<p>When we visited Brown with D1 a few years ago, we were told about a Brown student who had just recently graduated after taking 100% of her courses pass/fail (technically, satisfactory/no credit). She was admitted to Harvard Medical School. Brown has an option, however, in which the student can request, and the instructor is obligated to provide, a narrative evaluation of the student’s performance. She had requested such narrative evaluations for 100% of her courses, with the result that her transcript ran to 40 pages. Apparently what was in the narratives convinced Harvard Medical School that she was a smart, hard-working, high-performing student.</p>
<p>Such narrative evaluations might carry far greater information value than letter grades, especially in a grading environment like Brown’s where the median grade is an A-. I guess I’d be concerned that some employers or graduate/professional school admissions committees might not bother to read them. Perhaps a better option would be to take the course for the conventional grade, earn the A, and request the narrative evaluation to supplement the the letter grade (also an option at Brown). That way you’re supplying something for both the lazy evaluator who only wants to see a GPA, and for the more diligent and demanding who realize that the average Brown grad is going to have an A- average, and it’s the narratives that will help determine whether this applicant is a cut above.</p>
<p>While med/grad schools may be willing to wade through 40 pages worth of written evaluations, most entry-level employers IME would rather go with the applicant with most/all grades…preferably 3.3 or higher though their official minimum was 3.0. </p>
<p>With few exceptions, they neither have the willingness nor the time to wade through 40 pages of written evaluations…especially if multiple applicants submit them in lieu of actual grades. Unless they don’t receive many Brown/peer school admits, they’re likely regard such an applicant as more trouble than its worth and go with a Brown classmate/peer school contender with actual grades when deciding on who to interview/retain for further consideration.</p>
<p>Moreover, there’s also a fear among a few employers that college instructors may be writing overly rosy portrayals of their graduates emphasizing effort or likeability over actual skillsets/competence, intelligence, and the ability to be quick studies with minimal supervision. </p>
<p>Granted, much of this is due to prejudices against some educational activists and educators among them whom they feel emphasize likeability and effort and are too “touchy-feely” in their evaluations of students. </p>
<p>This prejudice extends to the perceptions of academic/campus cultures at Brown and Oberlin where Professors and students are perceived to be radical progressives with too much of the “neo-hippie” vibe about them. Encountered this myself in a few interviews and a couple of Brown colleagues had similar interview experiences.</p>
cobrat, with all due respect, no matter what your experience may be, it’s just not enough for you to declaim on what “most entry-level employers” would do with a transcript like this from Brown. It might be just as likely to stand out as unusual–which may be one reason the person was successful in getting into medical school.</p>
<p>Think about it. Which is easier for an HR staffer or a hiring manager to assess quickly in a sea of job applications for a second look/first interview for a highly competitive entry-level position? A transcript with actual grades and a cumulative GPA or a 40 pages worth of written evaluations in lieu of grades which must be carefully read, digested, and analyzed in comparison to other peer school applicants with actual grade studded transcripts for a competitive entry-level position? </p>
<p>I don’t know about you, but I don’t know too many hiring managers who have the time or the patience to read 40 pages worth of written evaluations for each applicant. Especially from college instructors he/she may suspect due to his/her prejudicial perceptions of college instructors and/or the particular college’s campus culture.</p>
<p>We’re talking about a highly unusual transcript from Brown, not from Podunk College. I would find that applicant inherently interesting. I suppose a lazy employer might flip past it.</p>
<p>I’m not sure it’s laziness so much as employers finding themselves deluged with entry-level job applications for competitive positions and needing an efficient means to quickly reduce those numbers to a much more manageable number for a closer second look/first interview. In such situations, applicants whose applications create much more work for those involved in the hiring process tend to be given the stink eye and often tossed in the circular file at the very beginning of the process. Especially if said employer receives many applications from graduates of Brown and other peer colleges with grade studded transcripts.</p>
<p>Even if the narrative evaluations focused not on effort and likeability but on things like “actual skillset/competence, intelligence, and the ability to be quick studies with minimal supervision,” and drew comparisons to the rest of the class, or to the run of students the professor has taught in that class over the course of his or her career? Even if the narratives from a diverse array of faculty were remarkably consistent in evaluating a particular student on those qualities over an entire 4-year college career? So you think the skeptical employer would assume that 100% of the student’s professors were saying positive things just to be nice?</p>
