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I dunno how you manage to get a A+ with 70% final grade.... =S perhaps with a curve? a very generous CURVE?
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<p>When the average on the exams is a 40 or 50, not too many people are getting 70.</p>
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well there are classes that just don't offer A+
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<p>That's a fair statement, and is totally different than your initial statement.</p>
<p>Also, CC introduced the new policy of deciding whether to keep pass/fail or get the letter grade. I'm sure this is going to translate into higher over GPAs as people will be able to hide any Bs...</p>
<p>i was also wondering to graduating seniors if they know the approximate cutoff for CC or SEAS Summa/magna/cum laudes or Phil Beta Kappas... i'd imagine itd be somewher ein the 3.95+ range</p>
<p>hi, columbia2002, while really knowledgeable about CU and generally very insightful, in my opinion is making columbia seem ridiculously easy. if he/she got a 3.8-3.9 with ease--awesome--but this isn't the norm at columbia, so don't expect that coming in. i know people with 4.0s. i also know people w. 3.0s. i would say most are in the 3.5-3.7 range. and it definitely is hard/near impossible to get A+ in humanities classes.</p>
<p>i agree with randomosity. most of my friends - no dummies, all of them - tended to average around a 3.3. they had all gotten 4.0s in high school, or close to it.</p>
<p>I got a 3.3uw in high school, but got some discipline at college and ended up with a 3.9 and graduated magna cum laude. a 3.85 was the cutoff for magna, meaning no more than 10% of the class of 2006 got above a 3.85. It's not that common! Usually you only hear people talking about their GPAs when it's a very good GPA, so you get a big selection bias if you just rely on talking to people.</p>
<p>And yes, I did strategic choices of my classes - I dropped a few, had to take two incompletes after my junior year (long story, involves a girl...), and selectively managed my major requirements. But mostly, it was the fact that the class I was taking were on subjects that I happened to be good at - math, and computer science (my minor). In a class on Analysis & Optimization that's full of econ majors, an applied math major will cruise through. But if i'd taken the grad-level class in the math department that also would've met that requirement, there's no way I would've gotten an A. That sort of thing. Did I grade-grub with professors? Hell no, I have dignity, if you're going to give me a B, I probably earned it (or deserved worse). But I definitely was strategic.</p>
<p>Also, one thing I want to emphasize is that NOBODY here who is a prospective student or prefrosh has ANY freaking idea how well they're going to do at columbia. Nothing in your high school curriculum will give you a barometer, it just doesn't translate. Everyone who goes to columbia had to take an extremely rigorous high school program and do very well in it while juggling a dozen things, you're not special.</p>
<p>The one thing that WILL make a difference, and I speak from experience here, is paranoia. Most incoming freshmen fall in love with the freedom of college, don't manage their time effectively without a nagging parent around, and do poorly their first year (after which time they get with the program). If you come in with the mentality that you're a small fish in a big pond, and you need to be at 100% to stay afloat, and you're constantly preparing yourself and organizing yourself and going to professors' office hours and doing assignments on time, you will have an edge in freshman year. I arrived at Columbia feeling like I had a second chance in life, because I had been in the workforce and was craving an academic atmosphere. I also assumed everyone was smarter than I was and so I'd have to work even harder to keep up. I did well freshman year and sophomore year as a result. That's my advice to incoming prefrosh - don't assume you're going to do well, assume you're going to do poorly and have a hard time handling it, and plan accordingly. Panic, and everything will be fine :)</p>
<p>"I got a 3.3uw in high school, but got some discipline at college and ended up with a 3.9 and graduated magna cum laude."</p>
<p>Did they give you free chicks every time you got an A? Or what happened, :D?
