Harvard, Grade Inflation, and the Very Special Snowflakes

A recent article in the Harvard Crimson has generated substantially more buzz on the national scale than is common for college newspaper fare.  That’s because of its subject, a 25-page report authored by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh regarding rampant grade inflation at the university.  “Our grading,” she writes, “no longer performs its primary functions and is undermining our academic mission.”

Certainly the rapid and apparently inexorable rise in average GPA scores threatens to make grades obsolete, if we haven’t reached that stage already.  There has been a lot written about the situation over, well, about as long as Curmie has been paying attention, which is to say when he started his own collegiate career over a half-century ago.  There are manifold causes of the phenomenon: from a political attempt to help men retain their student deferments in the Vietnam era to an over-reliance on student course evaluations for decisions about merit pay, retention, and tenure to concerns about student well-being during COVID. 

Increased emphasis in secondary schools on standardized testing and the accompanying teach-to-the-test mentality also contributes, as students arrive at college having memorized a few names, dates, and formulas, but without having developed the thinking skills required for advanced study in any academic discipline, especially those in which personal interpretation is foregrounded.  Curmie has often said he doesn’t care whether you think Sam or Hally is the protagonist in “Master Harold”… and the boys; he cares about the thought process that gets you there.  (And it had better be more than simply parroting what some teacher told you.)

There’s a good article on the gradeinflation.com website that looks into both the statistics and the causes.  Curmie encourages you to at least glance through it, Gentle Reader.  But keep in mind that the information included there is over a decade old, and things have gotten far worse, especially but not exclusively during COVID.

How bad is it?  Well, there are literally dozens of articles out there, examining a lot of universities, but let’s stick with Harvard, where the problem seems to be worse than anywhere else.  (Curmie devoutly hopes this is true, because if any university’s grading integrity is more compromised than this, Curmie will run screaming into the night, never to be seen again.)  Over half of the grades at Harvard are now an “A,” and from what Curmie can decipher, that means an “A” as opposed to “A-range,” which would include A-minuses.  And get this: the cutoff for summa cum laude status is now 3.989, meaning that a single B-plus or a pair of A-minuses bars a Harvard student from getting summa.  Ah, but there a few fewer 4.0s in the most recent class than in the previous year’s; this is being touted as a sign of progress.  Sigh.

Ultimately, of course, whereas there are a lot of excuses reasons for grade inflation, they all ultimately boil down to the same thing: the faculty.  According to Claybaugh, “Nearly all faculty expressed serious concern… They perceive there to be a misalignment between the grades awarded and the quality of student work.”  Well, they could always… you know… give grades that corrected that “misalignment.”  True, there are pressures to keep passing out “A” grades like candy on Hallowe’en, especially in an era in which students are perceived as consumers rather than clients.  But grades are a professor’s responsibility, and a university that truly cares about the integrity of the process would encourage faculty to be a little more conscientious, not merely in words but in actions.

All of this (except a couple of specifics) has been a standard topic of conversation for a long time.  Curmie has written about it several times, most recently in a discussion of course evaluations, and he’s had dozens of conversations with colleagues from around the campus and around the country.  There’s one proposal from the Harvard administration he wants to talk about in a moment, but first, let’s look at Harvard students’ reaction to the suggestion that perhaps not all of them are the best in the class.

When Curmie started college many years ago, part of the orientation process was telling us (repeatedly!) that over 90% of us were in the top 10% of our high school classes, and that it was mathematically impossible for us all to do so in college, but being in the middle of a class at an Ivy League school was nothing to be ashamed of.  Our parents all got a letter with the same information.  One suspects that Harvard does roughly the same thing with their freshmen.

Ah, but the weeping and wailing from Cambridge drowned out the sounds of the jets at Logan Airport.  A follow-up piece in the Harvard Crimson described the horrors associated with requiring better than average work if you want to get an A.  One student described the report as “soul-crushing”: “The whole entire day, I was crying.  I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.”  Another worried about her ongoing ability to “enjoy [her] classes.”  A lacrosse player whined that “it’s not really accounting for what we have to do on a day to day basis, and how many hours we’re putting into our team, our bodies, and then also school.”

