<p>Hello. I got accepted to Brown University, and I wonder if Brown is highly grade inflated.</p>
<p>Indeed, it is known to be. Should that stop you from attending? I really don't think that should be a major concern, personally. If it's a match for your personality, one can get a great education there, most certainly.</p>
<p>Heck, I would say that not only should it not stop you, but that you should want to go to a school that is grade inflated. From what I've seen, grade inflation can only help you, it can't hurt you.</p>
<p>Grade inflation would hurt you if you did not pursue a higher understanding of a course because you felt your "A" grade signified your mastery of the material.</p>
<p>Also, if a college is known by the grad schools as having alot of grade inflation, they won't take someone's good grades very seriously. That wouldn't prevent me from going to Brown, though. Brown students still go on to prestigious grad schools regularly.</p>
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Also, if a college is known by the grad schools as having alot of grade inflation, they won't take someone's good grades very seriously.
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<p>Yeah, well, that evidently doesn't seem to hurt the grads from Brown very much. Nor the grads from Stanford. </p>
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Grade inflation would hurt you if you did not pursue a higher understanding of a course because you felt your "A" grade signified your mastery of the material.
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<p>Fine, fair enough. However, I would say that not pursuing a higher understanding of a course is a whole lot better than flunking out of school entirely because you pursued a grade deflated major in a grade deflated school. Ask the expellees from MIT and Caltech.</p>
<p>Plus, grade inflation can be a boon when studying a trditionally difficult major and trying to get into a gpa driven postbac such as med school or law school. Putting x hours a week and getting a 3.8 at Brown would be a lot more productive for a premed than putting the same amount of effort and getting, say, a 3.0 at MIT*.</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>*I don't know how much Brown is inflated, so these are just random numbers</p>
<p><a href="http://gradeinflation.com/brown.html%5B/url%5D">http://gradeinflation.com/brown.html</a></p>
<p>Brown is historically known for being a leader in, amongst other things, grade inflation. :)</p>
<p>Sakky, I'm not sure if admissions committees and employers actually did anything about grade inflation, but do you know of any cases where extreme inflation over just a few years caused some effects?</p>
<p>brown is pretty grade inflated...in terms of it hurting your chances of going to a good graduate school, I sincerely doubt it....GPA and test scores are everything, no matter where you come from. With that said, you might have a slight disadvantage if you have a 3.5 and half your class has a 3.5, but at a place like Brown where the university is nationally recognized, many schools will still accept you. It's much better than going to a grade deflated school and getting a really low GPA because a lot of times grad schools don't care how hard your school is, they just look at the numbers.</p>
<p>For more reserach, look at Cornell threads (esp. premed because courses are deflated) and mdapplicants.com (tells you results of people with certain gpa and mcat scores) I'm not sure if you want to go into medicine, but these are good resources regardless.</p>
<p>Rman3008, I can't agree with your assesment that GPA and test scores are everything to graduate schools. Maybe this is so at most of the Law and Med schools, but not graduate schools, or business schools.</p>
<p>USNWR considers undergraduate GPA in their rankings of graduate schools, so I doubt that graduate schools would try to compensate fully for grade inflation/deflation.</p>
<p>In economist argot, there is a mismatch of incentives. Why should a university unilaterally deflate grades if inflation has no tangible adverse effects, or at least on net. No one says Stanford is not prestigious because it inflates grades. And US News aggravates the situation by rewarding high freshman grades.</p>
<p>Grades have always seemed inaccurate. If grading is done by a curve, then your college (ie. the quality of your classmates) may matter far more than your individual grade. 30th percentile at Berkeley may be 80th at Riverside, but the UCR graduate has a higher grade to show for it. Maybe a system of weighting colleges would ameliorate the problem. Maybe not.</p>
<p>Drab, you would know better than I do. My comments are merely for med school...and I totally agree with you that for b-school, experience and intership are far more valuable. Honestly, med school is the only real type of graduate school that I have researched, so take my comments with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>Alright, if med school is what you are referring to, than you're right. It's best to be more precise with your words so as to avoid confusion and what not.</p>
<p>Personally, I am starting to lean towards the notion that grades shouldn't matter at all when it comes to grad-school admissions. Yes, you would still take into consideration factors like rec's, research experience, interviews, essays, and all that. But for the academic side of the house, you should use only test scores. That way, it's completely fair - every applicant has to take the exact same test, so you don't have to worry about different grading standards and different curves warping the analysis. If the current tests are found to be lacking, then the real answer is to make a better test. </p>