On a more serious note: Would you say that ppl tend to do better in their junior and senior years? I for instance sucked in freshmen year and just got better and better.</p>
<p>Let me rephrase -- if your main goal is to graduate from CC with a very high GPA (like a 3.8-3.9), it's fairly easy if you're of average intelligence for a Columbia student and are willing to be diligent with your studies. You can major in something fairly easy, you can take classes / electives that are known to be easy A's, you can take no more than 4 classes a semester, you can grade-grub, you can effectively use the drop/withdraw/pass-fail, etc.</p>
<p>Randomosity, my point wasn't to make Columbia appear ridiculously easy. Most people aren't at Columbia for no other purpose than to maximize their GPA. I know people who are average-intelligence Columbia students and got very high GPAs, and I know really smart people who got good but not stellar GPAs because they didn't care so much about grades.</p>
<p>How does the whole grade-grubbing thing work anyway? This isn't a common thing in our culture...</p>
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How does the whole grade-grubbing thing work anyway? This isn't a common thing in our culture...
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<p>Grading is really subjective in many classes. Your physics exam may be 3 huge problems and they're so complicated that hardly anyone gets it completely right so the TAs just give everyone a score based on how many sub-parts you did and whether you had the right idea, etc. So you get 20/33 on one problem, and you go to the TA and whine that you almost had it right, and they change it to 22/33 just to get rid of you. Do that a few more times, and the points add up.</p>
<p>Or there are people who pressure TAs/profs into reading rough drafts of their papers so they get a leg up on knowing what it takes to get an A on their paper to make the prof happy.</p>
<p>Hm... and this actually works? I imagine that the TA would hate you after a while and just take away points from your next exam, no? </p>
<p>The 2nd thing sounds like a good idea to me, ^^</p>
<p>Lol is this your advice:</p>
<p>"Generally, you want to shoot for a law school in the "Top 14" of the US News rankings, because anything less will leave you potentially jobless and scrambling to pay back your expensive loans. Plus, it would drag down Columbia's ranking in the Wall Street Journal rankings of colleges based on their undergrads' admission to elite grad and professional schools."</p>
<p>Actually, the WSJ ranking only surveyed 5 law schools - not 14. That would also be like encouraging 70% of Columbia's potential law applicants to not apply. Furthermore, you don't need a top 14 law school to succeed.</p>
<p>wait, what?</p>
<p>Aurelius, nobody's said anything like that in this thread, I think you have the wrong thread.</p>
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Actually, the WSJ ranking only surveyed 5 law schools - not 14. That would also be like encouraging 70% of Columbia's potential law applicants to not apply. Furthermore, you don't need a top 14 law school to succeed.
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<p>That reference was meant to be cheeky...making it top five is even better! Anyway, I recommend going to A u t o A d m i t 's Law forum and asking them why you need to go to a T14 to succeed. You will be bombarded with info. Their case is that you can do well at a lesser school if you're ridiculously high in the class - but it often requires surmounting stiffer competition than at the T14 schools, where people are more relaxed about their futures. In the long term, it's less work to get into a T14 than to succeed at a non-T14 to the extent that you emerge with a future similar to an average T14 grad.</p>
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Furthermore, you don't need a top 14 law school to succeed.
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<p>A guy with one arm played Major League Baseball and even threw a no-hitter. That doesn't mean that it's not a serious disadvantage to have one arm if you want to play pro baseball.</p>
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A guy with one arm played Major League Baseball and even threw a no-hitter.
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I spend a LOT of time talking baseball, and i've never heard of this. Can I get a reference?</p>
<p>Jim Abbott. Pitched for the Angels in the perhaps early to mid 90s.</p>
<p>Denzera -- A 3.9 was a magna! What was the cutoff for a summa? For Phi Beta Kappa?</p>
<p>Hey Denzera if you don't mind me asking are you SEAS or CC and what year? thanks</p>
<p>I was SEAS '06. I don't know the cutoffs for summa in CC but I think it was 3.9 in CC (less than that in SEAS), and probably the same for PBK since it's the same top 5% cutoff.</p>
<p>seriously, though, you guys are missing the point. Go reread post #25.</p>
<p>Approximate GPA cutoffs for Latin honors in CC are:</p>
<p>Summa (top 5% of class): 3.9+
Magna (next 10%): 3.8-3.9
Cum Laude (next 10%): 3.7-3.8</p>
<p>So in total, 25% of the CC graduating class gets honors. I know the approx. GPAs from friends. This link is helpful:</p>