<p>Is it harder to get a high GPA at an Ivy League school/Top rated school in comparison to schools such as Michigan/Texas/Baylor and other state/mid level schools?</p>
<p>I was just wondering if it would be beneficial to go to a lower ranked school to get a higher GPA. I'm not sure if they bell curve at Ivies and such schools, but wouldn't that kill you GPA, unless your super smart and ride the curve up.</p>
<p>I read that your undergrad institution doesn't matter for med school admissions as long as you went to a decent undergrad school, so I would think if GPA is easier at a mid-level school then that would work to a "med hopeful's" benefit.</p>
<p>It depends: I’ve heard at Princeton C’s are rare. Harvard, on the other hand, has grade-inflation, but not to the level where it wouldn’t be easier to get a good GPA elsewhere. Brown allows pass/fail, and if you fail a class (regardless of whether it’s for a grade or not) it doesn’t show up on your transcript, so it’s easier to ensure your GPA doesn’t dip too low. However, you also have to consider how well the school will prepare oyu for the MCAT: Brown’s pre-med program is serious business, and though a large portion of the class fails orgo, it means students are pushed to actually UNDERSTAND the subject matter.</p>
<p>I don’t think I have ever seen that question adequately answered… I think you’d need twins who tracked identically through high school, with one attending, say Penn, and one Penn State for college.</p>
<p>My gut tells me the grade inflation at elite private universities compensates fairly well for the additional competition… so that a top 10% student at Penn St. with a 3.6 GPA would be a top 40% at Penn (non-Wharton) with the same 3.6 GPA.</p>
<p>This doesn’t answer the follow-on question about whether the top 10% 3.6 at Penn St. and the top 40% 3.6 at Penn are viewed differently by employers or graduate school adcoms…</p>
<p>OP, your strategy would only make sense if med school adcoms use a strict gpa formula without normalizing, and that a gpa is a gpa is a gpa. I am most certain that is NOT the case.</p>
<p>The more relevant question for many, especially the high Type-As that post here and apply to Top 50 universities, is whether being a top 40% at Penn is demotivating and leads to depression and self defeating behavior, or whether the intense competition causes the student to raise their game. That is more a psychological/sociological issue that must be considered when choosing between two such schools.</p>
<p>It really depends on your major, too. I know some Penn State engineering majors who bombed some of the intro courses freshman year which takes a toll on your GPA, even though they went on to do quite well in subsequent years. Also- Rice engineering majors are typically not magna or summa cum laude grads.</p>
<p>At a job fair last year, my good friend was told by a pair of top hiring officials for two prestigious government agencies that they consider a 3.5 from elite public universities (Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan and UVA were specifically mentioned) to be equivalent to a 3.8 at Stanford/top Ivies, due to grade inflation at the latter. This is assuming that the majors are similar, of course (as in, that might not be the case if you were comparing an engineering student with a history major).</p>
<p>Think_Different – that makes sense since there is an approx. .029 delta in average gpa between public and private universities. But I think the logic is flawed…</p>
<p>In my opinion, due to the much higher caliber of average student at say Penn vs. Penn St., that a 3.5 at Penn is equivalent to a 3.5 at Penn St… with the Penn grad being about top 45% in class, and the Penn St. grad being about top 15% in class. A similar duo in CA would be Stanford and UCLA, where I think high achieving identical twins who split and attended the two universities would end up with identical GPAs at both … the student at UCLA would be top 15%, and the student at Stanford top 55% (that is, in the bottom half of the class, due to Stanford’s 3.55 ave. GPA)</p>
<p>thanks for all the info. guys. my major would be a biology major btw., but I might try to apply to pre-med modules or w/e you want to call them as well, but I will major in a biology-like program.</p>
<p>So, I take it that GPA at Ivies may even be a little easier in SOME cases due to grade inflation? I thought it would be the opposite, because so many smart kids go there, and that classes would need to have a certain overall class average , thus lowering marks of everyone…so grade deflation (assuming everyone gets high grades).</p>
<p>Do US universities bell curve? I know some Canadian ones do (I’m canadian, that’s why I’m so dumb when it comes to US universities and such). Like at UofT, bell curving kills med school dreams, that’s why many med hopefuls don’t go there for undergrad.</p>
<p>Those schools are full of students who have never gotten a C in their lives and have had very few Bs. Why would you expect them to begin making Cs or Bs once they get to Princeton and Harvard?</p>
<p>Back in the day I went to University of Rochester and transferred to Brown after freshman year. The grading at both schools was identical. In other words if you could get an A at Rochester you could get an A at Brown with the same effort.</p>
<p>^^that’s really helpful insight, i would expect GPAs to be higher at prestigious schools, since there are “smarter” students, I just didn’t know if there was grade deflation to keep class averages down, and if there was bell curving as both would lower your GPA</p>
<p>I wouldn’t use gradeinflation.com as a definitive source for average GPAs and the like unless they have a link to real hard data, not estimations. I see that for some schools, like Stanford, they used the “All-Greek GPA” or in the case of Yale an “estimation” to approximate the overall GPA. A simple google search shows that these GPAs could vary from the real one by +/- .2. </p>
<p>With that aside, what counts more than what school you attend is your major. Engineering will likely be hard at both Penn State and Penn. Any liberal arts major ending in “studies” likely won’t be as hard at either school. Finally, even if put in schools of the same “difficulty” it is unlikely you’ll make the same GPA at both schools, unless you completely ace or flunk out at both. The environment of the schools will affect whether you’re pushed to do better than your classmates or be content being average. Since I have only been on one side of the fence, but I do have friends on the other side, I would advise you that picking an Ivy/Top School in the hopes of having a higher GPA would probably not be the way to go. Of course this isn’t conclusive, and I can’t say for sure whether the “grade inflation” at top schools is more than, equal to, or less than the extra effort you have to put in.</p>
