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Adjusting GPAs: A Statistician's Effort To Tackle Grade Inflation
An anonymous reader writes "A recent analysis of 200 colleges and universities published in the Teachers College Record found 43 percent of all letter grades awarded in 2008 were A's, compared to 16 percent in 1960. And Harvard's student paper recently reported the median grade awarded to undergraduates at the elite school is now an A-. A statistician at Duke tried to make a difference and stirred up a hornet's nest in the process."
I can't say definitively one way or the other, but what I do see is that I periodically take my son to Starbucks for a change of scenery in his school day (we homeschool), and the work that the local college students are doing is only slightly more advanced than what my 9 year old is doing.
My distinct impression is that most colleges have gone the paper mill route for most of their courses. The only difference between the traditional colleges and the what generally get classified as paper mills seems to be that the traditional colleges will have one or two departments that are legit, so that those departments can be pointed to when someone calls them out as paper mills.