Way to play to the stereotype, guys!  Nothing says “snowflake” louder than this drivel.  You might end up with a 3.8 instead of a 4.0?  And that crushes your soul?  Get a damned life.  The chances are, of course, that these students never really had to work very hard in high school to get the grades that would get them admitted to an Ivy League school.  (Curmie didn’t.)  And the competition is tougher now. 

You don’t, or at least shouldn’t, go to Harvard for the extracurriculars; you go to get a Harvard-level education.  And prioritizing academics, at least somewhat, is, well, mandatory.  When Curmie started at Dartmouth, the cutoff for induction into the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society was 3.4.  Curmie figured he could write and edit for the college newspaper, help out at the Forensic Union (i.e., the debate team), work on shows essentially non-stop, play intramural sports, etc., as long as he kept that GPA.  (They changed the standard for ΦΒΚ in his junior (?) year, so Curmie didn’t end up getting in, but he shifted his attention to being magna cum laude, and achieved that goal.)  You can do things other than study and still get decent grades.

The whole “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school” argument (yeah, that’s a quote, too), suggesting that the work should be easier now, is beyond stupid.  It’s the equivalent of an all-conference high school basketball player complaining about not being all-conference in college although he averages 2 points a game, can’t guard anyone his own size, and has more turnovers than assists. 

One argument seems, superficially, to have some validity: if Harvard gets tougher on grades and equivalent universities don’t, it places Harvard students at a competitive disadvantage.  Ultimately, however, this line of reasoning really isn’t very persuasive at all.  A Harvard degree means something—perhaps less than it once did, but still something—but good grades there are now meaningless from an institution where an A- GPA is below average.

Curmie is reminded of a piece he wrote 15 years ago about the efforts by Loyola Law School to help its students be competitive, namely by simply raising GPAs by a third of a letter grade across the board, including instituting a new de facto A++ grade.  Yes, really.  But the thing is, the little ploy got a lot of attention, thereby diminishing the prestige of a Loyola degree and doing little to actually help students.  Here’s what Curmie wrote:

When I was applying to PhD programs, I was looking at one school that said something like “generally, we require a 3.5 GPA in your undergraduate work.” My undergrad GPA was 3.46 or something like that; it was considerably better in my major, but I didn’t meet the stated criteria. Still, there was that word “generally” in their statement. So I called them up. Their response, paraphrased, was “You have a 3.46 from Dartmouth? Of course we’re interested in you!” That’s what Loyola students used to have going for them: the reputation that a Loyola grad, relative to alums from a different school, was better than his/her GPA. Now the entire place is—or at least ought to be—a laughing stock. Oh, what a brave new world.

Harvard didn’t learn that lesson, apparently.  And, especially in light of the New York Times article a few weeks ago, the world knows just how little a good grade from Harvard now means.

There’s one more item to discuss before we get to the putain de stupide.  One of the arguments in favor of, shall we say, excessive grade generosity is that “For the past decade or so, the College has been exhorting faculty to remember that some students arrive less prepared for college than others.”  If a particular student needs remedial work in a single subject area, that’s understandable.  For example, Curmie had plenty of advisees who could handle all of the university’s general education requirements… except math.

The same phenomenon works in the opposite direction, as well, of course.  Years ago, Curmie taught a variation on the theme of English Composition at Cornell University when he was a grad student there.  One of his students was, from all accounts, a brilliant physicist.  But, curiously enough, he didn’t write as well in his third language (he was Korean; his second language was Chinese) as did the native English speakers in the College of Arts and Sciences at an Ivy League university.

Accommodating that student to the extent of dragging him kicking and screaming to a passing grade is one thing; giving him an A for barely passable work would have been something else.  More recently, Curmie has had a handful of students whose native language is Spanish.  All of them were learning English even as they were also learning Play Analysis.  All of them passed; all of them deserved to pass, without needing any accommodations, because they did the work, and their ideas were good even if they sometimes struggled with writing in their second language.  One, in particular, went on to become a star pupil in subsequent courses and got a Master’s degree from a quite reputable university. 

But if a student is “less prepared” across the board, that person shouldn’t be at Harvard.  One suspects, and you can be certain that the right-wing press will be asserting this, that we’re talking about what could be called DEI admissions.  There are certainly advantages to a diverse student body, but it does no one—not the student, not the other students, not the university, not the nation—any good to admit someone who just can’t cut it.  To this extent, the Trump administration has a point.

