<p>I thought the College is known for grade deflation, its even mentioned in the Baccalaureate Ceremony on Friday as a tribute to Prof. Makinen who was the Keynote. :)</p>
<p>However, when I opened the 519th Convocation program, I found there were approximately 1000 students received the "General Honors" award in the College and the total UG graduates is only about 1200. In other words, almost every graduate in the College was awarded "General Honors". It makes me think whether that Grade Deflation is still prevalent. As I know, everyone with 3.25 GPA will receive such an Honor and I thought from my college days to achieve a 3.25 or to be on the Dean's List is a kind of difficult thing. Has time changed that the 3.25 GPA is the norm, to achieve 3.5 is not so hard and 3.7 is a real target of difficulty?</p>
<p>I think requirements for honors vary by department. From what I could tell it is much easier to get honors in CS than mathematics. Not only there is a higher GPA requirement for Math honors but you are also required to take specific sequences which are much harder. There is also some difference between BA and BS with honors. In any case, I am not surprised that a vast majority of students at uchicago graduate with honors. After all, these are the kids who were at the top 5% of their respective high school classes. </p>
<p>You probably are confused with Honors and the “General” Honors I was stating above.</p>
<p>If you carefully read the Convocation program, there are apparently several kinds of “Honors”</p>
<ol>
<li>By Department, the sub title of Honors are mentioned under each recipient and that is very scarce, perhaps only 2-5% of the total listed. For example, I only saw 3 in the UG Biology department.</li>
<li>Student Marshals these are listed on page 96 and 97, I was told those had maroon gowns in stead of black. They have the highest honors.</li>
<li>“General Honors” starting page 102 of the program, which has about 1000 students listed.</li>
<li>Then there are Phi Beta Kappa awards and so on after page 107</li>
</ol>
<p>I did not cross reference if those departmental honors are also student Marshals or Phi Beta Kappa receipients,</p>
<p>I believe the student marshals are not all selected on academics, but most of them are, and all of them have decent academics. Phi Beta Kappa is based on GPA, I believe, so you can cross-reference the marshals with the Phi Beta Kappa list. A close friend of one of my kids was a marshal without being PBK, but he really had an extraordinary portfolio of extracurricular activities that contributed to the university community.</p>
<p>If 1,000 kids got general honors, that’s a meaningful advance from a few years ago. At both of my kids’ graduations, I counted about 850 general honors, out of about 1,500 graduates. (And newmassdad had similar results the year before my older kid.) General honors is a B+ average. Departmental honors are based on in-major GPA and usually an honors thesis or project, so it’s very possible to get departmental honors without getting general honors and vice versa.</p>
<p>JHS I have re-counted the total number of graduates by roughly estimate 100 per page, I estimate there is only 1200 UG graduates, it can’t be 1500. I thought they took in more students in recent years than the past.</p>
<p>Unless the other comparable elite Universities has substantial grade inflation, grade deflation in the College is exaggerated, IMO.</p>
<p>I did not go to a “elite” UG school, in fact, it is still around USNEWS ranking ~200, our school basically took any warm body that walked in. We had serious weed out classes, D and Fs are common. At the end of the day, 1/3 the class dropped out and not many As are given. To get on the “dean’s list” was hard to do. The was no 1000 “general honors” students out of 1200 in my UG at graduation.</p>
<p>You are right. I went back and looked at the Registrar’s statistical reports, and basically the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded at spring convocation has hovered around 1,100 for years, slightly increasing in the very recent past. 1,200 may be a generous estimate.</p>
<p>That said, were there really 1,000 students with general honors? That seems like an awful lot. If that’s true, people really have to stop complaining about grade deflation.</p>
<p>I hadn’t looked closely at the book they handed out but it was very helpful when they started handing out the degrees. S1’s little cousins had come and they were getting restless. So we started timing the rate at which the line was moving (~18/minute) and looking at the list given in the book we tried to predict when S1 was going to show up on the big screen.</p>
<p>Now, thanks to artloversplus, I have started looking at the details and beginning to find interesting tidbits - various combinations of majors, A.B/S.B etc. From what I can tell only a very few got honors in multiple majors and I am beginning to think that this “tiger dad” put undue pressure. No wonder S1 was a bit stressed out towards the end.</p>
<p>I’ve further cross referenced the student Marshals to the PBK recipients.
