<p>Grade</a> Inflation: Colleges With the Easiest and Hardest Grades - CBS News</p>
<p>Interesting .... though I have heard differently about some of these...</p>
<p>Calstate Fullerton? Oh, THAT’s the reason why I’ve heard bad thing about it…</p>
<p>Some of these schools make sense…but really? Did he try to compare the types of people attending these schools? If people at CSU-Fullerton and Harvey Mudd have about the same kind of grades, I think it just shows that Harvey Mudd is a very hard school (especially when everyone is in STEM) and that people at the CSU are just not as academically prepared.</p>
<p>I’d agree w Reed. Low % of people getting A’s, high % of people going on to get P.hd.</p>
<p>At Purdue there were massive curves and A was a cool 85 in my graduate Department for most classes. But it was department based, and other departments were different. </p>
<p>Also, the level of teaching was so good (in my department - graduate industrial engineering - at least) that you could put a brick in class and they’d learn the stuff, some of the professors were THAT good… So maybe there may be a method in the madness. </p>
<p>Also, there’s a big difference if the school is A+/A- or straight A/B…</p>
<p>It has been interesting to hear how different each U grades and whether the administration allows for alot of As for limits the # of As etc…</p>
<p>Also interesting is how a curve can work–How one student can have a B with a 60 and another student at a different school has a C for an 80…</p>
<p>The other interesting point is how some schools, like Brown allow for courses to be taken S/NC…not impacting the gpa.
I applaud schools like Brown for giving students the chance to explore and struggle, yet wonder if that skews the gpa since one would be inclined to take any difficult/non preferred subjects in that manner.</p>
<p>If you go to the bottom of [National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) , you can look up various schools’ GPAs.</p>
<p>The article is probably referring to GPAs in relation to admissions selectivity. CSU Fullerton’s GPA is 2.68 in 2005, while Harvey Mudd’s GPA is 3.31 in 2008.</p>
<p>I applaud schools like Brown for giving students the chance to explore and struggle, yet wonder if that skews the gpa since one would be inclined to take any difficult/non preferred subjects in that manner.</p>
<p>If difficult courses weren’t listed in GPA, would we assume that the GPA would be higher than otherwise?</p>
<p>Reed doesn’t give grades routinely, the student must make an appt with their advisor to see them. This perhaps also encourages focusing on learning rather than GPA.</p>
<p>^ I think that the ability to take many courses and not have them in GPA allows students to keep the tough stuff out of the GPA calc.</p>
<p>ALL students are to be focusing on learning…</p>
<p>If anything–the ability take the course without it reflecting on GPA…means the school IS focused on GPA…
and students artificially protect their GPA by taking courses S/NC or P/F …</p>
<p>I appreciate the whole “taking risks” mantra of schools like Brown and at the same time
Is it more honorable or “educational” to take a course S/NC or P/F than to take it for a grade and get a C?? The C impacts the GPA… That is more 'risk taking"</p>
<p>I think taking a course pass fail can take pressure off, but you might also having the student not doing best work if the student is normally motivated by grades.</p>
<p>^ Exactly.
And then taking only the gut courses or favorites where a student works harder for GPA means the GPA is skewed high…since it doesn’t include all work taken while at the U.</p>
<p>There is a lot of theorizing here without much data. I do not have much data either, but I do know that the system at Brown has worked the way it was designed to for our D. She opted to take one course S/NC in her freshman year. In the spring, she took an extra course—a sociology course—simply out of curiosity. Courses taken for a grade included two differential equations courses and three computer science courses. The sociology course was obviously the least challenging course she took. In her case, at least, the S/NC option encouraged her to take an additional course that she would not otherwise have taken. </p>
<p>Students are strongly advised to take courses in their concentrations (majors) for a grade. (Just try applying to graduate school after taking courses in your major S/NC.) At the same time, taking the occasional elective S/NC seems like a good idea to me.</p>
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Seriously? could it be related to the quality of work the students produce?</p>
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<p>I think it makes a big difference if the course taken pass/fail is taken on top of an already full load of classes. My science major D took an upper division English course S/U (she had to get at least a C- for the S) because the subject of the course was her favorite author and she didn’t have to worry about competing for an A with senior English majors. She was enrolled for 19 credits that semester.</p>
<p>there is an informative discussion about this on the brown forum where fogfog created an identical thread. my S is a freshman at brown and as a neuro/pre-med student he can’t take any of his science/math courses pass/fail (unfortunate since brown is well-known for having the most difficult organic chem courses in the nation, even amongst its peers:)).</p>
<p>“I think that the ability to take many courses and not have them in GPA allows students to keep the tough stuff out of the GPA calc.” (fogfog) – </p>
<p>not if they’re interested in going to any type of grad school or applying for a competitive job – that was made clear during orientation. brown isn’t attracting or accepting loafers, not w/ acceptance rates under 9%. one of the reasons it was my S’s no. 1 choice is b/c it’s known for its student body that loves learning for the sake of learning, hence its ranking in the top 10 for most intellectual student body by the princeton review and *****, the top website for college descriptions written by students. i think the two things the pass/fail option promote are 1) taking additional classes beyond the usual load of 4 a semester (like the brown students discussed here and over at the brown forum, it seems that many take a 5th course pass/fail, and certainly this grading option encourages kids to take on additional classes) and 2) intellectual curiosity = taking classes way out of your comfort zone that you might not take if you were at a school where this wasn’t an option. I would imagine that at schools where the kids don’t have these grading options, if so inclined, they’d game their GPA by staying away from classes that they think would sink their GPAs, not venturing far from disciplines in which they feel competent. And for their distributions, the non-scientist, for instance, might take “physics for poets,” or the foreign language-challenged might take sign language, as my neighbors’ daughter is doing at her LAC which has distribution requirements. She’s not the least bit interested in sign language; she’s in the class to fulfill her requirements. Obviously, this problem doesn’t exist at brown. (the profs I met during my S’s orientation told me that it’s a joy to teach at brown b/c the kids who are in their classes want to be there – there’s no dead wood.) </p>
