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In this week’s article, ‘Easy A’s for Ivy League Idiots’, I discussed the insane level of grade inflation at prestigious colleges.
In 2005, a quarter of Harvard students received A’s. In 2025, it’s over 60%. At Yale, A’s went from 67% of grades in 2010 to 78% of grades in 2023.
But not all grades are created equal.
- At the University of California Berkeley, 77% of grades in 2020 were A’s. While that number fell down to 64% in 2022, the more woke and worthless the subject, the worse its grades were inflated.
- Journalism hit 95% of A’s in 2022, and if you were under the mistaken impression that ‘environmental design’ was a serious field, both it and Black Studies offered 78% A’s. However Math offered only 42% A’s and Physics only managed 41% A’s. Those poor dumb idiots trying to understand the nature of the universe just can’t compete with those studying the “critical frameworks that articulate, explore, describe and/or impinge upon blackness.”
- As a result UC Berkeley students majoring in Applied Mathematics, Chemical Engineering and Physics had GPA’s in the 3.4 range while the highest GPAs went to students majoring in art, conservation and society.
You can see the numbers for yourself.
Grade inflation is in no small part due to garbage courses and woke majors.
I always maintained university students are dumb. dumb, dumb with IQ tests in 2006 indicating 100 & 106 points for undergraduates & graduates respectively compared with 108 & 114 in 1960. No new figures have been published since then which is grounds for suspicion. What I would like to know is the IQ test scores for recent students in the Micky Mouse studies like Journalism and Ethnic studies especially the lower edge of the Bell Curve, they’ll probably make Forest Gump blush with pride.
Part of that may be accounted for by degree growth. I suspect in the 60’s, a larger percent of the students were the cream of the intellectual crop. These days, everyone is going to college as witnessed by the growth in remedial courses.
School vouchers are the only solution.
I believed in school vouchers until recently when it came to light that they were being used to build islamic schools.
It would be better to return to the old way of funding only public schools rather than even a dime of taxpayer money being used to further islam.
No they are not. School vouchers are a Trojan Horse for the government to control private schools. First the vouchers will come and then the mandates attached to the vouchers will appear. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Tax credits are a much better solution.
Having the government pay for college is the reason these garbage degrees proliferated. Nobody would pay out of pocket for a gender study major that doesn’t lead to a job.
Eliminating public education altogether and all government money/involvement in higher education would be another solution.
When I was at UC Davis in the 1970’s, many professors gave exams under the honor system. That meant after the exams were handed out, the professor left the room, leaving the students by themselves as they took the exam. So, if UC still uses the honor system today, I think I could get an A in almost any class because all I would have to do after the professor left the room would be to pull out my cell phone and google any question on the exam that I wasn’t sure about. I still remember the guy in one class that managed to take his exam to the library and then return to class about 10 minutes before the professor returned. But, there was no such thing as grade inflation back then at UC. Several professors were completely sadistic – for example, putting questions on a calculus exam that came from an advanced course, and then telling students “you should have been able to figure it out.” Back then, the student newspaper even reported that 40% of the freshmen entering Davis will not graduate.
I would put a lot of effort into writing exam questions that could not be found in any answer manual or online. Pretty effective for a time. Then along came Chegg, the online tutoring and homework site.
Students would carefully and surreptitiously photograph an exam question and upload it. Then the stinkers in India and Pakistan would get to work on the problem and return an answer in some manner in around 10-15 minutes. sometimes the wrong answer.
What the test takers didn’t know was that Chegg maintained an upload log with a date/time stamp and a photo. Often the dummies would put their name on the test before the upload. I flunked one-third of a thermo class one semester on a final exam. Took 18 months to get through all the whiny grade appeals.
Sorry to say but American college diploma is not worth the paper is written on. Now days toilet paper is more useful than most of college diplomas.
It’s probably worse when you consider about half of most degrees are electives. So a person could major in applied physics and bolster his or her GPA by taking elective courses from an easier field. The ones with the major in an easy field can do the same but there is less effect from it. Imagine two students. One in applied physics where he/she earns a 75% in those classes and the other in journalism with an average of 95%. Both select electives from easy A courses. The applied physics student now has an 85% average and the journalism student still has a 95% average.
This seems like a good time to bring up Joy Reid. She has a degree from Harvard… in film studies. Imagine homework. This weekend, watch this movie and write a paper on how it makes you feel. Focus on lighting. Is it possible to fail as long as you turn in something? A film critic might benefit from that degree, but she didn’t go that route.
I know I did. The classes were so much easier. but still, long papers had to be written and 16 or so books read. They weren’t for unserious people and it would have been easy to fail them even with a good effort.
Daniel, You forgot Gender Studies. If you can identify 72 different sexes on a one question final, you get an “A”. LOL.
Plus, an 10 extra credit points if you spell your us/they/them/our name correctly.
95% of journalists get A’s.
USA Today headline: “Trump sent National Guard to DC to fight crime. Then two were shot.”
If they were your news source, you wouldn’t know that crime in DC, including violent crime, is down in DC since Trump brought in the Guard. You likewise wouldn’t know that the Biden administration had labeled 5 in 6 of the Afghani he brought in were security risks. You wouldn’t know that the mayor and many of the police have noticed an improvement. You wouldn’t know that the left has been encouraging the violence for political gain.
Does that seem like 95% A-level work?
An education degree has got to be in the running with Journalism. The average GPA for Ed majors in the 1970s at Utah was already a 3.95.
Most of the students can’t find their own home towns on a Map of their own Home State and most of the M.S. Media are Democrat Voters and Supporters you don’t need to be a Rocket Scientists to know that as a fact
I’m annoyed because I’m old and back in the day I actually worked for the A’s I received. In other words, earned my grades. Now, it seems the worth of the efforts of us oldsters has been reduced. Oh well, the world is on fire with hate and fake climate change so what does it matter?
Those annoying Asian students. They show up with their soaring grade averages in difficult subjects (all REAL A’s), diligent study habits, delaying gratification, having goals , discipline and constant hard work. They make it glaringly apparent that they are at an academic level so far above just about everyone else. Makes the other students in the class room feel bad when they appear stupid and unprepared for higher education, especially black students. I say this because this IS what it is all about. So the leftist running these institution ban Asian’s from getting it. Problem solved ! They can continue to dispense “A”s” for woefully mediocre work for useless subjects to the rest of the feckless ingrates. Rot starts from the top down and what happens at Universities eventually spreads into society as a whole.
When we look at the ACT/SAT scores of students going into education, they are much lower than those for students in STEM, yet education majors end up with higher college GPAs.
A psychology professor at a college in Florida told me “there is no secret to good evaluations. Just give out high grades.”
I heard an education major say “my professor told us what difference does it make it it takes you 10 minutes or 8 hours to figure something out?” Okay, so someone doesn’t understand the concept of productivity. These are the same geniuses who think socialism is a good idea.
Colleges facing declining enrollment are now emphasizing retention ore than in the past. One way to increase retention is to lower standards.
One of the many scams in education is giving teachers more money for getting a Master’s degree. That degree is even more of a joke.