I teach at a public institution of higher learning. Over the past 30 years funding per student has declined. This causes a shift in perception. Society is no longer my client as a result of this shift in funding. My clients are the students and the students want to pass. This pressure to pass people is especially present in adjuncts and the use of adjuncts has dramatically increased.
Over the past 30 years funding per student has declined
Source? According to this paper: "From 1970 to the present, state support for higher education has generally kept pace with both enrollment growth and inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index." http://www.sheeo.org/about/paulpres/Baruch%20College.pdf
Your source is hardly a valid one. It gives statistics but does not cite the source of the statistics.
The paper you cited contains statements like this:
"Increases in net tuition have significantly, but not completely replaced the decline in state support per student
from 2001 to 2005. In 2001 total revenue per FTE was $10,100 in 2005 dollars, essentially an all time high. It dropped 8.8% to $9,212 by 2005. While this is a material decrease from the high point in 2001, it is roughly the level of funding available in the early 1990s. "
The author thinks that since the funding per FTE student in 2005 is roughly the same as in the early 90's there has been no decline. This is an astoundingly bad conclusion. There is a thing called inflation. There is no reason to believe that since $9,000 per student was spent in the early 90s then this same amount ought to be adequate in 2005.
The author also writes:
"This amounted to about $10,000 per FTE student in financial aid, half grants and half loans and work study."
See, he counts as part of his funding per student debt that the student acquires in order to attend school. When a student acquires debt to pay for his/her tuition then this can't be counted as part of government funding for higher education. The only part of this debt that can be counted is the reduced cost in interest payments due to any federal guarantees of such loans.
In another place the author writes:
"The State Higher Education Finance study, done annually by SHEEO, shows “net tuition” (tuition revenues less waivers and student aid from state and institutional sources) has grown from 22% of total expenditures in 1981, to 26% in 1991, to 37% in 2005. This is a worrisome trend. "
Later the author writes:
"Increases in net tuition have significantly, but not completely replaced the decline in state support per student
from 2001 to 2005. "
The author is controlling for inflation, that's why he says, in 2005 dollars, meaning inflation adjusted dollars.
I don't think it's a particular good piece, since he doesn't cite the raw sources, which is what I'd want to look at. But it's enough to question your original statement that inflation adjusted, per student state funding of education has decreased over the past thirty years. Do you have a better source?
I do agree that net tuition has increased. But that's because the universities have allowed costs to increase at a much greater rate than inflation. The solution is to control costs, not to complain about under funding.
The author of the paper you cited explains that funding per student has declined from 2001 to 2005. He says that in 2000 funding was at an all time high. This is so because of the Clinton presidency and the economic boom.
Sorry, I didn't read the part of the 2005 dollars. I suspected but didn't find it in the paper. I retract my paragraph that this relates to.
You originally stated that, "Over the past 30 years funding per student has declined". What is your evidence for this? The paper I cited states that funding had no general trend over the time period, although with ups and downs based on the economy (for instance it declined from 2001 to 2005).
You're missing the point. Tuition increases have outpaced inflation. The portion of college tuition that is privately funded vs. publicly funded has increased considerably.
The author of the paper you link acknowledges this but justifies it by reasoning, "Most college and university expense is to pay well-educated people, whose incomes in the general economy have grown quite a bit faster than the CPI".
If you accept the premise that higher education isn't really meant for working-class people, then there's no problem. Bully for you.
The reason for the increase in tuition over inflation is because of the decrease in funding per student by the government. The gap that tuition is trying to overcome is twofold. It seeks to overcome inflationary adjustments and adjustments to the decrease in funding per student.
Higher education should not be free but should not be an undue burden on students. It's in society's long term interest to make higher education affordable. Your last paragraph is not justified by anything that I have written.
Yes, yequalsx, I agree with you completely! Check the thread lineage -- I was responding to bokonist's comment, not yours. (Admittedly snarkily, but that kind of revisionist crap annoys me.)
The paper below talks about the funding decrease at public institutions. This coupled with the increase in adjunct labor is partly responsible for the rise in grades.
Good to have statistics to back up my anecdotal observations.
My hypothesis about the cause: students complain more than they used to, and professors cater to them. Student evaluations amplify this: the common formula is "2 points easiness, 2 points sympathy, 1 point good looks."
(Evaluations are out of 5 points.)
