<p>In this competitive world should Colgate's policy of grade deflation effect your decision on whether to attend?</p>
<p>How</a> grade deflation can affect your college selection | USA TODAY College</p>
<p>Is graduate school or professional school admission (med, dental, law) hindered by this policy? Many seen to think it really doesn't matter where you attend. It's the GPA that is important. Why not attend the states flagship college and get that 3.8 gpa instead of settling for a 3.4 gpa at Colgate? Your thoughts and comments appreciated.</p>
<p>Some years ago, a top law school (which may have been Stanford) adopted a mathematical multiplier as part of its admissions process. It had found that all A’s from undergrad schools were not equal. Using whatever insights it had – which I assume included levels of success applicants from different undergrad schools had had at Stanford – they arrived at multipliers to raise or lower the GPA’s of students applying to Stanford to more accurately norm them. </p>
<p>Among those which were lowered were some of the top academic lights in the country, including a few of the Ivies, which had evolved very generous grading policies where A’s were common for fairly ordinary work, in some cases. </p>
<p>A few schools, most of them small and rigorous liberal arts colleges of the Bowdoin-Amherst-Williams variety, got GPA boosts. Colgate was one of the top schools on Stanford’s list of GPA’s to raise. </p>
<p>I don’t have the article (fromt the WSJ some years ago) in front of me, but I remember that of the 40 or so colleges listed, Colgate’s multiplier was somewhere around fourth highest. This means that Stanford, and one would think some other similarly competitive law schools, thought very highly of Colgate’s academic program and recognized that at Colgate, high grades were tough to get. I find that a lot more appealing than the lame and lazy “Easy A” approach so common in many colleges. Rigor is good, and tough grading is not bad since it insists you can do better. And who can’t?</p>
<p>This list was made by UC Berkley for their law school. It lasted only a few months before it was made illegal because it discriminated against historic all-black colleges. Honestly, I wish we would stop touting this list with pride, as it is embarrassing and counter to the open-minded values that we were taught at Colgate. </p>
<p>For medical schools, there is no magical list where Colgate comes up on top. In my experience (at top medical school interviews), most professors knew very little about Colgate or its reputation (most interviewees were from ivys so Colgate was no competition). For med school, all A’s are considered equal unless they are from top ivy league schools or those attached to top medical schools (e.g. Northwestern, WashU, Michigan). Nevertheless, I think Colgate was a great learning experience and I got a lot of one on one interaction with my professors that my peers in medical school did not get from their college.</p>
<p>Getting all A’s at Colgate is not impossible. However, as with every other school out there, B’s will harm your chances for graduate school.</p>
<p>The mathematical multiplier is very generous to liberal arts schools including Reed, Allegheny College, and also universities like UChicago and Princeton. In fact, schools like Reed and St. Johns have the majority of their students not even glancing at their GPA’s throughout their 4 years. Even more radical, New College of Florida got rid of the GPA altogether. Remarkably, St. Johns, Reed, and New College have fabulous grad school placement with high PhD production.</p>
<p>I think most graduate schools and big employers know that Colgate doesn’t give out inflated grades and have great respect for it’s graduates. A friend’s son got a summer internship at a world famous research facility. He was shocked to get it, as he was a bit insecure over his 3.2 GPA as a physics major. Midway through his time there, he had an opportunity to ask the department head how he happened to get the position. The quote as I remember was “I would take a 3.2 student out of Colgate over a 3.8 student from Cal Berkley any day.”</p>