Good Grades
Man, did I go to the wrong schools. There is an article here in the New York Times about grade inflation and some of the ivy's and sort-of ivy's.

Aiming to halt widespread grade inflation afflicting Ivy League colleges, Princeton University officials are proposing to limit the number of A's that its professors award.

The goal would be to lower the number of A's to 35 percent of all course grades, from 46 percent now.

Although there has been wide discussion of the easy grading policies at top universities in recent years, most highly selective colleges and universities have continued to give out abundant A's.

A survey by Princeton last year found that A's made up between 44 percent and 55 percent of undergraduate grades at 11 institutions: the eight Ivy League colleges plus Stanford, M.I.T. and the University of Chicago.

"We need to be more discriminating than we have been in the grades we reward," said Nancy Weiss Malkiel, dean of Princeton's undergraduate college, who released the proposal yesterday.

She said, "We believe there should be some correlation between intellectual performance and reward. We want grading to help students evaluate what they have learned, how well they have learned it and where they need to invest additional effort."

If Princeton's faculty approves the proposal later this month, it would be by far the biggest step in recent years by a top university to change the way it evaluates its students.

Harvard University said two years ago that it would reduce the number of students graduating with honors and make slight revisions in its grading system.

But a recent report by the dean of Harvard College, Benedict H. Gross, showed that after a tiny dip in average grades - from 12.67 (on Harvard's 15-point scale) in 1999-2000 to 12.58 in 2001-2002 - grades inched up again to 12.68 last year. (On a 4-point scale, where 4.0 is an A, that would have represented a 3.41 average in 1999-2000, 3.39 two years later, and 3.41 last year.)

Where I went to college, Miami University, Ohio, I think the all-men's average was like a 2.8, so if you had above a 3.0, you were doing fine. The Econ. Department there seemed a little stingy with the As. Some professors only gave one or two, and that usually wasn't me. In business school there was a forced curve for the core classes that limited the top grade, Excellent (they didn't use letter grades at UMBS) to 10%; so to get one of those you needed to forgo a little more sleep than I was willing to.

Grades seem like they are hard to compare across schools anyway because of this, so it is kind of silly that even now for some jobs, the idiots in HR still occasionally ask me what my grades were in college. Whatever.