D is ready to apply and looking at a wide slate of colleges/unis now. She hates worrying about cutoffs for plus/minus grades at her competitive HS and wants an institution with just the A/B/C/D/F system. H and I weren’t too concerned about this initially, as her stats are competitive everywhere. Our search has turned up zip outside of our state flagship - we know there’ve got to be at least some more out there!
D doesn’t care about location, campus life, and so on. This and fin. aid are her big hangups.
Florida Institute of Technology is just A,B, C, D. I’m not sure that it matters all that much since everyone else is also being graded on that same scale. My kids went to 3 different high schools and 2 out of 3 were just A,b,C,D with no pluses or minuses.
I don’t understand the concern over the grading system. That shouldn’t be a factor. It’s pretty silly actually, imo.
This has to go on my list of interesting college criteria. Wisconsin doesn’t have +/- but it does have two intermediate grades, AB and BC. I would say that the absence of +/- adds stress because that one point is now a full letter grade instead of a fraction.
Yes, UW has only 4.0/3.5/3.0 etc., with comparable letter grade options A/AB/B.
Hurt my kid sometimes, as a 93 was a 3.5/AB instead of a 3.7 or A- somewhere else, but helped sometimes, as the 88 was a 3.5/AB instead of a 3.3/B+ elsewhere.
Brown
Without +/-, there are fewer thresholds between grades, but each one has higher stakes (the difference between A and B is greater than that between A- and B+).
When I went to Hopkins they did not have plus / minus grading, but I think they do now. There were some issues with not having plus/minus grading.
Won’t your kid be a lot more worried about getting a B rather than an A than she is about getting an A- rather than an A? And yes, Bs happen to smart students! Besides, your final GPA out of college matters a WHOLE lot less than your final GPA out of HS, except for perhaps med school. (But again-- doesn’t that B become really scary now?)
There were some problems which I can’t go into with not having ± in the ultra competitive environment at Hopkins.
FWIW, colleges that have changed to +/- have seen no statistically significant impact in GPA, so it’s really not something I’d base college selection on, personally.
http://senate.rutgers.edu/asraconplusminusgrades042806.pdf
CMU does not have +/- for undergrads
College GPA generally matters in the following contexts:
a. Students need to earn a minimum GPA (usually 2.0) to stay in good academic standing.
b. Community college students intending to transfer to four year schools need GPAs high enough to get admitted to the four year schools.
c. Employers hiring out of college often have GPA cutoffs, the most common of which is 3.0, according to NACE surveys. GPA per se typically is not a factor in hiring once the applicant has passed the GPA cutoff and other initial resume screens and moved on to the interviews (although it may correlate to ability to answer questions that are specific to what the student learned in college).
d. Pre-med and pre-law students need very high GPAs to get into medical or top 14 law schools.
e. At colleges where some majors are at full capacity and have competitive admission to declare, earning a high GPA may be important for students trying to get into those majors.
Undergrad GPA also matters for doctoral program admission, outside scholarships, internal scholarships and awards, and federal jobs and internships.
Scoring inside of the 4.0 range is easier without it, apparently.
I think the requirement here shouldn’t be +/- grades but simply a more collaborative versus competitive academic environment. That is much easier to find and should have the same effect.
Collaborative sounds like they are working together on assignments. I assume you mean less emphasis on grades and more on learning and other things.
I would not want my daughter going to a competitive college without +/- grades.
How competitive the environment is may depend on the major or goals. For example, pre-med is basically a competitive weed-out process everywhere. At some colleges, specific majors are enrolled to full capacity, so trying to get into them after enrolling as undeclared is a competitive process. But a student not trying for a competitive major, not pre-med, and not in classes loaded with students in these categories may not see much of a competitive environment.
Competitive or friendly, that 90 cutoff for a 4.0 is easier than a 95.