<p>I was wondering what the competition is like in the Honors program at Michigan. Since it's Honors, I have a feeling that it'll be very, very hard to get high grades... almost as hard as higher-ranked schools such as Duke and Northwestern? </p>
<p>How hard is it to maintain a high GPA? (my main question)</p>
<p>hard…</p>
<p>Umich in general is probably harder than Northwestern. Umich is known for grade deflation.</p>
<p>“almost as hard as higher-ranked schools such as Duke and Northwestern?”</p>
<p>Michigan is an academic peer of those other two schools who happen to be higher ranked at USNWR. Please don’t get into the mindset that it’s going to be any easier at U-M.</p>
<p>Work hard. Pre-med (or any) weeder classes have that reputation for a reason, but it’s not like there’s no A’s given.</p>
<p>And as far as Honors goes though, you’re pretty much only going to have one class that’s all Honors students, and that’s Great Books. (There’s a few Honors seminars and stuff, but they’re not terrible.) So aside from that, there’s little internal competition within Honors.</p>
<p>Ok. Thanks for the help, guys.</p>
<p>Wait, there’s grade * deflation * at Michigan? Damn.</p>
<p>Dude, the average LSA GPA is a 3.1. The engineering average is a 2.9. You are going to have to work.</p>
<p>Wow. That’s super low. Yeah I love to work, so I definitely will work ridiculously hard. I just don’t want my super hard work to come to nothing. I don’t want anything to come easy.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that the LSA GPA for science majors is probably lower.</p>
<p>Sent from my iPhone using CC</p>
<p>Contrary to popular belief, there is, in-fact, grade inflation. </p>
<p>[University</a> of Michigan](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/Michigan.html]University”>University of Michigan)</p>
<p>^^^Actually all I see from that chart is that the university is getting better and better students over time.</p>
<p>Blackpen, </p>
<ol>
<li>MIT shows a similar trend of increasing GPA over the same time period.<br></li>
</ol>
<p>I don’t think the trend of increasing gpa on its own over time is sufficient to argue for grade inflation due to the fact that this trend seems present in all universities. I don’t think anyone would make the argument that MIT is grade-inflated, yet it shows the same increasing trend.</p>
<ol>
<li>Johns Hopkins, although they have a very small time period sample, shows a similar average gpa (2006-3.24) to UMich-Ann Arbor (2006-3.25).</li>
</ol>
<p>Most people (hopefully you do) accept the fact that Hopkins is grade-deflated, so this should give a good benchmark for what a “grade-deflated” average gpa is among top institutions. </p>
<ol>
<li>Compare gpas during the same time period among schools of the same caliber</li>
</ol>
<p>Instead of using the omnipresent trend of increasing average gpa over a long time period to argue for grade deflation/inflation, you should look at similar schools during the same time period. For example, Duke has a recent average gpa of 3.42 (2006). UC Berkeley has an average gpa of 3.27 (2006). Is the caliber of students accountable for a .15 difference in average gpa, or is it something akin to grade deflation instead? When you take into account that the average gpa of UMich engineering students is around 2.7 or 2.9, it seems likely that there are institutional differences at play. Most strikingly, this is illustrated by a comparison between Princeton and Yale. Princeton (2008, 3.28) is well-known for grade deflation in the sense that they explicitly limit the number of As to a certain percentage of students in every class. Yale (2008, 3.51), in contrast, has an average gpa that is .23 higher than that of Princeton and, to the best of my knowledge, has no such grading policy in place. Even among the most staunch supporters of USNWR rankings will not argue a significant difference in the quality of students among these two institutions and yet there is a disparity in gpa of .23. Harvard (2006, 3.45), without Princeton’s grading policy and with a similar student caliber, provides additional support to this argument.</p>
<p>In contrast, the trend of increasing gpa over time can, at least in part, be explained by the similar trend of better students over time as rjkofnovi indicated in the post above.</p>
<p>In conclusion, I would argue that UMich-LS&A either has grade deflation or does not have grade inflation.</p>
<p>In answer to the original post, it depends which classes you take. </p>
<p>Certain honors classes are known as being more difficult conceptually relative to their non-honors counterparts (e.g. Math 286 vs Math 216, Physics 260 vs Physics 240). However, this is countered by the fact that the honors classes allegedly have more lenient grading. As always, there are exceptions: Math 285 (honors calc 3) a few years ago had the B+/A- cutoff at 93%.</p>
<p>A lot of other science classes are graded on a curve or a hybrid curve. The hybrid curve is basically where loose grading boundaries are established at the beginning of the class (e.g. 80% is an A-). However, the boundaries change based on class performance; 77% may be an A- at the end of the course. Some classes, like genetics, claim to have a rigid grading system (94%+ = A, 90-94% = A-, etc). However, they ALWAYS curve genetics slightly upwards at the end, even when they say that they won’t, so it’s a little confusing. The point of this paragraph is that in some classes, your gpa is only controlled to a relatively small extent by the performance of other students (i.e. a good class performance will not cause you to fail instead of getting a B. However, it may cause you to get a B+ instead of an A-).</p>
<p>I don’t think being in honors will cause you to have a lower gpa as a premed. When honors students do compete against each other, the grading is usually a little more lenient to compensate for the increase in competition.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I am unable to compare how hard it is to get high grades here vs another university because I have only attended one university. But if I had to guess, I would say that your guess in the original post is correct. I wouldn’t expect a huge difference in the amount of effort to get a certain gpa here vs Northwestern. </p>
<p>Here, there are many, many resources provided to you to help you succeed. If you work hard and take advantage of these resources, I think you should be fine. If you fear that it will be hard to maintain a high gpa at UM, you will probably have the same fear at other top universities (I would imagine that the converse is usually true as well). In my opinion, since As don’t come easy, the hardest thing to deal with is people who cheat and manipulate to get grades they don’t deserve while you’re getting them honestly.</p>
<p>^wow. that was awesome haha thanks.</p>