If you’re not familiar with American colleges, the “dean’s list” is usually a list of all the students who get a high grade-point average during a year or a semester, an average above some cutoff that varies from school to school. You can tout “being on the Dean’s list” as an index of your academic merit, and it usually appears on your college transcript, something that you can show potential employers or graduate schools as a sign of your achievement.
But the creation of deans lists is waning for two reasons. First, with grade inflation, in many places the average grade is so high that nearly all students can get on the dean’s list. The average grade at Yale is an A, with the grade-point average being 3.7 out of 4. It’s 3.8 at Harvard—nearly everyone gets straight As.
The second reason is that ranking students in this way, by academic merit, is deemed to violate equity, as minority students (except for Asians) tend to get lower grades. The solution? Eliminate the rankings entirely, so that students who don’t do as well aren’t “stigmatized.” This is what just happened at Cornell, according to the student newspaper The Daily Sun. And the University explicitly gives “equity” as the rationale:
Click to read:
From the paper:
Starting Fall 2023, incoming Cornellians, including the Class of 2027, became ineligible to receive the Dean’s List distinction on their transcript.
The move away from the Dean’s List came after discussion within the Faculty Senate regarding equity concerns.
The Faculty Senate’s Resolution 182: Regarding the Award of Honors and Distinctions to Cornell’s Undergraduate Students, passed in May 2022, sought to create a more fair and equitable learning environment for students.
“[The proposal] is aimed at creating consistency across the undergraduate colleges and schools in the award of academic honors and distinctions and balancing recognition of high-achieving students against amelioration of an unhealthy level of competition at Cornell,” the Faculty Senate wrote in the resolution.
Cornell will officially stop listing the honor on student transcripts by Spring 2026, thereby leaving only two Ivy League universities — the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University — maintaining the tradition.
. . .Cornell’s seven undergraduate colleges each have their own set of requirements for students to earn a place on the Dean’s List, including different credit and GPA requirements. For example, The College of Architecture, Art and Planning requires a minimum GPA of 3.8, while the Nolan School of Hotel Administration requires only a 3.3. In the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, there are different GPA requirements for each class year, with first-year students needing a lower GPA than other students in the college.
When asked about the reasoning behind the Dean’s List requirements at each individual undergraduate college, Cornell and individual college administrations each declined to comment.
Note that the paper don’t mention grade inflation, nor does the University’s resolution to get rid of the dean’s list.
Oh, and there’s one more thing they’re eliminating, which I always thought was a good practice: listing the median grade (the grade that divides the students into two groups of equal size) on the transcript. This also helps graduate schools and potential employers deal with grade inflation, as they can see if a college is giving really high grades to everyone.
The removal of the Dean’s List comes in conjunction with Cornell’s decision to remove median grades from student transcripts, a similar measure previously used to show how well students performed in comparison with fellow students in each class.
“There’s a lot of pressure already on students, so this is just one less thing to worry about,” Tawfik said. “There are more important things to be focusing on.”
I can understand eliminating dean’s lists when they’re meaningless, as when grade inflation entitles every student to be on them (“all must have prizes”), but in general Cornell’s elimination simply reflects the trend in society to favor equity above meritocracy. While I favor efforts to provide everyone with equal opportunity (a VERY hard task), the elimination of indices of merit will eventually trickle down to us all, making us unable to judge the qualifications of people whom we interact with: doctors, pilots, and so on.
Aaaaarrrrgghh to grade inflation. Back in my days at Stanford (where I would have had to walk both ways uphill in the snow if we had had any🤓), the curve allowed only 15%!! of students to get A’s on any single test or course. (35% B, 35% C, 15% D+F). It’s horrible here in high schools as well. Our principal bragged about 90% of the 9th graders having A averages🙀🙈
Inflation may have been the harbinger of all this.
See, equity is now fixing those problems that it exposed.
[ Ouroboros ]
Next step, everybody passes, nobody fails. Failure is stigmatizing, don’t you know.
It’s the Oprah rule….
“You get an A! And you get an A! And you get an A!..”
