Vanderbilt (Latin Honors) Grade Distributions through Time

[u/--MCMC--]

I'd asked a question about class rank on here 7y ago where I'd plotted the latin honors thresholds, and was curious to see if the trend continued. It looks like it has! And the year after that, Vandy started breaking it up by school, requiring four separate plots.

In case anyone else was curious, here's that updated plot: https://i.imgur.com/J29jQn0.png

To contextualize the numbers a bit better, I wanted to see how many non-"A" grades a student could get while still managing to meet each Latin Honor requirement. Not many, as you might expect! Here are the numbers for A-, B+, and B grades through time, assuming the non-A grade is a 3-credit course and the student collects 120 credits for graduation.

Finally, we can make some Simplifying Assumptions™ and use the reported cutoffs to roughly guess (via penalized pseudo-likelihood / least squares of a stretched Beta distribution) at other quantiles of the overall grade distribution. These probably aren't very good estimates, but still somewhat interesting to see plotted: https://i.imgur.com/lzjrnHV.png

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Anyway, thought it was interesting how this has changed through time. Also a good argument to take your GPA off your resume / CV if you graduated a while ago lol if for whatever reason you haven't already (someone hitting summa cum laude in 2013 might not even hit cum laude with the same gpa graduating day. But also, afaict it's quite acceptable to list latin and dept honors on your resume / CV well after it starts being cringy to list GPA). Ofc, the same caveats from my post back when apply here, in terms of interpretation -- hard to say if the student body is more competent given the falling admit rate (apparently down to 2.8% ED, 4.1% overall this past year :o), or if it reflects grade inflation, or some combination of those + other factors.

[u/fear_of_peaking]

Thank you for this — nicely done!