Ah, but it’s time for the grand finale.  You may recall, Gentle Reader, that Curmie described the part of the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education that demands that universities return tuition money to students who drop out in their first semester as “a contender for the stupidest fucking idea in the history of stupid fucking ideas.”  Curmie spoke too soon, as there is now a new leader in the clubhouse, a proposal so blazingly inane it could only come from a university administrator, and probably one at Harvard.

Get this: one of the proposals, apparently initiated by Claybaugh and sent to a faculty committee for discussion, is to allow a limited number of A+ grades (Harvard’s best grade at present is an A), thereby “distinguishing the very best students.”  You can’t make this shit up, Gentle Reader.  The way to fight grade inflation is to further inflate grades.  Curmie might have thought that a better course of action to curb grade inflation might be to give students whose work is very good but not exemplary an A- or (God forbid!) perhaps even a B.  Curmie clearly was never cut out for administration, at least at Harvard.

Harvard has brought this on itself.  There are other universities that are, no doubt, almost as bad, but this stuff surpasses credulity.  The pampered little snowflakes who make up at least a good share of the student body should be scorned, but they’re still post-adolescents and might be salvageable.  The administration and faculty, however, are beyond hope of redemption.

About Those Course Evaluations...

Curmie was tempted to write a follow-up to his post about the reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, but realizes that there is little to be gained by doing so.  Conservatives will continue to pretend that only liberals perpetrate political violence (tell that to the cops attacked on January 6, to Paul Pelosi, to Josh Shapiro, to Gretchen Whitmer, to Melissa Hortman’s family…), that Charlie Kirk was a “moderate,” that Tyler Robinson was heavily influenced by the radical leftist ideologues in the Engineering Department at Utah State University during his single semester of (online?) attendance.  And on and on.

The vast majority of the readers of this blog, however, already know that paranoia, stupidity, and mendacity are in a death struggle to be the defining characteristic of the likes of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Dinesh D’Souza.  They also know that reasonable conclusions require evidence, but also that evidence does not cease to be evidence just because, taken by itself, it’s inconclusive.  There’s nothing new there.

So, where to turn for another topic?  Well, Curmie mentioned course evaluations in passing in his piece about FIRE’s less-than-impressive trumpeting of their free speech rankings.  And then, this morning, a Friend of Curmie posted a link to an article in The Atlantic with the portentous title, “How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University.”  And who is Curmie to ignore such a sign from the universe?

Rose Horowitz’s article is more than a little predictable: linking course evaluations to grade inflation and lowered standards.  And, of course, there’s commentary on bias: “Course-evaluation scores are correlated with students’ expected grades. Studies have found that, among other things, students score male professors higher than female ones, rate attractive teachers more highly, and reward instructors who bring in cookies.”  People in Curmie’s (former) line of work have seen literally dozens of variations on the theme over the years.

What’s curious, however, is that there is seldom anything suggested that looks like a potential solution to the problem.  So: Curmie to the rescue.

Let’s start with something basic: course evaluations have two purposes which are sometimes in conflict.  One function is to help faculty determine what aspects of their courses are or are not working.  This is useful.  Curmie made some changes based on suggestions made by students on course evaluations: increasing the number of exams so that there would be less material covered by each one, for example.  Sometimes there’s a question about “why did we have to read X?”  Well, because X is really important, and it’s important that you actually see what it says instead of just having me talk about it… but maybe I’d better spend a little more time explaining to students why that’s true.

One of the biggest weaknesses in student writers is in their failure to link the evidence to the conclusion.  Often, adding a single sentence, or even half a sentence, would improve an essay considerably.  But professors are not immune from making similar errors or omissions, and a brief comment on a course evaluation can indeed improve the quality of instruction in future iterations of a course.  Of course, faculty are, and should be, free to ignore suggestions they consider unhelpful.

The other reason course evaluations exist is the one that’s potentially problematic: the evaluation of faculty, especially regarding retention/tenure/promotion decisions.  No, 19-year-olds, even taken as a group, should not be primarily responsible for whether Professor X has a future at the university.  But that doesn’t mean that students should have no input.  So, what to do?

