<p>The likelihood of an A is more than twice as high at Brown compared to the other schools, because Brown does not offer A-minuses and the A vs A- split at most schools is generally 50-50 or below. The fraction of A’s among externally reported grades would be comparatively even higher, because of the nonreporting of failing grades.</p>
<p>The likelihood of an externally reported (or GPA lowering) grade below C is zero at Brown, and substantial elsewhere. </p>
<p>It is hard to say whether the lack of plus and minus decorations on the A/B/C grades has an upward or downward bias on the B’s, but it has a huge positive bias on the C/D/fail grades and on the A’s. Those are what show up at gradeinflation.com and in the law school GPA renormalizations.</p>
<p>Also, the inability to tell apart the top students (grade inflation on the A’s) shows up in the Brown Phi Beta Kappa numbers.</p>
<p>I’m interested - assuming Brown did record pluses and minuses, and assuming they included failing on transcripts, this seems to imply the average GPA would be among the lowest of the Ivies, if not the lowest; even just the latter (which can be done without any guessing) puts Brown in the same range as Harvard for the 1 year I calculated. Obviously Brown does neither, and so the grades are as high as they are, and the perception is thus. I do wonder what would happen if Brown did both, though. It seems that this would remove the entire discrepancy (correct me if you have data that suggests otherwise). It’s interesting to consider, if nothing else, the sources for the astronomical numbers.</p>
<p>Brown doesn’t calculate GPA, but that’s not going to stop many people from doing so, and so I feel that this is relevant.</p>
<p>On the other hand, one thing I do find very frustrating is how Brown may be the hardest of the Ivies to qualify for a “Good Student” discount on auto insurance through the insurance company my parents use. There are 4 possible ways to qualify, the most common being a GPA of at least 3.0, which the numbers seem to suggest is rather common at the Ivies. However, since Brown administration must confirm the GPA, and institutional policy disallows them to, one doesn’t qualify through this way. There is no class standing, so this method (top 25% iirc) does not work. There is no Dean’s List, so one cannot qualify this way. The final method is “all grades at least B.” This is frustrating because 1 C would cost a significant amount of money, while if Brown calculated a GPA, it would not exclude me. So sometimes the lack of GPA does increase stress.</p>
<p>I’ve had this conversation about grade inflation with some people I know at Brown and apparently they are the wrong people because none of these people chased A’s and didn’t feel the need to just for the sake of getting an A (and not learning much from it).</p>
<p>I only went after an A when given a B once while at Brown because the professor was basing his grading on a ridiculous idea so I let him know my feelings on the matter.</p>
<p>The math basically shows that if you include NCs Brown drops to normal levels. I’ve demonstrated this countless times on CC. This grade inflation discussion is hilarious for two reasons-- 1) Very few people talk about this who are looking for schools off this webpage. In ~200 tours at Brown, countless information session, several interviews now, high school networking, etc etc, grade inflation doesn’t even come up as a blip on the radar screen. 2) Quite frankly, the vision of grading this entire discussion is framed around is not the vision of grading at Brown. There are many ways to view the purpose of grades and most people don’t expand beyond a single view. 3) I got a few Cs at Brown in science courses that I’m damn proud of. I also got some As that required more work than I thought I had in me. I also got some Bs that probably should have been As but never once asked to be bumped and neither has anyone I’ve come across in four years (unless there was a mistake).</p>
<p>I’m peacing out from here though, I don’t think there’s much useful conversation to be had on the topic that won’t reduce us down to a place where we miss the forest for the trees.</p>
<p>I don’t know what sort of demonstrations you could possibly be talking about. The math, if done correctly, provides more evidence that Brown is an outlier and does not drop to the level of peer schools other than Stanford.</p>
<p>“Including NCs” means counting them at well above zero. That’s because to test the notion that grades of C and higher at Brown are allocated by the same standards as at other schools, the thing to calculate is “what would happen if Brown handled performance below its C range (i.e., C- or D+ and below) identically to other schools”. Most of those NC grades would appear as C-, D+, D and D- on transcripts at other schools, implying an average GPA effect of 1 or more, not zero. </p>