I received the following complaint this semester: "Linear algebra is supposed to be an easy A! But people are failing!" Linear algebra is the first class where you do proofs and see abstractions like vector spaces. It's meant to be a weed-out course. Some profs remove all the proofs and just teach you to multiply matrices, which is indeed an easy A.
Interesting fact: there was a much bigger spike in grade inflation during the Vietnam war. Professors graded more easily at that time to allow students to remain in college and escape the draft.
I don't know how I feel about this. Many of the students probably took Linear Algebra because they believed it would be a way to satisfy their electives without messing up their grades and thus their future. They were thinking about other things than your class. Also, you don't really know anything about your students and what path they might be on. For example, I'm taking an elementary level class right now because it's easy and I have one more requirement left and I am graduating this semester and have a startup on my mind.
University is incredibly valuable but the idea that it's the only thing in a student's life is just not true anymore (if it ever was). Even with amazing grades you will lose out to those with experience.
I'm not saying these classes are worthless, and I value highly the things I've learned that I wouldn't have otherwise. I just don't know what the solution is. I feel like society has destroyed our students' ability to make university their life. Trying to force the students to dedicate their lives to your elective class is just not realistic and you are focusing on the wrong group.
If you want a certification without knowledge, go to the University of Phoenix.
It's completely unreasonable to expect one of the most fundamental math courses (taught at a top 5 applied math school) to be an easy A. Particularly when the students are business, econ, CS and physical science majors, some of whom plan to work on a trading desk.
A specific complaint: I showed how to use linear algebra to construct synthetic derivatives (e.g., build a bull spread or iron condor from puts and calls). One of the business majors complained to me that it wasn't in the book and was too hard.
I think you're missing my point. While many kids in your math class might need linear algebra in the future, there are many classes that don't adequately prepare you for study in that field yet expect that you are, in fact, on a major path in that field.
This just isn't true for many cases and you can't expect students to not be turned off by this. At the same time, learning that you don't know anything about a certain field is incredibly enlightening and makes you realize you aren't an expert in that field, it's just unreasonable to expect students to risk messing up their future in their field of study over a class that isn't relevant.
In hindsight, Linear Algebra was a bad example of irrelevance.
This also has a lot to do with the watering down and "subjectivization" (for lack of a better word) of the humanities. Even at Harvard, which is notorious for grade inflation, math and science courses still give Bs and Cs for middling work (I know some very intelligent people who've received Cs in physics and chemistry courses there). The inflation is mostly in the humanities.
Also flagrant is the bifurcation of the economics major. There's a "serious economics" track for those who want to go to grad school, involving quant courses and math up to real analysis, and a watered-down/easy-A economics track for the mediocrities who want to be investment bankers.
There's a "serious economics" track for those who want to go to grad school, involving quant courses and math up to real analysis, and a watered-down/easy-A economics track for the mediocrities who want to be investment bankers.
Fun fact: the I-banks don't even look at students who did the watered-down track.
False. It's not like people put "watered-down track" on their resume, and most investment banks don't ask for transcripts until after employment (as verification; they fire you if you don't have one, but this is extremely rare).
Investment banks don't care about intelligence so much as the ability to go through hoops, follow orders, and game the system. In fact, if you look at their preferences as far as analysts go, intelligence seems to be selected against.
Most students list difficult courses on their resume. They also ask tricky brain teasers on the first phone screen. It's not that hard to weed out the dumb ones. Students on the watered down track will never get into the front office.
I've gone on IB interviews myself, and I've spoken to students who've done the same. They do focus on conformity and big company culture (I was definitely a bad fit at Goldman), but they also aim for a great deal of intelligence.
I think you are basing your opinion more on politics and tribal identity than on facts.
This is true of trader and quant interviews, but not when people are being evaluated for "soft skills" departments like IBD and M&A.
A "tricky" brain teaser for IBD is: "What is the expected value of an 8-sided die?" or "If the Euro is worth $1.50 and a dollar is worth 100 yen, what is a Euro worth in yen?" Mathematically-illiterate but intelligent people (125 IQ; Ivy League non-quant major) will sometimes get these wrong on occasion, but they're not exactly hard questions by our standards.
DE Shaw quant interviews, on the other hand, are tough, but the average wannabe banker will never get anywhere near one of those.
