<p>Yeah that’s the type of study I’m talking about. Except the one I saw was done by a user from these boards, and was more recent.</p>
<p>My biggest concern is that the LSAT or any graduate admission test will have a lot of holes in the types of student they cover. Different types of schools will have different types of students going to law school and taking the LSAT. I wish someone would repeat the study (same format) but with the SAT, which all students take.</p>
<p>As to the original Canadian poster’s question about grading curves: all sorts of classes/schools do it differently. In most, I’d say the professor is pretty much god for her/his class, and they can choose to grade however they want. For some classes, it means grading on a “natural” curve (waiting until all scores are in, then seeing where on the scale students tend to clump. If they see on a grade distribution three distinct clumps, they have their A’s, B’s, and C’s, and those who fell way below get F’s). For some (especially, from what I’ve heard, upper division and small discussion courses), it means grading based on understanding: did all students end up really comprehending the material? If so, they all deserve A’s, because they accomplished everything (sometimes it’s if they accomplish everything and more) that was expected of them. It really depends on the class and professor.</p>
<p>thanks a lot guys! @crs1909’s link. It is old, but its probably still relatively accurate. So, I see all the Ivies and Top schools near the top of the list. So, does this mean that Medical Schools know that its harder to get a higher GPA at those schools and when it comes to Med School admissions realize that the 3.6 from Harvard is really great?</p>
<p>Like, let’s say one person goes to Baylor and gets a GPA of 3.75 and the other goes to Harvard and gets 3.5…will the Med Schools consider the GPAs to be about the same, or even prefer the Harvard student’s? I want to go to a top level med school, so I don’t want a lower GPA to kill me, yet if it’s easier to get a higher GPA elsewhere, would that benefit me?</p>
<p>Plus, I read “bluedevilmike’s” post on another thread saying the average GPA of a Duke student going to med school is 3.5. </p>
<p>This is off Baylor’s website about their Pre-Medicinal course:</p>
<p>“And of the 130 premedical completing the program annually, 60-65% are generally accepted for medical study (avg. GPA 3.6).” </p>
<p>This is terrible if a avg.3.6 GPA only gets 60% of students in. That means if you want to be a shoe-in to a great med school, you need around a 3.85 or higher. So, this means that grades at Baylor would be EASIER, correct? (since Med School’s only accept 60% of students with 3.6 GPAs, but around 80% of Duke’s students with 3.5 GPAs. (so around a 3.7 from Duke would get you in to some prestigious med schools I assume…along with other stats/comm. service, ECs, etc.)</p>
<p>confidentialcoll-</p>
<p>You may be talking to different people than I am, but I’m not talking about system adjustments. I’m talking about what the expectations were weekly to do well in a class and the difficulty of exams. Pretty simple thing to look at. I also think that you may be mistaking a lax attitude toward grades as a lack of work ethic. Maybe your friends are purposely choosing easier courses because for them, the outside of class stuff is a more important learning experience. At Brown, even the administration has used the phrase “co-curriculum” as opposed to “extra” because they’re viewed as equal pursuits in your education. The Open Curriculum gives you the freedom to lower your workload if that’s your desire, but I assure you, going through more challenging paths at Brown is as much if not more of a challenge than any you’ll find elsewhere. I know students who are transfers or masters students from notoriously difficult schools who get crushed under the load when they get here. Only some of that is system-based, and most all of them find they’re perpetually hard workers like the rest of us.</p>
<p>Some courses will always be graded on a curve and it makes sense for those classes. But grades are not always about differentiation, especially in a class of 8, and while not everyone everywhere or even at Brown agrees with that, as a someone who studies education and is going into schools systems soon, I have to say we’ll all be better off when we understand that.</p>
<p>ViggyRam: Just because graduate programs acknowledge differences in difficulty, it does not mean they will adjust their admissions criteria to make everything fair. For example, even if Berkeley Law does determine that a 3.5 GPA at Swarthmore is equivalent to a 3.8 GPA at Pepperdine, it does not follow that Berkeley Law will accept the 3.5 Swarthmore student over the 3.8 Pepperdine student. In fact, it is widely accepted knowledge that law schools do not give tough undergrad schools as much of a boost as they deserve, and any actual boost is in fact so tiny as to be negligible. This may also be true for med schools. Why do they make it unfair like this? Most people blame law school rankings which of course do not account for undergrad institution attended.</p>
