<p>Intuit. Do you realize that Cornell's reputation for grade deflation has been greatly exaggerated? Its % A's is right in line with the rest of the Ivies.</p>
<p>KG: WHY should it be the hardest? I would think the best should have the most talented students, the best faculty, the most sucessful graduates, the best facilities... I could go on forever about characteristics that would make a university great, but low grades would not be among them. Would the students benefit, and how, from lowering the average grades? If not, then why do it?</p>
<p>"The issues of grade and honors inflation have been hot topics on campus and across the nation. Isaac Kramnick, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education explained "Cornell has had comparable grade inflation to the other Ivies. Where it is different, however, is in honors inflation. For a variety of reasons, not necessarily because we are tougher, the rate of Cornell students graduating with honors is much lower than the rest of the Ivies, especially Harvard." To learn more about grade inflation, you might be interested in the following sites:</p>
<p>I can't speak for all majors, but especially engineering...
This is what is done... for a given question a slight error or a stupid mistake would ususally cost you the bulk of the points of the question. Even when one shows complete understanding of the material yet gets a wrong answer or through a wrong method a lot of points are taken off... Unreasonably. Hence pushing those people who aren't perfect test takers to the wrong side of the curve. Secondly, the grades are curved towards the median which is always significantly higher than the mean. This is because the median doesn;t take into account the many scores that are in the teens and in the single digits. Another example... Introductory General Chemistry which most engineers and premeds take is ridiculously competitive. What the department does is they don't accept AP credit and college credit for the course. So essentially people of all kinds of different levels are taking the same class. So I was competing against a student whose parents are both chemists and who's been eating living and breathing chemistry his whole life. And me, someone who had basic introductory chemistry and horrible teachers at that. Now i think something is wrong here.
My main point is this, since graduates from all kinds of universities are competing for the same jobs, shouldn't we have a standardized system of grading or at least somewhat equal? Perhaps administrating standardized tests like... like is done is Junior High and High School</p>
<p>Harvard University, for instance, came under sharp criticism for graduating 91 percent of the Class of 2001 with honors, and subsequently announced this semester that it is raising the minimum grade point average (GPA) needed for an honors degree. At Cornell, which graduated only eight percent of the Class of 2001 with honors, the number of A's awarded to students has more than doubled since 1965.</p>
<p>I got this from the Sun. Inspite of the fact that A's more than doubled we still had only 8% of students graduating with honors.</p>
<p>I agree engineering is a tough major. But it is tough everywhere, not just at Cornell. </p>
<p>Yes, Harvard was mocked into reducing the number of students who graduate with honors, but it dod not change the grade distributions. So students get the same grades now as they did before, it just takes higher grades to graduate with honors. Grades do not really tell you much about a person anyway. How could you standardize them? Grades are the results of independent decisions made by tens of thousands of professors at colleges across the country. There are standardized tests taken by people applying to graduate or professional schools. On those tests the grads of "grade inflated" schools do very well. So perhaps they are not so inflated after all.</p>
<p>There are multiple ways to perform grading. One way would be to determine if the class undertands the material well and if they do, they would get an A which might allow an entire class to receive an A. Another way would be to establish a median grade and curve the class to it to allow those students who excel in the material to rise to the top and others to sink to the bottom in order to obtain a distribution. This latter method seems to be the norm in engineering, some science, and some other classes. The professors frequently mkae the grading so harsh and the tests so difficult that nobody can ever get 100% and the average is frequently closer to a 50%. Since everything's relative, this may not be a problem within that program and it allows the school to distinguish between students (all of whom are very smart students) but it can be a problem when one is competing for grad schools with those taking majors at the same school that don't perform the harsh grading or when they're competing with other schools who don't follow the practice of the infamous 'curve'. I hope grad schools understand the grading policies of schools and departments at some of the other schools although it'd probably be difficult for them to know this intimately for any other than the schools supplying the greatest number of applicants.</p>
<p>btw - I can tell you that UCSD engineering is also tough on grading as are many engineering schools - especially the higher-ranked schools. They can be brutal in the 'weeder' courses.</p>
<p>ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad, graduate schools consider and value more highly many other factors in admittance than grades (although they play an important role, in some fields far more than others). Because departments generally receive students who majored in the same field (or broad discipline, such as humanities or social sciences), they're generally familiar with grading practices. It's the professional schools in which low grades, regardless of how or where they come about, are problematic. They rarely seem to care about differences in grading, and the two most popular (law and med) have a lovely standardized test score they highly value. Business schools care about grades much, much less than other factors.</p>
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There are standardized tests taken by people applying to graduate or professional schools. On those tests the grads of "grade inflated" schools do very well. So perhaps they are not so inflated after all.
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<p>Well, lets remember that a very small sub-set of a school takes each test whereas average GPA is a function of the entire school, and that doing well on standardized testing isn't the same thing as doing well in courses. They require different skills. Do students at the best schools often have both? Well, yes, that's how they get into the best schools, but I don't know if the correlation of GPA and test scores is justification for grade inflation.</p>
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I agree engineering is a tough major. But it is tough everywhere, not just at Cornell.
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<p>Yeah, but there are degrees of toughness (no pun intended). There's a certain school in Palo Alto which is a consensus top engineering school that tends to be relatively soft when it comes to grading (at least, relative to other engineering schools).</p>
<p>bu sucks. the grade deflation is the professors way to inflate their own egos and make themselves feel special because they are bitter about harvard being more awesome, more prestigious and simply just higher on all scales than bu</p>
<p>I have not read every post on this thread so I apologize in advance for any redundancy. Grade comparison is tough even within a school. At S's school, honors for his "major" in the humanities is 3.0. It is exceedingly difficult to get a full B or above in a course. In another department in the same school, honors requires a 3.5 (both of these GPA's require an honors paper, recommendations, etc. as well). There are about the same percentage qualifying from each, is one group more accomplished than another? In another science course of 90 students there were 7 A's given. The most frequent grade was C. Students who choose their major well, avoid those particular science courses, and manage their course selection (taking a lower level calc or bio sequence) can get a very good GPA. The majority of students don't do this, resulting in the College honors GPA is 3.25. Who is the better educated, the 3.7 student who navigated the course selections, or the 3.25 student who really challenged themselves? (Luckily, most at the school are the latter.)</p>
<p>I think a school’s grading curves should correlate between incoming SAT scores (ie. inflation for higher scores). It doesn’t make sense to compare the GPAs of HYP caliber students to those of lower ranked schools.</p>
<h2>I think a school’s grading curves should correlate between incoming SAT scores (ie. inflation for higher scores). It doesn’t make sense to compare the GPAs of HYP caliber students to those of lower ranked schools. </h2>
<p>What happens if I have a 1600 SAT at a state school versus someone with a 1500 SAT at Harvard, and I have a lower GPA? Do I get a “boost” in my GPA? </p>
<p>While it might be the case that on average, HYPS students are better than students from state schools, the top students from state schools are probably just as good as the top student from HYPS.</p>