RippleMatch, a business that helps Gen Z finds jobs, was able to compile average undergraduate GPAs at Ivy League universities (link). The statistics may shock you:
Or, if you are aware of grade inflation, they don't.
Can these numbers be trusted? That depends on the data source. Clearly, these are not numbers found in press releases by the universities.
Here's the methodology:
RippleMatch is an AI-powered recruitment platform that matches early-career candidates with high-quality jobs and internships. When students sign up for our platform, they are prompted to fill out a profile which requests several different points of information, including their GPA. We have over 50,000 active student users from over 500 universities and determine the average GPA of each university based on the composite data from our users at each university.
In short, they come from self-selected respondents of a survey. We don't really know how large each university sample is - that depends on what kinds of people use the Ripplematch platform. On average, they have about 100 students per university but the Ivies can be either above or below that average.
Is the sample of students from, say, Brown University, who filled out the survey representative of the universe of Brown students and alumni whose academic performance the average GPA statistic purportedly estimates? In order to be representative, the sample would have to look like random. This would mean that the average user of Ripplematch is like a randomly selected student from any given college.
This condition is highly unlikely to hold. For one thing, this type of AI recruitment platform is favored more by the tech industry; some industries may not use it at all so there is an industry bias. The demand for an automated recruiting platform increases with the competitiveness of the industry, and the most qualified candidates tend to flock to the most competitive jobs.
Students with higher GPAs are more likely to submit their resumes to a platform like RippleMatch. If I had a low GPA, I don't think pushing my resume at online screening applications will result in interviews.
I would not be surprised if those average GPAs used to prove grade inflation are themselves inflated.
P.S. This other webpage contains GPAs at some other schools. For example, Stanford is 3.66 right behind Brown. Vanderbilt (3.57), Duke (3.56), Amherst (3.53), WUSTL/Northwestern/Johns Hopkins (3.52).
P.S. Chapter 1 of Numbersense (link) covers the manipulation of statistics by many many law schools and colleges. Grade inflation is also grade compression. It's hard these days to get grades below 3.0 at most schools. Look at Brown's 3.71 versus Princeton's 3.49. That's two-thirds of a grade as the difference between A and A- is 0.3 GPA units.
The difference of 0.22 seems trivial. Emphatically not so! Just try to imagine how many Brown students earned GPAs above average but not perfect i.e. between 3.71 and 3.91. Let's say it's 30 percent. (That sounds high but remember that it's rare to get GPAs below 3.0 nowadays.) If we assume that the shapes of the grade distributions are identical between Brown and Princeton, except for the means, then Princeton's GPA distribution is just shifted down by 0.22 GPA units. So the equivalent 30 percent of above-average students at Princeton will have received GPAs between 3.49 and 3.69 (3.49 + (3.91-3.71)). This interval notably does not overlap with Brown's 3.71-3.91.
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