<p>Is there grade inflation or deflation at Brown, and if so, how much?</p>
<p>some would argue that grades at brown are "inflated" because in non-curved classes more than 1/3 of the class often get A's.
in practice, the philosophy of education at brown, and the philosophy of most professors is to give people the grade they deserve--independently of how they compare to their classmates. if everyone deserves an A, everyone can theoretically get one. if no one in the class does A work by the professor's standards, no one will get one. the idea is to foster collaboration and cooperation over cut-throat competition.</p>
<p>In class, I've heard numbers greater than 1/3 of students getting A's. I think my History class prof. said that 40 something percent of grades given out schoolwide are A's. 40 percent of kids deserve A's- kids here put in work. I transferred to Brown from a top 20 liberal arts college, where I had a 4.0- I would guess I did more work at Brown, and got a 3.5</p>
<p>Dont be fooled- the numbers are the numbers. </p>
<p>Brown is a major player in grade inflation.</p>
<p><a href="http://gradeinflation.com/brown.html%5B/url%5D">http://gradeinflation.com/brown.html</a></p>
<p>I really hate to say it, but yeah, Brown inflates grades, at least in the humanities. I'm not sure how to get a B in humanities...I did next to nothing all semester and ended up with A's, only one of which I deserved. Sometimes I wish profs would just give well deserved B's...</p>
<p>Actually the website stated that Brown's change in GPA is 0.13 in 10 years. Slightly below the national average. I would say that the grade inflation depends on the classes</p>
<p>according to an article published in one of the other ivy's newspapers, then reprinted in Cornell's, about 46-52% of all grades given out are A's. This is right behind Penn whom gives out slightly more. Result: highly grade inflated.</p>
<p>I hate discussions of grade inflation. I think grades are inappropriate at Brown anyway. What I will say is this: The caliber of the students at Brown has grown immensely over the last ten years. The idea that the grading should have stayed the same despite that is, to me, silly, as is the idea that creating some kind of academic hierarchy using GPA's is some kind golden goal that schools should hold themselves to.</p>
<p>If you want to take easy classes and make the 4.0 you can. If you want to take extremely difficult classes and struggle for a 3.0 you probably could do that too. I don't know which classes Robo has been in, but it has not been my experience that classes are a cakewalk.</p>
<p><em>shrug</em> I haven't taken any of the classic gut classes if that's what you mean. Most of them have been at the advanced level in my department, with the result that I'm nearly finished with my concentration. I think part of the problem is that since it's a small department, the professors know me pretty well, and even if I didn't really perform well in class, they for some reason give A's anyway.</p>
<p>Oh, no, I was not trying to suggest anything about the courses which you had chosen. But, I was saying essentially that the courses offer a manageable challenge which again varies from person to person</p>
<p>Oh yeah, as always at Brown, the courses are what you make of them, and you'll probably always be challenged no matter what. (Now, deciding to study and meet those challenges...that's the tough part.)</p>
<p>"according to an article published in one of the other ivy's newspapers, then reprinted in Cornell's, about 46-52% of all grades given out are A's. This is right behind Penn whom gives out slightly more. Result: highly grade inflated."
All grades given does not represent the grade distribution for the grades of the students that take the class S/NC would not be reflected in the distribution.(as well as all the writing classes, etc that require mandatory S/NC) Furthermore, it's only plausible that a lot of the students, especially those who were unsure of their performance in the class, would take the class S/NC. That would left the grade distribution very skewed...</p>
<p>Not really worth worrying about, but here are a few points to consider:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>A large proportion of A's is typical at elite colleges and universities, Brown, the other ivies, other top universities, the leading LAC's.</p></li>
<li><p>Grades tend to be lower in engineering and natural science than in humanities and social sciences. When comparing overall GPA's across colleges, you must control for the proportion of students who are majoring in (and therefore taking many of their classes in) these different fields. This can differ widely among colleges. Thus, not meaningful to compare overall GPA at a tech school (overhwhelmingly engineering, math and science majors) to a very liberal arts-oriented college (mainly humanities and soc sci majors). </p></li>
<li><p>Grade inflation.com uses old data of varying ages from different colleges. So the mean gpa figures cannot be compared from one school to the next unless you adjust for the difference in time.</p></li>
<li><p>Grades overall have been going up, but "inflation" implies higher grades for equivalent work. Virtually no one has even attempted to determine whether this is the case. Instead, they simply assume that if grades have gone up, then grading standards have become more generous. In the humanities in particular, professors have reported that with word processing, spell and grammar checking, they rarely see papers with technical deficiencies that used to be common. No systematic data on this that I know of.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>But most important SO WHAT? Perhaps it is a hold over from high school, but it is hard to imagine a concern of less importance than the level of so-called grade inflation. It tells you nothing about educational quality, subjective experience, subsequent career sucess of the students, resources of the university, feel of the undergraduate housing, attention from professors. In short, after all the analysis, it is meaningless.</p>
<p>"according to an article published in one of the other ivy's newspapers, then reprinted in Cornell's, about 46-52% of all grades given out are A's. This is right behind Penn whom gives out slightly more. Result: highly grade inflated."
All grades given does not represent the grade distribution for the grades of the students that take the class S/NC would not be reflected in the distribution.(as well as all the writing classes, etc that require mandatory S/NC) Furthermore, it's only plausible that a lot of the students, especially those who were unsure of their performance in the class, would take the class S/NC. That would left the grade distribution very skewed..."</p>
<p>Um, S/NC is included in that distribution--it's like 48% As, 23% Bs, 3% Cs, 24% S, 2% NC</p>
<p>I didn't see this mentioned anywhere, but keep in mind that Brown doesn't give Ds, and that NCs (aka Fs) do not show up on a transcript. It is thus impossible to have a GPA lower than 2.something, the fact that there are no +/-s also messes things up.</p>
<p>No +'s or -'s? So we can have straight 90%'s and have a 4.0uw gpa?</p>
<p>woah thats cool</p>
<p>I have never taken a college course where the grade cutoff was 90%, lol.</p>
<p>i mean, yes, you can do A- work and get a 4.0, but I mean it's not like employers and admissions officers don't know that.</p>