Grade-Fraud in the Ivy League

“Grades are like any currency… [Elite Ivy League schools] are actively championing their students by giving them higher grades than the national average… They want their students to have a competitive edge.” 

 Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who tracks grade inflation.

“I don’t think many people care, 10 years out, what kind of grades you got at Yale… They mostly care that you, you know, you studied at Yale.” 

Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis.

Admission: I am a graduate of Yale in an era when a B was actually considered pretty good. My old room is on the extreme left side of the above photo. I am sad to say the “good B” reality has slowly eroded over the years. Yale students getting Bs today are horrified, often going to their professors to protect… or at least beg for a better grade. Why? Writing for the November 30th The Yale Daily News, Evan Gorelick calls out elite Ivies: “Yale College’s mean GPA was 3.70 for the 2022-23 academic year, and 78.97 percent of grades given to students were A’s or A-’s.

“The data, which show a sharp hike in grades coinciding with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, come from a document presented at a November faculty meeting. According to economics professor Ray Fair, who authored the report, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis distributed the document to faculty members who attended the meeting.

“Even before the pandemic, the percentage of A-range grades was climbing — it reached 72.95 percent in the 2018-19 academic year, up from 68.97 percent five years prior. But in 2020-21, that share jumped to 81.97 percent. Fair dubbed the grading upturn the COVID effect… ‘Some thought [the COVID effect] would be temporary, but it has more or less persisted. [It’s] probably the faculty going easier on students because COVID was a pain,’ Fair told the News. ‘The report simply documents the history of grading at Yale … It gives the ‘current state of grading’ and I think the numbers are straightforward to interpret.’” Gorelick adds that these numbers are “nearly identical to figures released by Harvard College in October.”

It's not as if Yale is proud of this reality (I’m sure not!): “Earlier this semester, the University Registrar’s Office denied the News’ request to access Yale College grading data, and the University has not published similar data in over a decade.” Gorelick got the data directly from Professor Fair. Writing for the December 6th New York Times, recent Yale grad and NYT journalist Amelia Nierenberg, seems as stunned as I was when I learned the news: “The mean grade point average was 3.7 out of 4.0, also an increase over prepandemic years.

“The findings have frustrated some students, alumni and professors. What does excellence mean at Yale, they wonder, if most students get the equivalent of ‘excellent’ in almost every class?... ‘When we act as though virtually everything that gets turned in is some kind of A — where A is supposedly meaning ‘excellent work’ — we are simply being dishonest to our students,” said Shelly Kagan, a Yale philosophy professor known for being a tough grader… The trend has scrambled the very meaning of grades themselves, he said. Students no longer think B means ‘good.’ An A is the new normal.”

“Yale’s cluster of A’s and A minuses has been rising for years. In the 2010-11 academic year, 67 percent of all grades were A’s and A minuses, the report found. By 2018-19, 73 percent were in the A range.” This grade inflation is nothing new. Many private prep schools have indulged in this practice to get their students into top schools. But college admissions offices got wise to the practice, discounting the grades from those who attended schools that applied this process. But now the contagion has spread to major prestigious universities, mostly private.

State colleges and universities have, for the most part, maintained more traditional grading skews… “Private colleges tend to have higher average G.P.A.s than public schools, Dr. Rojstaczer said. In 2013, the average public school G.P.A. was about 3.1, compared to 3.3 to 3.4 at private schools. Yale’s and Harvard’s averages are even higher.” NYT.

In fact, this trend toward jacking up grades appears to be an overall reaction of elite colleges trying to level the playing field for their students competing for professional and graduate admissions or even better jobs… when comparable institutions have inappropriately elevated their average grades. “[S]tudents — and graduate programs — do care about undergraduate grades. And Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, worries that grade inflation could ultimately hurt students’ mental health.

“‘Students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom,’ she said, adding, ‘Extracurriculars, which should be stress relieving, become stress producing.’… Dr. Claybaugh plans to disseminate more information about alumni outcomes, to reassure undergraduates that ‘students who get B pluses at Harvard still do fine in life.’

“But Harvard is part of an ecosystem, and employers compare resumes across schools. What if Harvard decided to intentionally limit the number of A’s awarded — as Princeton once did? How would its graduates compare to Yale’s, or Stanford’s, in such a competitive job market?... ‘We don’t want to move alone,’ Dr. Claybaugh said. ‘We don’t want to disadvantage our students.’ NYT. Are these grades effective lies? A macro-George Santos effect? Why have grades at all if they are so uniformly ubiquitous? Isn’t teaching honesty and values part of a solid undergraduate education? And yes, I am embarrassed by these “admissions.” That “everybody does it” is a horrible excuse… and at the root of the problem.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in a world cursed by flood of fake news and excessive braggadocio among our nation’s leaders and captains of industry, isn’t time for those institutions that are preparing the rising generation to take over the country to claw back to honesty and reality?