Suggestion #1: take course evaluations offline.  Back in the day, course evaluations were completed in class.  Curmie often had a colleague teaching in the same time slot down the hall, so with 15 or 20 minutes left on the last day of class, we’d switch rooms: he’d pass out the survey in my class and I would in his.  Sometimes, if the schedule demanded, the department admin would do the honors.  Anyway, the result was that if there were 25 students in a class, we’d get at least 22 or 23 responses.

Shifting to online meant that filling out a course evaluation became a choice, and we’d get the formula Curmie mentioned in the piece linked above: “If there are 20 students in a class—5 loved it, 3 hated it, and a dozen thought it was OK, you’ll get two positive responses, three negative responses, and two ‘meh’ responses.”  Yes, you can incentivize filling out the online form, but Curmie could never figure out how to make that not seem like a bribe for completing the eval or a penalty for not doing what the student might reasonably consider a waste of time.

Suggestion #2: stop pretending to an objectivity that doesn’t exist.  Assigning a numerical score to a question that requires an obviously subjective response is inherently problematic.  Curmie would get rid of those number scores altogether: have students write a paragraph each about what they thought the strengths and weaknesses of the course were.  Prompt them with ideas about relevant topics: knowledge of material, availability outside class, keeping the interest of students, etc., but don’t ask about every item individually.  And insist on specificity.  Don’t insist on an answer to whether a faculty member keeps regular office hours if the student never tried to go to them.  If a student’s only complaint is that the course was too difficult, that’s significant.  If the complaint is about turn-around time for essays or exams, how long did it take?  And so on.

Suggestion #3: actively compare course evaluation scores to grades.  Yes, Curmie thinks that 1-5 scale should go the way of the rotary phone, but it’s unlikely to do so, so here’s what Curmie did when he was called upon to review a colleague’s RTP documents: take the average score on that overall instructor rating and subtract the average grade in the class.  So, for example, a popular professor might get a 4.5 on that 5-point scale, and the average grade in the class might be exactly a B.  4.5-3=1.5.  That would be an excellent score.  Over 1: good.  0-1: OK, maybe.  Less than 0: terrible.  Yes, this is a quick and dirty analysis, and it shouldn’t be used in isolation, but it does at least discourage buying good evaluations with undeservedly good grades.  Our client is the society.  We need people with skill-sets, not just degrees.

Suggestion #4: when considering a major decision—one involving promotion or tenure as opposed to simply retention—the students who really matter aren’t the ones who just finished the course: they’re the ones who took that course a year or more ago.  You took the introductory course from Professor X: how prepared were you for the advanced course?  You’ve now graduated: are you ready for a job/internship/grad school?  You’ve been out five years: tell us how Professor X prepared you (or didn’t) for your current career path.

Suggestion #5: administrators need to grow some cojones.  Years ago, student opinion factored into decision-making only on rare occasions.  Generally speaking, the only time it mattered was when the senior faculty, department chair, and dean were leaning towards a favorable result for a faculty member, but student opinion was overwhelmingly negative (the converse of that didn’t apply: overwhelming support from students never reversed a tenure denial).  But if administrators are now placing too much emphasis on course evaluations, that’s on them, not (or certainly not exclusively) on the assessment device.

Suggestion #6: look for other means of assessment of faculty.  Curmie always got at least good (i.e., positive), sometimes excellent, course evaluations.  But what mattered to him, and what should matter to decision-makers, came not from student opinion, but from student success: his former students’ success in more advanced classes, including in grad school; their pass rate on the state content exam for prospective secondary school teachers; their subsequent lives as artists, teachers, administrators… but most of all, as citizens.

There are indeed some problems associated with course evaluations.  There are, as noted above, some things that would lessen the harm while keeping the advantages.  But the real problem is that lazy and feckless administrators don’t have a clue how to process the information they have available to them.  A lot of programs are rather like the Augean stables, and there’s no Hercules in sight.

How Not to Be a Good University Administrator: Two Case Studies

I promised two more stories that touch on education… here they are.

We turn first to an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education website about Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, who is now returning to the classroom after having been suspended for (OBVIOUSLY!!!) joking on Facebook about killing students. The offending status updates are as follows: "Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ..." and "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete [sic] hitman, it's been that kind of day." Really. She got suspended for that. Or at least that was the story being spun at the time by one Marilyn Wells, interim provost and VPAA at East Stroudsburg.