<p>This calculation on the 2008-9 Brown data gives an average of 3.53, which is above the level of any other Ivy League school and is equivalent to Stanford.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Of course they don’t ask about it. Grade inflation is a marketing tool for the schools. Students want it. But for both the applicants and the schools, it is optimal to never mention this. The schools can maintain the party line by pointing to the objective difficulty of the school, while reassuring everyone that there is a “relaxed atmosphere” … without dwelling on a critical factor in creating and maintaining that atmosphere.</p>
<p>Here is something else to consider as to whether there is more grade inflation at Brown than, say, Chicago or the rest of the Ivies outside of Harvard and Yale. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, when it comes to law school admissions to HYS, Brown does better than most schools considered its peers. The law school admissions piece to the premier schools is particularly significant because law schools in general, and premier law schools in particular, use only two main metrics in admissions-grades and LSAT scores. If Brown’s historical applicants were grade inflated, and did worse than peer schools in law school, Brown would not consistently be among the top seven alma maters every year in the student bodies at HYS. Brown also does as good, if not better, than most of the Ivies for fellowships, another situation where grades are important. It also betters the rest of the Ivies, including Harvard, when it comes to Fullbrights. Top tier graduate schools and employers obviously don’t buy the notion that Brown assigns grades to students without merit. As I’ve said before, Brown’s prestige among the upper social classes rivals HYP. It’s when you start talking about the middle and lower social classes that Brown suffers from a relative lack of prestige because of the way many of these people have been raised and educated in school. This in part accounts for why Brown doesn’t usually get the top students at Exeter, Andover, or St. Paul’s. The top students tend to be driven middle class students or Asians, who view attendance at these schools through the personal prism of upward mobility. The kids in the top 10-25% who apply to Brown from these schools tend to be from a higher social strata and less grade driven. Let me also state that Brown rejects a lot of the students from St. Grottlesex. In a usual year, about 45-47 students from St. Paul’s apply to Brown. In a typical year, Brown will only accept 6-10.</p>
<p>Siserune, I like the way your posts are usually empirical but sometimes you make assumptions that may not apply if you took a more holistic viewpoint. I feel they are not completely representative of most people’s perception of things, but more specifically the perception of a person enjoys thinking about this field, and has conversations with other people who investigate this field in a similar way. Sometimes this translates into a conversation where, as modest stated above, we miss the trees.</p>
<p>Now siserune is saying that Brown’s grades are more inflated because we give too many 0s? Really? The NC below a C was not designed so there are no Ds/1s on a transcript, it was designed because getting a D in a course is a useless pass-- if the credit wouldn’t transfer and we wouldn’t accept it, that means that we’re basically admitting that you didn’t learn enough to ever build on that course work. You don’t earn a grade for that at Brown, period.</p>
<p>Not having NCs on the transcript exists because in order to have people pursue breadth when they are independent to select courses, we needed to remove some of the “sticks” which would push people away from challenging course work that was outside of their comfort zone.</p>
<p>The result is the 0s don’t show up-- but they’re still 0s.</p>
<p>But in the end, wolfman has it right, and I had it right in the previous post… I’m just amazed that siserune, with all his/her clear intelligence, feels comfortable filling in his/her model with assumptions for which there is little justification simply to make the math work conveniently to make a point. If you want to be considered objective by using data to make your points, you have to understand the quality and limitations of your data and only make assumptions that are as specific as possible to avoid over/under estimation and ensure you’re not just adding error rather than accuracy.</p>
Yes. Smarter actually. But its more like 30 out of 150-250, the size of a prep school senior class.
Top schools have scholarship endowments in the $millions and are pretty meritocratic these days. TOP prep schools, I mean. But the top schools are a precious few.
I will say, to controversialize, that perhaps 20 schools nationally are rich enough and selective enough to compose a student body that universities would do well to favor. That 20 does a lot of pre-selecting.
