Some friends who had a daughter getting her PhD in BioChem from Yale told us an interesting - and disconcerting - story. Their daughter vented to them about the entitlement of the undergrad students at Yale, and told them a story about an undergrad BioChem major insisting that the PhD candidate re-grade her exam omitting the “hard questions”. The PhD also said she needed permission from the department to give a student less than a “B”. Does this kind of thing actually go on? I have heard the joke about “the hardest thing about Harvard (or insert name of Ivy League school) is getting in”, and I have read about grade inflation at Ivies, but I did not think it was that bad.
Can recent grads, current students, or - better yet - current instructors shed light on this?
Not surprised that there are students at Yale (or any university for that matter) that are grade grubbers, especially those on a med school or other pre-professional track. D is a PhD student at a large well known flagship, and she has complained to us about some of the “entitled” kids she TA’s. Never heard of such a departmental grading policy as there are certainly “C”'s and lower handed out at Yale. S a recent Yale grad definitely knows of classmates receiving C’s. It is dependent on how the prof chooses to grade.
Really? I need more than that, because I just can’t believe it. I would love to see how the American entitled would do in normal French school. Total grade deflation, and there is no arguing.
I absolutely believe the attitude and expectation displayed by the undergrad student in the story is not a one off. I’m not getting into it further because it will devolve into debate.
And in answer to your observation, many American students would NOT do well in the French school you reference.
Terribly. The French are notoriously difficult graders (and their grading system is totally different than ours) - personally, I never got full points on anything.
The arguing and asking/insisting on re-grading stuff happens at all schools, not just at the level of Yale. Maybe it happens a lot more at schools like Yale. I don’t know, I’ve never taught at a college anywhere close to that level.
That’s different from having to get departmental permission to give a grade lower than a B. I’ve never heard of something like that and it would be disturbing as a professor to have to do that.
Here’s a little story that makes me chuckle:
A teacher at a private International school using the British system of grading was berated by an American mother because her child received a C. The teacher felt that the C grade was fair and in the British system it was not a bad grade. The mother stated that in the USA, C stood for crap.
At the same school, the junior football (soccer) team was playing against the b team of an American international school. The British parents were all upset that the other team were larger, and it was remarked that at least the British boys knew how to play the game. Anyhow, parents are ridiculous, so I guess that’s where the kids get it from.
When my daughter was applying to three selective colleges in Manhattan, it so happened that one of her teachers had been lecturing at a one of them at some point, and the spouse happened to be a Prof there.
They counseled her that she “could do better” than this particular, selective college “X”. The teacher was taken aback by the class sizes for a lecture on a super-specialized/niche subject - but most importantly, the spouse was frequently frustrated by pressure from administration to explain individual low grades, in cases when they were absolutely adequate.
I can’t comment on Yale, but it does seem that at at least some well-known colleges, there might be an expectation to “deliver” certain grades.
My nephew who graduated from Yale about 10 years ago told me at the time: “It can be hard to get an A, but it’s much harder to get a C.” My son currently at Harvard finds a similar experience.
Elite schools such as Princeton, UChicago, and Columbia were known for a very heavy workload and grade deflation. The grade deflation has largely gone, but the heavy workload remains.
In contrast, Harvard and Yale can be as easy or as difficult as the student wants to be, only subject to the required courses for the major. They offer highly challenging courses but generally don’t require students to take them. So while it’s perfectly possible for students to graduate without being challenged, my son’s experience is that most students are passionate about something, and that is where they seek to challenge themselves by taking the difficult courses, and take it easy in other courses.
Note that when it comes to the most difficult courses, students who do poorly in the initial exams are encouraged to drop the course if they get a C or below.
I’ve had three of my kids graduate from Yale in the past 6 years. There is definitely a disparity in academic readiness within the student body but everyone is exceptionally academically capable! Given this, it makes sense that most grades are A’s and B’s as the students are generally exceptional. Dean Chun was asked at a parents forum what he thought was the biggest challenge for the incoming freshmen. His response was that most of these students have never had any grade less than an A in their lives…and everyone is not getting an A! Some are most certainly earning their first C!
Madam, I am sure Freshman year at “elite” universities like Yale, MIT or Stanford is a shock for many students who were top, or near the top, of their HS class. Even if they attended a highly ranked public or private HS, they are now in classes filled with students from across the nation who were top of their respective classes.
Yes, it certainly can be. Some students get hit a bit later when they get into upper year classes.
In high school I was good at math, but bad at some other things such as French. When I got to MIT I think that it might have helped me that there was something that I was bad at. I had some clue what to do when a course is hard. Many of my classmates had never had any class that was difficult for them, and they did not know what to do. Many of us had to learn quickly how to study.
One daughter is currently in her first year of a DVM program. In the welcoming speeches several people emphasized that “C’s get degrees”. In a DVM program you have a very similar thing happen. Students who are used to getting a lot of A’s and very few B’s all of a sudden get a mid term exam back with a grade that they are not used to getting.
I have wondered about this. People talk about grade inflation at the top universities. However, the students at Yale and Harvard nearly all had top grades in high school. They are not all getting A’s at Yale and Harvard. It would seem that the grading at these top schools must be tougher than high school grading even if they do give out a lot of A’s. I suppose that grading should be tougher at a top university than it was in high school.
I also have some sympathy with schools that give out A+ grades (Stanford does, MIT does not). You have classes full of students who all got A’s all through high school. How do you distinguish the “exceptional” from the “very good”? You either need to give the very good students B’s and C’s, or give the exceptional students A+'s, or they all get A’s and you can’t tell them apart.
MIT gives no +/-, at least for transcript purposes.
Personally, I think the concept of A+ at the college level is BS, but that’s another issue. Anyway, even if a college has an A+ grade, some departments give nobody that grade. Or professors choose not to give that grade. I suppose if someone earns an uncurved 99 in a course where the median is 60 (which I have seen in my courses), an A+ is warranted. But in a subjective course, no
Plus the exams are generally tougher than what one had in HS. The questions are generally not copied from the text, and the answers may require more synthesis than a HS test.
Exceptional to what? Presumably not to each other. Some students are vastly more capable than others in one subject or another at Yale (or another school), and grades are used to differentiate. Otherwise, why do we assign grades in the first place?