My initial thought was that Dr. Wells, whose background is somewhere in the health/phys ed/recreation area, is either a). a drone or b). a moron: this response is prompted either by paranoia (“ooh… what if she really means it…[and she kills somebody and we get sued],” even though no rational human being could possibly interpret her remarks that way) or raging stupidity, the inability to tell the difference between a woman who’s had a bad day and one who is legitimately homicidal. Hmm… I suppose “c). possessed of an autistic inability to discern irony or hyperbole” would be another possibility. But I strongly suspect that “d). none of the above” is the correct answer to today’s little multiple-choice quiz.

I have an inkling that about midnight at some tech rehearsal somewhere along the line, I’ve probably told my stage manager not that I’d like to kill some actor or designer or props person, but that I was going to do so. I never followed through, though, curiously enough. I don’t recall ever posting on Facebook that I’d like to kill a student, a colleague, or a boss, but I might have… if I did I, like Prof. Gadsden, would have been careful to ensure that anyone with an IQ over room temperature would know I was joking. And I’m certain that I’ve volunteered to be the “discreet hitman” (I’d have spelled it correctly) for a friend. I was, however, never actually engaged to perform such duties. One of my favorite people, a former student, now a teacher, posted a Facebook status not long ago that suggested her desire to “beat someone to a pulp.” I even endorsed that sentiment because… wait for it… I’m not a moron, and I know—not just think, know--that she didn’t plan, literally, to commit assault. But that whole “not a moron” bit doesn’t apply as well, apparently, to Dr. Wells. I should note here that the overwhelming majority of comments on the first Chronicle article—the one after the suspension, not the one after the return—seem to think Prof. Gadsden is the guilty party. This, I must say, makes me fear for academe. Honestly, I can't decide which these people need more: a whoopee cushion or a laxative.

Here’s the official statement: “Given the climate of security concerns in academia, the university has an obligation to take all threats seriously and act accordingly.” This is, of course, symptomatic of the mindless adherence to silly policies that plagues much of society, with academia certainly at or near the top of the list. It’s the same mentality that gets high school girls suspended from school for giving a Midol to a friend, or kept a high school boy from graduating with his class a couple of years ago for wearing a bolo instead of a standard necktie under his robe. It’s easier for the lazy and feeble-minded, whether they be TSA agents or university provosts, to blindly adhere to some regulation than to think. No, I’m not suggesting that prudence isn’t a good idea, and no, gentle reader, I’m not going to go all Ayn Rand/Friedrich Nietzsche on you. But the official response to an obvious case of venting was remarkably, audaciously, cretinous. Or was it?

It turns out that Prof. Gadsden is unpopular… apparently with students and colleagues alike. And she’s bounced around from job to job a fair amount: that’s a red flag to search committees, but one which the folks at East Stroudsburg apparently ignored. She didn’t help her cause in being perceived as a good colleague by publishing an op-ed in the Chronicle that is, well, pretty whiny. In her world, confrontational students or assertions that she is “intimidating,” or “cannot teach” are unequivocally racist. While I have (obviously) never been called the n-word by a student, I’ve experienced all the rest of the allegedly racially-tinged problems she describes. Still, I have no basis for knowing whether she has a point or not… beyond my mantra that “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.” And Prof. Gadsden sure does want to tell us about her qualifications and (implicitly) her teaching. Being brilliant—as she may be—doesn’t make one a good teacher or a good colleague. The fact that fellow faculty are telling her that she’s "too sensitive" or "a little paranoid" might mean, as she suggests, that they “fail — or refuse — to understand the complexity of retaining faculty members from underrepresented groups.” Or it might mean that she’s too sensitive and a little paranoid (just like her boss…).

What I’m not saying outright (because I don’t know) but strongly suspect is that Prof. Gadsden is a thorn in the side of all and sundry at East Stroudsburg. The USA Today article suggests that she fears the incident may hurt her chances for tenure (interesting that the Chronicle piece doesn’t mention her tenure status, leaving the reader to assume—falsely, apparently—that, as an associate professor, she’s already tenured). Gee, you suppose there’s a link, there? Tell me that some little gnome isn’t whispering in the provost’s ear, “maybe if we humiliate her, she’ll just go away, because you know she’s going to sue us for racial discrimination if she doesn’t get tenure.” Ultimately, I’m reminded that Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion. If I had to guess, I’d say that proving someone can’t teach—even with reams of supporting evidence—is harder than claiming recklessness and ginning up a little fear-mongering. From where I sit, I’m glad she’s not a colleague, and I’m even happier that my provost has a brain.

