I’ve been reading a few blogs about concern for Brown’s reputation. In a school where there are no requirements and classes can be dropped or turned into Pass/Fall, it is pretty astounding to find that a “C” is almost unheard of. I’m wondering how GPAs from Brown can be compared to GPAs from rigorous schools. Can this be correct or am I reading the graph wrong?
The average GPA at Brown for 2013/14 was 3.63. That is astounding.
I would image that most top schools have high average GPAs. When you have the brightest students, what else could you expect?
One way to fix this would be grade on a curve, like Cornell often does. But that isn’t really in the spirit of Brown, is it?
This is from the poster @norcalguy a few years ago:
How sweet of you to be concerned on other’s behalf. I don’t think you have to worry on Brown’s account though. Students there do very well in grad school results. I know many of my daughter’s friends did, and she had top 10 results too in CS PHD program acceptance. It is not true that there are no requirements. Majors have comprehensive requirements similar to any other top rigorous school. Yes you can drop classes, however graduation rates remains high for the 4 year and the 6 year assessments. And you can do pass/fail, yes, mine did that with two courses, Mandarin and Russian. Oh and fiction writing which was mandatory. I guess you would have to ask grad schools how they compare gpa but they are even more interested in the research experience the candidate has which is has a high participation rate at Brown.
At least Brown is not ‘the laughing stock of the Ivy League’ as that honor goes to Harvard.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/3/grade-inflation-mode-a/
At Yale, 62% of grades are A or A-.
http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/3735
We all know that grade inflation is an issue at a lot of elite schools (yawwwwwn!), but I wonder why this thread was started in this forum, and not at some other?
Oh wait, it has!!!
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/1732466-gpas-at-penn-vs-brown.html
(Kudos to the Penn forum folks, who as of this writing have completely refrained from responding to the thread. But who knows, maybe it will heat up there)
I don’t really get the “Cs morph into Ss” given that the deadline to declare A/B/C or S/NC is usually about 4 weeks into the 15 week semester.
Given our curriculum structure, wouldn’t it make more sense (i.e. not be astounding) that Cs would be rare? Outside of a concentration students only take classes they actively choose to enroll in (thus more likely to do well). Students can drop classes up until reading period (who do you think is more likely to drop, the student on his way to an A or the student on his way to a C)
But then again I’m guessing you weren’t looking for a real, actual discussion were you OP given this line (emphasis added)
Because everyone knows if there’s two things that define the rigor of a school’s courses, it’s whether or not you were forced to take it and when you are allowed to drop it.
Some people just make stuff up to fit a story they want to tell, like “Cs morph into S” with no evidence this happens or is even possible. In college you are taught not to manufacture evidence to fit a preconceived story you want to tell.
I think a lot of grad school bound students likely do not do S/NS in their major, and many grad schools are more concerned with gpa in major or last 2 years than overall gpa.
I’ll also add that the deadline to declare S/NC or A/B/C usually falls such that if the course has only 2 major graded assignments, it’s before either of them (e.g. a midterm and final). Even a class with 3 major assignments (e.g. 2 midterms and a final like many science classes) might not have a single graded thing before the deadline, but if it does, easily as much as 80% of your grade is still TBD.
Grading on a curve doesn’t make a class more rigorous - it just makes it more competitive. Just because someone is outside the top 60% of the class doesn’t mean they don’t have a strong grasp of a given set of material. Have you ever wondered why many med schools and grad schools don’t grade on curves?
I hate to potentially sidetrack this sure to be extremely educational dialogue but this was one of my issues with that SAT article I posted in the rankings thread. To correlate SAT scores to freshman GPAs ignores that fact that at many colleges the students are enriched and then forced into a curve (unless they meant just looking at the correlation within the school but then the range of point variations is so small, a few hundred points/2400 max?)
P.S. That’s Dr. @norcalguy to you!
An interesting discussion, but I question whether the OP has a genuine interest in Brown. The OP has already said in past threads that Brown is not an academic powerhouse and it’s academic departments are not highly regarded and that Brown students “can make up their major–no need to sweat any sort of requirements beyond a made up major. Brown’s certainly a good school for someone whose major interest is maintaining a particular GPA.”
I think you’re misinformed, but if you’re a prospective parent or student, and Brown’s ‘new curriculum’ and grading polices concern you, by all means scratch Brown from consideration and move on. It works for some (I think Brown had three Rhodes Scholars in 2014) and not for others.
