a paper trail with obvious lying) and the professor was like "eh, give him an 8/10 instead of a 10/10". That was the attitude 15 years ago, I can't imagine what it's like now if trends have continued..
When you do grade inflation the institutions will loose trust in the grade quickly and revert back to internal testing.
One issue is that evaluation of teaching is often heavily based on student ratings, so there's a huge incentive to avoid conflict and resentful feelings. There is in fact good reason for weighing ratings, because they are predictive of objective learning outcomes, but my sense is the pendulum of emphasis on them has swung a bit too far. I'm old enough to have had a glimpse of an different era and zeitgeist, and have seen what happens when you have instructors who teach poorly, are out of touch, and then blame it on lazy students, but I now I think sometimes basing so much on student feelings is a bit too much.
I also have colleagues at well-known private institutions who have told me very, very clearly and directly that they not infrequently have pressure from administration to give students better grades. They have multiple stories of the college getting calls from a parent who is a significant donor, complaining about their child's grade, and asking the professor if there's "any way the student can make up some of the grade" or something like that. It's never a direct order, and there's never a request to just change the grade outright, but you can tell that there's an implicit message that if they were to ignore them repeatedly, they would make things difficult.
Really like a lot of things in higher education, grade inflation involves a lot of things other than the process of assigning a grade per se, and the interaction between the student and the instructor. There's a lot of cultural and sociofinancial variables involved, many of which are difficult to quantify and might not really be in people's conscious awareness all the time.
Then again, where I've been at there were deliberate but reasonable efforts to rein in grade inflation, and I've never really felt like I was being overly generous for its own sake or to avoid trouble later. In my experience, if you are very very clear about expectations and your grading criteria, and they are reasonable, students don't complain.
Another issue I rarely see brought up in this is that I think increasingly students are counseled by college advising to drop courses if they are struggling. In fact, as I think about it, they track this very very very closely, and have a systematic screening process to flag students who might not do well, with check-ins all the way up through midterm. Some of this is due to new conditions of federal higher educational loans, but some of it is just due to changed advising practices to be more proactive. If you have a bunch of students who might have otherwise failed dropping the course in the second week, where there's no record of a grade in their record, it will look like grade inflation when it's really a type of selection bias.
Maybe it makes a difference for grad school, but even then there are likely far better indicators of potential success.
For context, the author is Eric Schwitzgebel:
“an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief”
Sources:
I'd be curious if inflation holds there, as well, since engineering departments have to answer to an accreditation body (ABET).
For a short period of time, I did some part-time pizza delivery in the UCR area. These college students are... not very bright. We're talking leave car doors open (in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods around) and go back inside while chatting on the phone with their best buddy sort of naive. Some don't even know their own address and have been in the same student apartment for several years.
The ones in the Ag./Hort. Sci classes seem to be mostly on-the-ball, but it helps UCR is almost entirely research fields, for that one. Ditto the geology department (having a literal mountain to yourself in your Uni's back yard for studies helps.)
But the average person has not become more scholarly or ambitious. Just that the umbrella of “what is acceptable for college” has become broader.
As a business it makes sense. You don’t want your product to be hard to consume so having stringent admissions or academic rigor goes against that goal.
So it’s obvious that there’s infinite pressure to lower the bar in admissions and grading so the university can pass more customers through, collecting 4 years tuition.
I say this as someone with 3.5 degrees who benefited strongly from education. There are benefits, but the average college for the average student today is a scam.
A hundred years ago college (and especially elite colleges) were largely for white upper-class men so I would be very careful throwing around words like "rare breed". Education in general was something reserved for the elite, why would you bother educating someone who would probably be working a factory line?
The general population is far more educated, providing massive well-documented and widely-studied societal benefits. What has changed is we have moved (slightly) away from viewing education as a way of stratifying our society and more towards it as something that should be a baseline for our citizens.
In the US. Other countries had different factors on who they discriminated against.
// and more towards it as something that should be a baseline for our citizens.
At least that's the idea. In reality someone can now graduate 300K in debt, with a degree that neither enables them to make a living nor be an informed citizen of the republic.
I suppose another way my point can be made is that there's now a wider gulf between "has a college degree" and "has a valuable education" because of how common and watered down college has become.
We have a whole lot more failing restaurants nowadays than two hundred years ago, should we conclude people have gotten worse at cooking?
If you think college grads are on average less "informed citizens of the republic" than those who do not go to college, I'm going to tell you that you have very strong personal biases at play that do not reflect reality.
See https://uwm.edu/academicaffairs/student-success/data-of-the-...
Students have more resources than ever to do a good job, perhaps it's students that are improving
You can pair that with surveys of how much college students are studying and it is down significantly from 30-40 years ago. You might make the case that they are better prepared now, but the other side of that would be that less may be expected of them.
The better answer would be not to admit them in the first place. But there are people who, after not doing well in high school, find motivation or grow up or whatever, and are able to do college-level work, and do it well. They need a place to go.
So there's not really a great answer. But I think that grade inflation might be the worst answer, because it destroys the institution, not just the individuals.
That place, in the US at least, is community college with a setup to transfer once they've established themselves and acquired basic study habits and so forth, also there is much less non-academic distraction coming from greeks, athletics and campus lifestyle organizations.
This is actually better for everybody at all levels because it's hard to justify paying full tuition rates, even at a state school, for lower div classes offered at a community college for one fifth the cost or less.
Interestingly, at this level community colleges are in some ways even -more- rigorous than "real" universities because classes are very cheap so the financial penalty of retaking is much lower, and at the institutional level there is no ranking pressure to get students to graduate in 4 years.
On the other hand the peers that students will be mingling with are a much wider spread from highest to lowest in terms of ability, than at a school that has at least a minimal selection funnel. There will be a small group capable of work at the very top (ivy/MIT/cal etc) echelon who attend community college to save money or for other practical (commute, unpredictable family situations, etc) reasons, and of course a much larger cohort of people at a barely functional level of ability, but these tend to discover that they may not be a fit for college after the first year or so.
I have also seen local community colleges near me actually have Profs from the R1 Flagship school "moonlighting" teaching courses in the evening. They often are freer in how work with students and also try out new material for textbooks they are authoring.
Each have their issues. Even with grade inflation, GPA is reflective of a long-term process that unfolds over years. ACT is an afternoon when who knows what can be going on.