Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7 (A-) GPA
As a professor, I&#x27;ll put out there how I&#x27;m currently thinking about grade inflation in my case.<p>Classes of let&#x27;s say &quot;Type 1&quot; have lots of students and very specific learning objectives. I need to make sure everyone who passes the class is proficient in those objectives. So I focus on teaching the baseline expectations. I give assessments where, if you understand the material, you get it right. Therefore, most students who have the prereqs and try hard get A&#x27;s. The median grade is pretty high along with a tail of people who mostly aren&#x27;t trying that hard. But you don&#x27;t need special aptitude to get an A. Unfortunately that can make the class pretty easy for top students, and I&#x27;m working on ways to challenge them. But I don&#x27;t need to knock the whole class down to a B just to challenge top students.<p>The other &quot;type 2&quot; classes are upper level where people are there to learn hard material and are self motivated. Here students may face tougher challenges and experience more failure even when they put in lots of time and effort. But I usually give As pretty easily. The fact that they&#x27;re trying hard in a difficult upper level class already shows they&#x27;re ahead of 95% of their classmates, why would I punish their GPA for that? And most of these students don&#x27;t need the threat of a bad grade to motivate them, they put in the effort because they&#x27;re interested. Of course some students will get bad grades in the class but the median is again usually pretty high.<p>So I find myself a contributor to grade inflation. Employers, look less at GPA and more at what courses a person challenged themselves with!