As for intelligence in investment banking, it's an asset to be very smart (135+) if you're looking to be a quant or a quant trader (floor trading is dying) but it's generally to your detriment if you're looking for an analyst position, because the smart people tend to fail when it comes to the conformity aspect. If you tell a smart person that he needs to sacrifice his weekend in order to have X finished by Monday morning, he'll probably do it, but he'll ask (gasp!) why it was left on his desk on Friday afternoon instead of delivered to him earlier... and you just don't ask such questions if you want to make it in banking.
Analyst programs are designed to pick out people with an unconditional work ethic: people who believe "deadlines are deadlines" and will never question why the work needs to be delivered in the way specified at the time specified, people who will toil for 100 hours per week and not care if their results are ever used or even relevant. This process tends to select against intelligence. Don't get me wrong: investment banks would obviously love to have someone with a high IQ and that sort of obedient profile, but that's a very rare combination. Not only that, but people with that sort of obedient makeup, while sometimes smart, are never creative or passionate.
When I was a grad student, 2 years ago, I was the teaching assistant for Operating Systems. I was responsible for all the grading in the class and the professor told me to give everyone A's no matter what on the assignments and quizzes. Most of the students had little to no understanding of the material. The professor said he was up for tenure that year and he was afraid that if we handed out bad grades the students poor evaluations of him would keep him from getting tenure.
I wonder if universities put to much stock in the opinions of the students. I'd imagine that the professors eveluations would be heavily skewed towards the negative if they grade their students performance accurately. I'd expect, if grades were some how a normal distribution which they probably weren't, that the students doing poorly in the class would give the prof low marks and the students doing well would give the prof meaningful marks - some percentage of which would be negative.
It's funny you bring up that anecdote about tenure because I had several professors tell me that exact same thing. Except in my scenario, I had brought forward allegations of cheating and the full professors were the ones to get behind my cause while the up-for-tenure ones (generally) looked the other way.
Student evaluations are there to determine how effective the professor is at teaching. Only talking to the students the professor succeeded at teaching gives you a completely skewed and overly rosy perspective.
Also it may surprise you that some people have such poor self-esteem that they will in fact take on blame themselves for their failings, even when an objective analysis might show that another professor could have made that student succeed.
Conversely, a high performer might falsely believe that their success occurred in spite of the professor's incompetence, when the professors actions were a key part of the student's success.
Student evaluations may be there to determine that, but they don't do an effective job.
If you make the class difficult, students will hate you. If you are easy, they like you. There are a few other tricks you can do to get better evaluations: sympathy, good looks, and jokes.
It doesn't matter if they learn more in your class than they would elsewhere, since we don't measure learning. If we really wanted to determine how effective the professor is, we would standardize exams and compare student performance across sections. We don't do this, probably because we don't really want to know the results.
Standardized tests stunt the curriculum, forcing an inflexible notion of what is worth knowing onto students. How, for example, do you have a standardized test to judge undergraduate research? Doing something absolutely absurd based on a fundamentally untrue proposition, so long as you put a lot of effort and thought into it, is an essential part of the academic endeavor. (The key of course being that there is no such thing as a fundamentally untrue proposition, and one can start with a premise generally believed false to produce a useful result which proves the premise true.)
Peer review and student evaluations together give a much better picture of a professor's ability, and recognize that professor's ability to truly challenge students, not merely parroting the general wisdom. Obviously, there are inviolable facts, and it's important to recognize them - but learning is more than understanding that which is generally accepted to be true.
Standardized tests don't stunt the curriculum, they merely define it. They force an "inflexible notion of what is worth knowing" only as much as a syllabus does.
For example, I'm forced to teach eigenvalues, but I don't get to teach about linear programming, even though I think linear programming is well worth knowing. That's because eigenvalues are on the syllabus, but not linear programming. This would not change if someone else, rather than me, designed my final exam.
All standardization does is give you a mechanism for comparing my students to yours.
Obviously you don't use a standardized test for research credits. But you do use it for already known material taught in class. In fact, many graduate schools do exactly this - the standardized exams are called "written qualifying exams."
