<p>If your school recommends that math course for your situation, you might as well go for it, especially if you got a 5 on the BC test and thought it was easy.</p>
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<p>Doen’t matter bcos professional schools don’t care – they only care about the gpa that they have to report to USNews.</p>
<p>But even at Brown, some of the premed prereqs have a A- curve, which definitely makes it a “unique” practice. :)</p>
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<p>Regardless of the veracity of the claim that undergraduate GPA’s are not evaluated in context by professional schools (which is in fact not a matter of consensus), the idea that Brown ought to be singled out for its grade inflation remains unsupported. No mention had been made about professional school admissions.</p>
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<p>I wonder where you got this statistic, especially considering the fact that, as I stated, Brown does not award grades of A-.</p>
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<p>From Brown alum/supporters on cc.</p>
<p>silverturtle, sure those are reasons for why Brown has grade inflation. But the reasons don’t matter; in the end, it still has a higher average GPA. LACs will tend to have more grade inflation because they tend to focus on the humanities, social sciences, etc. which tend to be more grade-inflated than schools with a greater focus on STEM fields. So what if that’s the reason? In the end it’s still an objective fact that there’s more grade inflation.</p>
<p>Now, offering those reasons would be useful if we were making judgments about the relative ease of schools, based on average GPAs, but that wasn’t the case: it was a mere acknowledgement of the fact that, yes, Brown has heavy grade inflation.</p>
<p>And pointing out the changes in grade inflation over the years for other schools is useless, unless we also mention how grade-inflated each was before the 8-year period. Some of those schools could have a higher increase in average GPA than Brown simply because they were less inflated to begin with.</p>
<p>Also, for the record, Princeton does not have a lack of grade inflation - in fact it still has quite a lot of it. It’s just that it’s less inflated than before. I read that the average GPA at Princeton for graduating seniors is 3.39, down from 3.46 before the change in policy - so not very far from what it was before and still on the whole inflated.</p>
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<p>Grade inflation is not demonstrated by the fact that a school has a higher average GPA: Grade inflation refers to an increase in GPA over time. Your equivalency would only be true if all GPA’s had some arbitrary but common point at which they all began; this is not the case, however.</p>
<p>My compounding point was that, even if grade inflation were in reference not to changes in GPA over time but instead to the difference between where grades “ought” to be and where they are, comparing Brown’s average GPA to those at other schools would not be sufficient evidence for making the case that Brown is “grade inflated,” again even by that non-standard definition. </p>
<p>In the same way that one would not claim MIT’s grades to be inflated simply because the average GPA there may be the highest in the nation, so should one not single out Brown as the most grade-inflated Ivy League college merely of its GPA. MIT operates on a 5-point scale, so the comparison requires adjustment; in that case the deduction of one point for comparative purposes provides a reasonable approximation for cross-analysis. Brown’s confounding factors in its grading, however, are not able to be so neatly compensated for. Again, these are the open curriculum, lack of pluses and minuses, and universal option for pass/fail grading. </p>
<p>Brown seems to concur: They don’t even bother to calculate GPA’s, so any cited “average GPA’s” for Brown are necessarily arrived at indirectly.</p>
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<p>Nothing could be more relevant to grade inflation, which is the increase in GPA’s over time, than the increase in GPA’s over time. </p>
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<p>Actually, after instituting its new grading policies, Princeton had rather notable grade deflation, seeing a .11 drop in GPA in just five years (from 3.38 to 3.27). </p>
<p>If we again apply the non-standard definition that grade inflation refers not to changes in GPA over time but deviation from the “appropriate” GPA, I wonder what sage figure holds the knowledge of that appropriate GPA.</p>
<p>^ that’s your definition of grade inflation, but for most readings of actual uses of the term, there is no temporal component. Rather, most people read it as the difference between what “ought” to be and what is. That definition, not yours, is the standard one. When you talk about inflation with money, then there’s an assumption of change over time. ;)</p>
<p>Sure, it’s true that comparing it to other schools doesn’t mean that Brown is necessarily more inflated, but by the same token, looking at average GPA, grade distributions, etc. can’t make a case for grade inflation (or lack thereof) for any given school. You’re right, it’s impossible to tell whether a school is inflated in the traditional sense of the phrase, since it’s subjective to state what the standard “is” in order to have a baseline comparison. That’s why it’s theoretically possible that a school with a 3.4 average GPA could be more grade deflated than a school with a 3.2 average GPA. So instead we focus on raw grade distributions and have a general rule of thumb: if the average GPA is getting high, then there’s probably inflation. Of course we can’t assume that every school will be skewed similarly, and it’s possible that Brown is no more inflated than HYPS. But given the factors you’ve mentioned (pass/fail, open curriculum), it’s pretty clear that it’s inflated - especially considering the 3.61 figure from gradeinflation.com (though their statistics are dubious). Let’s face it: Brown goes easy on students when it comes to the structure of their grading system, so it’s no surprise that it’d be inflated.</p>
<p>Regardless, I don’t think that grade inflation is bad at all. In fact, I think it’s good, at least at the top schools. That’s because the students are hard-working by nature, so they’re bound to learn a lot. More importantly, if done right, students won’t know how they compare to each other throughout the class. They won’t know whether they’re behind the curve or above it, so even if they know that grades will eventually be inflated, it can be hard for them to tell just how they stand, especially relative to other students. Because they’re high achievers, they usually work a bit harder to be safe. At least, that’s how I’ve seen it at Stanford where students, ignorant of just how much grade inflation could help them for any given class, work hard to be on the safe side and ultimately work themselves to the bone, learn a lot, and in the end are rewarded with high grades that get them into grad schools and nice jobs. It’s a win-win, though of course grade inflation isn’t a good thing unless the students are naturally hard-working and a little bit neurotic - which tends to be the case at the top schools.</p>
