<p>I’m fairly certain that the primary reason that app numbers have soared is because more and more people (like those who frequent this site) are applying to around 5 Ivies + 10 Ivy equivalents.</p>
<p><a href=“modest:”>quote</a> </p>
<p>Now siserune is saying that Brown’s grades are more inflated because we give too many 0s? Really?
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<p>No. I said that Brown’s letter-grade inflation apparently does not come only from suppressing failing grades (NC’s). One can see that from the data on Brown’s web site, and confirm it with a calculation of the kind Uroogla posted in #21, i.e., assuming that underlying student performance is similar to that at other Ivies prior to being placed into A/B/C/NC buckets. Two separate and roughly equal effects are prominent: the exclusion of grades below C from the transcript, and the reporting of A-minus performance as a straight A. Uroogla’s logic is fine but what it shows when calculated correctly is that Brown only drops halfway toward “normal levels”.</p>
<p>More precisely, let’s assume (and I would argue that you and Uroogla both implicitly made this assumption in his posting and your “demonstrations”) that the underlying student performance is the same, meaning that every grade reported on a transcript comes from an underlying raw outcome measured by one of A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, or Fail, with the distribution of outcomes being similar at Brown and the other Ivies, but with different policies as to how to report these outcomes on external transcripts. Brown, for example, might convert everything C- or below (or D+ and below) into an unreported grade of NC, or report any B-range grade as “B”, while other schools just print the raw outcome on the transcript. We now consider two effects:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Inflation of outcomes in the A range, by taking what other Ivies report as A-minus and reporting them as A’s on Brown transcripts.</p></li>
<li><p>Inflation of outcomes below C, by taking what other Ivies report as C-/D+/D/D-/Fail, and not reporting them at all on Brown transcripts (these are the NC’s).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>To correctly calculate the effect of the policy difference in either range of grades, you have to compare it to the situation where Brown and the other Ivies are equalized; they apply the same policy to any given student course outcome in that range. Failure to equalize was the mistake in your/Uroogla’s calculations. </p>
<p>For #2, the effect of NCs, equalizing would mean either that all schools don’t report grades below C (but we don’t have the Ivy data to make this calculation) or that Brown reports all performance within the NC range with the appropriate mark of C-, D+, D, D-, or Fail. We do have the data to guess at the latter calculation, and it would mean weighting the NCs closer to 1 or 1.2, not 0, because most of the below-C outcomes would not be actual failure (at least, this is not the case in the grade distributions outside Brown). This drops the average gradepoint awarded per class by about 0.08 or 0.09, to 3.53, in the range of Stanford which not coincidentally has policies similar to Brown’s that provide protection against low grades on the transcript.</p>
<p>For effect #1, the upgrading of A-range grades at Brown to straight A’s, we know that at other schools, the high grades are divided very close to 50-50 between A’s and A-minuses, with A’s being about half of all grades. At Brown 67.1 percent of the letter grades last year were A’s (53.2 percent of all grades). If half of those would be A-minus under the Ivy system, this means about 0.1 extra points per grade awarded.</p>
<p>The point is clear enough. Only about half the GPA benefit to Brown students comes from not reporting grades below a C on the transcript. The rest of the Brown/Ivy GPA gap comes, overwhelmingly, from converting A- grades to A’s. At least a third of the letter grades awarded at Brown are A-minuses that are upgraded to A’s. This assumes that students are not behaving strategically due to the known presence of the upgrade, so that there is the same 50-50 split of the grades in the A range. If that’s not true, and fewer students are shooting for a “true” A, but only for a “virtual A-minus” that will be reported as an A, then of course the numerical benefit from the Brown system is higher.</p>
<p>Way to. Ompletely miss the point. If you get below a C, the class not only doesn’t show up, you get no credit at Brown. There is no assumption that D level performance exists- where it does Brown rounds down to a 0, a form of grade deflation.</p>
<p>Take Brown’s current grade system and report failing grades (which 90 percent of the time can be figured out because all of a sudden 3 classes show up instead of four, but I digress) and you get to a pretty typical Ivy number. There is no meaning to the phrase D-level work here, the student who earns a D here fails or gets bumped to a C. Since adding back in NCs as 0s brings us in line with peers, it’s hard to say if this range is inflated or not by not having Ds, perhaps people are being assigned Cs when they should be getting a D instead of failing, but you ignore that possibility and only account for NCs increasing to anhgher average and not the fact that Cs may become Ds, counter acting that effect.</p>
<p>In the end, we have our grading system for a reason which is coherent and well founded. People here do well for a variety of reasons the most important of which is that they love what they are learning and work hard. But in the end, if failed courses showed up on your transcript as Brown considers a failed course, if slwe don’t touch anything else, then the mean grades at Brown are comparable to peers. In spite of our system and the uniqueness of both our approach to grading and the grades available to award, averaging NCs, As, Bs, and Cs gets you to the same end point.</p>
<p>I’m not dumb at all, I understood your first long post about how NCs magically rescale to Ds but no C magically scales to a D. A C is as low a grade you can give and still pass someone-- if you don’t think many of those grades would go down than you are just further demonstrating that your analytical skills are based on algebra, and not on seeing the way of things and then representing it with math.</p>
