<p>Is the Benjamin Franklin Scholar program difficult? I was offered a spot in the program, and accepted, but am wondering if this was the wrong decision and will affect my GPA. I'm not someone who needs to absolutely have a 4.0 or anything but I would like to keep my GPA high enough that I won't have trouble getting into grad school. Should I be worried?</p>
<p>probably not granted that they offered you a spot. I wouldn’t obsess about grad school either. You’d be coming from an Ivy league school’s honors program!</p>
<p>Congratz on acceptance!</p>
<p>I had exactly the same question. It could seriously mess up my GPA. The BFS courses look they require a lot more work and I don’t think they accept you thinking that you’ll definitely get an A in those courses. So, I’m thinking that while graduate schools might like the honors program, it might not be worth the GPA trade-off.</p>
<p>Does anybody who goes to Penn know whether there really is a trade-off with the gpa due to these courses? someone i know at Penn told me she didnt think there was as apparently BFS course grades arent limited to as rigid a curve (ie: they can give as many a’s as they want) and since, in general, the kids in the class are honours students, profs are generous with the grades.</p>
<p>I would love to know that too- I might just get too scared to mess up my GPA.</p>
<p>It wouldn’t make sense though for professors to be generous with grades because these are honors students because you don’t have to be in the program to take BFS courses…</p>
<p>non-honors students in BFS courses constitute about 1/3 of the class so it’s fine. Also, you can bet that those non-honors people are strong enough students to be considered honors students.</p>
<p>the course descriptions still make the courses out to look significantly harder in that they seem to require more work. are there any people who have taken bfs courses here??</p>
<p>I’ve taken one… it was definitely more work than my other classes, but it wasn’t graded harshly. Mine was once/week, and we had a book to read every week to prepare for the discussion for that given week. The reading was a pain, but the grading wasn’t on that, but more so on our response papers (one every other week or so) and our participation in the discussion.</p>
<p>thanks for the post. which bfs course did you take?</p>
<p>how did you get invited to the program? </p>
<p>if you werent invited, can you still take part in it?</p>
<p>we were invited online and by snail-mail. You can apply to the program during your freshman year but not after that.</p>
<p>where can you find the BFS courses? can you post a link? also are the Winter 2010 courses available to be previewed now?</p>