<p>At Brown (and I’m just trying to understand how the school works… I’m not actually going to do this), if I take every class pass/fail… what’s my GPA? Or what if I just take one class normally and get an A… will I have an automatic 4.0???</p>
<p>i think something like 30% or more of Brown students have a 4.0 freshmen year, which is swayed because of the credit/no credit system. keep in mind that if you plan on applying to graduate school, graduate schools may request to see your actual grades, so even if you P/F, it still helps to get an A</p>
<p>Brown doesn’t technically have GPA to begin with, but it’s easy to figure out what one’s GPA WOULD be if Brown did calculate it on transcripts.</p>
<p>We don’t calculate GPA period. If you did that, however, you would not get magna because 100% of your grades you earn an A. You need to be in the top 20% of As and S<em>s for magna, and S</em>s are very rarely used (they’re also not externally reported).</p>
<p>If you took all classes S/NC you would not report a GPA (even though reporting any GPA would be your own construction), and you’d probably specifically discuss why you took everything S/NC and have some CPRs to go along with your transcript.</p>
<p>I think it’s safe to say that nobody cares whether Brown itself calculates GPA or not. As far as grad school adcoms will be concerned, it’s only a sign of laziness on our part. It’s like if they asked you “what is your height, we need it to make you a bed” and you’d say “oh sorry, I don’t have one, we don’t measure height in my country”. If you’re just choosing to be ignorant and arrogant like that, it doesn’t mean you don’t actually have a height. You’re not that special, really. I mean seriously, other than just looking stupid, what is the purpose of not having a GPA? For grad school/employee purposes, of course, because that’s the only place you need a GPA.</p>
<p>Not calculating the GPA will not make all your bad grades somehow invisible, so I’m not sure what the purpose is…the adcoms will likely make their own GPA from your transcript, but it seems polite to say the least if brown spared them of this. Or what, do you expect them to treat Brown differently from all the other thousand of schools? Isn’t that a little presumptuous? </p>
<p>“So, jim, what gpa did that johnny guy had? Oh, you see bob,johnny doesn’t actually have a gpa…he’s just special like that, from that very special place, brown. Oohhh, I see, then how do we estimate his academic performance? Well, what we can do, is just list all his courses, try to remember as many of them as we can, then quickly write something down before we forget - but this is important: what we write down must not be a quantifier of any sort!!! Or the sky will fall! No, we cannot add all his grades and divide by their number like everyone else does…he’s from Brown, remember…they don’t do that…don’t question it”</p>
<p>The purpose of not having a GPA is, in part, because comparing GPAs from Brown is senseless when students have taken at least 1 course pass-fail. According to a Yale admissions officer, as quoted in the Brown Daily Herald, when one takes a course pass/fail, one really has no sense of how one did, since one generally has to be awful to fail. So what does a 3.9 mean if you have 4 pass/fail courses? Would you have gotten As? Would you have gotten Cs? They can’t tell. And some courses are mandatory pass/fail, which means this would come up quite a bit. In addition, the grad schools will focus primarily, if not exclusively, on the courses that are relevant to the field to which you’re applying, meaning if they’re using a GPA, they’d have to calculate one for those topics themselves anyways.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.browndailyherald.com/your-brown-transcript-off-college-hill-1.1722969[/url]”>http://www.browndailyherald.com/your-brown-transcript-off-college-hill-1.1722969</a> is a good article concerning the New Curriculum and grad school (and thus grades).</p>
<p>If I’m not wrong, you really don’t have a GPA.</p>
<p>@cdz512: One doesn’t, in theory, though this hardly stops students and employers and grad schools from calculating one. However, this is not as sensible as one would be led to believe, nor is it quite as presumptuous as negru seems to think.</p>
<p>Basically, if you take all four years S/NC (satisfactory/no credit), you won’t be able to calculate a GPA, which is going to confuse grad schools. It’s a lot easier to get all S-grades than all As, and any grad school (or employer, for that matter) will be aware of that.</p>
<p>This is why it’s probably not the best career move to just pass all of your classes. You want to look quantifiably intelligent, not just “satisfactory.”</p>
<p>However, utilizing CPR reports and deliverable, portfolio-style items I think will still position you quite well in almost any area.</p>
<p>Graduate school certainly cares far more about letters of recommendation and research experience (and the product of that) than grades, and many jobs (excluding finance) may never ask for a transcript or only ask for one as proof of graduation.</p>
<p>GPA doesn’t matter at all except for a few select fields (professional schools, finance, etc) and even then, matters for the first two years out of college and then not at all past that point.</p>
<p>The bottom line is this-- most people do not take courses SNC that are in their concentration because they believe it’s best to be able to report grades to a graduate school should they choose that path.</p>
<p>However, if one works the system right, taking whatever you want SNC will not significantly penalize you (except for med school, law school, and finance/consulting).</p>
<p>Btw, Urgoola, I think that’s the only article of the four in that series I’m not quoted in :(.</p>