<p>And you think the employers would be better able to determine characteristics like “skillset/competence, intelligence, and ability to be a quick study” from looking at a GPA based on a transcript with letter grades showing all grades of A and A-, in an institutional setting where pretty much everyone gets a grade of A or A- in pretty much every class ?</p>
<p>And tell me this: if a skeptical employer would just assume that a professor who had extremely positive things to say about a student in a written narrative evaluation was just painting an overly rosy picture, then why wouldn’t that same skeptical employer assume that the grade of A that same professor gave in his class did not also reflect an overly generous assessment of that student’s performance? Especially if that same professor is giving everyone in the class grades in the A to A- range? </p>
<p>In many classes, the letter grade is not one bit less subjective than the narrative, and the professor has exactly the same incentives to be overly kind, or not, whether that comes in the form of a written narrative or an overly generous grading curve. The difference is that with the written narrative, there’s room for nuance that is entirely absent in letter grades, especially when the letter grades tend to cluster narrowly in the A to A- range. </p>
<p>Letter grades are an extremely coarse filter, and not much of a filter at all if they’re all A or A-. Any professor worth his or her salt would be able to draw finer distinctions among students with written narrative evaluations. Many do. I do. I have many A students (though in my classes that tends to be more like 1/4 or 1/3 of the class, not a majority). But among the A students, not everyone receives my highest recommendation. Some just barely eke out that A grade; others turn in nearly flawless work. I can tell the difference. Our crude letter grading scale doesn’t make those distinctions. My letters of recommendation do. Not that I have negative things to say about anyone who earns a grade of A in my classes; if they get that grade, it’s because they earned it, and I am happy to say so. But there’s a huge difference between my being able to say, “this student was in the top quartile in my class,” and “this student was among the top 2 or 3 in a class of 40,” and “this student was among the top 8 or 10 I have taught in 15 years of teaching this class.”</p>
<p>Well, I’d characterize that as laziness–either that, or just taking the easy way out as a shortcut, which amounts to much the same thing–but that’s perhaps just a semantical quibble.</p>
<p>I don’t dispute that the phenomenon you describes occurs, which is why I suggested that a more sensible approach might be to go for the letter grade to satisfy the lazy and those for whom time constraints make it impossible to look beyond GPA (though I would tend to lump those two groups together), while also going for the written narrative to provide more information to those inquiring minds who recognize that Brown regards all its students as WAY above average and therefore deserving of an A or, if their performance is slightly subpar, an A-, and consequently it leaves said inquiring minds looking for meaningful ways to draw distinctions among Brown applicants who all come in with A or A- GPAs.</p>
<p>I suspect, however, that the additional information value of the written narrative is a scary proposition to the median Brown student, who fears that it might reveal too much. Better to hide behind the stellar GPA and insist that it’s stellar because all Brown undergrads are stellar, and hope employers continue to buy it.</p>
<p>Not necessarily, especially when “revealing too much” could leave a Professor and his/her university open to a potential lawsuit. </p>
<p>Even when its unmerited to the point of being “open and shut” having to deal with such meritless suits or the potentiality of such is a major hassle few want to have heaped on their heads. </p>
<p>I can also visualize the possibilities of harder suits to defend against due to “revealing too much”…such as potential discriminatory suits on basis of disabilities, cultural bias, etc.</p>
<p>Oh come on, xiggi, post #142! I won’t divert this thread into the USAMO/MIT topic, but all of my posts about “rewarding” USAMO accomplishments via college admission were restricted to MIT–where the USAMO accomplishment is of direct relevance.</p>
<p>Of possible relevance to the main thread issue, and why there is not a similar type of recognition to USAMO for a really outstanding young person in the humanities (I know there are contests, but I don’t think they are equivalent):</p>
<p>In grad school, my spouse-to-be and I were friends with a man completing a doctoral degree in history. He had returned to the university for the graduate program, after about 15 years of work and travel, mainly in Eastern Europe. At that point, he spoke 14 languages fluently. We had a discussion about tenure practices in American universities. We knew that one university in our field asked about tenure candidates in a STEM field, “Is this the best person in the world in [subfield]? If not, who is better?”</p>