The other story was released on April 1, and it’s silly enough that, if comments on the Chronicle of Higher Education article are to be believed, both the reporters and/or editors at the Chronicle and at least one person their reporter called for comment thought it was an April Fools’ joke. Alas, apparently it isn’t. No, it actually seems to be true that Loyola Law School Los Angeles has decided to retroactively raise the grades of current students and recent graduates by 1/3 of a point: a plus or minus, in other words (a B becomes a B+, a B+ becomes an A-). In the words of Elie Mystal on the Above the Law blog, “That’s not just inflation; that’s a rewriting of history.” Perhaps someone there is running for a slot on the Texas Board of Education?

You see, Loyola’s average students were being treated in the workplace as if they were average, and Dean Victor J. Gold just couldn’t stand for that: “We concluded that the grading curve was sending incorrect information about our students, and, frankly, it was putting them at an unfair competitive disadvantage in a pretty tough job market." In other words, “We have very, very special snowflakes here at Loyola. This isn’t Lake Woebegone, where all of the children are merely above average; this is Loyola, where they’re all brilliant.” The support for this absurdity comes from one Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired associate professor of earth and ocean sciences at Duke, who argues that “There are employers that have GPA cutoffs, and by inflating grades, you increase the number of students who meet those GPA cutoffs." Can’t argue with that, can we? The most rational solution by this logic, of course, it to give everyone an A+ in everything, thereby ensuring that even the most dim-witted and lazy of our brood can move directly into senior partner positions with high-powered firms. Because the reason some of our students can't find work isn’t a tight economy or the fact that our average students really are average, it’s that we didn’t have enough grade inflation.

Give me a damn break. First off, the Dean’s claim that class rank will be unaffected is true only because—and this is so laughable I can barely type—“While most grades of A+ will receive 4.333 grade points, those A+ grades that earn 4.667 grade points will be accompanied by an asterisk. The asterisk will lead the reader to an explanation on the transcript making clear that, as a result of the change in the curve we have now implemented, there are two possible grade point values for an A+.” This phenomenon is aptly described by Mystal as “a ‘double’ A+; an A+ with a bright, shiny, happy star — just so that employers all know that these kids are the super-most-awesome kids in the bunch!” [Note: If nothing else comes of this, Mr. Mystal has a new fan.]

Secondly, if employers (including government agencies) are using a GPA limit instead of a class percentile limit, they’re idiots and you don’t want to work for them. Moreover, those limits are minimums: in this economy—hell, in any economy—you’d better exceed, not merely meet, the minimum criteria if you want to get hired, and those criteria are more than likely to include skill sets not measured by grades. Note also the lawyerly cherry-picking of statistics by Mr. Gold: a B- is what the old first-year average was. Those grades inflate over the ensuing two years, so a Loyola student with a B average isn’t even average: by Gold’s own argument, a Loyola student with a 3.17 GPA (a little closer to a B+ than to a B) is in the 25th percentile. In other words, that B average required by some agencies is already being achieved (if that’s the word) by well over three-quarters of Loyola students. Speaking as someone whose life might conceivably be affected by one of those government agencies, I really don’t think that it imposes an incredible hardship on a prospective employee to be, well, within hailing distance of mediocre.

Thirdly, any rational prospective employer is going to know something about the reputation of the various institutions from which it might draw its new employees. These are lawyers, after all: the people hiring them are likely to be lawyers, too. It’s the job of someone in charge of hiring new people into a firm or an agency to keep abreast with what programs are good where. When I was applying to PhD programs, I was looking at one school that said something like “generally, we require a 3.5 GPA in your undergraduate work.” My undergrad GPA was 3.46 or something like that; it was considerably better in my major, but I didn’t meet the stated criteria. Still, there was that word “generally” in their statement. So I called them up. Their response, paraphrased, was “You have a 3.46 from Dartmouth? Of course we’re interested in you!” That’s what Loyola students used to have going for them: the reputation that a Loyola grad, relative to alums from a different school, was better than his/her GPA. Now the entire place is—or at least ought to be—a laughing stock. Oh, what a brave new world.