Grades inflated more at private universities?

I know we hate anecdotal evidence on these forums, so here is some anecdotal evidence.

::looks at thread title::

::looks at mediocre transcript::

nah, topic is bullshit.
 
Less than 3 weeks ago, Loyola Law retroactively increased their students' GPA.
Loyola students are having difficulty getting jobs. In response, did the administration consider dropping tuition? Nope. Instead, they just gave everybody an extra third of a grade — retroactively, no less. That’s not just inflation; that’s a rewriting of history.

Really, are employers out there going to fall for this? Loyola hopes so….
Click to expand...

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/03/loyola-law-school-la-retroactively-inflates-grades/
 
I do wish they'd talk about where they got this information and how. I will say this though, they're right (at least in my experience) about the difference in grading between different areas of study.

Myke, dmaul, either of you know anything about this?

And then there is what speed posted, wow.
 
Coming from the public UC system, I had a near 4.0 GPA mainly because grading in some classes was brutal... especially in the physical sciences; at times the teacher would decide that no one was good enough for an A, so an A- (3.7 GPA points) would be the highest available. In fact, no one (out of ~100) in my chemistry major survived 4 years with a 4.0...

At least, in the hard sciences, there is some objective criterion of right and wrong. In the humanities and social sciences, it is much more subjective... but nevertheless, I found it relatively easy to get A's in those classes, as long as I told the instructor what he or she wanted to hear...
 
I'd say i've had a mixed bag so far as hard sciences vs humanities/social sciences. I had a history professor who made me work harder than anyone before, i worried more about that class than any i'd ever had. In fact i'd say the astronomy class i just finished was actually easier than that history class.

On the other hand i didn't even take the final for my sociology class since i had enough points for what would be an A+ at other schools i suppose, and i didn't exactly work my ass off in that class. I think the music professor i had gave everyone an A in the end too. Just depends i guess. I can kind of understand those in the hard sciences being more strict since much of what they teach are hard skills to be used in life.
 
[quote name='JolietJake']I do wish they'd talk about where they got this information and how. I will say this though, they're right (at least in my experience) about the difference in grading between different areas of study.

Myke, dmaul, either of you know anything about this?

And then there is what speed posted, wow.[/QUOTE]

Can't say I know much about differences across fields etc. in how grades are given out etc.

In my (brief as this is my first year) experience, us professor's get no guidance or direction in assigning grades.

I have full freedom in designing my syllabus, choosing what to teach (that fits with the paritcular coruse) what assignments to give out, how to grade them etc.

It's not something I have had any input, guidance or pressure on. Nor have I heard of colleagues here or at other schools having any different experience--though I'm sure it does happen some places.

So in short, I'm skeptical that a whole school (or even field of study) can inflate grades etc. Some professors will be easy, some will be hard. Some fields are easier than others etc. But it would seem hard to inflate grades school wide and most professors wouldn't stand for that as freedom in our teaching and research is a big draw to academia and the lesser pay (and longer hours) than the private sector.

Beyond of course just changing grades etc. like speed just posted. But that's not something that really can be done covertly, so I'd think we'd here more about that if it happened commonly.
 
Taking a lot of hard science classes I have the same experience as BigT. Pretty much completely objective. Math (which was my major) had some degree of subjectivity, as some professors wanted more detail in their proofs and some didn't care. Some followed your line of reasoning (when you used a different method) and some didn't.

I did really well in all the social science classes (non hard science) that I took in college. It wasn't that I told them what they wanted to hear...I just completed the fucking assignment and backed up what I said.
 
[quote name='IRHari']
I did really well in all the social science classes (non hard science) that I took in college. It wasn't that I told them what they wanted to hear...I just completed the fucking assignment and backed up what I said.[/QUOTE]

Yep, that's about all I expect as a social science prof.

On subjective assignments like essays they just need to be well written, answer the questions and hand, and back up their arguments. As well as use proper citations etc. I don't care one bit if I agree with the answer or not as long as it's on topic, well written etc.

Exams are more objective as I make them multiple choice, true false and non-opinion short answer questions where they either know the stuff or they don't. Grad level exams, when I start teaching grad classes next year, will be more subjective and related to applying knowledge.
 
