About GPA distribution

Graduate School
1

<p>Greetings everyone! </p>

<p>I am an international student hoping to start my graduate studies in United States in the future. To evaluate my options I would like to know something about grade score distributions in US. </p>

<p>The background reasoning is that the current department I'm studying in attracts the very best scientific students in my home country and even still, less than 50% of those who start finish their studies at all, even smaller portion do that in the target time. Some transfer to easier programs while others figure they don't want a degree after all. Now, I don't know if this is the matter in every prestigious school in every country, but I don't assume it is. </p>

<p>Closely related to this is that the grades are not inflated. In a given class only about 5% of the students (which, I repeat, are in the top ~5% of the students in college, not mentioning the fact that the portion of people actually going to college is not a big one) of those who actually pass the course (usually between 50% and 90%) get a maximum grade (in a five-step grading). Again, I don't know if this is the matter everywhere, but I have got an impression that US college grades don't always have a nice gaussian distribution with a mean of 2.0. </p>

<p>So, could someone please help me here? I don't need a super-accurate figures of distributions, but some approximations of what kind of fractions of students get what grades would be really helpful. In addition it would be really helpful if someone could point me to some statistical data about GPAs and its distribution, if it is notably different from the distribution of individual grades. In the essence what I want to know is that how good a GPA of 3.0 or 3.5 or 3.7 etc actually are percentile-wise.</p>

<p>Thank you.</p>

2

<p>I apologize for the double post, but the software did not allow me to edit my previous post any more.</p>

<p>I guess that in the admission phase my GRE score will bear more weight than GPA, because the whole point of it seems to be putting people from different kind of grading environments to the same line. However, knowing the crude distribution of US grades would still help me evaluate myself before submitting to the evaluations of the people who decide whether I’m getting in or not.</p>

3

<p>I think it is unlikely that your GRE score will bear more weight than your GPA. A lot of students consider the GRE a nuisance.</p>

<p>As you can probably guess, GPAs vary considerably from college to college, or even from department to department. I do not have any statistics or distribution of GPAs across all borders, but some sites are available for specific fields with this information. For example, lawschoolnumbers.com gives the mean and interquartile range (25%-75%) of GPAs for admitted law students. One can look up, say, Harvard and see that their interquartile range for this subject is 3.72 to 3.95. </p>

<p>What is your major? If you are wondering if you have a shot at some American school, you can post your stats and people will chime in and discuss your chances of acceptance here or there.</p>

4

<p>GPA distributions vary widely from university to university, and even between programs at the university. At my alma mater (Penn State) there were a relatively high number of 3.00+ gpa’s in the college of education - students there were generally hard working and the material required hard work more than academic brilliance. Conversely, the college of engineering had a relatively low average gpa - admission to some departments was contingent upon gpa, but a 3.00 was high enough that you were guaranteed the right to pick whichever you wanted!</p>

<p>Here are some numbers for my alma mater, which is usually ranked around 50th worldwide on most lists:</p>

<p>[Distinction[/url</a>]</p>

<p>where Distinction is top 12%, High Distinction is top 6%, and Highest Distinction is top 2%. You can see it takes a 3.99 in education to qualify in the top 2%, but only a 3.95 in engineering or a 3.91 in business!</p>

<p>This one is even better:</p>

<p><a href=“http://senate.psu.edu/agenda/apr26-05agn/app_j.pdf[/url]”>http://senate.psu.edu/agenda/apr26-05agn/app_j.pdf](<a href=“http://www.registrar.psu.edu/graduation/distinction.cfm]Distinction[/url”>http://www.registrar.psu.edu/graduation/distinction.cfm)</a></p>

<p>It shows that the mean gpa is just above 3.00 at my school the last few years of the study, and that the mean for graduate courses (500-level at my school) is a whopping 3.69!!</p>

<p>Again, this is just my school, there may be other sources that show more.</p>

5

<p>Thanks for the response, red herring. My though about the weight of GRE was that because the admitting people have no way of knowing the real value of my grades because of the possibility of different grading principles, they should look at the GRE which offers some kind of unbiased score.</p>

<p>I’m not sure if I should avoid sidetracking this thread, but well, here it goes.</p>

<p>My major is physics and my unofficial second major (there is no such concept as official double major in this country, but as I could graduate with either of these I consider it an unofficial second major) is computer science.</p>

