<p>any current Dartmouth students have any comments on this?</p>
<p>the only thing i can tell you is that my daughter was an a+ student in high school and at dartmouth she is between a b+ and a- student.</p>
<p>Like many schools, the hard sciences tend to have grade deflation... the rest depends on individual professor and department</p>
<p>In general, I'd describe the typical class at Dartmouth as having grade inflation. My experience in some depts such as environmental studies is that agreeing with what the prof says is sufficient to get a high grade. On the other hand, occasional departments, like bio, do not practice any grade inflation whatsoever (part of the reason that Dartmouth premeds typically have lower GPAs than at equivalent schools).</p>
<p>In his limited experience, my freshman thinks there may be some grade inflation when the class is taken as a whole. However, by the same token, in his liberal arts courses he's had a professor rave over a paper of his, only to give him an A- simply because he failed to state outright some obvious fact, eg. that nuclear waste is dangerous to public health! So far it seems that in liberal arts course, A-'s are common, solid A's aren't. After all, the paper could always be better, right?</p>
<p>i'm an econ and gov major. i got a few a-'s, a lot of b's and a few c's in high school. i'm a straight a student at dartmouth. really, it's all about attitude. a lot of kids come to dartmouth as valedictorians from high school or whatever and don't accept that there are going to be tons of people smarter than them here. i realized that i was really lucky to get in in the first place, and i came in hungry to prove myself.</p>
<p>i agree with half baked, grades can radically change in college, and for many students, they aren't even striving for an A. Some might be valedictorians who are striving for a C.</p>
<p>There isn't rampant inflation (like Brown, Harvard, and Stanford) but its also no Chicago or JHU. Its slightly inflated in my opinion.</p>
<p>A lot of the humanities and social sciences classes are slightly inflated, but 4.0's are really rare. From my experience, it's not difficult to pull a decent or good grade (B+s and A-s are really common) but it's pretty hard to get an A.</p>
<p>Most science and math courses, though, especially large intro classes, are not inflated at all.</p>