CV NEWS FEED // According to a new report, 78.97% of the grades given out by Yale College undergraduate professors during the last school year were in the A range.
Yale economics professor Ray Fair conducted the internal study. Fair’s report also revealed that the average Grade Point Average (GPA) for Yale undergraduate students during the 2022-23 year was a 3.70 – a mark usually considered to be well above average.
According to Fair and many other observers, COVID policies were one factor in the unusual proliferation of stellar grades at the Ivy League institution’s undergraduate branch.
“Some thought [the COVID effect] would be temporary, but it has more or less persisted,” Fair said in an interview with Yale Daily News. “[It’s] probably the faculty going easier on students because COVID was a pain.”
Yale Daily News also noted: “Even before the pandemic, the percentage of A-range grades [at Yale] was climbing.”
“It reached 72.95 percent in the 2018-19 academic year, up from 68.97 percent five years prior,” the student-run publication reported. “But in 2020-21, that share jumped to 81.97 percent.”
Per Fair’s report, in the 2022-23 academic year, only 11.27% of the grades handed out by Yale College professors were B’s or lower. Fair’s research does “not include data from the 2019-20 academic year because spring-semester classes were graded under a ‘universal pass/fail’ policy.”
Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis observed that the large proportion of A’s and A-’s “[makes] it difficult for instructors to use grades for their intended purpose of helping students understand areas of strength and others that need attention.”
According to Yale Daily News, Lewis “encouraged” professors during a meeting last month “to make use of the full range of grades where appropriate.”
In addition, Lewis told FOX News:
Yale students are admitted through a highly competitive process. It is not surprising that they are smart and well-prepared and therefore tend to earn high grades. In general, instructors determine the grading policies for their own classes, individually. And because classes vary so widely by type, size, and subject, guidelines vary within departments and among instructors.
The dean added that he hopes his decision to make the report public will “promote transparency.”
Yale political science and pre-law student Gustavo Toledo slammed his college’s increasingly liberal grading system as “grade inflation.”
“Students who were already feeling pressured to get these high G.P.A.s will then feel that their work is sort of devalued,” he told FOX. “This obviously doesn’t help.”
FOX continued:
Yale isn’t the only Ivy League school liberally handing out As. An October report from Harvard University’s Undergraduate Office revealed nearly identical findings; 79 percent of grades given during the 2020-2021 school year were in the A-range.
FOX also reported that at both Yale and Harvard “there were significant differences between the grades given in humanities courses versus engineering and science courses.”
Breitbart reported a “whopping 92.06 percent of Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies students earning A-range grades compared to 52.39 percent of students in economic courses.”