<p>I do believe that the open curriculum at brown influences the type of student it attracts – these kids are independent, want to shape their own education, and relish an intellectual challenge whether they’re graded or not. it’s not for everybody.</p>
<p>and finally, fog i think it’s “honorable (wc?) and educational” to take a course because you’re deeply interested in it, regardless whether, or how, you’ll be graded. as i’ve always told my kids, it’s not about the grade, it’s about what you’ll bring to the class and what you’ll get out of it. my S audited classes during high school beyond those required. he did all the reading and participated in class although knew he wasn’t being graded. he took them b/c he was like a kid in a candy shop: so many classes interested him but he only had so much time to study for exams. I’m not so sure you do “appreciate the whole ‘taking risks’ mantra of schools like Brown,” but that’s OK b/c not everyone does :)</p>
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The work produced by the students at my MA institution was, to be frank, abysmal. The only comfort while reading such dreck was that it was frequently highly amusing (think something like [this[/url</a>] or [url=<a href=“http://mistupid.com/people/page027.htm]this[/url]”>Stupid People - Bad Metaphors]this](<a href=“http://strangeplaces.net/weirdthings/students.html]this[/url”>a history of the world according to student bloopers)</a>). While some students put forth effort, produced thoughtful work, and received A’s, I had no qualms whatsoever about assigning about 1/3 of my students the D’s and F’s they deserved. </p>
<p>My students at UCLA are bright, engaged, and generally produce excellent work – and their grades reflect that.</p>
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<p>What colleges and universities (that have normal grading systems) do not allow a passed / not-passed type of grade option? Seems to me that most do, although it cannot be used for courses required by your major.</p>
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<p>Of course, a Brown student may choose to take no science at all.</p>
<p>Thank you warblersrule for the first of your two links. I hadn’t laughed so hard in a long time.</p>
<p>When I was at Wellesley in the early/mid 70s, some people would take some courses at MIT for the easy A. The average grade given at W at the time was a C-. There was no such thing as pass/fail at all, even though it had become common at Ivies. The term paper companies supposedly guaranteed a B+ at every school in the Boston area except W, where they guaranteed a C. We were also not allowed to drop or change courses. This was “liberalized” when I was a senior, but if you did drop a course after the first week (IIRC), and no written work had been assigned or turned in yet, it would go on your transcript as “Dropped Failing.” It was common for MIT students taking English courses at W to drop after turning in their first paper–or even before that–when they realized that they were probably going to get a C. (They, of course, had the privilege of dropping at will, unlike us.) I was interested to discover, when a few years later I had grad school friends from Williams, that the top 20% of students there seemed to be Phi Beta Kappa. At W, about 6 or 7 students per year got it. (And it appeared that you had to be the favorite student of a professor with clout. This is not sour grapes on my part, since I had no delusions of being in the running.) 70% of the students at Harvard in those days graduated with some degree of honors.</p>
<p>Did this punitive structure result in a “better” education overall that than obtained at Harvard and MIT? I doubt it. Certainly I can testify that the English courses at W were far, far more challenging and probably more interesting than those at MIT to anyone with a serious interest in the subject, and it is likely that many of the other courses in the humanities were also. But it is also likely that the science and math classes at MIT were significantly more challenging and more interesting than those at W. Certainly the teaching philosophy in those areas was different, relying far less on memorization and more on conceptual understanding and intellectual creativity. (It is also true that MIT friends of mine who took some Harvard Med courses were astonished when they realized that they were actually expected to have MEMORIZED all this stuff. They were used to open-book exams that focused on something quite different from regurgitation. I admired the MIT way tremendously.)</p>
<p>One thing that the grading system at W did do was handicap graduates in competing for fellowships, when compared to students from other elite schools.</p>
<p>I think that the author of the article fails to understand the motivation of a student who takes courses to LEARN rather than to engage in grubbing for a good grade. She apparently cannot comprehend a student who will strive for the sake of excellence itself. I would venture to guess that there are many students of that type at Brown. She probably also cannot comprehend someone who will strive to excel at work unless they receive monetary reward for their performance.</p>
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<p>LOL. (Yeah, I’m sure that students at MIT and Caltech would readily agree.) </p>
<p>Yes, pre-professional need grades. But according to Brown supporters on CC, the College curves still science many of its courses to an A- average. No other college does the same. None. The same premed course at Dartmouth, which the exact same quality of students, would be graded on a B curve.</p>
<p>There is a great reason why Brown has the highest mean gpa in the land. Extremely smart choice for any pre-professional. :)</p>