Does anyone know the average college GPA for oxford. I heard it was a 2.7 and I hope to apply for the business school so I am worried. Thanks
I don’t know who told you that…look at the ridiculously exhaustive live of people who are “honored” at Oxford each semester. They have one for those 3.5+ and one for 3.0-3.499…There is really no way for the mean to be 2.7 unless there is some bimodal distribution going on such that a few people are doing extremely poorly. I would certainly imagine that some science and math courses have a mean of B-, but the whole school, nope. Not even the harshest grading competitive universities have that (Purdue is the only exception with a 2.8 mean). I would imagine it being less inflated than main campus, so I can imagine like 3.1-3.2 (would be more like 3.25 if I just took away the inflation, but I’m accounting for lower incoming GPA’s), which is reasonable considering many people do not do well freshman year at any college and you only have 2 years to do so at Oxford.
Anyway, here is the honors and merit list, it’s huge:http://oxford.emory.edu/news/honor-and-merit-lists-announced/
@Zylout I believe the median is maybe in the range you suggests (or maybe more like 3.0), but the mean is a bit higher from the approximations I did. Note that there are significantly more people in the 3.5+ category than those in between 3.0 and 3.5. In addition, I must say that the courses taken by pre-business students is not what drags the median down. Likely that honor goes to the pre-med/science crowd. All it does say is that Oxford has less grade inflation than normal. It is not likr Swat, Williams, and Amhert so you honestly shouldn’t expect that level of inflation. You also shouldn’t expect it to be like main campus, because it is a relatively large university and there is greater choice in course and instructor selection such that it is more easy to craft an “easy breezy” semester while also fulfilling requirements. There are no INQ courses or unifying educational goals that drive how a huge chuck of courses are taught on main. Instructors just do what is convenient for them which is making many courses underwhelming so that they can focus on research. Most elite schools have a huge chunk of faculty doing this despite claiming to “challenge” students (this is more so the case in humanities and social sciences, but can happen in the sciences as well as less graded assignments and more close-ended exams= easier grading).
Oxford perhaps has some standards in many classes outside of science and math (which is not what many universities of medium/large size can claim as I just claim). This is honestly pretty typical for schools using an LAC model (ultra selective or not)…the very top ranked ones with a bigger grade inflations than similarly selective universities are kind of exceptions. Most LAC model schools are known to actually push the crowd of students they have a bit further than a university would and it is mainly due to the size of the classes.
Oxford can probably explained away as: huge chunk of students in harsh grading science and math courses (even on main, these give a fair share of C’s, and even lower in some cases. B-/B is typical for an average student in such courses at most selective schools) along with more seriously graded humanities and social science courses (as in, will give many more B’s than university style campuses with similar caliber students. You can’t count on most to be “gut courses”).