When I think back on my college experience, it isn’t the courses that were most “rigorous” that stand out to me as the most interesting or the ones I recall the most from 30 years later. Creative Writing, Intro Psych, a 400 level literature class I took 2nd semester freshman year because it looked interesting (and I got an A, dusting those junior and senior English majors!), and an anthropology of North America class. I don’t really care what an employer might think of those – these all provided new ways of thinking about things that I still value. I hope my kids have/will take the time to do the same. I think they are (D2 is reveling in an abnormal psych class and a Shakespeare class at her STEM school this semester).
I recall dropping a few classes in college, as I felt they would prove too difficult. One was Chinese history. I could barely understand the prof, and at the first class, the curriculum looked long and exhausting. Same with Art History and Philosophy.
When my son asked me about dropping philosophy, I agreed. There was a math class he apparently avoided. When he was a college graduate, and working as a research assistant at his U, he took that class. I never knew his grades, and was surprised he graduated with Honors. Obviously, he did think about protecting his GPA, as did I, many many years before.
I will chime in with a totally different perspective from a Yale sophmore music major. First of all, she said no one talks about their grades so she must be running in different circles from @IxnayBob 's son. When I asked how her roommate was doing in a seminar they were both taking, she did not know. Also, after warning us not to expect too many A’s last fall, she said her friends joke that the only A that is important is the one between the Y and the L. (in Yale) She is taking lots of courses she is interested in, both in and outside of her major. She is loving learning and says she is learning so much she does not care about her grades. Like @Momofmusician17 's son, one of her most difficult classes last semester was an advanced music theory class, which she ended with a solid B. Her GPA is just barely above 3.7 though so she is doing well. She is not planning for law school, med school, or a high finance job. I think she will end up in grad school for music or another interest that she is thinking of for a double major.
@musicmerit, maybe they get wiser by the time they’re sophomores (pun intended). 
DS knows someone who decided to Cr/D/Fail a course rather than take an A-, so they do exist, at least in DS’s circle.
@musicmerit, I think DS took all the music theory classes (those required for a music major.) He had gotten his share of A- on these fun-for-him classes (his grades in such classes are lower than the grades in his STEM classes.) Some kids in such classes just loves to spend as much time on it as they could, independent of what grades they may get. He mentioned at one time that one of his classmates in such a class is Kurt Hugo Schneider (sp), the music arranger for Sam Tsui. Some classmates in such a class could have performed in Carnegie Hall before college – At least one of DS’s band members actually had performed there twice before college. It could be a lot of fun to hang out with such kids, I think. (BTW, DS was NOT proud of his GPA, despite of his 3.9x GPA at graduation. He once even said this kind of thing could somewhat have ruined his college experience which could otherwise be better.)
For some elitist employers, apparently that matters, based on reply #15.
For many other employers, the “screening for interview GPA” is likely much lower, often 3.0, and college GPA becomes unimportant after some years of experience.
I doubt a Yale CS graduate with a 3.5+ GPA would be screened out on the basis of that by most Silicon Valley employers. However, many may not bother to recruit at Yale due to distant location, small number of CS majors, and competition from finance and consulting employers, so a Yale CS student aiming for Silicon Valley may need to more aggressively look for and apply to employers on his/her own, compared to a CS student at Stanford, Berkeley, or San Jose State.
I have been thinking more about this thread and reread the original post. My daughter and her friends (a few at Yale) never talk about their grades or GPAs (her friends only learned each other’s GPAs when they helped edit each other’s resumes.) They are just not competitive like that.
I see comparing the x in 3.9x as a symptom of the ridiculous competitive nature that some Ivy students have. You see it here on CC all the time - only Ivy is good enough - only HYP not just any Ivy, one B is the kiss of death, the only “good” job is one on Wall Street making 6 figures your first year, etc.
What tiny percent of the population goes to HYP, makes 6 figures straight out of college, gets a 4.0 (at any college)? I think these students need to change their mindset - they need to learn for the sake of gaining knowledge - do what they love - get the job that makes them happy (not wealthy) - be their own person (not just try to be better than their classmates). Will their life always be about showing how they are the best - the biggest house - the most expensive car, etc?
