I don’t think grad schools are going to be fooled by a transcript full of P/F grades.
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Probably not. Just wondering, which applicant would a grad school choose to admit? The one from Brown with a transcript full of pass/fail grades or the one from down the road at URI with a transcript full of As, A-s, and a smattering of Bs?
Do applicants graduating from prestigious universities get quality points from grad school admissions offices?
I’m not sure about professional schools (medical, law schools, etc.) but grad schools that grant PhDs and are worth spending a few years on all have lots of experiences analyzing applicants transcripts. Unlike undergraduate admissions, their applications are examined in great details, and acceptance decisions made by professors in the relevant fields. These professors are familiar not only with the courses applicants took, but how their undergraduate colleges grade and how students from such colleges perform in the past. They pay great attention to research and LoRs from professors who are in the same field and whom they’re often acquainted with. Some of them will interview promising applicants to make sure they are who they seem to be.
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Doubtful. It used to be a joke among engineering majors that business (and some other non-engineering) classes were ways to pad one’s GPA, so there was obviously incentive to take them for letter grades rather than passed / not-passed. Also, certain general education requirements at UCB, such as the English composition course(s), may not be taken passed / not-passed.
For PhD programs, it is more department prestige and that of the specific recommendation writers in subject than college prestige that can matter.
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Brown actually has statistics on transcripts “full” of Pass grades and it’s MUCH lower than anyone thinks. I took one class Pass/Fail (it was outside of my comfort zone academically, and at the recommendation of the professor who said “I want you to love the class without worrying about how you are doing.” I did love it even though it was super hard for me). Most of my friends took one or two Pass/Fail, and a few took zero. The policy allows the applied math major to take a demanding Renaissance History class, and an econ major to take the Impressionism/Post-Impressionism seminar which is mostly grad students, without feeling like they are going to drown.
I agree that P/F is good for some students. Those that are truly going to get a low grade, or those that are overworked and stressed out about a course. That’s fine. But I don’t think it is for kids like my son. He is a straight A student that quite frankly does not work very hard for those grades, is not stressed out and really enjoys his non-major courses. He was considering P/F for a Shakespeare course (he’s a math/CS double major) that he thought he “might” get a B+ in. That just seems like the easy way out, at least in his situation. My husband and I told him it is better to get a B in a non-major course rather than take it P/F because it would be assumed that he was in danger of a C or lower, or he was too obsessed with a high GPA. He ended up with an A-.
I also find it hard to believe that everyone does it, but I looked it up and at least in L&S you do have the option of taking all breadth requirements (which are the general ed requirements) P/F. I hope that most students don’t!
UCB L&S does not allow taking courses to fulfill the reading and composition, quantitative reasoning, or foreign language requirements passed / not-passed. The seven course breadth requirement courses may be taken passed / not-passed.
https://lsadvising.berkeley.edu/degree-requirements
There are other restrictions, such as taking no more than 1/3 of the credits for the BA degree passed / not-passed. Pre-med and pre-law students are advised to consider that large amounts of passed / not-passed may not look too good to application readers for professional schools.
https://lsadvising.berkeley.edu/policies/grading-options-letter-graded-and-passno-pass
Oh I forgot that there were other requirements in addition to the breadth courses. But 1/3 of credits can be P/F? That’s actually even worse than I thought. That’s more than a whole year’s worth of courses P/F. Yikes!
Here are some stats on some common courses taken by non-majors (presumed breadth requirements):
Physics 10 (a “physics for poets” type of course) had 29.6% taking it P/NP. But Sociology 3AC (an introductory course specifically for non-sociology majors) had only 10.2% taking it P/NP.
Here are some more courses that are likely heavy with non-majors:
Note that the percentage taking these courses P/NP is under 20%.
I’d be curious how the percent that take courses P/F has changed over time. If it’s gone from say 5% to 15%, that would cause GPAs to go up a fair bit I’d think.
Here’s recent grade data from Brown. In 2020-21 67% of all grades were A (74% As in the Life and Medical Science disciplines), 10% Bs, 1% Cs (the remainder P/F). These percentages could be higher because of the pandemic (but the pre-pandemic trend was still increasing), will see if they normalize. But for now, when pre-meds ask which Ivy league school to attend, I’m going with Brown.
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This article goes beyond just grade inflation in colleges:
Registration is required to read the whole article. Here’s an excerpt:
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This has been so far removed from my D’s college experience that this model is totally unrecognizable.
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Right. It isn’t universal, thankfully.
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I can’t imagine paying for my son/daughters education and a transcript filled with P/F grades. I don’t know if that was even available when I went to college. Certainly seems useless.
I doubt it’s common in engineering, but it rings true in social science. I worry particularly about the potential for dumbing down of quantitative courses in some of those majors since those courses seem to attract the largest amount of pushback (presumably because the answers are either right or wrong).
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This is so individual even at colleges where P/F is possible.
I went to Brown- and was originally planning on a doctorate in Classics or something related to Antiquity. My advisors (both freshman advisor, before I declared a major, and then my Classics advisor) told me straight up that P/F in one class (or maybe two) in econ or physics or math was fine. But nothing related to my major if I planned to get accepted to a top grad program.
Then I switched gears and applied to B schools- and was accepted to a top 5 program, and I’m pretty sure that more than one or two P/F’s in a non-related discipline would have been a knock out factor, especially since my transcript had virtually nothing related to business on it as an undergrad.
So it makes nice headlines that your future neurosurgeon phoned it in as an undergrad, or that the team that designed the engine on the plane you’re flying on, or that the epidemiologist that tracks measles infections among pre-schoolers took all the courses P/F but that’s not reality. Nobody is getting into a rigorous grad program without a legitimate transcript.
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Most students don’t intend to pursue graduate degrees or careers in quantitative fields. Most employers don’t seem to care or know much about course rigors or grade inflation. Unless they start to care, the trend will probably continue.
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