At my school (UW Seattle) it varies a lot by department.

First-quarter computer science in particular is a real killer, curved to a median of 1.9 (2.0 required to advance, 3.8+ necessary to be a competitive applicant to the department). About 10 people out of 500 got a 4.0. The upper-division courses are a bit better, averages are around 3.2/3.3, but it's even harder to get a good grade in these classes because the only people that got accepted into the department are the hard-working nerds that were able to be top 5% in the intro courses. So... I mean, "average" in the upper-division courses means you're on par with the upper echelon from the intro courses, what was 3.8 is now 3.3. It sucks. Honestly, I wanna drop out. I'm part-time this quarter because I just got too sick of studying 80 hours a week.

By (stark) contrast, about a fourth of my linear algebra class (300-level math) got 4.0. What the fuck.

I can't speak for other schools, but at least in the case of UW Seattle, saying "the school's average GPA is ___" is completely meaningless.
 
[quote name='Koggit']At my school (UW Seattle) it varies a lot by department.

First-quarter computer science in particular is a real killer, curved to a median of 1.9 (2.0 required to advance, 3.8+ necessary to be a competitive applicant to the department). About 10 people out of 500 got a 4.0. The upper-division courses are a bit better, averages are around 3.2/3.3, but it's even harder to get a good grade in these classes because the only people that got accepted into the department are the hard-working nerds that were able to be top 5% in the intro courses. So... I mean, "average" in the upper-division courses means you're on par with the upper echelon from the intro courses, what was 3.8 is now 3.3. It sucks. Honestly, I wanna drop out. I'm part-time this quarter because I just got too sick of studying 80 hours a week.

By (stark) contrast, about a fourth of my linear algebra class (300-level math) got 4.0. What the fuck.

I can't speak for other schools, but at least in the case of UW Seattle, saying "the school's average GPA is ___" is completely meaningless.[/QUOTE]

That's brutal man. I have to say it varies quite a bit here too, once again by department and what not, and class course.
 
I didn't read the entire article, but typically private school students would have had better GPA's overall in high school to begin with in order to attend private universities. Better students being accepted would likely correlate to better grades being "earned" at the university level.
 
Well, not all private schools are stellar academic institutions. There are plenty that aren't and just charge high tuition.

One example--WV Wesleyan College in the town I grew up in. Not a great school, wasn't accredited back then (not sure about current status) so you couldn't even transfer most classes to the state schools--which are nothing great in WV--even WVU is a tier 3 school. Yet tuition was super expensive.

So don't think all private schools are Ivy league quality etc. There are plenty of crummy religious colleges, less than stellar liberal art colleges etc.
 
I once had this girl tell me she was waiting to take her sociology classes (her major) at some nearby christian school because she didn't want a slanted version of sociology.
 
It doesn't have any real hard evidence, it's just something i thought was a funny thought. A lot of people have the idea that private schools are typically better than their public counterparts, would be funny to find out most of them inflate student's grades.
 
Purely anecdotal (again), but I found college grading to be absolute bullshit. Either the class was way too hard, or it was impossible to fail.

I had one class where I literally wrote my name on the top of the lab work, filled out completely random numbers, and got a C every time. By the end of that semester, I was really, really sick, and I missed the final. The professor said I had failed due to missing the final, but he said that he could do some magic curve that would give me a C for a final grade. I took it, and as such began my downward spiral.

Next semester, there were no grades that we ever got back. We took one test. Our final grades seemed to be given at random. It was strange.

Fast forward a few semesters, and I had moved onto business. Businesspeople are the laziest scum on the face of the planet, and they just steal money. How do they do this? They take up a teaching position and teach business. Then they pretend they know how to create online tests. I had one online test that looked like it was put together by a monkey. Multiple choice questions had missing checkmarks, formatting was all over the place, and an entire section was completely broken. I was the only one who didn't wait until the last minute to do it, too. Everybody else in the class was much older and worked in offices and stuff. (I was the young black sheep of the business program.) They all said that they didn't do it yet, so I had nobody to back me up when I said that the test was broken. Somehow I got a B in the class anyway, but again, completely at random for all criteria I could find (which wasn't much).

