<p>According to gradeinflation.com, Brown’s average GPA is 3.61. 3.61!!! A full 0.2 higher than it’s ivy league peers- columbia, dartmouth, and penn, with lower SAT scores to boot!!! Grade inflation at its ugliest. Add to the fact that you can take almost any class P/F including major class, and you have no requirements at all. This is not a liberal education. This is a joke of an university. No wonder everyone applies. Every kid and their dogs can graduate.</p>
<p>Oh dear–my prediction, this thread is going to be about 10 pages by Wednesday with posts from many angry people at your ignorance. Are you seriously judging Brown’s academics by some random website??? Please, are you joking, insectetur?</p>
<p>Sorry I made a mistake in my previous post. It’s impossible for every kid and their dogs to flunk out since you can’t fail classes!! A/B/C/NR, and no +/- system? Are you kidding me? </p>
<p>How can an “university” with this kind of grading system retain its prestige? This is absurd! </p>
<p>No other Ivy League institution respects Brown, and now I know why!</p>
<p>LOL (10 char)</p>
<p>So, basically, you’re jealous.</p>
<p>I agree with Amadeuic…lol</p>
<p>A university should be judged by how good of an education it delivers, not how hard it is to get an A.</p>
<p>As an accepted student considering Brown, the “You’re jealous” response and complete and utter disregard for insectur’s valid concern about the school is sickening. Please, current students, rebuke this attack upon your university in a mature fashion before I make too many assumptions… </p>
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<p>They normally go hand in hand. Working like crazy for an A is a pretty good way to learn a lot of material pretty damn well, since the amount you learn is typically proportional to the amount you study. I don’t believe this is a matter of contention?</p>
<p>If insectetur holds Brown in such contempt why is he considering it?</p>
<p>No, I’m not contending that learning is directly related to studying. However, I don’t see how one can conclude that Brown students don’t study as much as other institutions, just because they’re getting more A’s (one could also make a guess that they’re studying more, hence the A’s)</p>
<p>Maybe Brown students are just smarter and work harder than the other schools you mentioned?</p>
<p>What a ridiculous thread.</p>
<p>Glad to know my remark made you feel that way, airbag… </p>
<p>It was definitely said in utmost earnestness.</p>
<p>Anywho, what are people supposed to say? A statistic is a statistic. On the whole they’re deceptive, but that doesn’t mean you can argue with raw data. Are we going to argue that our football players are smarter than their football players and consequently they don’t hurt the college’s overall GPA as much?</p>
<p>EDIT: Also, awesome name, Post 10.</p>
<p>No school of Brown’s caliber (or of any caliber) has an average GPA this high. As I have posted, its average GPA is a full 0.3 (NOT 0.03) higher than Princeton, 0.2 higher than its true peers at Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, and Chicago, and 0.1 higher than Harvard, Stanford and Yale. The fact that Chicago is known to be one of the most rigorous programs of study of any US university, and the latter group has far higher quality of students (undebatable) and rampant greater inflation does not make the case for Brown students’ “strong work ethics and intelligence” at all. </p>
<p>Frankly, I am quite surprised at all the self-denial within this thread. Brown is the currently the joke of the Ivy League for this very reason, and the only thing you can say is “LOL?”</p>
<p>Proof, please, that Brown is the “joke” of the Ivy? Show me one administrator of another Ivy institution saying on record that he or she feels that Brown is not a strong college academically.</p>
<p>I wonder if the average is affected by the fact that Brown does not have plusses and minuses? The average must be affected by the option to take classes S/NC – I’ll bet many students take classes for S/NC if they suspect they will get below a B, and some may even go for S/NC for any grade below an A. So many C grades (and possibly Bs too) are not calculated into the average. Also, some pre-meds will drop organic chemistry if they are getting a low grade (and there are many many students who get below A in orgo). </p>
<p>The S/NC option is a good thing – it means that students will take the risk to take a class outside their comfort zone even if it means they might not get a high grade.</p>
<p>I will report this anecdote – when the Brown Daily Herald reported this statistic recently, my daughter said that she and all her friends were very skeptical. None of them had straight As, or anything close.</p>
<p>There is an easy answer here, don’t apply. Clearly a school like Brown is beneath a student like you. Would you consider Harvard? By your own admission they also have ridiculous grade inflation.</p>
