<p>Is your employer in Asia? lol</p>
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<p>Actually, the RP study showed the gap between Princeton (#6) and Brown (#7) to be almost the same as gap between Harvard (#1) and Princeton. Princeton, within the study’s hypothetical admissions model, was about as likely to beat Brown as it was to lose to Harvard. No other school defeated Princeton nearly as often as Princeton beat Brown, in the RP model of the cross-admit tournament.</p>
<p>The correct summary of the Revealed Preference point rankings is that they found Harvard alone at the top, then a tier consisting of Caltech,Yale, MIT, Stanford and Princeton, then another tier headed by Brown sitting distinctly below the first tier.</p>
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<p>That isn’t cross-admit data. It isn’t even the cross admit data from the Revealed Preference study, which is where those numbers came from.</p>
<p>"Everyone here is ridiculous. The obvious (and only) response to the OP:</p>
<p>Your mom is too easy.</p>
<p>So there."</p>
<p>lol! I think that’s the best response in this thread!</p>
<p>Siserune, the New York Times percentages were based on data provided by The Revealed Preferences Survey, broken down in to easily represented graphics. Princeton really is not in the Harvard and Yale tier, and neither is MIT or Stanford. MIT, Stanford, Princeton are very close in the cross-admit competition, and Brown is right there. The differential between Princeton and Brown is less than the differential between Princeton and Harvard. True story, in 1970, before Hargadon started playing games with Princeton’s selectivity, the admit rate for Princeton was 21%. For Brown it was 19%. Brown also had a higher yield, and slightly higher overall SATs.(Barron’s Guide To The Ivy League Schools, Copyright 1971 by Barron’s Educational Services, Inc.) For the incoming class of 1970, Brown’s Verbal SATs were 685, while Princeton’s was 641. For math, Brown’s was 680, while Princeton’s was 684. The differential in selectivity between the two schools has long be small. When Brown segued to The New Curriculum in 1970, it diverged from the rest of the Ivies in de-emphasizing the rigidity of SAT score ranges, and starting selecting for classes more adept at negotiating a more unstructured curriculum while still taking what essentially amounted to a holistic, core, group of courses. This is one reason why you will see at places like HYS law school, or Harvard Med, that the standardized test scores for Brown/Princeton matriculants are similar. Their selectivity is pretty close. To say that Princeton represents, along with MIT and Stanford, a tier of selectivity above Brown is not supported by the facts.</p>
<p>Grade inflation exists. There’s no denying the steady upward trend in grades over the last 40 years (gradeinflation.com has lots of data from hundreds of colleges). The main problem I have as a 1986 college graduate (of Cornell, where grades have gone up 0.2 over 20 years) is that it devalues my academic work. That said, at this point, my grades hardly matter anymore.</p>
<p>pinderhughes</p>
<p>I don’t actually know which way this cuts, but the Revealed Preference study that I believe you are citing is 9 years old and probably not particularly relevant.</p>
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<p>No, Bangalore is not in Asia. It’s just outside of Paris.</p>
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<p>No, the NYT did not publish any data from the RP study. The RP study had plenty of cross-admit data but that is not what they supplied to NY Times. </p>
<p>The NY Times falsely presented the Revealed Preferences model parameters as “data”. It’s that pseudo-data that has been endlessly reposted in these boards.</p>
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<p>Are those your own conclusions (not derived from RP) on how the cross-admit battles and tiers shape up, or your summary of the Revealed Preferences computations?<br>
If the latter, note that my summary of tiers found by RP was, if anything, an understatement: in their model, it was inferrable with complete confidence that the top six schools are very well separated from Brown and all the schools below it. This was the largest separation they observed and the one which the resamplings assigned the highest confidence. Brown being at #7 (or below), and below YPSMC, was the one clearest ranking output of their model.</p>
<p>Now, you may like their model or not. I’ve posted any number of criticisms and comments about it in other discussions. But if you cite that study as evidence of anything, understand that as far as their model is concerned: Princeton outranks all the Ivy League schools except Yale and Harvard, with essentially 100 percent certainty; Brown’s “revealed desirability” is unambiguously lower than that of the six highest-ranked schools; and Brown is only ambiguously higher than that of Columbia, Amherst, Dartmouth, Wellesley (in other words, Brown is probably but not certainly at the head of its tier). </p>
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<p>So the Revealed Preference study is being cited as fact or fantasy?</p>
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<p>I’m not sure that means anything. It’s possible, and maybe expected, that the numbers are inflated for Brown and deflated for higher-ranked schools because the students (of similar GPA and rank) from higher ranked schools, including Princeton, are taking Rhodes and Marshall and internally awarded travelling fellowships, of which HYP offer more than Brown, in preference to Fulbrights that they turn down or never apply. </p>
<p>For instance, the Marshall scholarship posts detailed statistics at their website. Princeton gets 2-3 times the number of interviews and acceptances per endorsement in the Marshall Scholarship as Brown, and about three times as many scholarships. This has been true historically and in the class of 2007 for which you gave the Fulbright data.</p>
<p>(added: ) the table from KSU indicates that Yale, Stanford and Princeton are getting 3 more fellowships per year than Brown from the Rhodes, Marshall, Goldwater, Truman and Udall. Harvard gets about 8 more. So there is some evidence that the Fulbright numbers should be adjusted to get a more accurate picture.
