<p>It is indeed true that it is difficult. The pressure and stress is enormous and there are many obstacles to graduation. Cadets and Mids must perform academically, physically and militarily. A failed fitness test can lead to separation.<br>
The Class of 2009 entered Basis Cadet Training with 1251. About 950 will graduate on Saturday or 76%.
Major reason for not graduating on time at civilian schools are finances or changing majors. The Service Academies removes these obstacles.
The drop out rate used to be much higher but the Academies do provide a lot of support for cadets and mids to graduate and commission. </p>
<p>At all the academies every student must complete a rigorous Core Curriculum. At West Point every cadet graduates with a major plus an engineering tract, including 3 semesters of Calc, two of physics, 2 of chem, 3 engineering courses and two years of a Foreign language. They all take between 18-21 credits per semester.
Add the course load, required athletics, required duties/leadership responsibilites and military training and you have a hefty schedule. It’s very competitive and cadets are ranked on academics, phyical and military performance.</p>
<p>Service Academies also have a strict Honor Code. Just having knowledge that someone cheated and not reporting it, will get yourself flat out expelled.</p>
<p>I’m not so sure. Our very good friends had two kids wash out (from different academies). While FINE, strong young men, their math background was weak. Expecting them to manage the engineering gauntlet was foolhardy of the recruiters.</p>
<p>Also, reading the AF posts on cc, it appears that Colorado Springs has a built-in philosophy that only the strong should survive; thus, washouts are expected?</p>
<p><a href=“Hanna:”>quote</a>
In the case of Harvard, it’s extremely likely that the mean is a bit lower than the median, simply because the left-hand side of the curve has a much longer tail. In other words, you can graduate with a GPA that’s more than a full point below the median, but you can’t do the same in the positive direction. </p>
<p>My guess is that the mean is somewhere in the 3.3’s.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Survey says: </p>
<p>"The average self-reported GPA [of 600 Harvard seniors sampled in June 2008] was 3.53, and the average for men and women did not differ significantly. The GPA for varsity athletes was .14 lower and .11 lower for those involved in single-sex social clubs, including final clubs, fraternities, and sororities.</p>
<p>There were no significant differences in the average GPA across the disciplines. "</p>
<p>^
yeah, but that is based on a crimson survey sent to all seniors who self-select whether to respond and whether to give their GPAs (one can submit the survey without answering all the questions). </p>
<p>the type of people to complete such a survey may be more likely to have higher grades, and the people who choose to indicate their GPAs are probably disproportionately above the mean (ie, those who have GPAs in the sub-3.0 range may be reluctant to indicate it).</p>
<p>i’d say 3.3-3.4 is a good estimate.</p>
<p>edit: harvard is still ridiculously grade-inflated, regardless. the thing is that over time colleges have become more like businesses selling degrees, and students have become more like customers, and we all know the age-old adage about keeping the customer happy. students (and parents) aren’t happy with low grades, especially with such an emphasis on numbers among employers and tertiary education institutions (sorry, that was clunky, but i’m too lazy to re-word).</p>
<p>Had they surveyed 6 or 60 people that might be an issue. They polled 600, which is a large chunk of the class. These undergrad surveys at Harvard tend to take place in the dining halls and the coverage and response rates are outlandishly good, because all the students are on campus and, for whatever reason, students are cooperative with the surveys and willing to participate.</p>
<p>Had the survey been electronic, self-selection might have had an effect, but still a small one, as laziness in responding is not all that related to the factors driving grades.</p>
<p>^^Wrong, self-selection is still a problem, a big problem in this case. The obvious question to ask about the survey is why is that used when there is a much more accurate method to find out grades, i.e. work with the registrar.</p>
<p>mazatl, thanks for pointing out the problems. Once again Harvard is not quite what it’s presented as.</p>
<p>Are you personally familiar with the Harvard details I mentioned (and sampling theory, for that matter), or making these comments on general principle? What problems, specifically, are you pointing to as coming from self-selection?</p>
<p>The obvious reason to not go to the registrar is that estimating the grade average wasn’t the goal of the survey, but given that a survey was to be performed, that question was an interesting one to include. Also, the registrar would never release average grades by subpopulation.</p>
<p>The idea that it is easy to do well at Harvard is baseless at best and a flat out lie at worst. I think, like several people have said, that it is fairly easy to get decent grades. I think that showing up to class and turning in work will get you a B-, B average. However, to do really well is a different story. I know a handful of students who won top prizes at events like the Intel Science Fair or international olympiads but who have to pull regular all-nighters to do well in hard classes. I think the fact that Harvard has only had something like 7 4.0’s in its history is a good indication of the struggle to get top grades. Which isn’t to say that other schools aren’t like this as well. But I just think that it sells Harvard students short when people talk about how “easy” Harvard is.</p>
<p>I think the Harvard being tagged as easy stem from the following reasons:
Harvard is grade obsessive when it selects its freshman class. Since most of the students matriculating were grade obsessive to begin with so it is difficult for such students to get lower grades.