Also a lot of PREPARING, as in “prep” school, with various internships, university laboratory programs, Europe-touring orchestras and choruses, Intel and Siemens and Fed Challenge participation, and other precocious and advantage-conferring stuff.
And there’s also the PREPARATORY syllabus aspect of these places. The course catalogue (and it’s literally a catalogue) at my old school contains a slew of courses with names that read like university offerings, including even the Frenchie post-structuralist stuff.
Compared to when I was there a thousand years ago the courses are amazing.
That’s accurate. The Phillips duo and half a dozen others are not far off Brown’s 40 percent-plus. As I say, there’s a thin layer of top schools that are rich enough to be pretty meritocratic. Give 'em credit.
They think of themselves as national selective high schools. The Ten Schools Admissions Organization (TSAO) has that expressly in its charter.
Crew, ice hockey, lacrosse, squash, equestrian, and a few schools are feeders for basketball.
Hilarious and soporific. Can we drop it?
Grade inflation is an invisible notion to applicants, as Modest says. It’s a Sean Hannity buzzword of zilch import. No worthy graduate degree candidate was ever penalized for having attended an Ivy peer school that Sean Hannity says inflates grades.
Cretinous nonsense.
Politely put, Wolf. You meant to say that a pinch of wisdom or perhaps life-perspective is what’s needed. But this is a web forum mainly peopled by narrow alma mater jingoes (especially UPenn and Brown, but most especially UPenn). If you want life-perspective go to the Daily Princetonian forums, where people are smug.
I haven’t seen “St. Grottlesex” in print in a while. Pinderhughes’s usage and other evidence points to his being a Paulie. Back in the day the five St. Grottlesex schools were at or near the top, but new favorites like Milton and Harvard-Westlake now get the press. Milton was not in the front rank back in the day.
The demotion of Groton from its ancient place the very top is a mystery to me. And you never hear of St. George’s these days, unless Brown recruits an athlete from there. (St. Paul’s is, as ever and eternally, near the top, despite the rector episode.)
A mainly accurate paragraph.
Point of information: Brown was the most-applied to university among the prep schools in the late 1970s and 1980s. JFK Jr could safely socially go to Brown because there were 100 Phillipians already at Brown on his arrival in 1978. Brown was enrolling 20-25 students a year from each of Andover, Exeter, Choate, and Deerfield.
This is corollary to my assertions about the impact of Brown alumni of the classes 1978 to 1998 in my neck of the woods, namely Manhattan and exurban Connecticut.
Tragically, that impact will lessen as the flawed “Simmons template” dilutes the Brown product.
Thank you, Fred. It’s a no-brainer, in fact.
And with that cue, I’ll reprise my message of page 1 in this thread, because its EFFING more important than grade inflation.<br>
So, I’ve been reading through my pile of Christmas presents and on the night table just now is Jonathan Cole’s massive new book, “The Great American University” in which I’ve reached page 30.
The book is subtitled “Its Rise to Preeminence: Its Indespensable Role: Why It Must Be Protected.”
I had read all the way to page 30 before thinking to check the index for Brown.
What sent me there was this sentence: “By the turn of the twentieth century Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Hopkins, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Yale were transforming into research institutions. Some great colleges, like Princeton and Dartmouth, never fully embraced the new model.”
One had no expectations of seeing Brown on that list, of course. When one arrived at Brown in the early 1960s it was a lesser school, a regional school, much less prominent than four or five of the Seven Sisters, let alone Amherst and Williams.
Even so, one turned to the index of Cole’s book. But no Brown. Not a word in over 600 pages. The other Ivies, yes, and Stanford, Berkeley, and all the other players, thirty or so of them, with numerous references. But no Brown.
And it isn’t as if Cole has a professional aversion to Brown – his friend Vartan Gregorian blurbed the dust jacket for him.
THIS is why I (and we) say the “Simmons template” is a dreadful misallocation of resources. We can NEVER catch the great research universities on the sciences side. Not ever. The template is a sucker’s bet.<br>
The Campaign for Academic Enrichment (CAE) has resulted in:
(1) A WIDENING of the endowment gap between us and the other two laggards in the Ivy, Cornell and Dartmouth. We are further behind them now than we were in 2002. We have dropped two places in the national endowment rankings since the start of the CAE. Our campaign was the second smallest among its contemporaries compared to our peer schools, only Dartmouth’s being smaller.