<a href=“http://www.ksu.ksu.edu/media/achievements/scholarstop10of5.pdf[/url]”>http://www.ksu.ksu.edu/media/achievements/scholarstop10of5.pdf</a></p>
<p>^In the same vein, Princeton has 7 Gates scholarships to Cambridge last year, versus 3 for Brown (one a grad student who did undergrad elsewhere). There are a number of other scholarships to take into account in this way. It seems that, if 2006-7 is in fact a representative year, Brown is at best at parity with Princeton in number of travelling fellowships (with the distribution stacked toward the more prestigious ones at Princeton), and is below Princeton in number of years of fellowship funding earned. That is consistent with the rankings, SAT ranges and other standard measures. It could also be that Brown did well or Princeton did badly in Fulbrights that year, or that some schools are better with particular scholarships than others (KSU data shows Princeton underperforming in Truman fellowships), so one really has to consider a full range of scholarships when comparing schools.</p>
<p>While I agree that RP showed Brown at the head of the next tier, I’m not quite sure what the point of your next few posts are supporting Princeton as an institution and what their meaning is in the context of this thread. This is not a Brown v. Princeton thread, this was about whether grade inflation means that course work is not challenging relative to peers.</p>
<p>You’re starting a fight in this thread that no one is having, siserune.</p>
<p>Pinderhughes’ postings were insisting, repeatedly, that Brown is (at least) in the same tier as Princeton not only in the RP rankings but by several other metrics. I think it’s fair to correct any statistical assertions that are posted. Obviously Brown is one of the most selective schools in the country and competitive with all the other top schools in many respects, but that doesn’t mean that all Brown-positive statements should go unchallenged when clearly factually incorrect.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that the degree of challenge in the courses was precisely the issue being raised, or the only subject under discussion. </p>
<p>It is true that Brown is grade-inflated compared to other schools, as its own statistics show. This is due to the lack of distinction between A and A-minus grades, and the fact that nobody at Brown has gotten a grade below C since the 1970’s. I can’t say whether the elimination of plus and minuses for the B grades biases them up or down, but the A and C grades are biased upward and lower grades don’t exist.</p>
<p>It’s hard to separate degree of challenge from grade inflation itself. For a student who is, at least in part, motivated by keeping his GPA up, grade inflation reduces the challenge needed to do that. It can certainly be used by professors to give out more challenging material and then grade leniently, but I think it makes sense for that to be a less likely possibility than grade inflation making life easier overall. For instance, there is an annual listing of student course reviews (I forgot the name of it at Brown, sorry) and students wanting easier courses can find them, or avoid the hard ones. Brown’s grading structure makes it much easier to guarantee that they will succeed, than the sharper grading scale at other schools.</p>
<p>Also, the grade inflation partly explains Brown’s success in fellowships and postgraduate admissions. It’s simply better to have a transcript full of A’s than one with A’s and A-minus from a less grade inflated school, unless that schools is Caltech or Swarthmore or otherwise notoriously GPA deflating.</p>
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Correction-- NCs are awarded, but do not appear on external transcripts. The number of NCs awarded here are rather comparable to other peers.
