<p>I've wanted to go to Cornell for a long time now, but recently I've been hearing horror stories of grade deflation and no curved grading for classes. Is it really that difficult to get good grades at Cornell and get A's in classes? I'm asking more for AEM and Econ classes. Also, if it is harder to get a good gpa at Cornell compared to other ivys, do companies take that into account when hiring (is it harder to get a job out of Cornell)?</p>
<p>I hear it is harder to get into AEM, but it is easier to get higher GPA. My older kid was a math/econ double major. When she was interviewing for a finance internship she had a minimum GPA to qualify for an interview, but AEM students were required to have higher GPAs. A lot of employers will hire CoE graduates with much lower GPA, like 3.0 or lower. For what’s worth, all of my kid’s friends were employed after graduation. </p>
<p>According to Cornell’s 2012 post graduate survey, 57% of students were employed, and 26% of students were going to graduate schools.</p>
<p><a href=“Career Services | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University”>Career Services | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University;
<p>[Cornell</a> Career Services: Postgraduate Survey](<a href=“Career Services | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University”>Career Services | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University)</p>
<p>AEM is one of the most inflated majors.</p>
<p>Econ? Depends on the class of course, but yeah. It’s hard.</p>
<p>My S is an engineering major and is also doing a Dyson minor in business. He really, really likes the business classes and is happy he made that choice. He did mention the business classes are a LOT easier than any engineering classes - hopefully, he’ll get a little GPA boost!</p>
<p>Pretty sure all econ courses are generously curved. At least that’s what I understand based on my limited experience as a freshman. It’s a lot better than the math department for example, which curves to a B.</p>
<p>But regardless, you’ll generally need to be around the top 25th percentile minimum to get an A-/A</p>
<p>Difficulty of grading is highly subject to the courses you take. I had some classes at Cornell for which getting anything lower than a B was impossible unless you were borderline ■■■■■■■■. On the other hand, there were few courses for which even getting a B with a decent work put in was challenging.</p>
<p>Overall, AEM is known to be very easy major, relatively speaking. Econ is also fairly easy, especially so because you only have to take 8 major-related courses to complete the major, with other courses being all electives.</p>
<p>I was an Econ major at Cornell.</p>
<p>They changed the distribution requirements, I forget if it’s 10 or 12 major related courses now, and they made it slightly more math intensive by requiring the intro to probability-econometrics sequence which previously wasn’t required (and I think you could do the non-multivariable based statistics course to satisfy that pre req if they even had one for the old econ major).</p>
<p>When I went to CoE I remember freshman chemistry, they announced during the first lecture that the curve would work as follows: 10% A, 15% B, 50% C, 15% D, 10% F. This was qualitative analysis and required 3 hours a week of lab time which was insanely competitive, students were breaking each others’ beakers and blowing air into the propane lines and testing their samples with access to GC/MS gear that grad students had access to (I would have called it “cheating” but nobody was listening). Bear in mind this class included all the hyper-competitive pre-meds! I had an AP score of 3 and they demanded a 4 JUST to “place” (skip) the freshman course. The one advantage to THIS course was they were at least willing to disclose their curve, many courses would not, in many cases even in “recitation” you had to consider yourself lucky if the TA acknowledged your presence, good luck actually getting one to answer questions, all the profs looked upon undergraduates as members of an inferior caste and in many cases didn’t even have office hours for them. This was quite a while ago but leopards seldom change their spots, beware.</p>
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<p>Seems highly unlikely that professors would purposely make it so 10% of the class always fails regardless of the performance of the class as a whole. What it could have been were [now outdated] statistics of perhaps of what the grade distribution ended up being for a particular semester of general chemistry. General chemistry has a median grade of B/B- at Cornell (nowadays at least).</p>
<p>Students aren’t so competitive that they sabotage each others experiments, it isn’t even worth the risk of possibly getting a F in the class if caught. With the class having over 500 students, it is a pointless exercise to purposely not help others because you think it will hurt the curve. From my experience people do help other students (pre-meds included).</p>
<p>Anyways on the topic at hand, there is rampant grade inflation, not deflation at Cornell. So grading should be the least of your worries.</p>
<p>Whatever you think, it happened, I was there. I admitted it was quite awhile ago, would it help the overall credibility for me to say this was during the Vietnam conflict, when you could potentially be drafted if you didn’t maintain “satisfactory” grades? Yes it seems that impetus had the effect of INCREASING the pressure to get good grades (despite the notion that many professors would probably decrease such pressure if it served to stymie the government’s attempt to widen the war, since it was obviously not well received politically on campus). I even had classmates then who just dropped out and started completely over at other schools so they could get into a “decent” grad school (it paid off rather handsomely for some of them too). The curious thing is whenever I hear someone talk about grades back then they refer to grade INFLATION during that war, which is either just unintentionally inaccurate or else they don’t want to let out how totally callous they were about grading policy. I had solid 800 achievement scores going in there and studied as hard as I could and my GPA was totally savaged, as kind of a “booby prize” they did let me study for and earn the “non-research” master’s degree. I’m being completely truthful about what happened to me (and my memory is accurate too), I’d be very disturbed if my credibility was seriously in doubt after all the pain I went through.</p>