If you’re poor and getting poorer, what the hell are you doing putting your eggs in the expensive basket? Follow Dartmouth’s example. Dartmouth has never had an identity crisis. It knows what its money will buy and it has outranked Brown in every year but one since the US News rankings were introduced.
And don’t slight US News. Asians (and Asia-American parents) treat it as definitive. So do people from Nebraska and everywhere else. There was a Cornell study a few years ago that measured the impact of US News on selectivity. And anyway, I’m NOT dismissive of US News’s utility. It DOES measure resources, which, to quote myself, “translates in a palpable way to academic quality of life.”
(2) Stupidly, the CAE was overweighted to the sciences. The humanities were comparatively starved, and “starved” is the word humanities faculty use. Top humanities faculty are fleeing to richer places, which flight is presently an incessant topic of conversation in the Brown faculty. Prick up your ears, Modest.
(3) A bigger gap in the life sciences between us and the IMPORTANT research universities, all of which have built or are building much bigger facilities.
Look, Brown students have ALWAYS solipsistically overestimated the importance of what Brown does in scientific research. EVERY university issues press releases about scientific research. Publish or perish. But practically nothing Brown presently does in the sciences puts it on the map. Or in Jonathan Cole’s fat book.
Meanwhile, the little money Brown has disappears into, again to quote myself, “the insatiable maw of the sciences” when it might have purchased a Yale-standard or Princeton-standard humanities faculty.
And I am very happy to see that the institutionally savvy Fredmurtz2 agrees with me (and with my coreligionists).
(4) The blurring of our Brown Curriculum image which has led to a COMPARATIVE decline in our selectivity position. That’s a fact.
We simple do not see the yield in the top-most pool that we saw in the 1980s and 1990s.
Fireandrain has disputed that, but Fireandrain was in Providence then (as a sciences concentrator?) supposing that the “date rape” wall was what Brown was known for, whereas I was in New York watching the national Brown phenomenon in the big picture.
To say that our HISTORIC selectivity position is better now is simply inaccurate.
Anyway, the Brown-scornful crowd in College Confidential and elsewhere in the internet speaks volumes. Their contempt for Brown and ignorance of Brown will strike Laura Linney, Rick Moody, and Todd Haynes as a strange development.</p>
<p>I was asking the same questions vis-a-vis science funding of administrators and, faculty when I was there - only a few years ago. Never got a logical answer about U. Hall’s vision but, since UH has had a revolving door policy the past few yrs not a surprise.</p>
<p>Brown has had and retains a bit of an institutional identity crisis about whether it IS a LAC or, U and, about what it SHOULD be. </p>
<p>Frankly, Brown has missed a great chance to better leverage its autonomy in recent years. Simmons to her credit made the place need-blind, something many faculty members didn’t believe they could do. </p>
<p>Agree also that the numbers may be better now than before but, the profile and shadow on the landscape and more importantly, in imagination is certainly less distinct if not slightly smaller.</p>
<p>it’s not your businesses my observation skills. wow! why so many people spend time doing nothing in CC, don’t you have anything else to do? sure!</p>
“Viral” indeed.
The unmentionability of the You-Know-Who-Factor is mandatory, of course, but even so one admires the ingenuity of the circumlocutions, both here and a couple of weeks ago in a New York Times interview of Miller.</p>
<p>Sounds like we’re on the same wavelength. Graduated a year or two ago. Fascinated by this stuff and, still trying to figure life out. PM me if you’d like.</p>
<p>You guys would be amazed what would have happened to Brown without our recent boosts in the sciences. This had nothing to do with competing on an equal level.</p>
<p>I think you’re missing Jim’s broader, long-term point that it’s like using a better cannonball against a howitzer while the cavalry is in a drunken stupor. With that said, tell me why I’m wrong.</p>