<p>Both schools are famous for their difficult courseload, but in which school, is it harder to get a higher GPA? </p>
<p>Just fyi, I know I haven't gotten in either, but I'm curious.</p>
<p>I think employers would be sympathetic to the workload. So if someone is applying from MIT with a 4.0 GPA (B average)-ish or something lower, they’ll understand that it took a lot of work to get there. But anyway I’m pretty sure that after college, research experience is more important than grades. Of course, I actually have no idea. :p</p>
<p>Doesn’t MIT actually “inflate” your GPA since it’s on a 5.0 scale?</p>
<p>For a given major, MIT is probably slightly more difficult, though that is a merely speculative interpretation on my part of the average GPA’s as reported by the “National Trends in Grade Inflation” site.</p>
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<p>That’s an optimistic way to look at it. :)</p>
<p>Alas, when you report your GPA outside MIT, you report it on a four-point scale. </p>
<p>MIT does have an interesting grading quirk that can either work in your favor or not – although plus/minus modifiers can be given at MIT, they are not calculated into the grade point average, and are not reported outside MIT. So it’s possible to get a perfect 5.0 GPA at MIT by getting all A-'s.</p>
<p>At any rate, I think Princeton’s grading policy caps the number of A’s given in a class at 30%? That’s consistent with the grading policies of many of the classes I took at MIT. If I had to guess, I’d wager that MIT is harder than Princeton, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into lower student GPAs, on average.</p>
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<p>Yes, I believe that is the number; it’s a loose cap, though.</p>