<p>I am a rising senior who is almost completely sold on Princeton (if I have the honor of being accepted, of course). However, the extremity of Princeton's grade deflation scares me when I think about graduate school.</p>
<p>As of right now, I think I want to get a BS in engineering, but go on to get a masters. I have no idea where I would want to go to get my masters, but I do want to be able to keep my options open.</p>
<p>What would some of the top tier graduate schools think when they see an average GPA (I heard that 3.3 was the average GPA at Princeton but I am not sure if this is true) compared to the average GPA at Harvard, or Yale (3.6/3.7 I think)? Would these applicants be on equal grounds for acceptance?</p>
<p>There was an older thread about this issue, but I thought it was fairly outdated. It also only covered medical school.</p>
<p>Thank you for taking the time to read this! It means a lot.</p>
<p>Harvard: 3.45 (This is from 2005; given the trend, it’s probably about 3.50 now.)
Yale: 3.51 (From 2008)
Princeton: 3.28 (From 2008)</p>
<p>So the difference is not as dramatic as you thought, though it is certainly significant. But these are averages across the institutions as a whole; in engineering in particular, I’d imagine that the grade-deflating policy at Princeton has had a disproportionately small effect, making its difference from Harvard and Yale less than .2. I have no knowledge, though, of how or whether engineering graduate schools compensate for that.</p>
<p>What I heard (a while ago, when I was looking at colleges) is that grade deflation ends up being a <em>good</em> thing for admission to graduate school because it better allows you to stand out from your peers. A 4.0 from a school with a 3.8 average looks significantly less impressive than a 3.9 from a school with a 3.28 average like Princeton.</p>
<p>I went to a school with a low average GPA (3.1 I think?) and ended up getting into some good places (including Princeton =) ) for graduate school at least partially because my GPA ended up having some meaning behind it.</p>
<p>That said, as I’m sure you’re going to be told countless times over the next 4 or so years, the most important aspect of a graduate school application is your research. Not GPA (though don’t fail out): research. Try getting a publication or two out by the time you’re applying. You’ll be glad you did.</p>
<p>Thank you silverturtle and cesium55, you were both amazingly helpful. I don’t know why I thought the gap was so great in GPA’s, or that Princeton would purposely screw over its students.</p>
<p>The research is important, and I haven’t been thinking about that until now. But Princeton would offer some great opportunities.</p>
<p>Having spoken with many grad school admissions officers, a 3.6 at Princeton will not look as good as a 3.7 from Harvard or Yale. Though Princetons faculty may try to make it seem so, it is false. What is true is that some students are upset about grade deflation and HY grade inflation helps a lot. Please see this article from Princeton students. The same holds true for medical and graduate school, and I would directly talk to an admissions officer instead of relying on Princeton propaganda.</p>
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<li><p>The article linked deals with law school admissions, which is notoriously numbers-based. And even there, it’s not like there was some massive difference between the success rates of Yale applicants and Princeton applicants – it was 37% vs. 32%. I love Yale, but anyone who would choose Yale over Princeton for this reason is nuts.</p></li>
<li><p>Engineering school is not law school. First, and most importantly, engineering masters students tend to have been engineering bachelors students, or students from related disciplines like physics, chemistry, applied math. And there isn’t meaningful grade inflation anywhere in the undergraduate engineering neighborhood. Engineering schools are not comparing a Princeton 3.5 to a Yale 3.7; they are comparing a Princeton 3.2 to a Yale 3.2. Second, engineering school admissions are less competitive than law school admissions. Engineering grad programs are fairly large, and the prestige differences among them are smaller, and matter far less, than law school differences. In law, there is a really significant difference between #1 and #10, and an even more significant difference between #10 and #20. In engineering, the drop off from #1 to #10 is much less, and I’m not certain that there is any drop off from #10 to #20. What’s more, engineering BS degree holders can get real, well-paying engineering jobs; there’s nothing really equivalent for wannabe lawyers. </p></li>
<li><p>I wonder how much of the average GPA difference between Yale and Princeton reflects the fact that Yale’s undergraduate engineering program is much smaller than Princeton’s – about 1/6 as big, if you look at traditional engineering fields, and 1/4 if you look at everything each school groups under “engineering”. That alone could easily account for half of the average grade difference between the colleges.</p></li>
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<p>My son and I just met with a private college counselor who gave us a list of top schools from which science and engineering doctorate recipients received their bachelor’s degrees from 1997-2006.
(Now, it doesn’t say where they get their doctorates only that they do get them)</p>
<p>1.Caltech
2. Harvey Mudd
3. MIT
4. Reed
5. Swarthmore
6. Carleton
7. U of C
8. Grinnell
9. Rice Univ.
10. Princeton
11. Harvard
12. Bryn Mawr College
13. Haverford College
14. Pomona College
15. New Mexico Institute of Mining and Tech
16. Williams
17. Yale
18. Oberlin
19. Stanford
20. Johns Hopkins</p>
<p>So at least you know Princeton’s pretty high up on the list of students who go onto graduate school in S & E.</p>
<p>That’s more about number than anything else though ^. I think? unless I am reading it wrong… Not about quality of student or quality of grad school.</p>
I don’t know why I thought the gap was so great in GPA’s, or that Princeton would purposely screw over its students.</p>