<p>And yes, I am embarrassed for having gotten sucked into this thread.</p>
<p>There are objective measures that suggest that, if anything, Brown is tied with Princeton for the strongest undergraduate study body in the Ivies. Brown routinely takes the students that Penn, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Cornell vie for and lose to Brown. In fact, the NBER’s revealed preferences survey delineated that Brown wins the cross-admit battle with every Ivy except HYP. If you look at who wins the aggregate Marshall, Goldman, Truman, and Rhodes fellowships, once again Brown wins more than any Ivy except HYP. If you look at the college matriculants who formed the student bodies at HYS law schools, Brown is consistently in the top seven alma maters in the U.S. Brown is within the top 5 alma maters in the its graduates being the most successful in gaining entry to U.S. medical schools. In fact, at HYS law schools, Brown’s representation closely approximates that of Princeton. In the revealed preferences survey, it also indicated that Princeton was closer to Brown in gaining cross-admits that Princeton was to Harvard and Yale. Finally, before the implosion on Wall Street, Brown was among the most frequent alma maters at probably the most prestigious investment bank on The Street, Goldman Sachs. Anyone who contends that Brown is not among the handful of most prestigious colleges, and its undergrads among the most talented talented students in the country is being intellectually dishonest or willfully ignorant.</p>
<p>There’s this thing we have called S/NC. It covers a lot of would have been C’s and B’s. Therefore our avg GPA’s are higher. Hooray for math. </p>
<p>There’s this idea that one should be focusing more on learning than on grades. We’re not the only ones to embrace this kind of curriculum. Yale Law School did too!
"Yale abolished grades in the 1960s after student unrest, and while there are no strict GPAs or letter grades, there is (contrary to popular belief) a system of evaluation in place. The first term of classes is taken pass/fail; afterwards, class performance is evaluated on a scale of honors/pass/low pass/no pass. The result: no class rankings and far less pressure than most other top law schools, but also a fairly unconventional transcript that more than one employer has found difficult to gauge. Yale also has a highly flexible curriculum: only the first semester of classes is set in stone, versus the first year for most law schools. "
–top-law-schools.com</p>
<p>So Yale Law School is actually really similar to Brown’s undergrad policy…no + and -'s, pass/fail for the first semester(like MIT!)…no strict GPAs…and a flexible curriculum. By your standards, Yale Law School is also a joke! 
(Which it obviously is not).</p>
<p>
Averages aside, the percentage of A’s at Brown ranges from 47.1% in the physical sciences to 53.4% in the life sciences. This is higher than the percentage of A’s at Princeton where the percentage of A’s (including A- and A+) is capped at 35%. Hooray for math. </p>
<p>Of course, Brown is hardly the only university to have grade inflation. Yale, for example, also seems to have a median GPA between 3.6 and 3.7.
<a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/18226[/url]”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/18226</a></p>
<p>Ouch, ouch. There’s so much belittling in this thread! 
Let’s keep this somewhat objective, please!</p>
<p>Hypothesis: Since students are given more liberty to enroll in classes, they actually <em>want</em> to be in the classes they’re in. This shows that the students have intrinsic motivation to learn the material (so they’ll learn it more thoroughly) and get higher grades than the students who whine about fulfilling their core curriculum’s requirements and get bad grades in classes they don’t care for.</p>
<p>But that’s just a hypothesis. I’m not a Brown student <em>yet</em>! :)</p>
<p>“Averages aside, the percentage of A’s at Brown ranges from 47.1% in the physical sciences to 53.4% in the life sciences. This is higher than the percentage of A’s at Princeton where the percentage of A’s (including A- and A+) is capped at 35%.”</p>
<p>Ah, yes, though Princeton put that cap in place only 2 years ago. That’s a very recent Princeton development. Also, as pointed out, we have an open curriculum. We tend to enroll in courses we like and excel in. </p>
<p>And at the end of the day, as pointed out, we still do great at grad school admissions and recruitment to top corporations, so I don’t really quite see the point of this thread. </p>
<p>Ah, time to stop feeding ■■■■■■ (the OP, not necessarily the other point). </p>
<p>Re: airbag</p>
<p>I think they were simply matching an immaturely worded attack with a tired eye-rolling rebuke. </p>
<p>Re: pea
And I, too, shall bounce from this thread.</p>