Eighty percent of all grades at Yale are an A. Yale isn’t alone. Seventy-nine percent of grades handed out at Harvard are As. It wasn’t always like that. Ten years ago, 60 percent of students had an A.
The proportion of A-range grades given in the 2020-21 academic year varied significantly by division: 73 percent in the Arts and Humanities, 65 percent in both the Sciences and Social Sciences, and 60 percent in courses at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
The percentage was higher in the African American Studies department at 82.21 percent. However, it was the Gender Students department that showed that 92.6 percent of grades were in the A range. So only 7 % of students did not receive an A in gender studies.
So the colleges are teaching woke garbage. My advice to you is this: If your doctor or lawyer graduated from Yale or Harvard in the past decade, I would ask some hard questions about their qualifications. It seems that both colleges, perhaps all of the big colleges, are padding their grades.
When I was a teacher, my feeling on the subject of grades was this:
There are standards and objectives that a teacher has to meet for the class. That is, every student has to demonstrate that they have met those objectives. If they have, they get a passing grade. However, if all of your students are getting an A, you as a teacher are not challenging them enough. In other words, you are a pushover and your class is too easy.
It seems that the problem is that the students’ reviews of teachers are what is being used to judge raises and promotions.
as one faculty member put it, external “market forces” are influencing grading, particularly as faculty rely on positive course evaluations from students for professional advancement, she said in the interview.
I will tell you that my nursing school didn’t do that. Of the students who began the cohort, 31 percent of them failed out of the program. Of the ones who completed the program, there was a 100 percent rate of passing the licensure exam. So maybe it’s just the Ivy league, or perhaps just the big schools that are padding their grades.
Still, the real value in attending Ivy League schools has never been a superior education. Those schools have always been about bragging rights and networking. That’s why Presidents Obama, Clinton, both Bush presidents, Ford, and JFK all attended an Ivy League college.
Even more telling: Barack Obama, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush are all related. Barak Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, is a cousin of George W Bush.
There is even more in a future post.
5 Comments
SiG · December 7, 2023 at 8:59 am
I’m no longer involved in hiring but even 8 years ago when I was involved, I was avoiding those schools. The handwriting was on the wall. Too egotistical, too self-absorbed.
The one redeeming thing in that story is that As are still hard to get in the “School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.” At least there’s still some reality there.
Now the question is what has a Gender Studies or African American Studies graduate ever done for the world? Their degrees from Harvard should qualify them to work for Uber or Doordash.
it's just Boris · December 7, 2023 at 9:08 am
The cynical part of me also wonders about correlations between skin color / gender / “preferences,” especially for the GS and AAS departments. Even back when I was in college, some of my fellow students were saying was quite clear that professors in some fields had an intrinsic curve, as it were, and it was very clear to them that the “wrong kind” would never get highest marks, no matter how well they actually did. Fortunately for me I was in science and engineering, so I never had to deal with that except in electives.
Henry · December 7, 2023 at 9:16 am
I’m sure the schools would simply point out that because they are so selective and only admit the most highly qualified applicants, it’s obvious that these students would also be so high performing that the vast majority of them would score consistent As. And these schools might also be bold enough to assert that their students in the social sciences and “studies” majors are the absolute creme of the crop.
Half a century ago when I was working my ass off through engineering school the professors would have laughed at the thought of 70 to 90 percent of us as deserving of A grades. We were graded on a curve and you can be certain that the vast majority of us did not achieve As.
Anonymous · December 7, 2023 at 6:40 pm
University of Maryland Veterinarian Science major. Anatomy class started with about 70 people. Over half dropped out. Only two people received “A”‘s.
Divemedic · December 7, 2023 at 8:46 pm
When I took Anatomy I, there were 60 students there the first day. The professor told us that it would be a hard course. There was an exam at the end of the first week. The first day of the second week, there were 20 students. 40 had dropped. By the end of the course 16 weeks later, I had a B, and there was only one student that had gotten an A. She told us that she had failed the course the first time she took it, and was retaking it for grade forgiveness, and had made sure it was the only course she took that semester.
Even though a third of my nursing class failed out, that was a third of the students who even made it to the nursing class to begin with. More than half of those that begin the year of prerequisites needed to get into nursing school don’t even make it to the beginning of school.
That means of every 100 people who begin the path to nursing, only 50 make it to nursing school itself, and only about 35 of them become nurses.
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