There are so many great US colleges to consider, it’s not worth worrying about.
Best of luck in your college search!
I agree that some of the OP’s posts may seem as though they are being written by a youngster or parent in the midst of college search stress.
However, I lurk on some other forums, and in fact, the OP holds him/herself out as a guidance counselor (perhaps at a boarding school) or an independent college counselor. Here is just one example:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17764708/#Comment_17764708
I think the misinformation (nice euphemism) that has been cited in this thread and that has recently been pointed out in other recent threads here would be understandable…even if not excusable…for an applicant or an applicant’s parents. For it to be published by someone who holds him/herself out as a guidance counselor or independent college counselor is [fill in the blank]
@fenwaypark you glossed over this other nugget of advice from norcalguy (although I disagree):
Ironically, my GPA had me outside the top 20% at Brown and below my med school’s average but I was generally in the top 15% of my med school class on exams.
So how will Brown’s grade inflation impact a Brown undergrad student that is looking to apply to MBA programs 3-4 years after graduating. His/her GPA would be devalued right?
I am not involved in MBA admissions, just working from general experience here.
- Grades have diminishing importance the longer ago they occurred, I think. If you are not concerned about how your grades would affect your immediate prospects upon graduation, then I think this should limit concern about how grades would affect your prospects for an MBA program 3-4 years after graduation. What you do in those 3-4 years will be the proximate (not sole, just proximate) determinant of your MBA prospects I think.
- Consistent with this thought, perhaps you are looking for an undergraduate experience that, apart from grades, will prepare you to do special things immediately after graduation, and that you are looking for this to be the cornerstone for your MBA candidacy. This is not the place to get into all the advantages Brown has to offer in terms of the Econ, BEO, Engineering, and Applied Math/Econ concentrations...in addition to the atmosphere of self-direction and personal responsibility created by the Open Curriculum...but you can easily research them.
- Whatever impact your grades would have for MBA admission 3-4 years after graduation, you can see from just reading this little thread that grade devaluation, if any, would be greater for Harvard and Yale than for Brown. I cannot speak to the devaluation factor, if any, for other schools.
If an elite school has the ideal concentration (major) for you, and the fit is right in terms of geography, social life, feel, overall curriculum and whatever factors matter to you, I think it would be a difficult decision to turn that school down because you read on a message board that another school has less grade inflation
Every year, Brown graduates get into prestigious grad schools. Despite all this whispering about the problems of a Brown education, somehow Brown students seem to do quite well.
musktard, I have never heard any Brown students complain that going to Brown affected their ability to get into a grad school. Honestly, this is just absurd.
I have no idea what my daughter’s GPA is – Brown doesn’t calculate it, she never calculated it (she couldn’t care less) and I couldn’t calculate it because I don’t know her grades. I do know that she got a fair share of Bs, so she probably has a below-average GPA for Brown. But she has gotten into 4 top-ranked grad schools and is waiting to hear from 2 more; one of the programs she got into is highly selective – it accepts fewer than 30 students.
lostaccount: tell us more about these blogs. Do they exist somewhere outside of your head? How reputable are they? Who writes them, what are their credentials?
No worries. My guess is an applicant who would be accepted to Brown is likely not the type to be dissuaded by their high school guidance counselor.
I do not know if “worries” is the right word, but when I see stuff like the quote below from someone who holds him/herself out as a guidance counselor or independent college counselor, I guess I feel badly for the families, if any, who are paying him/her.
After all, if a purported counselor is misinformed about Brown, it would not be unreasonable to expect that the person is misinformed about other schools, right?
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17995983/#Comment_17995983
Not only misinformed but in this case going out his way to make a derogatory comment about Brown in a discussion on SUNY BINGHAMTON VS. SUNY BUFFALO
^ The irony about that particular @lostaccount post is that he/she began it: “Here is a good example of the need to be very careful about the information on this site (and any site). Do your homework. Don’t let comments derail you.” He’s not kidding, as his posts re: brown are misinformed. As I’ve said elsewhere, he bangs the same old negative drum about Brown repeatedly both on the brown forum and elsewhere. Who knows why? He also agitated some SUNY bing ppl with a histrionic title to a thread he began (“Crisis” …where there was none) that also included misinformation about that school.
I don’t mean to pile on @lostaccount , but I too am curious to see the blogs.