@kiddie, I like your post #107. Usually when people pusue the “best”, they need to pay for it in one way or another. For a “better” job, it could mean you have to invest more years/tuitions, or work more intense work hours everyday, or take more risks, and so on. If this is not the case, it could mean that 1) your talents are truly in demand, 2) your family have connections, 3) you can get more financial support from your family, and so on.
Be careful about what you really want to get and want to achieve. Even when you have got into a “right” environment that may help you get into a job with a greater chance of hitting it big, it could be a not so healthy environment.
DS once said that in his life circle now, there are no lack of people who are very intense - so intense that the only thing in their mind in every minute of their wake hours is their ambition and future career, to the exclusion of everything else in their life. The atmosphere is worse than what was like in the UG years. DS at one time said it is probably the exact reason why they get to where they are at today. Some of them may have a second thougt about wherher this is the purpose of coming to this world but most of them never have time or inclination to think of this.
BTW, regarding knowing each other’s GPA in college, I do not think the suitemates would bother to know each other"s GPA. It is only when, for eample, a student got inducted to a PBK, and got the latin honor at graduation that other suitemates may know the approximate range of their suitemate’s GPA. (At DS’s college, they only count the absolute number of A’s (excluding A-) for selecting PBK. But I think the students only compete against each other within the same department only, so the students in some department with a higher number of A’s will not take the quota from other departments, I think.
What if for some people wealthy and happy are the same thing? If students at Yale don’t generally care about the grade, how do you explain ridiculous grade inflation?
^ Except for those students from the well-to-do family (read: their parents are exceptionally successful in the society by various kinds of measures – not only their financial status) a very high percentage of these students could be the valedictorian from their high schools. They COULD care very much about the grade when they set their foot on campus. But many of them would find out very soon only a small percentage of them could continue to be the only “shining star” in academic (in term of the rank in the grades in the classes they take.) After all, a half of them need to have the bottom 50 % of the grades in any class they take (esp. in some introductory STEM classes where they are graded more objectively, potentially based on some curve.) A class average of 46 out of 100 in a midterm test in an introductory science class could make some of the students (who were not long ago the valedictorian at their high school) humble pretty fast.
They do need to accept the “learning” environment that they put theirselves in because of their choice of college.
In the end, if the goal is to get into grad/prof schools, the rank among the students from the same college matter more than the GPA. The admission staff will likely evaluate them in this way.
Harvard’s freshman survey mentions the majority of the freshman class had a perfect 4.0 in HS, so the majority were probably valedictorian. The average SAT score was ~750 per section. I expect Yale’s class has similar stats. When you have an incoming class like this, you don’t get many students who are coasting and just trying to do the minimum amount of work to pass. Instead the overwhelming majority is doing A quality work. As the selectivity increases, and you get a larger portion of outstanding academic students in the incoming class, a larger potion of students are going to do “A” quality work in college. So if the number of A’s at Yale reflects the portion of the class doing A quality work, I’d expect it to increase over time, as selectivity increases. If you compare HS stats with mean GPA in Yale classes, the two track well. The average grades given at Yale have increased the most during periods where the HS stats of the class increased the most, most notably during the Vietnam draft period.
I’ve taken classes at colleges with a variety of degrees of grade inflation – Stanford, RPI, UCSD, SUNYA, Syracuse, and Wyoming. Stanford had by far the most grade inflation and gave out by far the most A’s, yet as a whole I found it more difficult to earn an A at Stanford than at the lower grade inflation colleges. Many students I know had similar feelings. After the first major exams of freshman year, counselors from the student services centers were dispatched to my dorm because so many students were struggling with receiving the first Bs (or lower) of their lives. It wasn’t everyone who does the assignments fairly well gets an A. As a whole, a 3.5 at Stanford may indicate a greater mastery of the material than a 3.5 at a lower grade inflation, less selective college, even if 3.5 is below average at Stanford. They did have a way to indicate students who were exceptional compared to those earning the common A grade, with an A+. The few times I got an A+, it was for doing something that went beyond just acing exams and problem sets. For example, in my intro stats and intro EE class, my A+ related to finding new solutions on the exam that the professor hadn’t considered. In intro CS, it related to winning a final project programming competition (related to programming chess strategy). I have no idea if this has changed and now A+'s are more common.