I then got so fed up with the business program that I tried to fail out since even though I had the integrity to do a good job, I didn't have the courage to say "I don't want to do this anymore" so I tried to sabotage myself. Apparently my work ethic poured over into plagiarism because I practically copied and pasted Wikipedia and changed enough words around to make things look all kosher. Then again, I doubt the instructor, another businessperson who took a teaching job on the side, even read the paper since I barely talked about business at all in it, yet I still got a perfect A for it. I mostly talked about computer hardware and loosely tied it into business. That was going to be my hook to say "this is my call for help." Instead my efforts to sabotage myself were ignored, and I was rewarded for doing an absolute shit job.

Eventually I had worked up the courage to simply walk away, but it taught me so much about businesspeople. They're all scum. Every one of them. They will do whatever it takes to do as little work as possible while stealing as much money as possible. My experience as a business student was a joke and a waste of time. I managed to work up the courage to walk away because I realized that I was working towards a future where I would be one of those scumbags.

Even now in the real working world, I see so many slackers stealing so much money. The worst part is that the higher ups don't seem to care that I'm not getting my work done when it's dependent on some information from these slackers. The only person my backlog matters to is me. I swear all these people who get paid exorbitant amounts of money only have their own office rooms because they need the privacy to jerk off. The modern day corporate culture reflects the school I went to perfectly. Everybody's just doing just enough work to hope that they don't get laid off while they take their paycheck that they don't even deserve.
 
[quote name='speedracer']That's impossible Chuplayer. Companies are the paragon of efficiency.[/QUOTE]

Oh you.
 
I'm in engineering. Some professors are more forgiving with partial credit (oddly enough, the biggest douche in the ME department is the most famous for partial credit) than others, but that's it. Grading scales or curves might be different from class to class, though. In my 3 classes this semester, there are 3 scales:

- Kinda standard: 92-100 is an A, 88-92 A-, 85-88 B+, etc. I need about an 89 on the final for an A, 78 for A-.

- Weird as hell: 80-100 A, 70-80 B, 60-70 C, etc. He only sometimes give's out +'s or -'s. I need like a 68 on the final to get an A.

- Way more forgiving version of standard: 93-100 A, 86-92 A-, 81-85 B+, 76-80 B, etc. I actually have a 72 already in this class, so I can fail the final and still get a B+. Lower than I'd like, but still solid all things considered.
 
For the most part, I can't say I ever had any real issues with grading in my 4 1/2 years of undergrad, 3 years of Master's and 4 years of Ph D studies. I had pretty much the opposite experience of Chuplayer and always found the grading fair. Some classes were a lot more work and a lot more time consuming than others, but I had nothing that was impossible to pass and got mostly A's and a couple of Bs throughout my studies.

Only exceptions would be struggling with Computer Science and Calculus my second semester before changing majors (dropped the first, failed the latter). But that was just hating programming, and having a crummy teacher for Calculus (a near 80 year old retired professor they got to come back to replace someone for one year as an instructor backed out at the last minute). I did well in all my grad level stats courses which were mostly harder than undergrad calculus (the first one was lower level).
 
- Kinda standard: 92-100 is an A, 88-92 A-, 85-88 B+, etc. I need about an 89 on the final for an A, 78 for A-.

- Weird as hell: 80-100 A, 70-80 B, 60-70 C, etc. He only sometimes give's out +'s or -'s. I need like a 68 on the final to get an A.

- Way more forgiving version of standard: 93-100 A, 86-92 A-, 81-85 B+, 76-80 B, etc. I actually have a 72 already in this class, so I can fail the final and still get a B+. Lower than I'd like, but still solid all things considered.
Click to expand...

Holy....dude at my school it was (and still is):

97-100 A+
94-96 A
90-93 A-
86-89 B+
etc.
 
Grading scales aren't standardized at the university where I teach. We can make up our own for our courses.

I use the 10 point scale for letter grades-90-100 A etc. We do have plus and minus (but only C+ and up, we can't give c-, d+ etc.). Those I just basically divide into 3rds just like IRHari's scale.

But other profs can use their own scales for their courses, grade on a curve etc.
 
Well my undergrad didn't have + or - at all afaik. Individual professors could mess with the percentages if they wanted, but I think for me it was always 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, etc.
 
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