<p>Also, which schools are considered to be "easier" or "harder" than the others in terms of how rigorous the courseload is.</p>
<p>You high school GPA will equal your college GPA at Harvard.
You wont have a GPA at Brown.
The rest require hard work for a good GPA.</p>
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<p>Wrong. The average GPA at Harvard is well below the average high-school GPA of incoming students. </p>
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<p>Wrong.</p>
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<p>The implication that students at Brown and Harvard don’t work hard for their grades is incorrect. In fact, Harvard ranked on Princeton Review’s “Students Study the Most” list (the only other ranked Ivy was Princeton).</p>
<p>Here are the average GPA’s at the Ivy League Schools (and the year in which this was the case):</p>
<p>Brown: 3.61 (2007)
Yale: 3.51 (2008)
Harvard: 3.45 (2005)
UPenn: 3.44 (2004)
Columbia: 3.42 (2006)
Dartmouth: 3.42 (2007)
Cornell: 3.36 (2006)
Princeton: 3.28 (2008)</p>
<p>Brown stands out as a seeming inflator of grades, and Princeton as a seeming deflator of grades. This is unsurprising, as Brown offers the option of taking a class Pass/Fail and Princeton instituted a policy whose aim was to reduce the number of A’s that are given out.</p>
<p>Cornell’s may be a bit lower because a higher percentage of students have engineering as their major, something which is associated with a lower GPA.</p>
<p>^ where did you find that list? and is there an updated one?</p>
<p>^ I compiled it from here: [National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/]National”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/). I used the latest years available.</p>
<p>Isn’t Browns average GPA so high because of the fact that you can take so many classes Pass/Fail?</p>
<p>And then Princetons average GPA is relatively low because of the quota they put on the percentage of As a teacher can award.</p>
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<p>Yes, as I indicated in post #4. The “quota” at Princeton is supposed to be flexible, though the impact is still significant.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/faculty/documents/gpaStatement.pdf[/url]”>http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/faculty/documents/gpaStatement.pdf</a>
What does it mean that there’s no gpa in brown?</p>
<p>Brown does a lot of things differently in grading so that students feel they can get out of their comfort zone and try something different. For example my math/CS student took Mandarin and Russian Languages pass/fail–something she might not have done had she needed to worry about gpa. Her cousin at Princeton wanted to take a foreign language but didn’t because he wasn’t sure he could get a good grade and didn’t want to mess up his gpa. She says it isn’t widely used in one’s major.</p>
<p>Brown doesn’t give pluses or minus grades, part of having a cooperative culture within the department. No D’s on transcripts, or fails. So in that sense, it seems easy, when you try something and fail, it doesn’t stay will you forever. But don’t take that to mean a class is easy or an easy A. My daughter was stressed and overloaded pretty much the whole time there (but that was within her control.)</p>
<p>When she was there, I rarely heard about grades except occasionally, when she was happy with an A in a hard class. I never had any idea what her gpa was and don’t know it to this day. She’s in a grad program now and it sounds like 3/4 of her department went to work at microsoft.</p>
<p>@silverturtle: You really won’t have a GPA at Brown. If you NEED it, you calculate it yourself. I know people who got into research programs saying “I have no GPA, here’s why” and linked the explanation for why we don’t give out GPAs.</p>
<p>Reasons for Brown’s “grade inflation:” pass/fail tends to be most of people who would get Cs, and bombing a final doesn’t affect GPA, because fails never happened.</p>
<p>will given the price of these schools i think the least they can do is throw the students a bone every now and then…</p>
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<p>Yes, my dismissal of that statement should have been qualified. Nonetheless, there does seem to be data on the matter.</p>
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<p>wouldn’t this suggest that Princeton is tougher than Cornell, even though it is said that Cornell is the toughest Ivy from which to graduate?</p>
<p>^not necessarily because Cornell offers many programs that Princeton doesn’t. If you were to compare the GPAs between a particular program at both schools, you might be able to form some sort of conjecture as to which school might be harder, but even then, that conclusion might not be true for the entire school.</p>
<p>^yeah, but there’s typically a negative correlation between how “hard” a class is and the average GPA for said class. *Putting “hard” in " " because you can define hard a few different ways.</p>
<p>Realize that at the Ivies, Swarthmore, etc., nearly all the students have had either straight As or just a couple Bs throughout their entire pre-college academic experiences. While a 3.5 at a state university is a high achievement for many students, a 3.5 at one of the top schools represents a considerable drop in grade attainment for their students, usually after far more effort and intensity than was required of them in HS.</p>