<p>Additional Portion:</p>
<p>To address the “curving” it seems like most classes at my school (Stanford) are curved to a B+/B average grade-as in if you get the average grade in the class on the test that’s a B+ but one point below is a B. However, the average GPA at Stanford is higher than a 3.15 because people on the bad side of the curve tend to drop classes or switch them to Pass/Fail. Another thing is, grades of D and F (F doesn’t even exist) are more or less unheard of and C grades not given out often. This also leads to the percieved grade inflation. I think the competition for the A grades at Stanford is probably harder than the competition for A grades at UCLA, but the competition for C grades at Stanford is almost non-existent, while at UCLA getting a C could be the least of your problems. To think about it mathematically, which school is “harder” (assuming same student body) the one that gives 75% A’s and 25% F’s or the school that gives 33% A’s 33% B’s 33% C’s? Both come out to an average GPA of 3.0 but you cannot disagree that the competition is a whole different beast in the second school as opposed to the first. I’m not saying UCLA is the first and Stanford is the second (since that’s obviously not true) but that the distribution of grades needs to be studied before coming to a firm conclusion.</p>
<p>Ok that was a long post and probably wasn’t too coherent, but I hope it helped.</p>
<p>Somehow everyone got convinced that schools should all be grading on a curve in all classes. My thinking on a good grading system is when a professor has high expectations for his class and knows what it means to do well going in. An A should mean you learned everything that was expected of you well enough to teach the material to someone else. A B should mean you understood things well enough to take another course which uses the information in that class and be successful. A C should mean you understood the material but probably would not be successful if you moved on to a class that used that information/knowledge extensively. Anything less than that and you fail.</p>
<p>That’s just one set of ideas I came up with right now, but it’s quite easy to have a smart, motivated class of students who all do A or B level work if your vision of grades is not as a tool to differentiate (possibly in a meaningless way) between students and instead as a measure of success in meeting the course objectives.</p>
<p>modestmelody: Then in some schools everyone will get A’s, and in other schools everyone will fail. In the big picture, schools with vastly different student bodies all teach the same subjects, the same courses even. It’s not fair to set some objective grading scale, and then have all schools conform. It’s much more interesting to see how students do against each other, when the student body is relatively uniform (read: come from the same class in the same school).</p>
<p>James-- I don’t think that professors teaching a course in one school has the same expectations as a professor in another school, and I also don’t think these expectations are purely “more” or “less” either. I never said all schools should conform to the same objective grading standard, I simply said that grading is at the discretion of the professor just like course objectives are. Sorry, but I don’t think that education is about comparing people.</p>
<p>As for Brown’s average GPA, I’ve written extensively about how the fact that 20% of classes are taken pass/fail make the “problem” look worse at Brown than it is and also how the culture at Brown creates this environment.</p>
<p>Don’t believe me, ask the transfers who will all tell you they work at least as hard and sometimes much more for the same grade at Brown. I know it’s hard for some people to understand what self-motivation means… but it’s real and it’s exactly what makes Brown beautiful to me.</p>
<p>Bodeplot… I don’t agree with your assumption that the competition for an A at Stanford is tougher than at UCLA. Aside from being an odd notion on its face give the approx. .03 gpa difference in ave. gpa between the two schools, my personal experience was different – GPA at Stanford (60 units) was slightly higher than my GPA at UCLA (120 units).</p>
<p>Melody: Hmm okay. But if professors’ expectations aren’t tied to the field of study at large, what will they be based upon? IMO, the clear choice for a standard will be how students do in the class, i.e. recreating a curve. Grades are not just about learning, they are about comparing, too. Otherwise there is risk of clumping. I still like the way things currently are – a mixture of curve to spread things out, and professorial judgment to make things fair (moving the curve up or down based on how the class did, in his opinion, objectively).</p>
<p>On topic: I remember, though can’t remember where, reading a comparison of average GPA’s between ivy league schools and state schools, but using LSAT scores to control for student body strength. In that study, it was shown that Harvard et al, while having markedly higher GPA averages than state schools, actually had tougher grading than state schools. It was pretty crazy. Having just bare GPA averages, everyone scoffed at the ‘rampant grade inflation’ at Harvard. Then when LSAT scores were pulled out as the equalizer (as contentious as this choice may be), it was clear Harvard kids deserved their high GPA’s and then some.</p>
<p>Transfers will naturally have to work harder to adjust to a new system. For some reason I’ve had a lot of exposure to brown over my College years (I’m a senior at Columbia). I’ve visited several times, dated a Brown girl, interned with Brown kids and have many highschool friends there. If there’s one things I’ve found, it is that they do well without busting their a$$ on classes. Many of them work hard in an all round sense, and push themselves to do triple majors, or get involved with many campus organizations, but individual classes do not see this “self-motivation”, because people are doing better with less work. If they do see this self-motivation it’s just as much as any other top school. If anything, I’ve found Brown students to be less academically driven, it’s probably a function of high average grades, a laid back atmosphere, flexibility to drop failed classes etc. </p>
<p>Someone with “self-motivation” does not lose it because they have to fight for a top grade. someone without this inner self-motivation on the other hand, does lose the motivation to learn and do well when they don’t have to compete to get a good grade. I find it impossible to believe that Brown students are somehow more self-motivated than any other ivy, in my experience it has been slightly the opposite academically. saying that brown thus deserves higher grades is incorrect, if not a little presumptuous.</p>
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