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<p>Ok I’ll grant that a class of 8 students should not be graded on purely relative terms, because there really can be 8 super stars in a class, and in a small class motivation is a lot easier to monitor and influence. By the same token I’m sure you’ll find small classes where all 8 or 6/8 are demotivated. In these cases the average on an exam could be 65% and students would be outraged if they all received Cs. If you are going to argue for giving a small class As, you have to grant the opposite. I’ve never come across a class where the majority of students are given low grades even when they have definitely deserved it. If students in a class are all scoring 90+% then there’s a problem with the class, tests and teaching should be adapted to challenge the student more, every class can be made more thorough and more advanced and should if every student is managing to understand everything. Failing to do so, prevents the upper half of the class from recognizing their potential.</p>
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<p>this is only reason i can think of for grad schools to not account for difficulty of school. bloody rankings.</p>
<p>I would suspect ‘institutional diversity’ has something to do with it as well. Discounting weighted GPAs is a convenient way to favor less prestigious schools with weaker student bodies. This way law schools prevent academic stratification, and HLS doesn’t become an inbred Ivy cesspool.</p>
<p>quote/ For example, even if Berkeley Law does determine that a 3.5 GPA at Swarthmore is equivalent to a 3.8 GPA at Pepperdine, it does not follow that Berkeley Law will accept the 3.5 Swarthmore student over the 3.8 Pepperdine student. In fact, it is widely accepted knowledge that law schools do not give tough undergrad schools as much of a boost as they deserve, and any actual boost is in fact so tiny as to be negligible. /quote</p>
<p>So I was a transfer student, who went from a CC to Vandy, and the thing is, from my experiences, the students at the top 3.7/8+ would be top students, whether they went to Swarthmore or Pepperdine. Maybe a 3.7 Swarthmore student would receive a 3.8 at Pepperdine, but the difference wouldn’t be that big. At most, for the top students, I bet the difference would maybe be .1 or .2. I think the real difference would be for the 3.0 students. In that case, a 3.0 Swarthmore student might get a 3.3ish at Pepperdine.</p>
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<p>And when nearly 75% of classes are under 20 students? And an appreciable percent of classes are below 10? And many of the classes have subject matter unlike math and science where there is no objective, correct answer?</p>
<p>I agree completely that it should be possible to have a class where everyone gets Cs the same as a class where everyone gets As. However, a few points. </p>
<p>1) Everyone getting 65s may be great if the professors intention was to challenge the students and the expectation was that scores would be low like that. I’ve had many courses where this was the case and a 75 would not have meant separating yourself from the pack as much as it meant exceeding the expectations of a professor. </p>
<p>2) In an environment where you choose all of your classes and therefore classes are filled with people who affirm their desire to be in that class, what would all students doing poorly mean? Does it mean the students did not learn the material because of lack of motivation, the expectations of the professor were far off what was reasonable, or the professor simply failed to teach the material? In these moments, it’s not fair to assume that students who were in the top few percent in the country must all be slacking simultaneously as the first reaction. It may be true, but most professors will consult with colleagues and the class and the objective goals of the course and find that it was often not that their students were not working hard. No one likes to take an exam with questions they can’t answer and top achievers especially are not fond of this. Maybe in a more mixed space this is a student issue, but in small, top schools I don’t think this is the experience. My experience at Brown was that often a professor would find out they were trying to do twice as much in a semester as had been done previously in the course or they were way ahead of where other sections of the same course was, or they asked a question which somehow mislead students in an unanticipated way, or that they simply did a poor job teaching a particular concept which tanked the exam. Exams and grades can be formative as well as summative and evaluative.</p>
