<p>Brown has a pass/fail set-up. You can’t make an assumption about Brown is easier than Tufts.</p>
<p>btw, since you brought up Yale, might I refer you to your own words, YeloPen:</p>
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<p><a href=“Question About Yale - Yale University - College Confidential Forums”>Question About Yale - Yale University - College Confidential Forums;
<p>So let’s say a student at Yale takes 4 classes at Boston University over 2 summers. When he applies for graduate school will those classes at BU be part of his GPA? Will there be a separate GPA just for Yale classes or will it be a combination of BU and Yale?</p>
<p>Will Yale acknowledge that the students GPA includes the BU classes?</p>
<p>all college classes count for grad school, even those taken while in high school. For med or law applications, the application service will combine every college class into a new gpa.</p>
<p>I don’t know of any college that uses grades from another college and combines them. In your example, the Yale gpa is Yale courses only, even if they accept the BU course for fulfillment of requirement or “transfer” credit. It is not included in Yale’s calculation of Yale’s gpa.</p>
<p>mufasa104, Your use of “acknowledge” needs some clarification in your context. No course credits earned at any college except Yale college can be used to fulfill the “core education” requirement at Yale (they use a different term: “distribution requirement” but it means the same thing.) Otherwise, it may be not fair to some students from the not-so-competitive high schools (e.g., the parents can not afford to live in an affluent neighborhood/school district) because the majority of the students might have had tons of AP/IP/college-level credits before college so these students from competitive high schools would not need to take so many classes in 4 years. Many URMs students with a poorer preparation before college are still likely struggling in such an environment if they are premeds and therefore need mostly A or A- grades to be premed-worthy.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the requirement for each individual department is more relaxed and the credits earned elsewhere could be used but it likely requires pre-approval from the school before it can be counted. The treatment of AP/IP credits is similar – can not used to fulfill the core education requirement and could be used to fulfill the graduation requirement of each major if your department agrees.</p>
<p>@TuftsStudent: To be fair, some schools do have a legit claim to grade deflation. UChicago and Princeton come to mind since they have top students and grade deflation. Not really a great comparison since they’re probably the exception.</p>
<p>@bluebayou: Sorry again for the harsh response. I understand that the OP attends Harvard and not Yale, I suppose my response was to your comments about grade inflation in general, not specific to this thread.</p>
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<p>You can take that as evidence of grade inflation if you like. It’s my personal opinion, and as someone that slept 3-4 hours a night throughout high school, my standards for what constitutes achieving a grade “easily” might not be applicable to everyone. More clarification:</p>
<p>A) I put in a lot of effort for academics, so I don’t see me getting a B “easily” as being a problem.
B) To be fair, I got an A easily in many of the “normal” classes I took because these included classes like Calc III and Linear Algebra (took them in high school).</p>
<p>Also, you left out the part of the quote where I mentioned Freshman Organic Chemistry and how difficult it was for me despite being one of the most grade-inflated science classes at my school.</p>
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<p>People say that, but unless they changed things intensely in the last 3-4 years, it doesn’t appear to be that true: [Princeton</a> University](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/Princeton.html]Princeton”>Princeton University), [University</a> of Chicago GPA Trends](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/chicago.html]University”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/chicago.html). I have heard stories about UChicago kids working intensely hard at school and doing nothing else, but I wonder how much of that is exaggerated and bad campus atmosphere.</p>
<p>Most schools are being grade-inflated over time, so that’s not surprising. They’re still grade-deflated compared to other schools because they have a combination of top students and low-ish average GPA. </p>
<p>My main problem lies with the claim that it’s easier to get a better GPA at a school like Harvard than at a school like Cal. Not singling anyone out here, but I do know that this attitude exists. All I’m saying is there are better things to bring up about a school like Harvard than grade inflation. Grade inflation is brought up as an advantage of attending a top school very frequently and I think it’s misleading; I’m sure that a Harvard student would be able to achieve a higher GPA at Cal.</p>
<p>Eh, they’re down by 0.1 or 0.15. Not a whole lot. But I definitely agree with your second point.</p>
<p>Yelo:</p>
<p>Take Dartmouth and Brown, for example. Arguably nearly two equal student bodies; test scores and gpa & class rank are the same. Yet Brown has a mean gpa of 3.6+ and Dartmouth is ~3.4. Or take H & Y, which also have nearly identical quality students. Yale is a 3.55+, whereas H is lower.</p>
<p>2 things:</p>
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<li><p>The picture only looks like that because you’re handpicking the schools. For D vs. B, don’t leave out schools like Columbia (3.42) and Penn (3.44) to compare with D (3.42). For H vs. Y, A) don’t forget about Stanford at 3.55 and equal student quality, B) Y is 3.51, H is 3.46, if that’s a difference you really want to point out then sure.</p></li>
<li><p>If you look at the second half of my above post, it should be clear that my goal is not to make comparisons like yours. When people bring up grade inflation, they are usually comparing private vs. public schools, not schools from the Ivy League against each other. I mean, if you look at the Ivy League, it’s not like their GPAs are drastically different from one another. If you take out P (3.28) and B (3.61) since they’re pretty far off, the range is from Cornell (3.36) to Yale (3.51).</p></li>
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<p>In any case, my point is that the main point of complaint/comparison for grade inflation is public vs. private (3.0 vs. 3.3), not within the Ivy League. So that’s where I intended to address my posts.</p>