<p>Now the point which makes my future decision quite easy is the fact that I’m only applying if I have a chance to go to a great school. My current university is not bad at all and I’m happy here, so if I don’t stand a chance of getting into a good enough school, I’ll save the money and get my PhD here. </p>

<p>I think what I want to do is computational neuroscience or something close to that, or maybe computational physics. I haven’t made any priority list about the schools yet, but it will probably include the well-known institutes of technology and some other good candicates I can find. I am very open to suggestions. </p>

<p>I haven’t taken the GRE (even test one, though I plan to do it soon, maybe this week) yet, because I don’t plan to apply this year but the next. I trust it doesn’t matter that because my native language is not English I will naturaly get a lower score in the tasks that require extensive vocabulary, even though they were ment to measure another ability? I have naturally tried to read as much literature, both fictive and academical, as I can, but I still don’t think my ability to express myself intelligently is even close to the one I have in my native language. </p>

<p>I have done some original research and have a paper published in a journal, but as I understand it’s not anything extraordinary amongst the applicants to the better universities.</p>

<p>My GPA is not exceptional, maybe in the best 40% of the people having the same major who are left in my class. It suffers greatly from the fact that I had a very busy programming job during my two first years. The trend has been good however and my major GPA(s) is (are) somewhere in the best 10%.</p>

<p>I can probably get a great LOR from my research advisor, but I’m not sure if I can get two more that are good enough.</p>

<p>I’ll post my test GRE scores as soon I get it done. In the meantime, feel free to crush some dreams.</p>

6

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<p>Odds are someone on the admissions committee will know the reputation of your school if it’s the top in your country.</p>

7

<p>

I hope so, but we are talking about a small backwater country here with only about five million people. Also, even though the school attracts the best students we have, the research here is usually quite unambitious and perhaps because of that not too well known. Thanks for the glimpse of light, though.</p>

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<p>Your subject GRE may hold weight in this instance. If the admissions committee can’t make heads or tails of your grading system, they may rely on more familiar measures like the GRE score. They may glance at the general GRE score but your subject GRE score may serve as a stand in for a GPA. </p>

<p>What country are you from? There aren’t many countries that aren’t represented in American academia.</p>

9

<p>Finland. People may recognize names like Linux and Nokia, but I’m really not sure about academic achievements. Someone might have heard about self-organizing map also, but that’s all I’d bet my money on. Of course, I haven’t been reading any related journals too much lately, so I can’t be sure.</p>

10

<p>I am again really sorry for double post.</p>

<p>Silly me, it was of course subject GRE I was actually having in my mind all the time, even though I talked about the general one. Concerning that, do you think it will be a good idea to take the subject GREs of both physics and computer science if I feel I can do well on both?</p>

<p>Also seems I forgot to thank cosmicfish for his/her really helpful post. Thanks cosmicfish!</p>

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<p>Finland is not the wild west. American academics will know all about your cockamamie grading scale, 1-5 = pass. It isn’t terribly different than the systems used by other european university systems.</p>

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<p>My main concern was not the trivial conversion of four-step grading to five-step, but the fact that what seems like really heavy grade inflation (the US system) might make it next to impossible to someone from not-inflated country to have any hope of getting in, unless the admission board and the pre-trashcanner understand the different principles in awarding grades. </p>

<p>I haven’t completely thrown the hope out, as I remember seeing a conversion chart on some uni’s web site which stated that a Finnish grade of 3.0/5.0 (and German 2.0/5.0!) will be viewed as approximate equal to 3.0/4.0 US grade, but I am not sure how wide-spread that attitude is. </p>

<p>Btw, this was the absolutely first time I saw the word cockamamie. I hope I can pass the TOEFL without that kind of vocabulary…</p>

13

<p>‘cockamamie’ doesn’t come up too often. Your vocabulary seems quite sufficient. I’ve heard the TOEFL is a really easy.</p>

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<p>Lol, don’t worry about cockamamie being on the TOEFL, it’s yiddish. If you do move to the US, you might find a lot of yiddish in common usage.</p>

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<p>Any insight on taking two subject GREs if I feel I can do well on both and both are be related to my potential PhD subject? Really good or complete waste of money?</p>

<p>Also would it be appropriate to mention the programming job as a reason for suboptimal grades for the first two years? It strengthened my programming skills a lot after all. Also it was the only way to avoid starvation without taking loans.</p>