Yes, as JHS stated, not all Student Marshals are PBK recipients, only 16 out of 45 Marshals are also PBK recipients. Further more, the PBK recipients are not necessarily Departmental Honors, roughly 40% of the PBK recipients are not departmental honors.</p>
<p>I also need to correct my previous statement where departmental honors are scares, when I just realize that BA’s in biology department has less honors but the BS’s in biology department has plenty. All told, perhaps 20% of the graduating class has departmental honors. I did not count, just eyeballed it.</p>
<p>The problem here isn’t that too many UChicago students achieve general honors, it’s that the GPA cutoff for general honors (3.25) is much too low. </p>
<p>In contrast, look at how the cutoffs for latin honors have risen at Yale College over the past couple decades:</p>
<p>Cum Laude cutoff at Yale used to be about 3.7 in 1990, now it’s 3.8.</p>
<p>UChicago, like all top colleges at this point, practices grade inflation - as can be seen with how many students graduate with general honors. I’d imagine that now, the avg. GPA in Hyde Park is between 3.3 -3.4. </p>
<p>This being said, to keep up with the Joneses, one could argue UChicago still doesn’t have ENOUGH grade inflation. The average GPA at Harvard or Brown is probably about 3.5, and Duke, Dartmouth, etc. are probably at about 3.5 now too. </p>
<p>UChicago should raise the general honors cut-off to 3.4 or 3.5, or possibly even 3.6. The average GPA should be around a 3.4-3.5. I get the sense now, it’s still a little lower than that, which means it’s toward the lower end of schools that grade inflate. </p>
<p>I am with Cue7, there should not be a “general honor” group, keep it simple, Cum Laude, Megna Cum Laude and Summa Cum Laude plus departmental Honors.</p>
<p>Chicago does not have Latin honors like Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude. etc. “General honors” more or less equals Cum Laude.</p>
<p>The reason why lots of kids with top grades don’t have departmental honors is that kids with top grades who don’t intend to go to an academic graduate program often feel that they don’t need to do the extensive extra work required for departmental honors. Your law school, medical school, or bulge-bracket investment bank didn’t know (and didn’t care) if you were getting departmental honors when it accepted you.</p>
<p>I’m curious about the average GPA at UChicago as well. I really like the school but feel like it may make the path to med school harder for me. If 80%+ of undergrads are getting at least 3.25, could you reasonably infer that that the average GPA is around the high 3.40s or low 3.50s? </p>
<p>IMHO, honors, cum laude etc matter only on graduation day and they give some bragging rights to parents. GPA matters a bit longer - until you get your first job or entry to graduate/professional school. </p>
<p>From what I hear, it is relatively easy to sail through core classes with good grades during the freshman year. It is when you get into smaller honors classes at later stages and the grading is continued to be done on a curve small differences in test scores can result in big differences in grades. I think this kind of grade deflation continues to happen @ uchicago and that’s what people are mostly complaining about. </p>
<p>I believe every department is different in “easy” or “hard” course rigor. While CS/Math maybe harder at the end, Biology maybe harder in the beginning, just for example. It is not easy to sail through U of C, but since they picked the students most likely will succeed, the graduation rate is at around 98% and most students can maintain a gpa of 3.25.</p>
<p>Congratulations to everyone, especially to UWH’s S who received the department Honor.</p>
<p>BTW, the CS department has expanded to around 200 students from perhaps 50 just 5 years ago. It will be more difficult to get department honors from now on.</p>
<p>I have not heard any CS student who did not get in great companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, FaceBook, Twitter or Linkdin or equivalent.</p>