<p>Now don't get me wrong, I don't think tests are completely reliable. But they are better than the current situation of relying on the inherently varying standards of college grades, where an A from one school may be more easier to get than a C in another school which therefore requires that adcoms compensate for this fact, or (even worse), refuse to compensate for it and simply treat all grades equivalently. A comprehensive test, properly run, may not capture all the information that you would want from a candidate, but it's more reliable than the current situation of relying on grades. </p>
<p>I also think that one 'quick-fix' would be for colleges to print student's transcripts that only list their grades, but the median grades given out in every class they took. So if somebody got an C where an C was the median grade, that fact would be fully reflected on the transcript. The transcript would show the student's C, and then, right next to it, the median class grade's C. Anybody who read the transcript would then understand that while the student may have gotten a C in a class, he didn't do any worse than the average student in that class. The transcript could also show a 'scaled' GPA that showed not only what GPA you got, but what GPA the hypothetical "average" student would have gotten if he had taken the exact same courses you took. </p>
<p>You could then use this scaled GPA for the purposes of calculations of honors. Take Berkeley as an example. Berkeley awards graduation with University honors, high honors, or highest honors (the equivalent of cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude) based on graduating with a GPA that is within the top x% of your college. But think about what that means. You have to compete with all members of your college. Not with all students in your major, and certainly not with all students who took the exact same courses you took. No, you are competing with all students in your college. What that means is that people who took grade deflated majors tend to get screwed in the honors calculations. For example, chemical engineering majors have to compete with chemistry majors in the College of Chemistry for honors calculations, and hence a lot of ChemE students get shafted. Physics, Math, and CS majors have to compete against "Studies" majors in L&S. What would be better is if ChemE's only compete against other ChemE's, Physics majors compete only against other Physics majors, etc. What would be even better than that if is you compete against that hypothetical student who took the exact same courses you did. So to graduate with honors (top 20%), you would have to get a GPA that is in the top 80th percentile compared to that hypothetical student. This would eliminate the incentives for students who are on the boundary between honors and no-honors to cherry-pick a bunch of easy classes just so that they can graduate with honors. </p>
<p>However, I agree with ashernm that there is no economic incentive for anything to change.</p>
<p>Graduate schools (not talking here about professional schools) look at actual courses, not just grades. Many top graduate schools care not at all about the GRE's because the test does not tell them anything about how a student will perform as a scholar. It will tell how they did on the test, but the grad schools don't care about the test. </p>
<p>So an engineering major applying to engineering grad school is not competing with an English major. If you come from a well known place, then the grad school faculty will have an opinion about the academic standards at that place, and do at least a mental adjustment for what they think. So Caltech, MIT, and Harvey Mudd grads do just fine in grad school admissions in science. </p>
<p>The grad schools want to know whether this student has a passion for the field (grades may or may not reveal anything about this), ability and motivation to learn the fundamentals (the only thing that grades probably help with, and the least important factor), and the imagination and determination to be a scholar. Letters of recommendation, and scholarly productivity as an undergrad, and a good idea of what the student wants to study in grad school and why, are far more useful than grades.</p>
<p>" also think that one 'quick-fix' would be for colleges to print student's transcripts that only list their grades, but the median grades given out in every class they took. So if somebody got an C where an C was the median grade, that fact would be fully reflected on the transcript. The transcript would show the student's C, and then, right next to it, the median class grade's C. Anybody who read the transcript would then understand that while the student may have gotten a C in a class, he didn't do any worse than the average student in that class. The transcript could also show a 'scaled' GPA that showed not only what GPA you got, but what GPA the hypothetical "average" student would have gotten if he had taken the exact same courses you took"</p>
<p>CORNELL DOES THIS MAN.</p>
<p>in fact, on cornell's website, they publish the median grade for every course given for every semester, and they do put the median grade next to each grade on your transcript</p>
<p>so for biology, they will know the median grade was a B- or C+.</p>
<p>Showing the class median grade still does not accomodate the difference in student quality among schools. You could try and tie it to SAT scores, but I doubt that that would be reasonably accurate (what is reasonable you ask?). But, I suspect that any attempt at statistical correlation/comparison would be better than the current so-called "mental adjustment."</p>
<p>Though grades may give information absent among other credentials, it could be de-emphasized for information provided through other means, as other posters said.</p>
<p>This only applies to grades given based on a curve.</p>
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Graduate schools (not talking here about professional schools) look at actual courses, not just grades.