While I think the increase in selectivity is a major contributor to grade inflation and also explains a large portion of why average grades given at private colleges tend to be higher for more selective colleges, there are other large contributors as well. One is competing with other similar colleges. HYPSM have similar degrees of selectivity and likely a similar portion of stellar students, but P and M have lower mean grades. Princeton has recently started cutting back on its grade deflation policies because they are losing yield to colleges like HYS. Colleges with more grade inflation get more applications and win more cross admits. Colleges with more grade inflation also have better grad school outcomes. For example, if I look at med school acceptance rates by class rank, the higher grade inflation elite colleges do better than the lower grade inflation among lower class rank students. The law school stats I showed earlier suggest the same. I’d also expect a large portion of employers don’t factor in grade inflation, so the colleges with higher grade inflation also likely have better employment outcomes as a whole. In short, grade inflation improves a number of criteria colleges value.
…sigh. I don’t know where to begin. Do I really need to even try? So why don’t we give everyone in top 10 all A’s? We’ll also give everyone in the bottom 10 all F’s. If Stanford gives only 30% A’s is it because students at Stanford is not doing A quality work? I heard Princeton suffers from grade deflation. Clearly, Princeton students were not valedictorians in HS and not doing A quality work. 
If many of the bottom 10% had mastered the material, is it fair to give them failing grades? Or would it be more fair to only give F’s to students with unsatisfactory mastery of the material, as reflected in assignments and exams?
If you read my full post, I discussed Princeton. Princeton has ended their past grade deflation policies, as discussed at http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2014/10/breaking-after-faculty-vote-grade-deflation-policy-officially-dead/ . Also note that the article mentions 40-43% of the Princeton grades were A during the grade deflation period, suggesting that A was still the most common grade in a large portion of classes. The article states,
“According to the report that prompted Monday’s vote, only 5 percent of students and 6 percent of faculty deemed the policy effective in maintaining fair and consistent grading standards, according to the committee’s report on grade deflation released in August.”
DS knew at least a few val. from non-magnet high schools were actually struggling in many classes at his college. It is important to go to a magnet or very competitive high school.
Here is the article that Laszlo Bock was responding to:
http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203733504577026212798573518
So is Zhou an A student or a “B or C” student? To make it more complicated, how do you compare a history major from Princeton to a physics major from Berkeley, with and without similar GPAs?
I think the system we have today is too easy to game. (In the math-oriented economics thread, posters were talking about elite college students struggling with easy high school math). This screams for a standardized exit exam that would look at a graduate’s general skill set such as verbal, analytical and quantitative ability, just to start. If I were an employer, I would ask for an LSAT, GMAT, GRE, and what not depending on the nature of the job, at least until something better comes along. We need a common yardstick to measure all graduates by. I think the system we have today is too inefficient. Comparing GPAs from different institutions? We are barely scratching the surface here.
Is that where common core comes in? A lot of what they teach in college should have been taught in HS. But in HS if a teacher tries to hold a high standard, s/he hears from parents. College professors hear from parents, too, My kid was a valedictorian in HS, the best the hs ever produced, gets an A in every other extremely difficult courses except yours. You must be a lousy teacher. So comes 70% A’s. Who wants to be a bad guy doing more work?
I think you misunderstand these kids–well, probably some of them are like what you describe, but many aren’t.
The top law schools give need based financial aid, though your parents’ income counts if you are under 27/28. Very few of the others do. So if you are from a family with limited income and you already borrowed for undergrad, you really, really, really want to get into one of the few schools that does give fin aid.
You’re more likely to get merit money for a high gpa/LSAT score, but given the glut of attorneys right now, attending a lower ranked law school to get one is seen as risky. At the highest ranked law schools that give merit $, you are going to need a very high LSAT and very high gpa to get one.
