<p>I used to really like Princeton, but then I found out that they limit the amount of A's given per class. The Pton forum said that their top quintile ends at like 3.7. I don't like the idea of a college where my grades vary directly with geniuses in the class who spend every minute studying. And I'm sure getting a 3.6 or lower gpa will hurt my grad school chances.</p>
<p>So do any of the other top schools have curbs like this, or do their grades generally depend on how hard YOU work?</p>
<p>All top schools pretty much operate the same when it comes to this. It depends on what class you take. In certain classes As potentially can be given to everyone, but certain sciences usually have much more restrictive curves and means.</p>
<p>I believe Cornell has a stricter policy than even Princeton.</p>
<p>In general, the curves tend to be harsher in the sciences.</p>
<p>Why does it matter? If it's for graduate school purposes, I wouldn't worry about this - the Adcoms know which schools have grade inflation and which ones don't.</p>
<br>
<p>All top schools pretty much operate the same when it comes to this. </p>
<br>
<p>How are they all pretty much the same? Limiting A's to a certain percentage of the class in all courses in all departments is very different, both in theory and in practice, from leaving the issue up to the discretion of the instructor, which is what many other schools do. Social science and humanities classes at Harvard (just for example) are virtually never curved like they are at Princeton.</p>
<p>Each policy has its pros and cons, but I don't see how they could be considered "pretty much the same."</p>
<p>i hope Ivy is right about that, i've always like to think the Adcoms are a virtual encyoclopedia of program difficulty across various schools, but with all the apps they look at i wouldnt be surprised if that isnt always the case, as my GPA is in the lower 3's, but it's in a program where the average is set at 2.8, unlike some other places, so i've been a little shifty about my grad school chances, at least in terms of how my GPA will help/hurt it.</p>
<p>spincut,</p>
<p>i am... think about it... understanding the grading system across the major undergrad programs would be one of THE most important things that grad schools understand...</p>
<p>even if they didn't (but they do) but even if they didn't, an applicant is competing first and foremost vs. his/her peer group at his/her undergrad class before that individual competes vs. the entire group. - i.e. the grade averages may be slightly lower at, say, Cornell or Princeton for any given applicant class to a selective grad school, but that won't hurt the applicant just because he/she is coming out of any particular Cornell/Princeton class that has an average below the overall applicant pool - the Adcoms will focus first and foremost on the "best" applicants out of his/her peer group first and then vs. the general pool.</p>
<p>this is not unlike the Adcom process at selective colleges. i.e. a 3.5GPA from a HS applicant from highly/nationally competitive prep schools such as Phillips Exeter or highly/nationally competitive public schools such as Thomas Jefferson (VA) is not the same as a 3.5GPA anywhere else.</p>
<p>so picking colleges based on their grading scales is a bad idea?</p>
<p>if that's your only reason for going (or not going) to a school, then, yeah, i think that is a pretty short-sighted (if not totally flawed) reason for selecting (or rejecting) a school.</p>
<p>i mean, at the end of the day, call me crazy but, i would think that grades would be secondary to the ACTUAL EDUCATION you will be receiving at any given college.</p>
<p>put another way, if you could get a degree with straight A's, but you learn absolutely NOTHING vs. getting a degree with a B- average, but receive an education BAR NONE what would you choose?</p>
<p>please guys, princeton's new cap of what.. 30% getting A's (?) is STILL GRADE INFLATION. i wouldn't be complaining about it. throw yourself into the berkeley environment of grade-deflation, and then you'll appreciate princeton's (and other ivy + stanford) grade inflation.</p>
<p>well obviously even at a school with a rough grading policy there will be those that manage to do way better at times, but i have still had my concerns. I would think that if my schools curve wasnt as bad that i would have comparatively done better overall, but hopefully, contrary to what i've heard from some going to grad from SC, that the curve is noticed when looking at your GPA.</p>
<p>kfc4u has it right...</p>
<p>30% of a class getting an A is a huge percent.</p>
<p>A lot of classes at my school ~10% (or less) get A's.</p>
<p>Hanna, </p>
<p>With your experiences of doing undergrad
work at Harvard, Bryn Mawr & Haverford
what is your opinion of the grading curve
that exists or does not exists at these 3
academic rigorous schools?</p>
<p>At which school did you experience the
most demanding work load?</p>
<p>Although Princeton's stated grading policy is that 30 percent of each department's grades are in the A range (i.e., A or A-minus, since Princeton doesn't count A-pluses in the GPA), in fact, the cutoff between the top and second quintiles of the first-year class was 3.7, or A-minus. In other words, only 20 percent of the class had an A-minus average or better. Doesn't qualify as "huge" in my book.</p>
<p>The grading curve, the rigor, and the workload at a given school are just about independent of each other.</p>
<p>Bryn Mawr had, without a doubt, a tougher grading curve than Harvard -- that is, fewer A's were handed out. There's also no doubt that I had to do much better work at Harvard than at Bryn Mawr to get an A. In general, Bryn Mawr classes have a heavy workload, but relative to Harvard or Swarthmore, you don't have to write that well or understand particularly tricky concepts in order to get an A. So despite the stricter curve and heavy workload, I didn't consider them very rigorous.</p>
<p>It's difficult to generalize about Harvard because there are thousands of courses and they range from the very easy to the impossible, and each student can pack the curriculum with as much or as little difficulty as she wants. I generally took four classes at a time: two that were very challenging, one in the middle, and one fun "gut." I knew people who were taking six courses including four graduate seminars; I knew a few others who coasted.</p>
<p>Just to give you one illustration, though, in my sophomore year, I took introductory Japanese at Haverford, which was the toughest class I'd ever had in my life. After I transferred, I thought I would be able to start second-year Japanese at Harvard, because the two schools use the same published curriculum and thus cover the same material. It turns out that I had to start over again from the beginning...because Harvard uses the same curriculum as Haverford, exactly twice as fast. Book 1 is Year 1 at Haverford but SEMESTER 1 at Harvard. That's the regular-speed Harvard course; they also offer accelerated, which goes four times as fast, and covers the Haverford bachelor's degree program in Japanese in the first year.</p>