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<p>I agree. The problem comes with the professional schools, particularly law school and med-school. That's where the guys from tough schools like Caltech get shafted, as has been discussed extensively in the Caltech section of CC. </p>
<p>That's why I think another helpful idea would be my idea of 'pseudo-transcripts'. Basically, med-schools and law-schools use the AMCAS and LSDAS transcript clearinghouses respectively, where students send their transcripts, and these clearinghouses then reformat them into 'standardized' GPA's and process them for the med/law schools. I would propose that highly difficult schools like MIT and Caltech send a cleaned-up transcript to LSDAS or AMCAS where grades are adjusted for the difficulty of the school.</p>
<p>Lest you think this is a controversial idea, I would point out that it's not significantly different from the idea of dual-transcripts at MIT. All MIT students have 2 transcripts, an "internal" one that only the student and MIT faculty can see, and an "external" one that outside parties, including non-MIT graduate programs, can see. The external transcript contains far less information than the internal one does. For example, if you fail a freshman class, that fact is recorded on the internal transcript but does not appear on the external transcript. If you drop a class after a certain deadline, that fact is recorded only on your internal transcript. Your external transcript shows nothing. Furthermore, that external transcript is the 'official' transcript that MIT will send when a student wants to apply to a non-MIT graduate school or needs a transcript to show to an employer, etc. </p>
<p>So if MIT can provide students with 2 different transcripts where one transcript contains less information than the other, then why not a 3rd transcript that shows even less? For example, how about a transcript that conceals all grades that you get below a B, or converts all those grades to P (for Pass)? Like I said, if MIT's external transcript conceals freshman failing grades from outside parties, why not provide a 'pseudotranscript' that conceals all bad grades from outside parties? This transcript would be the one that is sent to AMCAs and LSDAS and would put MIT students on a full and fair footing with other students who came from grade-inflated schools. </p>
<p>Again, lest you think that there is something sinister or unethical about this, compare it to the situation we have today. Under my idea, MIT/Caltech would give out bad grades but then conceal them to maximize the chances of their students in getting into med school or law school. By comparison, grade-inflated schools accomplish the same thing simply by not giving out bad grades in the first place. So what's the difference? Which concealing bad grades really any more sinister than just not giving them out in the first place?</p>
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CORNELL DOES THIS MAN.</p>
<p>in fact, on cornell's website, they publish the median grade for every course given for every semester, and they do put the median grade next to each grade on your transcript</p>
<p>so for biology, they will know the median grade was a B- or C+.
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<p>Well, good. We need more schools to do this. It doesn't solve all your problems, but it's a lot better than doing nothing at all.</p>
<p>Sakky, that may ameliorate a bit of the problem, but not most of it. The problem is: How do I compare a B from say, Caltech with an A at say, University of Colorado, in Plasma Physics, whether or not they have the same curve? The only way I see is somehow adjusting for the quality of the students at each college.</p>
<p>I read somewhere about Harvey Mansfield (is that his name?) at Harvard giving a report card, where the student was shown what he actually got and what he should've got - and the latter was far lower.</p>
<p>Like I said, the BEST way to ameliorate the problem is for adcoms not to use grades at all, but use test scores only. That way everybody takes the exact same test. It's completely 100% fair. If the problem is that the test is not comprehensive enough, then the real solution is to make a better and more comprehensive test, not to rely on grades. </p>
<p>However, if adcoms insist on using grades, I am proposing several ways for grades to be made fairer. Perfect? No. But better than the current situation? You better believe it.</p>