<p>How is the Hotel school generally with all of this?</p>
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<p>Sorry, that wasn’t my intention. I wasn’t there so I cannot comment on the credibility of the story, but by today’s standards it does seem unrealistic. However, I also feel standards are also decreasing by the year. One of my professors recently made the median grade of the course to a B+ and he mentioned when he started as a professor 25 years ago the median grade for the same course used to be C+.</p>
<p>I don’t think people miraculously got smarter (or put in more effort in the course) in the 25 years, but standards have decreased. </p>
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<p>I haven’t heard many complaints with the grading in the hotel school, but Introduction to Wine Tasting is not as easy as most people going in believe it to be.</p>
<p>Jefflaw’s post, while it MAY have been true a LONG time ago, it is NOT true today. I felt the responsibility to log on to clarify the bogus he spread on this thread.</p>
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<li>The instructor last semester showed us the exact grading distibution. It was really weighted in the B’s, ~20-25% A’s, and 20-25% C’s, with people who just don’t show up getting D’s and F’s. He then proceeded to tell us that these were determined by the ChemE department and will not change semester-to-semester.</li>
<li>Nobody would be as stupid to break beakers or ANYTHING in lab. Not only would think get you in A LOT of trouble if caught, it also isn’t worth it… Labs are worth only like 20-30% of your grade (spread across 10 labs) and they aren’t even graded on accuracy of results! I think that there was only one circumstance in which you lost 1 out of 20 points if your answer wasn’t within ~10% of actual.</li>
<li>My TA would tell us to fudge numbers if something weird happened or just include bogus results. Labs are meant for the experience, not getting the “perfect number.”</li>
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<p>While your experience may have been valid, you REALLY need to either not post that on the board or clarify MANY MANY MANY times that your experiences likely are dated.</p>
<p>Also, THERE IS NO GRADE DEFLATION. The medians are chem:B, FWS: ~B+, Math 1910/1920: B-, physics: B-, intro to engineering: B-, intro to cs: B.</p>
<p>THAT IS NOT GRADE DEFLATION! What do people expect for intro classes? A median of an A-? haha… be thankful that you aren’t in Gtech’s or Cal’s intro classes that are sometimes curved to a C+…</p>
<p>Actually I’m not surprised that most of the grade deflation went away, it just isn’t “competitive” in the modern classroom. I’m a bit more surprised though that from the way you’re depicting it the profs and assistants have softened in their utter hostility and contempt towards undergrads because that’s more cultural. They HAD to have that contempt in order to give out such impossible assignments (an “intro to computing” course with only access to keypunch equipment, if you got lucky you could “turn around” a deck 4 times in a day, and a $25 account limit, and we were expected to WRITE A COMPILER FOR ONE MADE-UP LANGUAGE IN ANOTHER, all original, no code libraries? Wait, it gets worse - this was the version IN A SUMMER MAKE-GOOD COURSE, the in-semester assignment WAS EVEN HARDER?? This a full decade before even the most primitive PCs were introduced, and no sourceforge or even internet. This type of thing was clearly “biased” to benefit the OCS employees who even then had full 3270 terminals with no account limit on their desks as I found out much later.) And THAT’S just an example of the environment in which a lot of us were really STRAINING just to keep our GPA heads above water. Sure, go ahead and deny that this kind of absurd treatment ever happened, I obviously was completely delirious for 5-1/2 years. All I’m saying is that a school that was once capable of such egregious excesses can have a “relapse” at any time!</p>
<p>I used to walk 3 miles up hill to school in sub zero temperature. Yawn.</p>
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<p>I’m skeptical to a relapse, the circumstances are completely different. A university nowadays cares about attrition rate (statistics are readily available). If their attrition rates are too low then it will discourage potential applicants and obvious loss of current students (loss of revenue). Less students getting jobs or going to grad. school reflects poorly on the school. I’m also guessing the classes back then consisted of a homogeneous group of students, nowadays there’s a strong push for both gender and ethnic diversity. </p>
<p>As it is, I don’t see standards getting higher in the recent future. Grading at Cornell should not be a concern, as it is now mediocre work in most classes merits an A.</p>
<p>Oldfort, I assume from your attitude you were a prof back then?</p>
<p>No. I am an adult, a parent, with 30+ years of work experience. I frankly can’t remember what homework or grades I got in college, all I could remember are few fraternity parties (but not so well either). Even if I do remember, not really sure how relevant my college experience would be for students in 2014.</p>
<p>Jefflaw - you must not have kids. Whenever I start to talk about the good old days, my kids would just roll their eyes.</p>
<p>Oh I have no real beef with you. I did later take some engineering courses in which deliverable assignments were designed to be group efforts and I quite enjoyed them, but I came from a background (HIGHLY unrealistic, and in retrospect quite a mismatch) that strongly discouraged (forbade?) much in the way of social interaction. I suppose Cornell was never intended to work very well for those of us who were raised like that (for example if like me you never joined a frat then you never got access to any exam archives which could have been VERY helpful) but there was this ever-prevalent message “if you can’t take it get the heck out of here” and never much that could be counted as generally useful as counseling or anything of that ilk. Then again nowadays it is for quite a few reasons (after I finally threw in the towel and decided to have someone else evaluate my decisions) my therapist refers to me as “the ultimate survivor” (reasons that I refuse to discuss here). I didn’t mean to upset any applecarts, I’ll just say if you haven’t walked a mile in my moccasins then you don’t get to cast stones (to mix some tired metaphors).</p>
<p>yeah but you have to let a dude sodomize you to join a frat</p>
<p>Would rather fail college than lose my pride.</p>