<p>My D is also a current Wellesley 3rd year. She is working extremely hard and the grade deflation can indeed be disheartening, though we remind her that as long as no one has died, it’s all good.</p>
<p>What Pizzagirl said. We told our DD to chill out - at the end of the day she will have a degree from Wellesley - she wins!</p>
<p>What does it exactly mean when Wellesley says it will only allow a B+ to be a class’s highest average? I don’t understand why everyone throws this around so much because even in high school classes, I would guess the average to be B+ or even lower. I don’t mean this in any condescending way, please don’t take it as such! Just genuinely wondering. Thanks!</p>
<p>The policy is: the mean grade in 100 level and 200 level courses with 10 or more students should be no higher than 3.33 (B+). </p>
<p>In the Common Data set for 2012-2013, over 64% of Wellesley freshmen had a composite ACT score of 30 or higher. If you look at national statistics, a composite score of 30 on the ACT is in the 95th percentile. Likewise, for the SAT, the national average reading score is 496, and over 52% of Wellesley freshmen scored over 700. Seventy-five percent of Wellesley freshmen scored 650 or higher.</p>
<p>So let’s say you have an entire senior class of high school students, and you pull out the top 5%, who are the very best, smartest students. Now tell these students who are in the top 5% of their class their mean grade can’t be higher than a B+, or 3.33 GPA.</p>
<p>I don’t know if this example will make sense to you, but basically that’s what happens at Wellesley.</p>
<p>so the way I see it is that the academic rigor of Wellesley is affected by three things: the department and professors and the students. </p>
<p>the department
naturally, there are a few more career-facing departments, like the STEM, political science, and economics departments. They just attract more people who are openly more ambitious, so you obviously feel the students working harder. In the classics department, everyone may be working as hard as the ones in the computer science department, but it’s definitely a whole lot more overt and tangible in compsci. </p>
<p>the professors
we tend to attract good professors with good pedigrees, but certainly since we are not a huge research institution with megafunds, we’re probably not going to attract the ultra-hardcore professors that MIT or Harvard can. Thus, the classes’ difficulties overall are above average, will require significant work outside of class time. Nonetheless, especially in terms of STEM classes, Wellesley can be slower-paced and less quantitatively rigorous. If you know you are a STEM person and you are really good at it and you know you want to do it for a career, then you may find the academic rigor to be lacking. You’re better off in MIT.</p>
<p>the students
I’m an econ/math major, and I can tell you that the top bracket of economics students are extremely competitive. It’s not overt, it’s quite subtle (no one will question you about your grades or jobs/internships but everyone somehow knows how everyone is doing). However, this top bracket consistently studies harder and performs well so professors come to reserve the As for these sorts of students and the academic rigor goes up. I don’t think it’s limited to the economics department, I’ve heard it’s difficult to get an A in political science… I took a political science course just for kicks and my professor told me he rarely gives As and he only gave one A in my course of 15 people (me!). All of my friends consistently spend considerable amounts outside of class preparing for class… of course, I’m aware I probably self-select friends to be like me, but I honestly don’t know any Wellesley student who is just swimming in boatloads of free time…</p>