Is UChicago course difficulty more hype than reality?

How are you even discussing grading at Brown and Chicago in the same thread? Both great schools but…

MODERATOR’S NOTE:

And yet we’re still off-topic. Move off the Brown discussion please.

Three data points here.

First data point

A poster in another forum (who swears that they got these numbers from a very reliable source within the College) posted that the grade distribution at Chicago now is as follows

25th Percentile: 3.4, Median: 3.62, 75th Percentile: 3.8

Second data point

https://cha.uchicago.edu/winners

A total of 172 PBK among 1,415 degrees awarded in 2018, so around 12% of the class is PBK. if you assume PBK is 3.9, that doesn’t suggest a grade deflated school. Just for comparison, Brown, the “poster child” for a grade inflated school on the other hand had only 102 PBK members for 2018. So either Brown is not “as grade inflated” as everybody is suggesting, or Chicago is not as much of an outlier as everybody believes.

Third data point

1,192 of 1, 415 or 84%, got general honors (3.25) in 2018. That means 3.25 is around 16th percentile

Those all point in the same direction, in my opinion, which suggests that grade deflation is no longer present in Chicago.

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say the median GPA at Chicago right now is between 3.5 and 3.6

All good points. I wish actual figures were made available to public

PBK will require a higher GPA to be elected third year than fourth. It’s typically about 10’ish% of the class of any school, isn’t it? Not sure you can deduce a GPA from that. However, recent posts on other social media and similar forums suggest 3.8 - 3.9. There are other requirements besides GPA but that’s going to be the biggest one.

Deans’s List is 3.2 and announced in the spring of every year. I believe a LOT of kids get that designation and the general honors graduates are probably a steady subset of that list.

  1. General honors is anything rounded to 3.3 (i.e., >3.249999999999). Ten years ago, it was a little more than half of the graduating class. If it's really 85% of the graduating class now, that's a big change.
  2. PBK is never a fixed GPA; it's always capped at a percentage of the class, which at Chicago has long seemed to be somewhere north of 10%. But it doesn't imply 3.9 necessarily. It could be 3.7, if that's what top 10% means. It also doesn't have to be entirely based on grades, but often is. (At my law school, there was a similar cap for Order of the Coif. It was 10% of the class, by GPA. The way the grading system was organized at that school, the vast majority of the class had GPAs around 3.0. I made Order of the Coif early -- in the top 6% of the class -- with a 3.6 GPA. The top GPA in the class was 3.8, and theoretically it could have been as high as 4.3.)

I got PBK as a third year a couple of years ago with a 3.90. I’d guess the cut off for getting it as a fourth year is about a 3.8.

@surelyhuman I don’t know why Brown would have fewer PBKs but it’s unconnected to grade inflation, as @JHS said. From the LSAC data in that thread, it looks like Brown is still probably much more inflated than Chicago, though Chicago has definitely inflated. (Chicago’s average Gpa of students applying to law school is <3.6, similar to Hopkins and Princeton, while HYS and Brown are >3.7).

Brown had 136 PBK members.for 2018 - 102 elected as seniors; 34 elected as juniors
http://www.browndailyherald.com/topics/phi-beta-kappa/

But let’s move on, please.

It’s hard to use GPAs of law school applicants as a good proxy for grade inflation. There is no guarantee (in fact I think it’s pretty unlikely) that the student body or the group of people applying to law school remained identical. It’s not hard to think of many scenarios where the rigor and grading standards of UChicago stayed the same while the GPAs of law school applicants went up. Perhaps more qualified students were admitted to the college and objectively earned higher GPAs. Or perhaps, as the lawyer bubble (or whatever you want to call it) burst, only students reasonably confident that they had a shot of getting into Yale or Harvard applied to law school and students with lower GPAs stayed away.

I don’t necessarily think this is happening, but I think statistics like that are less useful for tracking grade inflation then they may seem. PBK is even less useful, since it’s determined relatively.

Even more tenuous is making the connection between grade inflation and course difficulty. Courses could remain brutally difficult and give out better grades over time if standards shift.

For what it’s worth, I think there is some “grade inflation” relative to the past, but I get this from…hmm…cynical people might call it “anecdotes” but I call it “qualitative interviews with my teachers.” These professors and instructors, when I asked, told me that they feel hesitant to give out grades worse than a B- or C+ because they don’t want to punish students for taking their classes and they worry about impacting student’s job prospects. But, on the other hand, they don’t feel like they have to give most of the class an A: “the right answer gets a B” is a common refrain. If you want an A you have to stand out, they say. In my experience this has been largely true.