<p>An interesting bit of data, although I don’t quite know how to analyze it:</p>
<p>From an article concerning Harvard (written Summer of 2002) (source: [National</a> CrossTalk – Vol. 10 / No. 3 – Summer 2002](<a href=“http://www.highereducation.org/crosstalk/ct0302/news0702-high_marks.shtml]National”>สล็อตเว็บตรง ระบบ Auto เว็บตรงลิขสิทธิ์แท้ 100% รองรับ ทรูวอเลท))
On the other hand, between the years 1998 and 2002, Brown’s percentage of NCs was always between 3.0 and 3.1. 5% of Harvard grades were Cs, while a comparable (4.6-6.1% over the range of years previously mentioned) percentage of grades were Cs at Brown.</p>
<p>The article is a bit dated, but the data still seems relevant enough. I can, of course, think of a few reasons why the number of NCs at Brown would be higher due to the system (organic chemistry students trying to help the curve on the final exam, for instance, rather than dropping the course or trying for a C).</p>
<p>While Brown may be heavy on the top end (though it should be noted, the range of 42.7-45.2% of As is lower than the 50% of As and A-s at Harvard according to the article and would mitigate slightly the effect of not having A- grades), it’s also heavier on the bottom end, and the lack of a grade of D does not seem to be the cause. This data’s only for Harvard, of course, but it seemed pertinent enough.</p>
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<p>Brown and its faculty call it reality, not nonsense:</p>
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<p>The same is true everywhere. On the whole, grades are a product and students want it at the lowest price.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.browndailyherald.com/campus-news/more-than-half-of-grades-are-now-a-s-data-show-1.1668702[/url]”>http://www.browndailyherald.com/campus-news/more-than-half-of-grades-are-now-a-s-data-show-1.1668702</a></p>
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<p>Simmons or her template may be duds as you say, but Brown can have competitive (and at least in some subfields, first-tier) theoretical and computational science for as long as it wants to by poaching from the Boston junior faculty treadmill.</p>
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<p>If you assume that grades of S have the same distribution as ABC grades, then the average GPA works out to a 3.49. This gives an upper bound to the actual figure since the distribution of S grades in unknown (but probably less As, and more Bs and Cs). (The lower bound, 3.23, is not as useful.) </p>
<p>siserune: Here’s an interesting article: [Yale</a> Daily News - Poll suggests grade inflation](<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2006/10/04/poll-suggests-grade-inflation/]Yale”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/university-news/2006/10/04/poll-suggests-grade-inflation/)</p>
<p>Back to topic:
Brown seems to have the biggest increase in applications out of all Ivies- again. Brown even rivals HYP in the acceptance rate now, how crazy is that?
But why the big increase, especially compared to other ivy league schools?</p>
<p>Princeton went up 19%. I’ve seen stats for Harvard and Dartmouth, but not the other Ivies – so do we really know that Brown had the biggest increase?</p>
<p>
[quote}how crazy is that?
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<p>For those of us who know how great Brown is, it’s not crazy at all!</p>
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</p>
<p>Agreed. 10char</p>
<p>"- At Brown, Apps are up 20% to 30,000</p>
<p>With apps up 20 percent, Admission Office calls Alumnae Hall into service|Blog Daily Herald</p>
<p>Overall, Brown has around a 60% yield, and a class of around 1500, so that would make for an acceptance rate of about 8% this year (2500 accepts/ 30,000 applications). </p>
<p>Harvard had a 5% increase in applications, to around 30,000:</p>
<p>Harvard Receives Record-Breaking Number of Applications | The Harvard Crimson</p>
<p>Harvard usually has a class of around 1600, and a yield of around 75-80%. Harvard’s overall accept rate this year should be around 7% (2100 accepts / 30,000 applicants). </p>
<p>Princeton saw a jump of 19% in applications this year, with a total applicant pool of 26,166. </p>
<p>Breaking News: U. sees 19 percent jump in applicants to Class of 2014 - The Daily Princetonian</p>
<p>Princeton usually has a yield of about 60-65%, and a class size of around 1200-1300. This year, that would mean an accept rate of about 8%."(THX to Cue7)</p>
<p>Dartmouth´s applications went up by 4% to 18500</p>
<p>Penn´s applications rose by 10% to 25000</p>
<p>I´m a Brown student and I know how that the school is amaizing… But why the sudden increase? I guess Brown didn´t change that much over the past 2 years. Whereas 2009 the commonap was made responsible for the increase, 2010 it can´t hardly be that. Brown is very reputable, but it received almost as many apps as HARVARD and way more than Princeton. Do you guys think this will affect Brown´s dramatically underrated USWN placement? Is Brown now the 2nd hardest ivy to get into?(This would certainly affect the yield rate)</p>
<p>Admit rate != selectivity.</p>
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<p>What, pray tell, is the Simmons template? Just throwing money at the sciences?</p>
<p>Brown’s yield is not close to 60%. It got close to that a few years ago, but has since fallen. And the RD yield rate is under 50%.</p>
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<p>No, because those stats play a very small role in determining US News ranking.</p>
<p>The only thing that could dramatically improve Brown’s USNWR ranking is a dramatic increase in PA (we’ve gone up .1 recently, but we’d need to hit 4.6) and/or having twice as much money as we currently do in the bank (because even though our financial health and ability to pay the bills will be better than a few higher ranked schools for the next couple of years, they’ll still have a ton in the bank when all is said and done).</p>
<p>It’s sad that I don’t agree with the use/how they’re using either measure, but that’s the result and I think Brown folks have to get used to that.</p>
<p>Our overall yield has hovered between 55-58% rather consistently.</p>
<p>Wow, first time looked up the USWN methodology… Acceptance rate counts only 1.5%!!!