Most of the students graduate from Harvard in Liberal Arts which has much easier classes than engineering as evident from the fact that the class of 2008 at Harvard started with 130 engineering major in 2004 and only 30 graduated in 2008. Others drifted to easier major with higher GPA as these students were grade obsessive to begin with.</p>
<p>I think you’re wrong about engineering at Harvard. I think that people don’t do it because it isn’t a very good program when compared to other majors. In fact, the only person I know who is doing engineering is a recruited athlete who freely admits the only reason she is doing it is because she has no clue what she wants to do with her life and she thinks that engineering will make her money. I think your statistic of “130” to start comes from the fact that people apply as potential engineering students because they know that it will get them a leg up. I know several girls who applied as potential engineers because they were told by the program that they desperately needed people, especially girls, and it would help there chances. So I think very, very few people come to Harvard with any intent of majoring in engineering, especially with MIT right down the river. The number is merely inflated by applicants.</p>
<p>There are so many holes in this Harvard discussion, its difficult to know where to begin. First, 600 students is less than half the graduating class. Secondly, I see no mention in the article as to how many of those polled answered all the questions. I would also expect that some percentage of the students lied and some percentage who are not doing well didn’t respond. The only valid data is that which is obtained from the school directly not student polls.</p>
<p>Anyone going to graduation at Harvard this month? Anyone care to count and then report the number graduating with the various levels of honors? That will tell us much about the gpa distribution there, and get away from these mindless criticisms and attacks on the one bit of substantive data we have.</p>
<p>FYI, the reason people think of Harvard as a slacker school (just kidding…) er, high GPA school is because of the report from a few years ago that 90% of the graduates graduated with various levels of honors, with a high % of summas. </p>
<p>Do you critics want to provide real data to refute this historic gpa inflation? Just saying “there are…holes” or “The idea that it is easy to do well at Harvard is baseless at best and a flat out lie at worst.” is pretty lame. Surely Harvard defenders, of all schools, can do better than that!</p>
<p>"Do you critics want to provide real data to refute this historic gpa inflation? Just saying “there are…holes” or “The idea that it is easy to do well at Harvard is baseless at best and a flat out lie at worst.” is pretty lame. " Basing anything on a survey of less than half of the graduating class is more than pretty lame, its absurd.</p>
<p>600+ out of 1600 is a large sample for this purpose. If they were trying to determine the number of students with extremely high or low grades, or the GPA of each sports team separately, the sample size would be an issue. In this case, the observable of interest is distributed smoothly throughout the population. For reasons I hinted at earlier, the sampling is likely to be quite representative of the population.</p>
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<p>Both the response rate and the completion rate on these things, overall and for particular questions, tend to be impossibly high by ordinary survey standards. Strange but true. Unless you have some theory of how nonresponse by 200 students (if that) is enormously correlated with (and influential upon) GPA measurement, this objection won’t add up to much. </p>
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<p>You would have to also expect some serious conspiracies for this to bias the data much. The survey is anonymous, by the way.</p>
<p>Harvard publishes the exact numbers on their website. They are stable year to year and in line with other (grade inflated) schools: 50 percent with honors, including 20 percent with some flavor of magna/summa. As at other schools, and partly in response to data about grade inflation in the past, those percentages are predefined limits and, effectively, quotas: the number of honors issued matches the set limits each year.</p>
<p>It means the MODAL grade was 3.41. The average could be above or below, depending on the distribution.</p>
<p>I would still like to see an actual count, just to see if Harvard is actually keeping to its own limits. I’ve heard anecdotal reports in the past that it does not - that its efforts to reign in honors has been fought by the faculty. siserune, can you give a link?</p>
<p>FYI, U. Chicago, reputed to be grade deflated, awarded honors to about 2/3 of its June 2008 graduating class. I did an actual count at graduation. (it takes a long time to read off 1000 names…). Since this kind of honors required a 3.25 GPA, it is safe to assume that the modal (and probably the average) grade at UofC is well above 3.25, probably closer to the Harvard modal than a lot of folks would want to believe. (this is the power of data. )</p>
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