Average US undergrad GPA over time \ stacker news ~charts_and

pull down to refresh

Average US undergrad GPA over time www.gradeinflation.com/

1635 sats \ 15 comments \ @Scoresby 20 Nov charts_and_numbers

What causes this?

GPAs effect future placement, public schools become competitive with private schools, private schools are incentivized to differentiate and do so on placement, public schools change to meet expectations.

That’s what I’ve always imagined.

213 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 20 Nov

Yes, it's kind of like a prisoner's dilemma / race to the bottom, (see my first point here: #1286911)

However, that would naturally lead to the question of why grade inflation doesn't cause a university's reputation to suffer. So that's my second point, I think reputation is a lot more weighted towards upfront selectivity than difficulty of coursework. In other words, reputation is based on selection of innate talent now, rather than the value-add of the coursework itself.

A third point is that the fiatization of the economy may have led the Cantillon effect to be more important. And thus selectivity on pedigree has become more important than classwork as well.

169 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 20 Nov

selectivity on pedigree

This is what it feels like. It's not about quality of education or evidence of great alumni...the only time you hear someone say what school a person went to is when the school makes a big deal of it.

45 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 20 Nov

But SAT and other standardized tests should account for differences in school quality. Not all A's are created equal which is why the Texas rule admitting the top 10 percent from all high schools into UT is absurd

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 16h

Very few publics schools are competitive with private schools and most of those 'public' schools are charter or magnet

247 sats \ 5 replies \ @denlillaapan 20 Nov

Everybody knows Americans are so much smarter these days

11 sats \ 4 replies \ @BlokchainB 20 Nov

This is my take haha

155 sats \ 3 replies \ @Bell_curve 16h

Actually Steven Pinker has taught the same Cognitive Psychology class at Harvard for over 20 years and he has noticed a decline in aptitude... the median test score is 10 points lower than 20 years ago

Pinker says part of it is that students are reading less especially books. A second factor is the lack of hand note taking. Writinig by hand increases memory and retention vs typing on a laptop

73 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 16h

Did he actually give out lower grades though?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 16h

Grading is based on a curve and other political factors

Edit: I bet if you email him he will respond

He explained this to Bill Maher on Real Time, I will try to find the clip

67 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 20 Nov

My first thought was: there's almost no incentive to give a student a bad grade. Institutions want their students to do well in the marketplace, and giving bad grades doesn't accomplish that. The only downside to bad grades is that your institution's reputation might suffer in the long run if you graduate bad students, but it's not clear who within the university is properly incentivized to think about those long term consequences.

My second thought was: nowadays the bigger reputation signal of a university's quality is how selective they are in admissions, and not what they actually teach the students. There's data showing that over this time period, average SAT scores became much more correlated with ranking, suggesting that students are more and more sorted by talent at the entry point. If university reputation is based on selectivity up front, then grades out the door matter less. The increase in selectivity is likely due to the increasingly national/global nature of universities, as well as the increase in demand for them.

A third idea is that selection on pedigree has become more important. That is, select students who have a good family / network. This may be especially important in a fiatized world where the Cantillon effect dominates resource allocation. Another way to say this is, who you know has become more important than what you know, which again makes coursework less important, reputation-wise.

11 sats \ 2 replies \ @anon 20 Nov

After the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which invalidated segregated-schooling laws, school segregation took de facto form. School segregation declined rapidly during the late 1960s and early 1970s as the government became strict on schools' plans to combat segregation more effectively as a result of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County.[2] Voluntary segregation by income appears to have increased since 1990.[excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_segregation_in_the_United_States]

"Limited evidence on school economic segregation makes documenting trends difficult, but students appear to be more segregated by income across schools and districts today than in 1990" [Reardon & Owens (2014) https://sci-hub.st/10.1146/annurev-soc-071913-043152]

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 16h

What's your point?

Black schools are subpar because black teachers and students are subpar?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 1h

Not at all. I don’t have expertise in this topic so I’m not in a position to make a point (your take is very low IQ btw). The economist Thomas Sowell argued that government policies like affirmative action misplaced students and turned them into academic failures whereas they could have succeeded at a different college. He has written a few books about the topic as well as his own journey through the US education system.

A testable hypothesis could be that socioeconomic status has become an increasingly strong predictor of GPA disparity over time and that it interacts more strongly with race and/or gender over time. The interaction means that the effect of socioeconomic status is amplified by race/gender-based policies. This model assumes all schools are inflating their grades at the same rate but this assumption can be relaxed. It assumes that affirmative action policies are more widespread at public colleges and that private colleges are more selective in who they admit (this could also be modeled for individual colleges if AA policy could somehow be quantified).

More meritocratic policies should be better at placing students into institutions that are better matched to their ability. For example, a state college that has to admit the top 10% from each high school in a state would be more likely to misplace students than a private college that is free to pick from the top 10% of students across the whole state and, due to their parents higher income, probably also went to better high schools. Students who fall behind also reduce the quality of the education received by other students, thereby exacerbating the GPA underperformance while increasing the cost of education.