<p>Does it exist?</p>
<p>Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.</p>
<p>Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.</p>
<p>Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.</p>
<p>Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.</p>
<p>Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"</p>
<p>Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke (1) your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.</p>
<p>Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel, (2)
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!</p>
<p>Yes and no. Let's define grade inflation as a grading distribution where the median is a B or higher.</p>
<p>Math, Econ, Wharton, Biology, Physics, etc = no</p>
<p>English, Psychology, Political Science, History, Sociology, Languages, etc = yes</p>
<p>Now we also need to account for what I like to call "super grade inflation," where the median is an A-. This is the real problem.</p>
<p>One finds this in two places: The English department, and writing seminars (usually run by the English department). This is how you get the cocaine-snortin' ugg boots-wearin', trust fundin' sorority girls with 3.8's that make you scratch your head about how they even got in.</p>
<p>Median on my last econ midterm was an A-......</p>
<p>Median on the econ midterm before that was a B</p>
<p>Econ is definitely grade inflated, though not as bad as English.</p>
<p>Engineering is not.</p>
<p>why would you worry about grade inflation? isn't that a good thing?</p>
<p>Apparently not for bio majors...</p>
<p>lululemon I'm wondering exactly the same thing...This might be terribly naive on my behalf and plese bear with me, I am the first in my family to go to the US for undergrad so I'm not that familiar with the system, but wouldn't grade inflation be good for the student because when recuirtment time comes he'd have a great GPA?</p>
<p>Grade inflation is a mixed bag. Your transcript says "School X. GPA: Y"</p>
<p>If someone else from your school has a different major (humanities, let's say) and their classes have "grade inflation" (median grades of A) then if you study something that's not inflated (engineering or Wharton at Penn, for example) then you will get the short end of the stick. Sure, recruiters know that those disciplines are more difficulty, but it's not fully discounted. The 4.0 English major looks a lot better than the 2.9 engineer when they both apply to Law school.</p>
<p>This is a subject of hot debate for the Ivy League: "what exactly is grade inflation? are our students smarter or our professors easier than 10 years ago?"</p>
<p>@JCO: I actually had to memorize that for a class many years ago.</p>
<p>JCo, why did you write the White Man's Burden on a Grade Inflation thread?</p>
<p>Matt: that's awesome.</p>
<p>Venkat: Sometimes, a little kipling is what someone needs.</p>
<p>JCo love this poem - dunno why but it has got an aesthetic look.</p>
<p>Grade inflation (to me) is indeed a mixed bag. We had an occasion when we received the marks for our term paper and everyone got an A or A- (except 2 guys with a B and one with an A+). Now usually you (and especially those who aren't that good in school) would be happy about an A- or even a B+ (German grading system is a little bit different, a B+ is a pretty good grade) but we simply weren't. </p>
<p>Of course we all worked a lot for it and wanted credit for the work we had done and now you are one point better than your classmate who has hardly done half of the tasks. I mean this kills your motivation at all. </p>
<p>Another story is that my Latin class teacher was an *******, in fact he was a genius and a terrific teacher but he did not give good grades nor was he particularly friendly. He gave us wrong vocab so we could not find out which text he would use in the tests for instance - which is fine. But the other class new EVERY test text beforehand and thus easily wrote the translation down they had looked up before.</p>
<p>In the end, I was greatly satisfied with the B- I earned (again - German grading system is a little bit different, you really never see a straight As and the average is C) but if a recruiter compares the A- all the guys in the other latin class received with my grade, my performance doesn't shine.</p>
<p>To conclude - for job prospects, grade inflation is the best which can happen to you but personally, I don't condamn grade deflation, just because I feel better. I'm not naive but grade inflatiuon isn't the holy grail.</p>
<p>Here's the deal:
In the humanities classes, it's not too hard to get a B or B+, but can be difficult to get an A or A-. In pre-med science & math, Wharton, and engineering, sometimes you have to work your butt off just to get a B. Plenty of freshman here fail their first science or math mid term thinking it will be as easy as their high school APs were.</p>
<p>Pretty difficult to get a really high GPA unless you either work all the time or are very careful choosing your professors.</p>
<p>Oops... I forgot how inflated Econ 101 and 103 are. I was thinking of econ 1 and 2, which rocked me with their tough curves.</p>
<p>There's also variation across time. I heard that Astronomy 1 was an easy class where everyone got A's, when I took it I got a hard teacher and got a B+.</p>
<p>
[quote]
In the humanities classes, it's not too hard to get a B or B+, but can be difficult to get an A or A-. In pre-med science & math, Wharton, and engineering, sometimes you have to work your butt off just to get a B. Plenty of freshman here fail their first science or math mid term thinking it will be as easy as their high school APs were.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This is rather untrue.</p>
<p>Eh, college is an adjustment. 'nuff said.</p>
<p>Econ courses vary in difficult I'd say, some upper-level classes can be curved very harshly since all are major students and there's only 25% A's to go around. The more fluffy ones are easier though.</p>
<p>Writing seminars are NOT usually run by the English department. Even the ones that are listed as ENGLXXX are not run by the department. They are all run through the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. In upper level seminar classes, you do have to work to get into the A range.</p>
<p>
[quote]
In the humanities classes, it's not too hard to get a B or B+, but can be difficult to get an A or A-. In pre-med science & math, Wharton, and engineering, sometimes you have to work your butt off just to get a B. Plenty of freshman here fail their first science or math mid term thinking it will be as easy as their high school APs were.
[/quote]
[quote]
This is rather untrue.
[/quote]
Sounds true to me.</p>
<p>I do not think it is true at all. Then again it may depend on what you like doing. I did well in my Math and humanities classes, but I found classes like Management and Accounting to be really hard to do well in.</p>