<p>Everything depends on the class. For example,</p>
<p>In orgo last semester, the average on one test was a 65. In order to get an A you had to get an 82, a 70 was a B, a 50 was a C, and so on.</p>
<p>On a recent math midterm, the average was 67, and an A+ was 93, an A was 85, a B was 70 and a C was 55.</p>
<p>In an English class I had last semester, however, the professor used the ten-point grading scale.</p>
<p>You really can never tell anything until you actually get into a class. As long as you are a few points above average you don't really need to worry.</p>
<p>
[quote]
"do you NOT understand what a curve is???</p>
<p>There is no set score for guaranteeing an A. It all depends on how well your classmates do. Like I said, if you get an A- and all of your classmates get A pluses, then you'd probably have a C. It's all in the competition"
[/quote]
</p>
<p>omg venus, i thought i made it clear...
i know wat a curve, is. i also know that from year to year the students generally tend to perform at nearly the same levels, so the mean, etc. tends to stay pretty consistent.</p>
<p>thx everyone else for the stats, i have a better sense of where the difficulty level stands</p>
<p>it is quite true that grades on exams tend to be consistent year to year within a class, even considering the variations in professors for most classes. For example, my orgo II syllabus this semester says that the anticipated mean on most exams will be around a 60, so in order to get an A, you should have an average of 80 or above (the Chem department assumes the standard devation will be 20, so in fact you only need to be ONE deviation above the curve).</p>
<p>The estimate of 2 standard deviations is actually overly conservative. Beating one deviation is usually enough to put you in the A range, because by definition you're in the top 16% of the class assuming a normal distribution, and most science classes aim to hand out about 20% A's.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I don't think Ivy's really have grade inflation...
the students there are just smarter!
I mean how can teachers give students who have 2200 with perfect high school records Cs? it doesn't make sense to give them anything lower...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I hope you're kidding.. but if you're not, college grades are extremely different from high school grades. Just because you can survive at an Ivy doesn't mean you'll excel at one.</p>
<p>Chewie what she's saying isn't unreasonable. When the best students in the country enter college and start receiving Cs, it is somewhat strange. The same students could attend local universities and receive 4.0 GPAs...so there's no way to really compare GPA across colleges. She definitely has a point.</p>
<p>As for the previous question about Econ grades:
It depends primarily on the type of class you're in, and secondarily on the professor's grading style. Econ classes registered as seminars (I believe they have to have less than 30 students) don't have to follow the grading curve, but those registered as lectures must follow a curve similar to Wharton's. Some profs purposely scare the hell out of underclassment and students looking for an easy class in order to lower the enrollment and qualify for seminar, and then proceed to become very helpful and polite the day they get under 30 and Add period is over. Generally, Econ (like the other quantitative depts in SAS) spreads its grades out better than research and writing-intensive classes.</p>
<p>My other experiences were mostly in PoliSci, where I felt that in the larger classes I could either kill myself working for an A and still get an A-, or do absolutely none of the work while attending class sometimes (when the weather wasn't too nice or too cold) and still get at least a B+/A-. In the larger classes, it seemed like if you hadn't cheated on your admissions, you'd do reasonably well. The opposite, however, was also true: if you went out of your way to get into a smaller, more challenging class, then you'd probably have to work hard for that same B+. Overall, political science classes tend to reserve C's for the unfortunate non-polisci majors who stumble upon an advanced class on constitutional law or political economy and find it interesting enough to stay but don't have the same background.</p>