<p>I’m not sure I see the philosophy behind having an S<em>. So you choose pass/fail in order to not be worried about grades, but if you do well, you get something extra? Seems a little too convenient. It’s supposed to be choice, and like any choice, it can end up being either a good one or bad one. If we had S</em> which are the equivalent of an A, then everyone should assume that a simple S is then the equivalent of a B or C. So what’s the point then? Just naming things differently doesn’t change the facts: people can still interpret them realistically.</p>
<p>@modestmelody</p>
<p>Is it that the rest of faculty members were using S* when the student would have otherwise gotten an A* (i.e. 99% or higher?) when the A* grade still formally existed?</p>
<p>@negru</p>
<p>No one outside of Brown can see the S<em>. They all will see S, whether or not the student got an S</em>. That’s why S*s are meant to be used only in the internal magna cum laude calculation.</p>
<p>@cdz512</p>
<p>And this: <a href=“http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/faculty/documents/gpaStatement.pdf[/url]”>http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Dean_of_the_College/faculty/documents/gpaStatement.pdf</a> says that there is no GPA regardless, although students may calculate one.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, what would be a sensible way of letting adcoms know of such imba grades which do not appear on the transcript? While we still had them anyway. I’m thinking through a recomendation, but is not rude to suggest a professor to write about that? Or is it ok if it’s a really really sneaky suggestion?</p>
<p>If one is taking a class pass/fail, one is permitted to request the professor write a report on your performance, which might help. They probably wouldn’t explicitly say what grade you would have gotten, but they would talk about your strengths and weaknesses (from which it should become clear). If the course is mandatory pass/fail, they must comply with your request. Otherwise, it depends on the course - in a large lecture course, they won’t really have much to say about you in particular and might decline.</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem to be <em>quite</em> what you’re looking for, but it would help.</p>
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<p>The idea is that since we’re still going to have Latin Honors, we shouldn’t penalize students who use SNC as we intend it to be used. The most convenient way to do this was to allow for an S* grade which indicated internally that this course should be counted toward magna. However, it would not be reported externally, and therefore, the idea was that SNC would still represent a simple system to the outside with non-differentiation without penalizing students who are eligible for magna.</p>
<p>My personal opinion is that like many law schools, we should just follow Brown’s curriculum to the logical extension and just offer courses SNC with an S* externally reported.
Course performance reports, which are a great way to get more qualitative feedback, especially in an SNC class, that will essentially sit in your transcript as a letter of recommendation without being one of your letters of rec necessarily.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’d be over the line to ask a professor to mention, in addition to whatever other qualities, that you did earn an S*.</p>
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<p>The A* is a false grade and is no longer even internally recognized since Banner exists, all the way back to the 70s. The A* developed because the way the handwritten grading forms existed, there was a column for a grade and a column for <em>s, which were only meant to be used in SNC classes. Occasionally, professors would mark the * column on a grade other than an S, most often with students who earned As. This was internally recorded, but never counted for or meant anything. There was no official explanation for what an A</em> was because that didn’t actually exist as a grade that can be awarded at any level according to university rules and regs.</p>
<p>In general, however, this “mythos” of the A* did, I think, have some wear off to the S* along with different language about the S* in different places. Most professors though S* was a grade to be given to maybe a single member or two of a class, and even then, not necessarily in every class. However, in the Faculty Rules and Regs, S* is clearly defined:
</p>
<p>Page 53, Brown University Faculty Rules and Regulations v7.2, July 1, 2009.</p>
<p>@modestmelody</p>
<p>That is pretty interesting - last term I had a syllabus that explicitly said we’d be given an A* for a grade of 99% or higher, which confused me because I had been unable to find information about such a grade. I believe it was left over from an old syllabus, however. It gave something to aim at, even if it doesn’t count.</p>
<p>I don’t see how Brown not caclulating GPA is an imposition on adcoms. 1) The GPA is just shorthand for what matters more-- the transcript. 2) If they want a GPA, they will want to do it their own way. They might just count classess in the field you are going into. They might count S.NC as 2, 3, or 4. They might just count the last two years. How many different ways are high school GPA calculated? Weighting or no weighting? If weighted, how to weight. Does PE count? </p>
<p>And though Brown is exception in allowing everything to be S/NC, it is not alone in allowing some P/F option.</p>
<p>Sorry I was actually talking about the A*'s. I was only wondering how to get them mentioned somehow, for perspective-background reasons…a course evaluation report seems way too overkill for this purpose. Plus it’s been two years since then. I probably won’t be asking any of the respective teachers for recs either. I would like to do this because of the grade inflation associated with grad courses…of which I’m taking some instead of the normal ones. And grade inflation my ass, I got a B with 94 point average. We have some imba Chinese grad students here. I know for example Princeton even discourages students from taking grad courses because of this.</p>
<p>Any solution? Sucks we don’t have to send any more “school counselor” type recs. That would’ve been the place. It also sucks that the new transcript format deleted the * completely, so I would have to mention this myself to whomever. But it has to be sneaky, without making it sound like bragging…more like an honest concern.</p>
<p>And about how adcoms should handle this, I only said it seems impolite…not necessarily harmful in any way. More like professional etiquette. Just like writing your CV or research paper in a weird format. Everyone will eventually get what you’re saying, and if it’s important it will be treated accordingly…but it’s nice to stick to the rules and general guidelines everyone else is following. Unless you’re einstein. Then you can go and write everything upside down or however you want. But unless you are it’s appropriate to not consider yourself special in any way and expect others to accept this.</p>