<p>Hey Guise!</p>
<p>What is the grading scale at Brown?</p>
<p>I know that there aren’t D’s and F’s, so does a C translate to 60-76?</p>
<p>There is no university-wide scale. Individual professors are free to assign grades as they deem fit.</p>
<p>Universal grading scales, be they in high school or college, mean absolutely nothing. Carefully fixing the relationship between the one arbitrary scale and the other is like establishing a fixed exchange rate between monopoly money and Hanukkah gelt.</p>
<p>So yeah, no set scale. Some professors give hard tests. Then they give you an A for a score of 45%. Some professors give easy tests. Then they give you a B for 92%. At schools that purport to have set scales, people just adjust the tests, not the grades.</p>
<p>Generally, when professors use the 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B scale, 70-79 = C and below 70 is failing. I’ve only been in a few courses like that though. My humanities classes tend not to deal with numbers, while the math/CS courses tend to curve.</p>
<p>Do you pretty much have to NOT do the work at all and/or do TERRIBLY on the exams in order to get below a C?</p>
<p>HaHa! Not at all. It depends on the course, and on the student! But for instance, in Organic Chem you can study day and night and still fail! In some courses, some students may be working very hard and still getting C’s or below, and others may just “get it” with much less effort. If you are very concerned with grades, numbers on tests etc, then I would suggest too, that you just won’t get Brown and it is not the school for you.</p>
<p>Don’t get too worried about any of this. All professors should give you an outline with their expectations and grading standards on the first or second day of class. If you don’t get one, ask for it ASAP, then you’ll know what’s expected. </p>
<p>Also, O-Chem is a butt kicker. When I took it (at another school), the curve for one test was almost 50 points for the highest grade to reach 100.</p>
<p>Also you can take any course S/NC (Pass/Fail). Many of them are mandatory S/NC, but you can opt to take as many as you want to with that option. Not really recommended, but possible.</p>
<p>^I’m coming to disagree with the “not recommended” about taking many courses S/NC. So long as grad school isn’t what your after (and potentially even if it is), for a lot of reasons S/NC makes a lot of sense.</p>
<p>^Not sure if franglish was saying not to take many, or just not to take too many. </p>
<p>In any case, my own opinion is that if you don’t graduate from Brown having taken at least 8 classes S/NC, you did it wrong. However, even within my very pro-open-curriculum little group of friends, there are people who give me crap for that (strongly-held) opinion.</p>
<p>Re: grad schools: I took at least one class non-mandatory S/NC per semester, and my law school choice came down to Harvard vs. Stanford. And I didn’t even have that awesome an LSAT score. Just sayin.</p>
<p>I was saying that it is recommended not to take too many S/NC classes, but just because of the grad school situations. In fact, just because of med, business, and law schools, probably. These very competitive programs often need GPA calculations in their admissions process. But Brown does not compute GPA, anyway. You should take as many S/NC courses as you want! It seems to be the very heart of the Open Curriculum’s success. There is a rumor (apparently true) of a student who was accepted to Harvard medical school after having taken every single Brown class S/NC.</p>
<p>^With respect to law schools, GPA is calculated by an organization called LSAC, with pass/fail or equivalent (S/NC) classes ignored. This GPA (along with LSAT score) is what the law schools report to US News to provide an image of student quality, the most important factor in law school rankings. For that reason, law schools care a tremendous amount about LSAC-calculated GPA and LSAT score, almost to the exclusion of everything else. For those who’d like some evidence, take a look at the charts on lawschoolnumbers.com .</p>
<p>If you’ve taken only one class for a grade, and received an A, your LSAC GPA will be 4.0. Throw in a CPR (course performance report) from a judge who taught you at Brown, and you’ll be all set! :)</p>
<p>In all seriousness, it is probably true that in the course of the quick glance given to your transcript by law school admissions offices, extraordinary use of S/NC will raise a red flag that an applicant would have to deal with. I’d simply like to point out that, especially with a five class/semester courseload, one or two S/NC classes per semester does not rise to the level of ‘extraordinary’. And, as I’ve said, I understand dipping too far below one/semester to be somewhat failing to live up to Brown’s academic philosophy. (And, as I’ve said, that viewpoint is controversial even among my gung-ho pro-curriculum friends.)</p>