<p>Hmm, well, since I DO want to aim for the med/law/finance track… I would probably take the least amount of pass/fail classes as possible. Thus, should I go to Brown, I would probably not even take advantage of the main reason people choose to attend that school… So I’m still trying to decide whether or not to keep Brown on my college list. I still realize though, that Brown’s open curriculum would still be enjoyable in the sense that there are no requirements.</p>
<p>SNC is hardly the main reason people choose to attend Brown. Only about 1 in 5 courses at Brown are taken SNC, and many of those are mandatory SNC courses.</p>
<p>well ok but from what I have seen, the main reasons people give for attending Brown are having no requirements as well as the ability to take any class as pass/fail. That’s just what I’ve observed</p>
<p>The lack of requirements is generally a bigger reason for attending Brown, in my opinion, since one can better tailor one’s undergraduate experience to one’s needs, desires, and background.</p>
<p>ok fine, you guys win haha.</p>
<p>the lack of requirements is a bigger reason than pass/fail classes when deciding to come to brown.</p>
<p>I don’t see how the fact that this is a problem we created in the first place is in any way an excuse. I mean, what if we made our grading system based on [Z],,[Y] instead of A,B,C, where [Z] represents a tree, represents curves on a 2-sphere, and I’ll leave Y up to you. When an adcom wants a GPA, what do you say, ***, you can’t add trees and curves to get a number? If I were an adcom I would go: “not my system, not my problem”. </p>
<p>Not that it matters and adcoms feed the GPA into a computer (they might in some places), I’m just saying it seems inappropriate for us to expect adcoms to go over their heads to understand and accommodate our own weird system. Just like the schools that don’t have a rank. *** is up with that too? Just because you’re too lazy to count from the top to your spot, or pretend the word doesn’t exist in the dictionary, doesn’t mean you don’t have a rank. What’s next? We don’t have classes, we just do everything continuously? Discretization sucks anyway. We don’t have any tests, we just go by good faith? Stressing kids out is bad, right?</p>
<p>Our actions and decisions are based on what we think is right for our community to thrive and what matches our goal as a community. We’re not here to make adcoms elsewhere more or less comfortable. Almost every high school in the US has a different standard for grades and adcoms at undergrad institutions have to specialize by area and ask for information about schools’ grading systems all the time to keep track, so this is hardly a higher education phenomenon in the US.</p>
<p>Our system is actually extremely easy to understand and doesn’t really require much accommodating. In fact, grades still exist at Brown almost entirely because of graduate school. The student body got behind the New Curriculum full force and was taking as much as 70% of classes SNC through the mid 70s. Since then there has been a slow decline as the student body that enters Brown does so less and less for its unique features, culture, and philosophy as well as that student body becomes increasingly concerned with the justification of an expensive, elite education.</p>
<p>FWIW, Brown basically has an SNC grading system in non-science classes in my experience. We have S<em>, S, and NC just like we have A, B and NC (so few Cs are given out in non-science classes). The only real difference is S</em> is used less because faculty are not as well informed about it existing and that S* is not externally reported.</p>
<p>
Modest, to me, this is the most disconcerting part of this whole post, and, in fact, of many. How can this be? Not that you guys do everything for grades, but they are one of the products of the system. How can faculty not know and understand the grading policies of the school? This should be completely transparent and a part of every faculty member’s way of teaching and working within the system. Is this not in the faculty handbook? I really hope that you are mistaken on this one. It would be your first mistake, true, but I hope that is what it is…</p>
<p>We had a whole discussion on the CCC about what an S* is and why and when it is supposed to be used. The faculty are aware the grade exists, but have drastically different views as to what it means and when it’s appropriate to use it. Apparently, and this was news to me last year, S* should be awarded any time a student would have earned an A in the course had they been taken it for grade. However, most faculty believe it’s a distinction that should be given out much, much more rarely than As are awarded. Even faculty on the CCC expressed surprise when they learned that’s when S* is supposed to be used.</p>
<p>The problem comes up when calculating magna, the only time S<em>s count, and in fact, the reason S</em> exists. When we went through the magna calculation (and a discussion about whether we felt magna made sense at Brown), people were shocked to learn the history and use of S* as an internal reporting mechanism and admitted there practice was widely different. In fact, IIRC, the graduate student on the council, who had been a Brown undergrad, said that when she graded students she used S* differently (she was in Literary Arts, where grad students do run courses).</p>
<p>There is a past threads about Pass/Fail GPA:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/brown-university/106773-browns-pass-fail-system.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/brown-university/106773-browns-pass-fail-system.html</a></p>
<p>Which states that there is no GPA if you take all Pass/Fail</p>