"As a rough rule of thumb, the average GPA of a school today can be estimated by the rejection percentage of its applicant pool:
GPA = 2.8 + Rejection Percentage /200 + (if the school is private add 0.2)"
Interesting the more students a school rejects the higher its GPA seems to be. To say it another way, the more selective an institution is the higher the GPAs. ie. If you get smarter students, they tend to have higher GPAs. Example my econ professor has been looking at the actual distribution of performance in his class. He does not find a bell curve. Additionally he asserts there is no reason to expect a bell curve in a college course, as students tend take courses they are both interested in, and good at. The consequence, since you don't have an even distribution of stupid students to smart students, you won't have an even distribution of grades.
The problem (or at least the obvious problem) is not that some schools have higher GPAs than other schools, but that average GPA has been increasing over time at a rate that cannot plausibly be explained by improvements in performance.
It depends on enrollment at the institutions in questions. If overall enrollment has not increased in step with population, then it makes sense that the quality of the students at the most selective schools has increased.
Well, I think you have to define what you mean by "college course". From past experiences, core college courses seem to have bell curves because everyone has to take them and not everyone will be good at them. Graduate core college courses have less of a bell curve because the students tend to be smarter and more motivated, but there are still those who do poorly. I would say, Graduate College Courses in Your Major are the ones that resemble a homogeneous distribution.
To take a topical example, I'm sure MIT's EECS department looks like a candidate for a grade inflation accusation after the dot.com crash.
What really happened is that when enrollment also crashed, the students still taking the major were serious about it per se, not just as a good and high paying career (hah!).
So nowadays almost all the students are making As and Bs, with the notable exceptions being those going through some sort of personal crisis unrelated to academics.
And thinking about it, to the extent the 1/5 of MIT's students who are no longer taking EECS are instead in majors that they are a better match for, I'd expect their grades to increase as well.
Or look at the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider. Some departments had lines of students switching their majors out of physics; to the extent those students found their new majors easier (physics is hard) I would expect a bit of "grade inflation" as well.
A final note on MIT: this is not the first time this site has been forwarded to HN, and I'll note again that its grade inflation ended in 1970. It was pretty much a phenomena of the turbulent cultural '60s (which didn't quite start in 1960), which is not surprising for a whole bunch of reasons, e.g. I'm pretty sure MIT decided to make itself a bit less difficult to succeed in (e.g. when I attended in 1979-80, the entire freshman year was pass/fail, now it's only the first term, and I'm sure before the '60s they didn't do this).
Oh, that rule of thumb predicts 3.00, while MIT including the freshmen is 3.17. Given the tremendous self-selection in the applicants, that's interesting.
36 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 80.2 ms ] threadSource? According to this paper: "From 1970 to the present, state support for higher education has generally kept pace with both enrollment growth and inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index." http://www.sheeo.org/about/paulpres/Baruch%20College.pdf
The paper you cited contains statements like this:
"Increases in net tuition have significantly, but not completely replaced the decline in state support per student from 2001 to 2005. In 2001 total revenue per FTE was $10,100 in 2005 dollars, essentially an all time high. It dropped 8.8% to $9,212 by 2005. While this is a material decrease from the high point in 2001, it is roughly the level of funding available in the early 1990s. "
The author thinks that since the funding per FTE student in 2005 is roughly the same as in the early 90's there has been no decline. This is an astoundingly bad conclusion. There is a thing called inflation. There is no reason to believe that since $9,000 per student was spent in the early 90s then this same amount ought to be adequate in 2005.
The author also writes:
"This amounted to about $10,000 per FTE student in financial aid, half grants and half loans and work study."
See, he counts as part of his funding per student debt that the student acquires in order to attend school. When a student acquires debt to pay for his/her tuition then this can't be counted as part of government funding for higher education. The only part of this debt that can be counted is the reduced cost in interest payments due to any federal guarantees of such loans.
In another place the author writes:
"The State Higher Education Finance study, done annually by SHEEO, shows “net tuition” (tuition revenues less waivers and student aid from state and institutional sources) has grown from 22% of total expenditures in 1981, to 26% in 1991, to 37% in 2005. This is a worrisome trend. "
Later the author writes:
"Increases in net tuition have significantly, but not completely replaced the decline in state support per student from 2001 to 2005. "
It's a bad paper and a bad source of information.
The author is controlling for inflation, that's why he says, in 2005 dollars, meaning inflation adjusted dollars.
I don't think it's a particular good piece, since he doesn't cite the raw sources, which is what I'd want to look at. But it's enough to question your original statement that inflation adjusted, per student state funding of education has decreased over the past thirty years. Do you have a better source?