<p>Grade inflation is also indicative of small classes; statistics show that the smaller the class, the higher the grades tend to be. Students learn better in a more intimate setting and thus work harder, and ultimately earn the grade they get. So it’s no surprise that top schools like Brown and Yale and Princeton have high GPAs, given their small classes and naturally hard-working, intelligent students. IMO grade inflation is very much a good thing at these schools.</p>
<p>Regarding Princeton, the figures I stated might be different from yours because mine were actually the mean, not the average (though I seriously doubt there would be a .11 difference). More likely, the reason for the difference is that yours is the average GPA for all students, which I think is useless, since that includes GPAs that are “not complete,” e.g. those of underclassmen. Graduating seniors’ GPAs are the most important and give a clearer picture of grade inflation. According to this NYT article, in 2009 the mean was a 3.38 for graduating seniors. Pretty inflated.</p>
<p>[At</a> Princeton University, Grumbling About Grade Deflation - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/education/31princeton.html]At”>At Princeton University, Grumbling About Grade Deflation - The New York Times)</p>
<p>Nice title.</p>
<p>^ nice username…</p>
<p>(If it’s totally innocent, my apologies.)</p>
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<p>But is the smaller class the cause?</p>
<p>Larger classes tend to be freshman and sophomore level courses, often including breadth requirements (at least at non-Brown/Amherst schools), while smaller classes tend to be junior and senior level courses that students are taking in their major. Presumably, students are most interested in and best at their major subject, so one would expect that their grade would be higher in those courses.</p>
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<p>But if grade inflation continues, wouldn’t the average GPA be so close to 4.0 that graduate schools and professional (medical and law) schools will have a hard time telling the difference between outstanding achievement in courses and merely good achievement in courses? That problem already exists at the high school level when applying to highly selective universities, which have more 4.0 GPA applicants than needed to fill their freshman classes several times over. So then they have to use opaque holistic criteria that is often viewed as a lottery.</p>
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<p>Incorrect. They may not publish the results, but they do “bother” to calculate GPA’s. (They have to as a D1 college.)</p>
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<p>…the f***?
Mathematical mean = average. Please tell me you meant median.</p>
<p>Also, I think this thread took a huge detour. So here’s a good question: how does one avoid feelings of inadequacy at a school like Princeton? I’m asking this for everyone, not necessarily myself.</p>
<p>hah well the main reason this is a problem is because the students that get into places like Princeton tend to be accustomed to being at the top of their class, which is highly unlikely at gpa-killers such MIT and Princeton.</p>
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<p>Yes, I misspoke - I meant to suggest that one is the median and the other is the average.</p>
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<p>But Princeton isn’t a GPA killer. An average of 3.38 for graduating seniors is not “GPA-killing.” Also, MIT hasn’t released average GPA statistics in many years, which seems to me that MIT is reluctant to show that it has more grade inflation than people would think.</p>
<p>“Also, MIT hasn’t released average GPA statistics in many years, which seems to me that MIT is reluctant to show that it has more grade inflation than people would think.”</p>
<p>Or…maybe they can’t find anybody on campus who knows how to compute a statistical average.</p>
<p>^ (?)</p>
<p>…or they’re hiding an unfavorable truth, which tends to be the case when universities refuse to release data that they obviously have.</p>
<p>Let’s focus on the main issue here so this thread can actually help people in the future.</p>
<p>How does one cope with being a 4.0 student/class president/all-state athlete or musician/“genius” or some combination of those types of people to just ordinary?</p>
<p>This is actually a good story for ANYONE entering college. I met kids at my branch college who ran into these feelings- they’re feelings that everyone, at every college, has at some point during their first two years.</p>
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Yeah, Ivy League students don’t realize how good they have it. The OP really doesn’t have as much to complain about as he/she thinks. -.-</p>
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<p>This is a difficult question to answer. I know that Princeton has very “low” prerequisites for difficult math courses. The prereqs for some of the most difficult math courses are the very basic 5 on Calc BC and 750+ (something like that) on SAT math.
I personally did not take 203, but a couple of my friends did. Here is my impression from their experiences.</p>
<p>Looking at the fall 2011 academic calendar, there are approximately 5 weeks from the beginning of classes to midterms. Math classes meet 3x a week for 50 minutes a class. This is not enough time to catch up and learn the midterm material for mat 203 without having taken multivariable in the past. There is a good change that instructors will not even cover the fundamentals in lecture. I’d guess that over half of the students who do not drop from mat 203 have taken multivariable in the past. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.math.princeton.edu/undergraduate/203_exams/203Smt07-08.pdf[/url]”>http://www.math.princeton.edu/undergraduate/203_exams/203Smt07-08.pdf</a></p>
<p>To see if you’re right for 203, look at this midterm. Most of these questions should be very familiar. You should definitely be able to do questions 1 and 2 on the spot without using any reference materials, as these would be typical questions administered on a mat 203 pre-test. If you’re comfortable with these questions, go for mat 203.</p>