<p>I was trying to come up with my best guess for standard deviation of GPAs in Engineering, but all I have to work with is a median of 2.9 and 1598 on the Dean's list (which to me is a shockingly high number, makes me feel dumb). Anyway, that gives me a standard deviation of about 1.16, which is obviously nonsense. Anyone have better information?</p>
<p>And yes, I'm pretty sure I do realize all the problems with what I tried to do, but I don't have information which is going to let me do any better.</p>
<p>It’s been a while since we saw each other in person on campus … feel free to PM me if you want to. </p>
<p>I remember seeing a post on the forum about this. (UMich CoE hasn’t posted the Fall 09 Dean’s List yet on-line)</p>
<p>I think the reply was that the Top 3% have a 3.7, Top 10% have a 3.5, and something like Top 25% have a 3.2, and the median (Top 50%) have a 2.9. Don’t quote me on it, but that’s how I remember it. It also varies by major within CoE, and some people boost their GPA by taking easier LSA classes.</p>
<p>It’s tough. It’s college. It’s Michigan Engineering. Don’t expect to leave with a 4.0 like you did in high school. :)</p>
<p>sorry, cum laude(3.2) i think is actually roughly top 25%. i don’t think the standard deviation is huge. Most people are in the 2.8-3.1 range, your perception of the average depends on the crowd you hang with, the people i hung out with were mostly in the 3.5-4.0 bucket, made me feel like engineering average was more like 3.5, which it obviously is not.</p>
<p>Well, I based my number off the number of people on the deans list (I simply counted the number of names on the deans list), not a “crowd I run with” thing. Though I’m wondering how so many people are on the deans list (which is a 3.5+) when the average GPA is quite a bit lower than such would indicate. </p>
<p>Based on the numbers from ab2013, the standard deviation is about .45, for anyone who was wondering.</p>
<p>Personally I believe that there really shouldn’t be reason for UofM gpa to have some sort of normal distribution. A high standard deviation is normal. Think about this. Most freshman traditionally start of with a higher gpa but once they begin upper level engineering courses, their gpa drops. Thus, there is nothing standard about the engineering gpa curve since it isn’t a totally random distribution. I should also mention that some majors are harder to receive the grade than others, i.e. IOE and Civil have a larger percentage of their students receiving Dean’s list then others. Thus, rather than a a single curve, the gpa curve probably is a blend of many curves [i.e freshman curve, senior curve, IOE curve, Aero curve… etc.] that would most likely make some sort of distribution, but not at all normal.</p>
<p>I pretty much realized it’s not normal, though the way I was looking at it is there can’t possibly be people maintaining a sub-2.0 GPA because they need to maintain one to remain in good academic standing. My guess is that when you look at grades as a whole (though I imagine the quoted numbers by ab2013 are at graduation???) they are normal enough that you can come up with some sort-of meaningful number.</p>
<p>Though I’ve also heard that grades tend to go up for higher level courses.</p>