Private schools must be inflating their GPAs in order to position their students better in the job market, according to Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy. The New York Times reports that the study “finds that G.P.A.’s have risen from a national average of 2.52 in the 1950s to about 3.11 by the middle of the last decade.”
For the first half of the 20th century, grading at private schools and public schools rose more or less in tandem. But starting in the 1950s, grading at public and private schools began to diverge. Students at private schools started receiving significantly higher grades than those received by their equally-qualified peers — based on SAT scores and other measures — at public schools.
In other words, both categories of schools inflated their grades, but private schools inflated their grades more. The chart below shows average G.P.A.’s from 1930 to 2006. Gray dots represent individual schools’ average G.P.A’s. The blue and green lines represent the average G.P.A. for each school type — public or private — over time.
Several factors complicate the simple reasoning of this study. One is that more people are going to college than ever before — and are headed in droves to state schools rather than private schools. The other is that the curriculum is far more dumbed down than before. What English departments assigned in the 1950s was a bit more rigorous than what is assigned today. (Just look at the books themselves, if not the course listings — if I can find some old courselistings from, say, Harvard, I’ll post and compare.)
The study was also done using peer groups based on high school GPAs. Sounds good. But are we talking about professors who grade on a curve? What are the requirements and courseloads in these schools?
