In 2011, the mean GPA for Haas undergraduates was capped at 3.2 and 3.4 for core classes and electives, respectively, in order to ensure consistent grading across courses. Effective May 3, the caps have been raised to a mean of 3.4 for core classes and 3.6 for electives.

Prior to 2011, professors would often teach the same courses at the same time but have differing grades by section — an example of grading inconsistency the caps aim to resolve, said Haas associate professor Don Moore.

After 2011, many students expressed discontent over the caps, saying they created a more competitive and stressful atmosphere.

“I certainly saw a few of my fellow students suffer along the perception that it was too much work to go from a B to an A,” said Tyler Wishnoff, a Haas senior and Haas Business School Association president.

Strict guidelines led some students to enroll in classes with perceived lenient grading — ones they might not be interested in — with the expectation that they would get better grades, Moore said.

To resolve issues with the 2011 cap levels, faculty looked at historical average grades at Haas and other departments at the university, job prospects for students and grading policies of comparable institutions, Moore said.

“The entire goal was not to adjust average grades but set the average consistent with historical averages,” Moore said.

The amended policy applies to all current undergraduates, including graduating seniors and incoming students, said Richard Kurovsky, executive director of marketing and communications at Haas.

However, some Haas seniors are petitioning for retroactive application of the new grading policy, saying they have been negatively affected by the strict GPA guidelines since 2011. They are asking Haas to either retroactively reweight GPAs, add notations to outline Haas’ grading policies to their transcripts or allow Haas faculty to make exceptions to the cap at their discretion, according to Moore.

Faculty members will discuss retroactive adjustment of grades under some circumstances, but at this time, the schedule for this discussion has not been set, Kurovsky said.

“Retroactive application on all classes sounds great ideally, but pragmatically, this is really hard to implement,” said Shahryar Abbasi, a Haas senior and current ASUC external affairs vice president. “At academic institutions, policies change — it’s not feasible, every time a policy change occurs, to retroactively apply it.”

Contact Christine Tyler at ctyler@dailycal.org.

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A woman he knew had an irritating habit — one that was fairly common but irksome nonetheless. She always had to be right. He could not help but wonder why someone would be motivated to act in such a manner.

“It then struck me that, to her, the important thing was to be perceived by others as smart and knowledgeable,” Anderson, who teaches at the Haas School of Business, said in an email. “That thought led me to speculate that overconfidence in general — or the tendency to perceive yourself as more competent than you actually are — might be driven by the desire for status.”

Anderson’s musings led him to investigate the phenomenon in a more scientific manner, the results of which will be featured in a forthcoming paper entitled “A Status-Enhancement Account of Overconfidence” to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Anderson and three co-authors, including UC Berkeley Associate Professor Don Moore, conducted six studies exploring why individuals would be motivated to be overconfident, looking specifically at whether the desire for social status contributes to overconfidence.

To do so, researchers measured the degree to which participants falsely believed they were better than others at various tasks.

In one study, for example, researchers gave participants a test to objectively measure their knowledge of geography. The participants were then paired up and told to work on the tasks together, after which they were asked to rate one another’s competence. Researchers then measured who rose in status as they collaborated with others, according to Anderson.

The authors consistently found that individuals who had exhibited overconfidence in a subject area — say, for example, that they claimed to be better at geography than they actually were — were seen as more competent by others even when they were not.

The authors followed up these findings by examining the unique characteristics of overconfident people to determine what made them appear so competent.

“We found that they were not obnoxious,” said Anderson. “They didn’t boast or brag, or talk about how great they were. They simply participated more, provided more of their opinions, exhibited a greater comfort and ease with the task.”

That means that, as Moore explained, the fact that someone was not as competent as they appeared never came out.

“(We were) looking at the early phases of status evolution,” Moore said. “Checking up on accuracy is harder. People can get away with expressing more confidence than they ought to have.”

In total, the authors found that not only did overconfident individuals attain higher status because of how they presented themselves to others, but also that the desire for higher status was a key motivation behind this overconfidence.

While there are clear benefits to maintaining a sense of overconfidence — namely that people will be more likely to listen to you — there are also some obvious drawbacks, according to Moore.

“Once it comes out that you don’t know what you’re talking about — you can get into enormous trouble,” said Moore. “Think of generals who were too sure they’d win a battle (or) CEOs who were too sure their product would (succeed). Lots of debacles have been caused by overconfidence.”

Sara Grossman is the lead research and ideas reporter.

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The study — published  on June 20 by Haas School of Business associate professor Cameron Anderson in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science — attempts to determine the effect of monetary circumstances and social standing on general happiness for a total of 787 participants from diverse backgrounds.

“It’s just that you have to look at the right form of status,” Anderson said. “Respect and admiration in the eyes of others around you, or your sociometric status, matters a great deal, even if income or wealth does not.”

Anderson also studied the relationship between the respect subjects in the study received and their general happiness to find out if respect directly influenced happiness.  The results of the study showed that sociometric status — the amount of respect, prominence and admiration a person has in their social group — is much more important than socioeconomic status in determining happiness for an individual.

According to Anderson, the study was conducted by observing different groups including campus ROTC, fraternities, sororities, student clubs, MBA students and a national sample of adults using an online recruitment system. Anderson said that he used “peer-ratings of status, ‘objective’ indicators, such as whether (subjects) had occupied positions of authority, as well as self-reports.”

Anderson then looked at the link between these results and the self-reported happiness of each participant.

2011 UC Berkeley graduate and former President of Delta Phi Epsilon, a campus co-ed foreign service fraternity, Caity Knowlton said that respect is more relevant to happiness than money is “perhaps because of the tight-knit bonds we form in college, particularly in professional fraternities, and the pressure to be successful and a respectable member of the community.”

Beyond student life, respect also plays an integral role in the professional world, according to the study.

Don Moore, also an associate professor at Haas, said that in terms of business, and more specifically in terms of employee motivation in the workplace, money is not always the best incentive.

“The most important thing that business executives want to know when they come to Haas is how to motivate their employees,” he said. “Money comes with problems, (and it) does not provide lasting satisfaction.”

Anderson said he hopes to continue his research, focusing specifically on the theory that sociometric status is more important to happiness than socioeconomic status is, because people adapt to socioeconomic status, but they do not adapt to sociometric status.

Anderson also said that people may never become accustomed to being respected, although they can get used to how much money they have.

“(Sociometric status) gives individuals a sense of control and power, which boosts happiness and a sense of belongingness in the group,” he said.

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