Harvard College's Grading System Is 'failing,' Report on Grade Inflation Says

An interesting article that confirms something I've often been annoyed about - in Australia most of the top universities don't use GPAs but WAMs (weighted average marks).

In a GPA system whether you get 100 or 85, you get an A which results in a 4.0 GPA. In Australia, it's simply a weighted average number (so there is a big difference to employers when reading a resume that has an 85 WAM or a 95 WAM). I guess the flip side 'benefit' is that there's a marginal difference between 84.5 and 85, whereas that's 1 whole GPA point in the US.

To add on to that, from what I've heard, broadly speaking in the US getting an A is the result of turning up to class and doing the homework. Here, you've got to really go above and beyond what they teach you to get anything close to 85. The somewhat aggravating part of that is given how large the foreign student market is here (it's our 3rd biggest export industry), it results in grade inflation at the low end. Teachers/ lecturers will find all sorts of ways to get students an easy 40-60% worth of marks and then absolutely crush students in the final.

In other words, it's very very easy to pass classes, but exceedingly hard to do very well. If I had to approximate, the mean mark in most university classes would be around 60-65 with the standard deviation being something like 8 marks (meaning the top 2.5% of students get above 80ish). Compared to the 60% of students getting A at Harvard.