I do agree that net tuition has increased. But that's because the universities have allowed costs to increase at a much greater rate than inflation. The solution is to control costs, not to complain about under funding.
Sorry, I didn't read the part of the 2005 dollars. I suspected but didn't find it in the paper. I retract my paragraph that this relates to.
The author of the paper you link acknowledges this but justifies it by reasoning, "Most college and university expense is to pay well-educated people, whose incomes in the general economy have grown quite a bit faster than the CPI".
If you accept the premise that higher education isn't really meant for working-class people, then there's no problem. Bully for you.
Higher education should not be free but should not be an undue burden on students. It's in society's long term interest to make higher education affordable. Your last paragraph is not justified by anything that I have written.
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/FFP0410S.pdf
My hypothesis about the cause: students complain more than they used to, and professors cater to them. Student evaluations amplify this: the common formula is "2 points easiness, 2 points sympathy, 1 point good looks."
(Evaluations are out of 5 points.)
I received the following complaint this semester: "Linear algebra is supposed to be an easy A! But people are failing!" Linear algebra is the first class where you do proofs and see abstractions like vector spaces. It's meant to be a weed-out course. Some profs remove all the proofs and just teach you to multiply matrices, which is indeed an easy A.
Interesting fact: there was a much bigger spike in grade inflation during the Vietnam war. Professors graded more easily at that time to allow students to remain in college and escape the draft.
University is incredibly valuable but the idea that it's the only thing in a student's life is just not true anymore (if it ever was). Even with amazing grades you will lose out to those with experience.
I'm not saying these classes are worthless, and I value highly the things I've learned that I wouldn't have otherwise. I just don't know what the solution is. I feel like society has destroyed our students' ability to make university their life. Trying to force the students to dedicate their lives to your elective class is just not realistic and you are focusing on the wrong group.
It's completely unreasonable to expect one of the most fundamental math courses (taught at a top 5 applied math school) to be an easy A. Particularly when the students are business, econ, CS and physical science majors, some of whom plan to work on a trading desk.
A specific complaint: I showed how to use linear algebra to construct synthetic derivatives (e.g., build a bull spread or iron condor from puts and calls). One of the business majors complained to me that it wasn't in the book and was too hard.
This just isn't true for many cases and you can't expect students to not be turned off by this. At the same time, learning that you don't know anything about a certain field is incredibly enlightening and makes you realize you aren't an expert in that field, it's just unreasonable to expect students to risk messing up their future in their field of study over a class that isn't relevant.
In hindsight, Linear Algebra was a bad example of irrelevance.
Also flagrant is the bifurcation of the economics major. There's a "serious economics" track for those who want to go to grad school, involving quant courses and math up to real analysis, and a watered-down/easy-A economics track for the mediocrities who want to be investment bankers.
Fun fact: the I-banks don't even look at students who did the watered-down track.
Investment banks don't care about intelligence so much as the ability to go through hoops, follow orders, and game the system. In fact, if you look at their preferences as far as analysts go, intelligence seems to be selected against.
I've gone on IB interviews myself, and I've spoken to students who've done the same. They do focus on conformity and big company culture (I was definitely a bad fit at Goldman), but they also aim for a great deal of intelligence.
I think you are basing your opinion more on politics and tribal identity than on facts.
A "tricky" brain teaser for IBD is: "What is the expected value of an 8-sided die?" or "If the Euro is worth $1.50 and a dollar is worth 100 yen, what is a Euro worth in yen?" Mathematically-illiterate but intelligent people (125 IQ; Ivy League non-quant major) will sometimes get these wrong on occasion, but they're not exactly hard questions by our standards.
DE Shaw quant interviews, on the other hand, are tough, but the average wannabe banker will never get anywhere near one of those.
This is what an IBD or M&A interview will be like for the average HN reader: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0yQunhOaU0#t=0m51s
As for intelligence in investment banking, it's an asset to be very smart (135+) if you're looking to be a quant or a quant trader (floor trading is dying) but it's generally to your detriment if you're looking for an analyst position, because the smart people tend to fail when it comes to the conformity aspect. If you tell a smart person that he needs to sacrifice his weekend in order to have X finished by Monday morning, he'll probably do it, but he'll ask (gasp!) why it was left on his desk on Friday afternoon instead of delivered to him earlier... and you just don't ask such questions if you want to make it in banking.