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<p>You can only submit one subject score, so taking two is a big waste of time if you feel confident about both of them.</p>

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<p>I’m from Finland myself and graduated with a 4.92 GPA (from teknillinen fysiikka, which I also assume you’re from…) and also did pretty well in some math competitions. I now go to one of the top schools in math for a Ph.D. I also have a few Finnish friends at top schools in the US and all of them had a GPA in the 4.4+ range (from Finland that is). One thing I should mention is that maybe a third of the international students at my department have a medal in the international math olympiad. So if you feel intimidated by all the Finnish IMO team members at Tfy or they kick your ass consistently, then you have a problem. However, I’ve heard that the admissions for physics isn’t really as hard as for math, because math tends to take around 5-15 new students per year for top schools while physics programs take around 40 and the amount of applicants is pretty much the same.</p>

<p>I think you’re maybe kidding yourself with the GPAs. One of the reasons why the average is so low is in my opinion the fact that Finland has only 5 million people and still TKK alone takes around 2000 new students a year. This is simply due to the fact that departments gets government funding for each new student they accept, so they tend to accept more than are actually qualified. Then you have University of Helsinki too which takes almost the double of that. At the same time you have schools like Columbia which is in a city that in itself has a larger population than Finland and there are actually many good institutions in the same city. This has the consequence that the quality of students at Finnish universities varies a lot more in the same school while in the US students tend to converge to institutions where most peers are pretty similar.</p>

<p>Just make sure you get a 95%+ in the subjects tests and you should be set, so be prepared to work your ass off especially on learning to solve integrals quickly! I study math, so I did the math subject GRE and got a 97%. In analysis the GRE doesn’t go beyond the compulsory first year math at Tfy, but you should at least read some intro to topology and also algebra if you haven’t taken the algebra course and the optional freshman course in measure theory i.e. Moda (which also covers the topology and the Lebesgue integration stuff that is sometimes on the test). The Finnish books Topologia I&II by Jussi V</p>

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<p>Thanks sarbruis, that solves my problem trivially.</p>

<p>And thanks dst for your very informative post. I don’t completely agree with the GPA issue, even though what you said is true. The student quality in AMK’s and in many of the less selective university programs can vary a lot I agree, but Tfy amongst few others seem to be upholding a good quality. (Note to our non-Finnish readers, AMK is an institute for kind of a terminal Bachelor’s/Master’s degree which doesn’t qualify one for PhD studies and is generally not regarded as very high quality education. Non-AMK institutions of higher education are called universities even when studying for undergraduate degree, the word college does not have a counterpart in Finnish. And both Bachelor’s and Master’s students are called undergraduates.) Of course since doing well in high school is radically different from doing well in univesity physics, good input quality doesn’t necessarily imply good quality in university, but I’d guess they still correlate well.</p>

<p>However, what is interesting here is not the relative quality of Finnish students to the Finnish population but relative to the world as whole. First, if we assume Finnish high school is not much worse than it’s foreign counterparts and middle school is not a training center for standardized tests, PISA ranking is a good place to start. I don’t have the numbers of what percentage of Finnish or US middle schoolers go on to apply to college/university/AMK but wildly I assume the percentage of people applying to a Finnish universities is similar to the amount of US people applying to quality colleges, which means maybe top 100.</p>

<p>PISA science scores for year 2006 show that US has larger SD than Finland (106 versus 86) and significantly lower mean (489 versus 563. I don’t know what was the maximum of the scale). So taken two populations of equal size (say, city of Columbia and Finland) it would mean, if the above assumptions are correct, that the quality of applicants is higher in the population from Finland than in the population from US. However, the population of whole US is about 60 times as great as the population of Finland, which alters the situation greatly, as does the greater SD. I don’t know if we have to worry about PISA test being saturated, which would have the effect of reducing the SD, but I think it is plausible that US really does have bigger SD.</p>

<p>This means that the higher we set the required level, the greater the percentage of US people compared to Finnish people exceeding the level is. The absolute amount is obviously always bigger, but due to much greater amount of colleges/universities in the US, I think the average absolute scholastic quality in Finnish universities and US top 100 colleges are about the same and the situation stays relatively stable when we move towards more selectiviness, say Finnish top 5 individual programs and corresponding amount of US top programs. Of course US can increase the selectivity more than Finland because of the greater absolute amount of quality students, so assuming we could determine it, the best US program has undeniably better students than the best Finnish program.</p>