After 40+ years teaching in both an arts and sci department and in law school, I have encountered several versions of this problem. Regarding grading on curves, I remember asking a physics colleague how he would handle an exam in which more than half of the class got 100%. Was that good teaching on his part? Was it a group of very smart students? No, he said, it was a bad exam. OK. But if an exam is designed to segment the student body into 4 or 5 tiers, it risks relying on variables that have little to do with what really should be measured. Most of us prepare exams to test student knowledge and understanding of material we judge they need to know, not material that would reveal who could perform one point better.
In that regard, a course grade should reflect the performance of the student who receives the grade, not the performance of all other students. I mention the physics course because grading there, as in math courses, for example, is usually much more objective than in English Lit, in which grade inflation is certainly a reflection of an instructor’s explicit or implicit biases rather than actual student performance. It is theoretically possible that the admissions criteria at highly selective colleges have chosen a high percentage of students who will excel. Remember that the average overall grade for Harvard College students was low at a time when Harvard was a finishing school for a social elite, and those students invented the “gentleman’s C” grade as a way to pass without sullying oneself with actual work. If the overall average grade is now higher, it may be due, at least in part, to a policy since the 1940s of admitting students with better academic qualifications.
Just a couple of thoughts…..
I think you make many excellent points, Barbara, but I think it had been a very long time since Harvard et al were elite finishing schools?? 70+ years, perhaps.
Yes, read my last sentence, which notes that Harvard et al shifted to admitting students with better qualifications in the 1940s. When I was at Harvard the hallowed walls were covered with portraits and photos of well-to-do gentlemen from as late as the 1930s, but after 1944 the GI bill opened up the possibility of a college education, including a Harvard education, for many middle-class GIs — and within a few years, Harvard was looking for excellence in at least a large portion of every freshman class, not just legacies.
Yes, but I think the grade inflation in the last, say, 20? years is not necessarily just a result of there being more qualified students admitted.
From the article :
“The move away from the Dean’s List came after discussion within the Faculty Senate regarding equity concerns.
[…], sought to create a more fair and equitable learning environment for students.”
The sacred object of equity.
No measurements of it, no definition of it besides – undoubtedly – “equal outcomes” (check out the DEI discourse on eXtwitter lately), and the set up for a positive feedback cycle – consuming everything – with no end (“equal outcomes” will never, and have not ever, and has no expectation to ever, take place). It’d be great to find Cornell’s definition, for the record.
“Equity” is the sacred object of a cult.
(Or, of course, the real estate/housing market economy term).
TP, you gave the definition of equity, namely equal outcomes. There’s no ambiguity here. The average Joe and Jane does not know this definition, but in woke-influenced academia it is clear. Of course, often, like in this case with Cornell, the definition will not be stated – to fool outsiders.
Is that a fact?
I might look it up one day for kicks – a bunch of examples of the definitions were put on eXtwitter. Most had “equal outcomes”.
I found :
https://scl.cornell.edu/belonging-support-services/centers-student-equity-empowerment-and-belonging
They have already dialectically synthesized DEI into EEB.
Equity is
“Equity ensures that students are provided the resources needed to access the same opportunities. ”
I’m not buying it, even with “equal opportunity” – but feel free to disagree.
I note there is “equity law” that is different and I must read about.
Post-edit deadline:
For the record, as of Jan. 20, 2021, The White House defines “equity” as being connected to “underserved communities”. For brevity, I do not quote it but leave a link:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/20/executive-order-advancing-racial-equity-and-support-for-underserved-communities-through-the-federal-government/
Remind to never go to doctors who went to these “colleges/univetsities” or fly on a plane piloted by one of them.
They are more concerned about hurt feelings than competency or merit.
No thank you.
They will be increasingly difficult to avoid as time goes on.
How are medical schools supposed to find top students in such an atmosphere?
Hmmmm….. medical schools continue to use a standardized test, the MCAT, for admissions, and medical students must pass several rounds of standardized national exams to move forward — and then need licensing, CME, etc, to practice. So, while you may have some bogus institutions in mind with the scare quotes — “colleges/universities” (like Trump University?) — Cornell and the other Ivies remain real, actual colleges and universities.
