I remember one time during freshman year when two guys sitting in front of me in intro micro started scanning through the median grade report, marking down all the classes that had A or A+ median grades. This was right before pre-enroll, so they were obviously looking to maximize their chances of getting a good GPA for the next semester. This approach never really made any sense to me. As long as median grades are listed on your transcript, isn’t all that matters your deviation from the median?
Then I found this from an article about a new Kaplan survey on grading leniency and professor selection:
A new Kaplan Test Prep survey of 1,229 college students and recent college graduates* showed that of those who have visited professor rating sites, nearly half (45%) were influenced to take courses based on the “easy grading reputation of a professor.” This supports previous research conducted by Cornell University which found that students shop for classes where the median grade is higher. In fact, a 2009 analysis on grade inflation by a retired Duke University professor that found the average college GPA rose from 2.93 in 1991 to 3.11 in 2006.
So I guess this is going on at Cornell as well. It would be interesting to see how our GPA figures have changed since we started publishing median grades.
One thing I would like to bring up in your article, Dennis, is that Cornell just started putting median grades on the transcripts this year for people class of 2012 and under; anyone older would not have the median grades published. So unless the two gents sitting in front of you were also freshmen, then their transcripts would list only their grades and not the median one.
There was extensive coverage about grade inflation at Cornell, and the impact that the median grade reports had on it, in The Atlantic Monthly a couple years back:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/06/primary-sources/3969/
Hello, superb writing.