Analyst programs are designed to pick out people with an unconditional work ethic: people who believe "deadlines are deadlines" and will never question why the work needs to be delivered in the way specified at the time specified, people who will toil for 100 hours per week and not care if their results are ever used or even relevant. This process tends to select against intelligence. Don't get me wrong: investment banks would obviously love to have someone with a high IQ and that sort of obedient profile, but that's a very rare combination. Not only that, but people with that sort of obedient makeup, while sometimes smart, are never creative or passionate.
I wonder if universities put to much stock in the opinions of the students. I'd imagine that the professors eveluations would be heavily skewed towards the negative if they grade their students performance accurately. I'd expect, if grades were some how a normal distribution which they probably weren't, that the students doing poorly in the class would give the prof low marks and the students doing well would give the prof meaningful marks - some percentage of which would be negative.
Also it may surprise you that some people have such poor self-esteem that they will in fact take on blame themselves for their failings, even when an objective analysis might show that another professor could have made that student succeed.
Conversely, a high performer might falsely believe that their success occurred in spite of the professor's incompetence, when the professors actions were a key part of the student's success.
If you make the class difficult, students will hate you. If you are easy, they like you. There are a few other tricks you can do to get better evaluations: sympathy, good looks, and jokes.
It doesn't matter if they learn more in your class than they would elsewhere, since we don't measure learning. If we really wanted to determine how effective the professor is, we would standardize exams and compare student performance across sections. We don't do this, probably because we don't really want to know the results.
Peer review and student evaluations together give a much better picture of a professor's ability, and recognize that professor's ability to truly challenge students, not merely parroting the general wisdom. Obviously, there are inviolable facts, and it's important to recognize them - but learning is more than understanding that which is generally accepted to be true.
For example, I'm forced to teach eigenvalues, but I don't get to teach about linear programming, even though I think linear programming is well worth knowing. That's because eigenvalues are on the syllabus, but not linear programming. This would not change if someone else, rather than me, designed my final exam.
All standardization does is give you a mechanism for comparing my students to yours.
Obviously you don't use a standardized test for research credits. But you do use it for already known material taught in class. In fact, many graduate schools do exactly this - the standardized exams are called "written qualifying exams."
http://imgur.com/nmEsW.png
I could be wrong, but surely home computer access plays a role in evening the playing field and raising the bar.
"As a rough rule of thumb, the average GPA of a school today can be estimated by the rejection percentage of its applicant pool: GPA = 2.8 + Rejection Percentage /200 + (if the school is private add 0.2)"
Interesting the more students a school rejects the higher its GPA seems to be. To say it another way, the more selective an institution is the higher the GPAs. ie. If you get smarter students, they tend to have higher GPAs. Example my econ professor has been looking at the actual distribution of performance in his class. He does not find a bell curve. Additionally he asserts there is no reason to expect a bell curve in a college course, as students tend take courses they are both interested in, and good at. The consequence, since you don't have an even distribution of stupid students to smart students, you won't have an even distribution of grades.
That does explain quite a lot about economics!
What really happened is that when enrollment also crashed, the students still taking the major were serious about it per se, not just as a good and high paying career (hah!).
So nowadays almost all the students are making As and Bs, with the notable exceptions being those going through some sort of personal crisis unrelated to academics.
And thinking about it, to the extent the 1/5 of MIT's students who are no longer taking EECS are instead in majors that they are a better match for, I'd expect their grades to increase as well.
Or look at the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider. Some departments had lines of students switching their majors out of physics; to the extent those students found their new majors easier (physics is hard) I would expect a bit of "grade inflation" as well.
A final note on MIT: this is not the first time this site has been forwarded to HN, and I'll note again that its grade inflation ended in 1970. It was pretty much a phenomena of the turbulent cultural '60s (which didn't quite start in 1960), which is not surprising for a whole bunch of reasons, e.g. I'm pretty sure MIT decided to make itself a bit less difficult to succeed in (e.g. when I attended in 1979-80, the entire freshman year was pass/fail, now it's only the first term, and I'm sure before the '60s they didn't do this).
Oh, that rule of thumb predicts 3.00, while MIT including the freshmen is 3.17. Given the tremendous self-selection in the applicants, that's interesting.