Piloting a plane is a skill that is not very closely related to academic performance, and licensing requires achieving a passable level of skill and knowledge, so I suspect that you can feel perfectly safe in any major airline. I got my private pilot’s license at age 17, many years ago, and was IFR rated by the time I graduated from high school, so nothing about my college education was relevant…
From Newsweek:
https://www.newsweek.com/diversity-delusion-comes-health-care-opinion-1725699
“The campaign for diversity is long running and has some value, yet the ideological extremism of the past two years has led medical schools to adopt dangerous strategies. To fight supposed “systemic racism,” at least 40 institutions have dropped the requirement that all applicants take the MCAT, the gold-standard test that measures students’ grasp of this life-saving profession. The University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, where I used to work, now waives the MCAT for a number of applicants each year, primarily from Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
It’s also getting harder to gauge whether graduates are well prepared. The U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, which residencies rely on when picking trainees, recently abandoned objective grading for a pass/fail system, largely on diversity grounds. And calls are growing for post-graduate resident evaluations to be weakened as well. That would let potentially unqualified individuals enter medical practice and endanger patient well being”
Earlier in the article, it stated that 40 Med schools have dropped the MCAT admission requirement.
So, no thanks.
Thanks for the update — it’s a small correction, but the link in the Newsweek article lists 17 medical schools that do not require the MCAT, not 40, and most of them substitute some other evidence of quality. The 10 additional medical schools that have early admissions options only drop the MCAT for EAP students, who have demonstrated their ability in other ways — so perhaps 27 schools are MCAT optional, not 40. And, of course, that is only for admission, and students who are admitted still have to pass — you will recall the old joke about what we call the person who graduates last in their medical school class.
My SO, a cardiologist, used to joke that medicine is not brain surgery. One problem with physician production is that we would like to select for Nobel Prize winners when we need clinical competence, and a lot of research suggests that clinical competence, which is partly a function of lots of experience, is hard to predict in standard admissions criteria. The experience at Howard University might be a good model for medical schools that wish to focus on clinical skills rather than research.
All of that said, it will be interesting to see if there are measurable changes in the quality of clinical medicine that can be traced to changes in the MCAT requirement at those 27 schools, and if those changes are durable. I remember, as you will, that students in “The New Pathway” at Harvard Medical School were originally performing poorly on the USMLE — but they were among the most talented students in the U.S., and ultimately made excellent docs.
Amen! Or perhaps, Ramen!
Have you been touched by the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
That is exactly the intent. After all, you’ll still be able to judge what really matters, their race.
Quoting from Ibram X. Kendi’s greatest speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day be judged, not by their character, but by the color of their skin.”
Only thus can equity be attained.
Oh Christ. Did he really say that?
The elimination of grades altogether is the next logical step. Ugh.
When I was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Binghamton (1974-1978), the grades were A, B, C, and No Credit (there were also pluses and minuses IIRC). The idea behind No Credit (NC), rather than D or F, was to focus on the competencies a student achieved, not the failures. By grading A, B, C, and NC, only the competencies ended up on the transcript. NC went unreported (again IIRC). It seemed to work, but at some point after I left, they adopted a more traditional system, which they seem to retain today.
In my 3rd undergraduate year, I was a bit annoyed that my university didn’t include the median mark on our transcripts. There were two blocks of a biostatistics course, one of which was taught by a very good teacher, the other not, and you can guess which one I had. Those of us in that class had to learn the material from the textbook, as the prof was no help (eg. he was going over a problem in class, we pointed out that he had made a minor mistake in his solution, and he just dropped the problem, moved on, and never returned to it). Anyway, while I ended up with a decent grade in the course, it annoyed me that the median grade wasn’t on the transcript, as seeing my grade compared to our median (probably around 54%) compared to someone with the same mark in the other section (median probably 67% or more), would have been useful information for comparison.
What’s funny is I thought academic achievement was a great leveller. Getting on the Dean’s list was judged on pure academic achievement and money, class, influence, or anything else couldn’t change that.