Now keep in mind that this is heavily colored by the classes I take - mostly upper level undergraduate social science, computer science, and math classes that aren’t particularly easy and doesn’t get the kind of people gunning for “Junior Slave” - uh, I mean “Junior Analyst” - positions at certain banks who depend on high GPAs. It’s also not the kind of classes prospective law and med students take. So on one hand, I can imagine the pressure to give out better grades is higher there.

But on the other hand, there is a dark underbelly to UChicago student culture that runs through certain “prestigious” (ha!) RSOs, greek life, and athletic teams that identifies the most easily cheat-able class with surgical precision and distributes homework answers, old tests, and even essays to their members. These people, in my experience, tend to feel like UChicago’s difficult classes unfairly handicap them when competing for GPA sensitive post-graduate opportunities and they are entitled to cheat to “level” the playing field (scare quotes because they aren’t leveling the playing field - they’re cheating). I think this accounts for a non-insignificant amount of UChicago grade inflation.

I think the most important thing to note here that none of this implies that UChicago course difficulty is “hyped” or that UChicago classes aren’t difficult, don’t expect a lot from you, or aren’t fast paced and don’t require a lot of work to succeed. Come to UChicago thinking that at your own peril, lol.

This is anecdotal but my son took full time classes at a well regarded state University during his senior year of high school and part time during his Junior year. He took some difficult classes such as Organic Chemistry, Combinatorics and Computer Science and made all A’s without much effort. His view was that they were not much more difficult than high school AP classes.

UChicago classes have been on an entirely different level. He works much harder than previously and has a GPA in the 3.5 to 3.6 range, including plenty of grades in the B range and one C. He is a math and computer science major and takes honors classes at almost every opportunity, so he isn’t seeking out easy classes but it doesn’t seem comparable to his experience at the flagship state University.

Aloysha - Son was C.S. major. Your son has a VERY good GPA given the major(s) he’s pursuing added to his taking honors level classes at every opportunity. My son used to grimly joke that some of his C.S. homework problems were things like, “You have a pipe cleaner and a cup of tea. Derive the history of the world from the beginning of time. You have until Saturday night at 12 am.”

Wow - those CS majors have to be MAJOR help during Scav.

I also heard anecdotal info about undergrad classes at UChicago from an alumni who said after he graduated from UChicago, he decided he’d wanted to try a bio class, and he heard that a certain CUNY offered the best/hardest bio classes. After having taken the classes at cuny, he said a week at UChicago undergrad was more difficult than his entire bio class.

My favorite UChicago vblogger just comes out with a video about courses she is currently taking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd-ceRLVqww

Signature courses (5:29)? I have never heard of them.

Her notes are a work of art.

These signature courses sound like they could be pretty exciting, in that the Profs are teaching customized courses directly stemming from current work they are doing. That would surely create an extra buzz. Long ago I took a seminar course from Norman Maclean that was a bit like that: it was an examination and analysis of prose style, with examples drawn from an eclectic mix of authors, English and American, old and modern. It was in effect an expression of Maclean’s personal take on what makes for good writing. What we didn’t know at the time was that he was working on a little book called “A River Runs Through It”. When that book was published a few years later its prose embodied all the principles developed in that seminar. Aha, that was why he was so passionate about these things.

Yes - the signature courses are a great way for those in more technical and mathy fields to have some exposure to a multidisciplinary seminar where you really delve into the meat of the topic.

My D tried to get into Dec. of Independence, having taken the same professor’s American Revolution course. Unfortunately, it conflicted with another history course she was taking so she had to give it up. She might take it next year if she can fit it in - but she can also move on w/o too much worry if it doesn’t work out, simply because there’s a lot of overlap between the two seminars in terms of readings. Prof. Slaughter did tell her that Dec. is a fine followup to Am. Rev. so perhaps the specific study of the Declaration makes it worthwhile. I’d recommend them both and if you can’t get into one - take the other! Both are cross listed among various disciplines including English and History.

Here is a page of signature courses offered via the Humanities division (this may not be an exhaustive list). Note that a signature course should be so-designated on the course description either in the college catalog or department course list. My personal favorite: Mesopotamian Law

https://college.uchicago.edu/academics/humanities-signature-courses

With the Oriental Institute on campus and countless contributions of Chicago scholars to the field, Mesopotamia Law would be a great signature course.