How hard to get a high GPA (3.8-4.0) at Yale

Colleges and Universities A-Z Yale University
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<p>Some questions:</p>

<p>I'm just wondering how hard it is to get a top GPA at Yale. I'm curious because I'm comparing the school to Brown, where it seems that grade inflation is even more intense and the ABC/NC grading system (no +'s and -'s) seems to help out a lot. And I'm mostly curious about grading in ECON and Computer Science.</p>

<p>How much paper writing is there at Yale? How many papers and how long each would you say you have per course? I am definitely much faster with problem sets than writing.</p>

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<p>See: <a href=“yaleherald.com”>yaleherald.com;

<p>The length of papers are course/professor dependent – some assignments are 5 pages long, others are 10-20. By comparison, some students spend 20 to 30 hours a week on their PSET’s. Time management seems to be key. It’s all been pretty manageable for my son, a junior – he claims Yale is actually easier than his high school, but he went to a school that required 3-4 hours of nightly homework after spending 7 hours in class.</p>

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<p>@gibby What is your son majoring in? Why types of classes (humanities, social sciences, life sciences, engineering, etc.) has he been taking?</p>

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<p>Yale > Brown IMO, just all around. Residential college system, not as many pot-smoking hippies, etc. </p>

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<p>As I’ve said before, I know many people who have turned down Stanford CS for Yale’s incredible student to teacher ratio. The “yale sucks at CS” thing is a CC invention; Yale is Yale, to put it simply. Now, if you want a lack of academic rigor, go to brown. The open schedule will allow you to take the easiest classes, if you so please. However, the distribution requirements at Yale are pretty lax, only demanding that a student take at least two courses per subcategory. The above poster is talking about prestige and prestige only; obviously Yale (and 3 or 4 other schools) is the ultimate brand name. If that matters at all to you, that’s probably something to consider.</p>

<p>Also, I’m not quite sure why you think that Yale’s econ is worse than Brown’s (as you said in another post). Yale tends to destroy Brown in pretty much every subject ranking (from QS to USNWR), econ included.</p>

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<p>@bradybest What do you have against pot-smoking hippies? Hahaha</p>

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<p>it’s pretty hard to get over a 3.8, but definitely doable. if you make that your main priority and put in enough effor you’ll succed</p>

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<p>It’s easy to get a high GPA at Yale. If this is your primary goal you can (1) work very hard in the classes you have to take for your major and (2) look for gut (easy) classes for the rest of your schedule. There are some people who do this, but most don’t take this approach.</p>

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<p>The intro CS sequence at yale is very rigorous.
but if you make GPa your first priority, it’ll take over your life, which I don’t recommend.</p>

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<p>Grading in the ECON dept is pretty chill because there are really nice curves a lot of students taking the intro and intermediate courses credit d. I have no background in computer science, but in econ if you takr work seriously you should almost always have an A- if not an A. Also, most econ and computer science courses don’t require papers at all. They’re just psets, midetersm, and finals. </p>

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<p><a href=“Honors cutoffs rose for 2012 grads - Yale Daily News”>http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2012/09/07/honors-cutoffs-rose-for-2012-grads/&lt;/a&gt; If you look at the academic honors for each graduating class, you can see that 3.8 is usually around the cutoff for cum laude, which means that 15% of the graduating class got a 3.8 or above. So in terms of “how easy” is it to get a 3.8 or higher, it puts you in the top 15% of your class.</p>

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<p>*top 30% of your class.</p>

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<p>^Correct, my bad</p>