<p>Our friend said that no one could be tenured in history under that standard, because a 30-year-old historian simply could not compete with a 50-year-old historian–based on his view of the experience and knowledge base that it took to do work of the highest caliber in history. (I realize that it’s debatable . . . )</p>
<p>Also, please do not complain about my example of the 30-year-old tenure candidate. That still happens in STEM fields, although more rarely than it used to.</p>
High school transcripts commonly show letter grades and a percentage grade for each class. The same could be done for grades in college. Typically a professor gives numerical grades for homework, quizzes, and exams, aggregates these numbers, and then decides on thresholds for an A, A-, B+, etc. It would not be difficult to map the aggregate to a number between 1 and 99, which would then be mapped to a letter grade.</p>
<p>Computerized analysis of text is growing. The SAT essay is graded by one human and a computer, I believe. If I were hiring at Google, I would would welcome, in addition to grades, 40 pages of written evaluations, provided they were submitted as ASCII files. I would not use them initially, but after say five years of getting such transcripts, I could do a linguistic analysis of what kinds of written evaluations correlated with being a productive Googler.</p>
<p>Academic studies have found that when the CEO uses the word “challenging” a lot on an earnings call, you should sell the stock.</p>
<p>In addition to median grades, college transcripts could show class sizes and ranks for each course. If a professor is unwilling to rank students more finely than through the letter grade system, tied ranks would reflect this. If there were 5 A’s and 8 B’s in a class, the rankings could be the integer pairs 1,1 through 13,13 if the professor is willing to rank or 1,5 and 6,13 if not. I think of transcripts as just csv files. It should be no problem to add more columns. As an employer, I should be able to get any applicant’s csv file and then run it though my filtering algorithm. Professors have different grading standards? Add the professor’s name as a field.</p>
<p>As a high school student, I can say quite definitely that I spend far more time studying than either of my parents did in high school. I can’t imagine that will suddenly reverse in college, particularly at top colleges. So with students being better-prepared in high school and working equally hard in college, who’s to say they don’t deserve the high grades they get? I don’t find it hard to believe that many or most Dartmouth undergrads are capable of doing work deserving of an A, because that’s the work they had to do to get into Dartmouth, so why should the grades be evenly distributed if the majority are doing top-quality work?</p>
<p>This may sound snooty, but I just don’t think that many Brown or Dartmouth grads are looking for jobs at places that need an algorithm to evaluate resumes.</p>
<p>A company that only hires graduates with GPAs above a cutoff from a select group of schools is employing a filtering algorithm. Even a law firm that requires a BA for its file clerks (there was a recent NYT story “It Takes a B.A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk”) is using a simple algorithm. As data becomes more plentiful, companies that use better algorithms in hiring should gain an advantage. The graduates of colleges that provide more information, including meaningful grades, should have an edge.</p>
<p>I just want to point out that there is a lot of exaggeration and over-simplification going on here. “Everyone” is not getting As in “every” or even MOST classes. Certainly, this does not mean that there is not “grade inflation” as defined by those who bemoan its existence. (And who, for some reason, care.)</p>
<p>FWIW, when I was hiring, I never looked at a transcript and didn’t care one whit about people’s GPAs. I relied primarily on recruiters to prescreen candidates, and worked with several. The recruiter who understood what I was looking for and sent me those very bright, curious people who wrote, thought, and communicated well and had tons of potential was the recruiter who was most successful in placing people with me. The recruiters who didn’t get it didn’t get the $$. Of course, I didn’t approach recruiting as a cattle call looking for credentialed warm bodies who would just be weeded out if it turned out that they couldn’t cut it. (Although I did indeed fire people if they didn’t work out, despite all I invested in them.) I interviewed them thoroughly.</p>
<p>Nor was I ever asked for a GPA or a transcript when applying for a job.</p>
<p>I know that online resumes are searched for keywords and the like, but IMNSHO that is lazy, incompetent recruiting. I have seen too many ads for people in my former field, technical communications, that ask for knowledge of whatever software package the employer is currently using to produce manuals or help facilities or whatever. In my view, if a person is smart enough and curious enough to work for me, they are smart enough to learn new software rapidly. If they are too dumb and insufficiently interested to learn a new word processing package, how in hell are they going to master my company’s software?</p>