Which is why I suspect that a lot of DEI and the degradation of merit is actually supported by established white, non-Jews looking to fend off competition from overachieving minority groups, such as east Asians and Jews. Basically, if I can eliminate merit, I can still use my connections to get my dim-witted kids Connor and Madison into Harvard, just like in the old days.
They are effectively using underachieving minority groups as a battering ram…
That’s a shrewd point. But I think the explanation is even simpler. The substitution of ideological conformity for ability provides an entry way to higher status for conformists whose ambition greatly exceeds their ability. It is the march of what Hirsi Ali calls “the mediocre mafia”, or what was once celebrated as “Michurinism” in the galaxy far away.
Similar : see “entryism”, or “entrism” :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism
And of course the wide-open “obstacles” or personal narratives to get credit for all the activism (or, praxis) the applicant participated in.
Right, Jeff. Because the kids admitted under affirmative action or DEI or whatever it’s called now won’t be the serious threat to the success of Connor and Madison the way the despised Asians and Jews would be if they were allowed to “get in everywhere”.
I have to say I like the way you think.
I wonder why this wouldn’t become a deterrent for high achieving students to apply to Cornell, as ones’ transcripts will be engineered to look average.
The elimination of even reporting the median grade on transcripts comports perfectly with the current zeitgeist. After all, for the half below the median in any distribution, that situation is unfair and makes that half feel unsafe. We can look forward to DEI Office rules that prohibit any grades below the median.
In the USSR, of fond memory, and apparently to this day in Russia, many academic courses are graded on a simple pass/no pass ( (зачёт/незачёт) system. I wonder if this practice has anything to do with the fabled efficiency that was evident in so many features of ordinary Soviet and now Russian life.
I’m retired now, but in my previous university in Asia they got round grade inflation by using a norm-referenced system. The top 10% got a 1st class, the next 15% a 2.1. and so on. That also has its problems, but it does away with the problem of grade inflation and everyone getting an A.
I’d never heard about it in undergrad at the U. of Melbourne, I think it is an American thing. I learned about it at Georgetown doing post grad Middle East politics, when I was on it but didn’t know what it meant. hahahaha I think the cutoff was 3.5
I don’t remember at law school but I surely wasn’t on it. 🙂
You know what they call the dumbest kid in the class after he graduates law school?
A lawyer. HAHAHAH I kill me!
D.A.
NYC/FL
I remember someone pushing for this during my undergrad years (early 70’s). My immediate reaction was “Are you shitting me? Every issue of the student paper has two full pages dedicated to photos and stories celebrating students who can run fast, or throw a ball through a hoop, but a small text box in the bottom corner of page 5 once a quarter acknowledging those who are good at doing WHAT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE HERE FOR is too much? Go [long string of ’70’sexpletives deleted]”
Brilliantly put!
I’m reminded of the Monty Python sketch of a bunch of Greek philosophers walking around musing and pondering and contemplating on a football field.
Every time I see such a full spread of sports heroes, I contemplate their K-8 reading level.
Eliminating recognition of merit in the name of equity? Ceiling Cat help us. Grade inflation has been a growing problem in the UK, too, with the number of students gaining a First reaching 40% and becoming meaningless. Has everyone forgotten that when the Dodo said “”Everybody has won and all must have prizes” it was in a fantasy world and in the literary nonsense genre?
Two thoughts: On equity grading and grade inflation: On my favorite sitcom, the mom of a teenage girl asked the girl’s high school math teacher what her daughter could do to improve her grades. The teacher replied, “ Get more of the answers right.” When the mom asked whether her daughter could do something for extra credit to bring her grades up, the teacher denied the request with an explanation. He said, “Every day I drive across the bridge over the X river and every time I do I hope that the engineer who designed the bridge had a teacher who insisted on the engineer getting the right answers.” Made sense to me.
Another random thought on DEI this time: I live in the State of Boeing. We are very blue and tend to buy into the latest woke trends. After hearing about the missing bolts on some Boeing planes I wondered how many people on the crew installing those bolts were DEI hires. Fair? Absolutely not. But when identity matters more than objective performance, errant and objectionable thoughts can find purchase.