Nope, I've carefully looked at MIT's history of grade inflation (the info is online)
Citation? Every source I can find shows that a) they haven't released average GPAs since 2000 and b) from 1950-2000 they inflated grades at or above the average national rate.
Source was as I remember The Tech, MIT's student newspaper, but I can't find it right now, it was a raw data series. This '75 article starting on page 5 http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf covers '62-'72, but the data I looked at went quite a bit further. If you're really interested I can try harder.
Note that you should throw out results from the '50s and a bit further, when science and especially math education was poorer and MIT had to accept and weed out students. If one was really serious about this, you'd have to find the transition to when they could send acceptances to students they were quite sure could do the work, which had long been the case when I was got in in '79.
Can't say anything based on data about this century; do wonder why they stopped releasing them, but there are reasons that wouldn't touch on grade inflation per se, e.g. the dot.com crash resulted in a great discontinuity for the EECS, which lost more than half its students, after having 40% of them for decades. That resulted in the panic which replaced SICP/6.001 with harder introductory courses (it's even less a place where a pure CS type can slide by on two pure EE courses after the first required course), and it was some time before EECS enrollments returned (and not just at MIT, e.g. Stanford experienced this).
Hmmm, I'm not at all sure what that period might have done to the outside of EECS student body, but I could see many mathematically strong students simply not going to MIT, and my source on what's going on, who would definitely know in at least the School of Engineering, hasn't mentioned any grade inflation problems, I'll ask if that's changed.
There's also one discontinuity before this century, when a professional admissions director actually followed the faculty's official guidelines/rules/whatever on who to admit. There are two classes that were much less strong, this was fixed when e.g. physics faculty members made a big fuss and admissions got realigned with reality.
As for "every source", there's plenty that talk about MIT "suffering" from grade deflation. Actually a problem with others interpreting MIT GPAs vs. schools with notorious grade inflation, pre-meds are understandably very concerned about this; search on mit grade deflation.
Yes, there are plenty of articles discussing MIT and grade deflation. Unfortunately, none of the ones I could find have any data - its all anecdotal from students. The hard data I did actually find (http://www.gradeinflation.com/) shows grade inflation at MIT matching that at Harvard (the media's favorite grade inflation target) almost perfectly from 1950-2000.
I never thought this before, but now that I've actually looked at what little data is available, it looks an awful lot like the MIT grade deflation thing is a myth.
Ah ha, this site is where the data series is, specifically: http://www.gradeinflation.com/MIT.html and my memory about The Tech is from where they got a lot of their data.
So, you're telling me, the GPA going down 1/100 of a point in the quarter century of 1976-2000, is evidence of grade inflation???
If you can seriously look at this time series, accounting for the two factors of better post-Sputnik math and science education and Vietnam War avoid the draft, or simply limit yourself to the period after both of those ('73-75 for the draft, by which time the upper level post-Sputnik reforms would have hit the applicants), then factor in that freshmen went from pass/fail to grades in their second term during this period, and say MIT has statistically significant grade inflation, we have no basis for a discussion.
If we're allowed to pick and choose our time series, the quarter century before that MIT saw inflation at almost double that of the grade inflation poster child, Harvard.
Yeah, you can rationalize based on outside events, but without real data on how much of the change is actually attributable to those things, you're just fitting facts into your worldview. How do we know there aren't similar events in the quarter century you've chosen that are forcing deflation?
Comments
Citation? Every source I can find shows that a) they haven't released average GPAs since 2000 and b) from 1950-2000 they inflated grades at or above the average national rate.
Source was as I remember The Tech, MIT's student newspaper, but I can't find it right now, it was a raw data series. This '75 article starting on page 5 http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N11.pdf covers '62-'72, but the data I looked at went quite a bit further. If you're really interested I can try harder.
Note that you should throw out results from the '50s and a bit further, when science and especially math education was poorer and MIT had to accept and weed out students. If one was really serious about this, you'd have to find the transition to when they could send acceptances to students they were quite sure could do the work, which had long been the case when I was got in in '79.
Can't say anything based on data about this century; do wonder why they stopped releasing them, but there are reasons that wouldn't touch on grade inflation per se, e.g. the dot.com crash resulted in a great discontinuity for the EECS, which lost more than half its students, after having 40% of them for decades. That resulted in the panic which replaced SICP/6.001 with harder introductory courses (it's even less a place where a pure CS type can slide by on two pure EE courses after the first required course), and it was some time before EECS enrollments returned (and not just at MIT, e.g. Stanford experienced this).
Hmmm, I'm not at all sure what that period might have done to the outside of EECS student body, but I could see many mathematically strong students simply not going to MIT, and my source on what's going on, who would definitely know in at least the School of Engineering, hasn't mentioned any grade inflation problems, I'll ask if that's changed.
There's also one discontinuity before this century, when a professional admissions director actually followed the faculty's official guidelines/rules/whatever on who to admit. There are two classes that were much less strong, this was fixed when e.g. physics faculty members made a big fuss and admissions got realigned with reality.
As for "every source", there's plenty that talk about MIT "suffering" from grade deflation. Actually a problem with others interpreting MIT GPAs vs. schools with notorious grade inflation, pre-meds are understandably very concerned about this; search on mit grade deflation.
Yes, there are plenty of articles discussing MIT and grade deflation. Unfortunately, none of the ones I could find have any data - its all anecdotal from students. The hard data I did actually find (http://www.gradeinflation.com/) shows grade inflation at MIT matching that at Harvard (the media's favorite grade inflation target) almost perfectly from 1950-2000.
I never thought this before, but now that I've actually looked at what little data is available, it looks an awful lot like the MIT grade deflation thing is a myth.
Ah ha, this site is where the data series is, specifically: http://www.gradeinflation.com/MIT.html and my memory about The Tech is from where they got a lot of their data.
So, you're telling me, the GPA going down 1/100 of a point in the quarter century of 1976-2000, is evidence of grade inflation???
If you can seriously look at this time series, accounting for the two factors of better post-Sputnik math and science education and Vietnam War avoid the draft, or simply limit yourself to the period after both of those ('73-75 for the draft, by which time the upper level post-Sputnik reforms would have hit the applicants), then factor in that freshmen went from pass/fail to grades in their second term during this period, and say MIT has statistically significant grade inflation, we have no basis for a discussion.
If we're allowed to pick and choose our time series, the quarter century before that MIT saw inflation at almost double that of the grade inflation poster child, Harvard.
Yeah, you can rationalize based on outside events, but without real data on how much of the change is actually attributable to those things, you're just fitting facts into your worldview. How do we know there aren't similar events in the quarter century you've chosen that are forcing deflation?