The Critical Review is a great tool for students at a school at Brown, however, you’d be quite wrong to assume that you can simply take all easy classes just because students can advise you on work load they’ve had in previous years. For starters, we do have this thing called concentration requirements which does mean you’ll have no choice about certain courses. Second, while I appreciate you’re acting on outsider’s logic, here from the inside I can tell you precisely how these tools are used. They’re used for balance, not avoidance. They’re used as an advising resource so that students can effectively construct a schedule, the same way advisers at other schools use informal information (and students as well) to make the same kind of decisions. This may not be the case at another school if they adopted the open curriculum, but the caliber of students and faculty here, combined with our work to admit self-motivated people leads to an environment where the possible down sides you see are not really put into effect on the ground. It’s quite easy to see that what you’re talking about doesn’t happen if you come to Brown and ask students about their course choices. You’ll find we are looking at quite a bit more than just course load, and that we worry about difficulty and get information about difficulty in the same way as any of our peers.</p>
<p>What does inflate our grades is that we have the SNC system for all courses at Brown. As I pointed out earlier, when you factor in that 20% of all grades at Brown are an “S”, and assume that 3/4s of those grades are Bs or Cs, and assume of those 2/3s are Bs and 1/3 are Cs. That, in fact, I think is giving Brown students a bit too much credit, and even then, the SNC numbers account for pretty much the entire difference in GPA alongside not having the A-.</p>
<p>The take home here is that grade inflation at Brown, relative to peers, is largely a manifestation of structural elements, not the difficulty of courses or quality of student work.
Also, the grade inflation partly explains Brown’s success in fellowships and postgraduate admissions. It’s simply better to have a transcript full of A’s than one with A’s and A-minus from a less grade inflated school, unless that schools is Caltech or Swarthmore or otherwise notoriously GPA deflating.</p>
<p>wow the OP at least states his case with actual facts- not conjectures or anecdotal info. Brown is ranked in the top 15-20 schools in the country for undergrad so it is definitely a good school. One may argue the other ivy league schools are more academic, research-oriented and rigorous, but Brown offers a lot of cultural diversity and other social benefits. The 3.61 GPA is quite amusing but since Brown is not a feeder to Wall Street nor most graduate programs, it is not really a pressing issue for peer institutions.</p>
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<p><a href=“WSJ in Higher Education | Trusted News & Real-World Insights”>WSJ in Higher Education | Trusted News & Real-World Insights;
??</p>
<p>6th Ivy and 12th out of Top 50 schools</p>
<p>All credit given to modestmelody.</p>
<p>Someone out in California has been… dramatically owned…</p>
<p>it’s not grade inflation, it’s the ABC/nc system. There’s no trivial minuses to squabble over that bring your gpa down <em>gasp</em> .2 points. Go to Brown. go learn something.</p>
<p>The OP is relying on statistics or what one poster calls “actual facts,” which is not entirely accurate here. Brown structures its academics and grading differently than other schools - you can’t compare apples (Brown) to oranges (let’s say, Princeton) without accounting for such differences in educational research (or any other research for that matter). Anyone who has studied statistics which a modicum of depth knows this…</p>
<p>Let’s be frank: grade inflation exists at almost every “elite” institution. Yes, Chicago and Reed and Swarthmore pride themselves on not having any inflation and, to a great extent, I buy that. But almost everyone else is inflating their grades, consciously or not. If they didn’t, no one would pass organic chemistry! It’s not like graduate schools or grant programs don’t know this…The fact that Brown has the highest average gpa in the Ivy League (which, as an alum, I find funny to hear because the University does not calculate gpas to begin with, partly because it encourages competition rather than cooperation and collaboration) or that 90% of Harvard undergrad alums graduate with honors (or whatever the ridiculously high number is) is pretty irrelevant - it’s the quality of the work that the students at these schools are doing and the committment to teaching by the faculty that is relevant, which is why, at the undergraduate level, Brown is so revered. </p>
<p>Sadly, there are no more undergraduate rankings of teaching quality any longer - US News used to do it, but they found they would make more money and sell more magazines by pitting Harvard, Princeton, and Yale against one another rather than give smaller places that have traditionally focused on the undergraduates and teaching (like Brown, Dartmouth, Chicago) the limelight. That’s not to say that HYP aren’t amazing places - because they are - or that Brown, Dartmouth, and Chicago don’t have great grad programs - because they do - but their missions are very different with respect to resource allocation for undergraduate education.</p>
<p>Bottom line - you cannot boil the quality of undergraduate education at these institutions down to a gpa as they all do things differently. This diversity in our higher education system is one of the reasons it is the envy of other developed nations.</p>
<p>good post AdOfficer- one minor point- I don’t think one can mention Brown and Dartmouth in the same peer group as the University of Chicago at the graduate level. I can’t think of even one academic area where Brown or Dartmouth outranks the U of C.</p>
<p>I realize this may be of much less importance at the undergrad level, where the material is fairly trivial for the most part.</p>