Way more important is class rank and SAT/ACT scores… </p>
<p>@modest: Who does these peer assessment surveys? Are they sent to every university by USWN? And since you seem to know so much about all this. What other factors keep Brown from getting into the top 10? Does our Graduate school strain the College ranking?(It seems as if College and Grad school count both into the same ranking!?)</p>
<p>If it makes you all feel better, the University of Chicago saw an absolutely breathtaking 42% rise in applications.</p>
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<p>Harvard getting 30000 applications, when at most six to ten thousand are serious contenders, is a negative fact about the school. It says that the school is more invested in deceptive promotional campaigns and national ratings than in attracting qualified candidates. Over time, the more admission to any given school is perceived to be a crapshoot the more the process will be abandoned to the undesirables. As we see this year, Harvard is near the saturation point, having goosed up application numbers in every way possible over the past decade, and is paying for this excessive (and phony) appearance of hyperselectivity with a gigantic spillover of applicants to other schools. I’m not sure it is in Brown’s interests to imitate (much less compete with) the Harvard pattern, as it will mean more randomness in who is admitted, more capitulation to the national stratification of the admissions market, an enlarged presence of students on campus for whom it is not the first choice, and all sorts of other predictable problems.</p>
<p>Setting that aside, if you believe that raw application numbers are a good thing and measure desirability (rather than, say, applicant mismatch and procedural opaqueness), the more revealing datum is how many of the statistically in-range students are applying. A crude proxy for this is the ratio of applications to the number of students nationwide with SAT scores within 100 points of a school’s median score, or to the number of ACT scorers above the school’s 25th percentile, etc. It is not clear whether such an adjustment would rank Brown’s 30K above or below Princeton’s 26K, but 30K for Brown is surely “less” statistically than 30K for Harvard in the sense that Brown draws from a fatter slice of the bell curve. </p>
<p>re: grade inflation, the exact grade distributions were published for some recent years at Harvard and Cornell and allow a direct comparison with Brown’s tables. I will post the numbers in a later posting.</p>
<p>Hmmm. Imo ivy admission is a crap shot already.(Maybe not if you have won Olympic gold and you have founded a NGO at the age of 18…) Anyway, I know there are more stat-driven schools. However, I wouldn’t say that the 20% increase is due to the fact that Brown can draw more students from “a fatter slice of the bell curve”.
Maybe more and more students are ****ed off from the grade driven, cut-throat approach other schools seem to have. IMO Brown is unique and can therefore draw more applicants than ivies other than Harvard.
What would you prefer: Going to a school that is “almost as good as Harvard” or to a school where you can have a totally unique undergraduate experience?</p>
<p>P.S. If this would be a perfect world, we wouldn’t have any grades at all. Harvard Business School did that for years. Does anybody truly belief that the alumni without grades in their school report haven’t learned as much or are less capable than the current students that have to bust their asses for just another A in their CV?</p>
<p>In swoops siserune with suspect data analysis!</p>
<p>Anyway, Brown posts the break down of applicants in a particular SAT or ACT range and their acceptance rates here:
[Brown</a> Admission: Facts & Figures](<a href=“Undergraduate Admission | Brown University”>Undergraduate Admission | Brown University)</p>
<p>No need to dig for facts on this one. As you can see, only about 5,000 students score less than 650 on any given section.</p>
<p>To your PS-- the answer seems to be, “No,” since Brown applicants have not had trouble with grad school due to SNC and there is even that famous, and true, story about a student who took all their classes pass/fail and got into Harvard Med.</p>