The top law schools also have the best loan forgiveness programs. That means you don’t have to pay back all the money you borrowed to go to law school if you go into a lower paying field. It’s not as though it costs more to go to top tier law schools than second tier law schools… And, in many cases, in state residents pay almost as much as out of state residents for law school, so even if you are one of the lucky people who lve in a state with a highly ranked law school, you might have to pay almost as much to attend it. See for example http://www.law.umich.edu/financialaid/pages/tuitionrates.aspx ( If you are from Michigan, being in state won’t even give you a better chance of being admitted. )
So in at least some cases it is actually the young people who come from the least affluent families and/or want to go work for non-profits or teach law or work for legal aid, etc. who are often among the most obsessed with getting high grades in the effort to get into a highly ranked law school.
Among the science majors, young people who want to go the MD/PhD route are often the most protective of their GPAs. They usually do take VERY rigourous STEM courses. It’s in meeting their distribution requirements that they may tend to look for less rigorous courses.
Different students have different strengths. The article mentioned that Zhou’s grades went from B/C to A after switching from Computer Science and Electrical Engineering to Psychology and Public Policy. If I had made the same major switch, I’d expect my GPA would have shot down. Among all the fields I studied in college, I found that Computer Science was the easiest one to get high grades. Electrical Engineering (my major) was among the top 4 easiest, along with Statistics and Chemistry. I found these fields easy because one can apply a straightforward, logical methodology to get a solution. There is minimal rote memorization about non-intuitive concepts that did not interest me, and there are minimal papers with subjective grade for which no methodology can applied to obtain the optimal solution. In contrast I found getting high grades in fields that emphasize rote memorization and subjective papers to be more challenging . One is often not a universal A student or a universal B student. Instead Zhou may be an A student in her major and B student in EECS. I might have been the reverse and be an A student in EECS and a B student in public policy.
Most employers aren’t going to have a lot of situations where they are comparing resumes of an electrical engineering major and public policy major because they generally apply to different types of jobs. If I look at entry level online job listings related to my field of engineering, almost all say an EE or CS degree is required since they expect you to learn EECS related topics in college. They probably aren’t even going to consider a psychology or public policy applicant for this position, had one ignored the stated requirements and applied. However, they might consider him for a non-tech position at the company that does not require notable engineering knowledge and experience.
It’s quite common for tech interviews to focus on giving the candidates tech problems to solve. Some of the interviews I had were essentially just someone asking me to solve problems and describe my methodology while working. These generally weren’t quick and simple standardized test type problems. Instead it might be something like writing the logic for a traffic light’s state changing behavior in C++. They probably used the same problems for other candidates, making it a standardized exam that was specific to the type of skills required for the position.
Exactly, @Data10. I had a client meeting this morning with someone whose son is a freshman at Princeton. He’s an engineering major who is thinking of switching to math, his primary love. However, what he’s really finding hard is his history class–the copious amount of reading, and he’s in the midst of researching & writing a paper, tasks he finds very difficult, although the subject matter fascinates him. His mom said that he doesn’t find doing problem sets for math & physics onerous bc his mind is wired for those subjects. But synthesizing his history reading, coming up with an original thesis, marshaling the material to support his argument, and then the mechanics of writing are far more time consuming for him and challenging.
As an art history student undergrad & grad, I find some of the conversation above odd. Is there truly a gut, soft major? I met a kid on this forum when I was helping my oldest son. She writes a fascinating blog discussing her college coursework, among other stuff. I think she’s one of the brightest kids I know. She’s a double anthropology & visual arts major at uchicago. She processes art in the most cerebral way. Her anthropology papers are brilliant. She’s working hard & kicking a** in her classes, sure to graduate at the top of her class. Her Latin honors & skills are as hard-earned as those of her math peers.
There probably is not a universal “gut” major, but it is likely that many majors are turned into “gut” majors at many schools (not the same major at each school). It is also possible that a given major at a given school may have a “gut” option and a rigorous option (e.g. honors or other more difficult in-major choices). Or the courses may be easy to pass (C- to B- ) but hard to do well in (B+ to A+).