<p>I am slowly and unsurely approaching my point, which is that the average scholastic aptitude of Finnish university students is not much different from the average scholastic aptitude of good US college students, and I would argue (though without providing any hard evidence - sorry) that the average GPA of these people converted to the same scale is significantly lower in Finland than in US. What this means then is that the average quality of such Finnish applicant with say GPA of 90% of the max (4.5) is better than the quality of the US applicant with a GPA of 3.6.</p>

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<p>There’s one thing you don’t take into account. In Finland even very smart students tend to slack off at uni and the reason for this is the fact that education is completely free. You don’t tend to value an opportunity as much when you don’t have to pay anything for it (of course you pay taxes, but it’s not the same). You’ll also have your parents pushing you a lot harder if they have to pay thousands of dollars a year for your education. Luckily at a Ph.D. program in the US you won’t pay anything for your education, because you’ll get a good scholarship from the school. Then you can also apply money from Finnish funds and they are usually more happy to throw money at anyone studying in good schools in the US, so you’ll be sitting on a pile of cash.</p>

<p>Now, you said that you’ll only go if you get into some top institution. The solution is then pretty simple, just pick 10 schools in the top 20 and apply to them. The US News physics graduate program ranking is a pretty good start. If you score very well on the GRE, then it might be a good idea to apply to institutions that post the GRE averages on their website. Incidentally, I got into most schools that did this and I’m tempted to think that schools won’t publish these details unless they look good, so they make sure they do. :)</p>

<p>If you’re applying in a year, then now is the time to start preparing. I would buy Kaplan’s GRE flashcards and keep it in my bathroom and read it every time I go there. I can assure you that in a year, you’ve memorized every word. I would also start doing the type of problems on the PGRE by doing a few every day and I would buy both a PGRE and math GRE book as they contain tricks that speed up calculations. The problems are easy, but you need to be FAST. Doing well on the PGRE is going to require loads of practice, because the top 10% is usually filled with people going for a Ph.D. It means that you’re competing with VERY strong students and getting into the top 5% is going to require a few months of full-time studying. I underestimated the difficulty of the math GRE. I just looked at some old test and thought it was trivial and got around 75% on a few days of preparation. I then had another attempt a month later and scored 97%. You mentioned the CS GRE, but that test is completely useless as even top CS programs doesn’t seem to care about the scores. Some unis actually had the possibility to include two subject GREs and you can always mail them your results, but after having studied CS at TKK myself too, I know that you won’t be well prepared for the test content, so I wouldn’t take it.</p>

<p>You also said that you don’t really know who to ask for recommendation letters. This is a problem in Finland as student faculty interaction is very low. To fix this I would recommend that you start doing lists of questions when you read your course materials. You should then start going to your professors’ office hours each week to discuss these. This will make them remember you, because no one else does this ever, unless they want to complain about some grading… If you actually go there interested in the topic, they will start noting you very quickly.</p>

<p>I also have one warning regarding recommendations. Most professors don’t have any clue about what to include in a recommendation letter as they have never written one for US schools and the type of letters written when applying for funding in Finland are often only a few lines. I only later found out that one of my letters was along the lines of “My best student ever.” which was already pretty much indicated on the recommendation form where the professor ticks a few boxes. Thus, you need to make sure that professors know what they are expecting on the other end. You need to provide them with some sort of an example of what kind of content they should include and you should make some kind of a list for them with stuff that they could elaborate on. This needs to be done carefully as a typical Finn might feel offended if tell them what to write in a recommendation. You also need to make them understand that the recommendations are the single most important part of your application and that if they don’t want to devote any time for it, they will destroy your chances.</p>

20

<p>I might add that some professors might be very helpful with letters and some the exact opposite. One professor at TKK who had never written a recommendation for a US school wanted me to print out some instructions on how to write the letter. He also wrote a bunch of drafts that I could comment on and he would change them accordingly. I also had a friend’s American wife fix the language in the final version, so it was really flawless. Another professor happily agreed to write the letter and I started to e-mail him a few weeks before the deadline, because he hadn’t submitted it. A week before the deadline I went to his office and he looked like I was disturbing him and he had lots of work. He finally submitted the letter 3 weeks after the first school had it’s deadline. This didn’t seem to make much difference though, because I actually got into that school and that’s where I’m currently studying…</p>