<p>3) Everyone doing well is not a sign that the top students are not being appropriately challenged. It may simply be a sign that in an environment which is already highly selective on who goes to that institution, then selective again as to who enters the class, there simply may not be a wide range of intelligence represented in the room. Especially in classes where collaborative work is encouraged, students may all walk into the room similarly prepared. That’s why in organic chemistry 1 and 2the standard deviation was routinely 15+ points whereas in the third semester of organic, the standard deviation was often 5 or 6 points.</p>
<p>When I went to an elite liberal arts college known for its grade deflation in the mid-70s, I had a 3.3 GPA at the end of two years. I then transferred to a renowned state flagship, where I earned a 3.9 GPA (and studied far less). Maybe times have changed, but the grades and coursework at the state flagship were a relative breeze.</p>
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<p>I respect your opinion, but this is exactly the kind of speculation that the LSAT study was meant to obviate.</p>
<p>My opinion is that the top students at Pepperdine would not be the top students at Swarthmore. I do agree with your second point that the absolute differences become wider towards the middle than at the very top; but this is just due to the nature of a long-tailed distribution.</p>
<p>Now that I think about it, the Berkeley LSAT study was in fact measuring top students. Only top students would apply to Berkeley Law. And it looks like, in the subset of top students, controlling for LSAT scores show that a top student from Pepperdine ranks many, many places below a top student from Swarthmore. The exact magnitudes are up for debate, so sure you may be right that the absolute difference amounts to a .1 or .2 margin.</p>
<p>do top schools have harder classes? In terms of teaching and expectations from students? For example, from UTexas to HYP, would classes be generally tougher at HYP since the students attending are already overachievers? </p>
<p>Would a HYP student transferring to UTexas find it easier there? Not necessarily getting better grades or anything, but just the difficulty of classes, difficulty of tests, etc.</p>
<p>I can’t say for all things, but I can say comparing my course work to some of friends, if there is a large enough gap between the schools there is a gap in the course work.</p>
<p>James098: my bad…by top students, i meant that they get high grades, regardless of the school they’re at</p>
<p>The general consensus I got from the transfers I talked to, most of whom had upgraded a tier or two in transferring to Vandy, was that Vandy is a little bit harder, but the main difference is that the workload (hw, readings, papers) is greater at Vandy. Also, it seems like the professors at Vandy do a heck of a lot more manipulation of grades than at the other schools I’ve been to. It seems like my grades at Vandy are a lot more subjective than at my previous schools because I’m fairly confident that had there not been curves or had my teachers not bumped up my grades this past semester, I wouldn’t have done nearly as well as I did.</p>
<p>Workload is also the most common thing I hear as being more intense at Brown.</p>
<p>oh ok. so workload is the only significant difference. Tests and such should be the same difficulty then? It’s not like I’m gonna base my decision on a college on this, but it’d be interesting to know.</p>
<p>Do yourself a favor and choose undergrad based on those four years. The percentage of people who change their plans during undergrad is so high that focusing too much now on making your choices due to what you may want to do later is probably not the best way to make a good decision.</p>
<p>Workload is not the only difference. Without bringing up some schools specifically, I know my exams in some classes were way more difficult than some places and similar to others.</p>
<p>I’ll put it to you this way…I’m a B student who gets an A+ in course selection. This semester I took Intermediate Micro with probably one of the easiest, if not the easiest, professors. I saw another professor’s tests and they looked quite a bit harder. Most kids at my school say that Int. Micro is the hardest Econ class. I thought that everything in that class, except for the final, was pretty easy. In the end, two main things factor into how hard a class is: the material and the professor. Luckily, in most cases, you can control who your professor is. </p>
<p>My advice would just be to talk to kids and consult ratemyprof to find out who’s easy and who’s not because an easy prof teaching Course 1 at Hard School is going to be easier than a hard prof teaching Course 1 at Easy School</p>
<p>^oh ok, thanks. I would love to visit the campuses of the schools I plan to apply to, but I live in Canada, so it’s going to be hard to visit them. </p>
<p>Yea, I’ve heard that here too…about ratemyprof. People here say that is one of the most important things to do before picking a class lol</p>