I go to Yale where the average GPA is a 3.6. So we suffer from a similar "problem." But honestly, I do not think it is a problem. Kids here put an absurd amount of work into their classes. It's not surprising that the average GPA is a 3.6, because the average assignment actually is A- level work. The obvious argument against this is that the grades should be curved so that the average level of work receives a C... but what do you do when most kids are getting the same top grades on tests, or writing the same high quality papers? It's a hard problem to solve, and as long as other colleges have grade inflation, it would be disadvantageous to your students to not have it.
The problem I have is differing GPA distributions between majors. History majors have a much easier time getting in the 3.6-4.0 range than CS majors, because history teachers will rarely give anything less than a B. So when a CS major applies to jobs that other majors are also applying to (say, finance), he can look bad in comparison.
> If everybody is blowing out your measurement scale, your scale needs to be higher.
This is only true if the purpose of your measurement scale is to partition scores into a normal (or similar) distribution. This is not always the case - sometimes the purpose of a rank like this is to measure something absolute, rather than relative.
For example, what would happen if every restaurant in NYC cleaned up their kitchens and used such safe practices that they all met the requirements to get an "A" grade on their Dept. of Health inspection? In that case, I would say that they are all safe to eat at, and they all deserve "A" ratings. However according to you, this would mean the scale was broken and we should grade them on a normal curve, giving B's and C's and even F's to perfectly-safe-but-not-quite-as-clean restaurants. This just doesn't make sense - if you meet the requirements for an "A", it's not fair to be put out of business just because someone else spent more time polishing their restaurant floor.
I think school grades should be treated similarly - as an "absolute" measure of whether or not the student learned the curriculum, not a relative measure of how well they performed against their peers. No one should be punished for the "bad luck" of being placed in a class full of wicked-smart students. Now I can't say whether or not the A's given out by Harvard were in fact fair, but the fact that the median grade was an A is not, in and of itself, enough evidence to say that the grading system is broken.
Nearly all of the most sought-after exits into the "real world" from Harvard care about GPA: banks, consulting firms, Big Corps, graduate schools, etc.
Right, and then there's this. But employers do give a shit about GPA when recruiting college seniors, because it represents one of the only available metrics for quality of work. In my experience, providing employers with other metrics reduces the value they place on GPA.
Perhaps schools should adopt the IIHS ratings scale: Good, Acceptable, Marginal, Poor. Doing away with letter grades that have strong historical bias and cultural signaling might be useful.
It may depend on the case - in many cases, the school a student attended trumps the GPA the student achieved at that school. For schools like Harvard and Yale, it is the brand that employers react to most, not the GPA. Having recruited students from those schools while at a strategy consulting firm, typically we looked at school, then major, then other stuff (which may or may not include GPA). Major was a better indicator of talent level than GPA at those schools.
The problem I have is differing GPA distributions between majors. History majors have a much easier time getting in the 3.6-4.0 range than CS majors, because history teachers will rarely give anything less than a B. So when a CS major applies to jobs that other majors are also applying to (say, finance), he can look bad in comparison.