<p>I'm a proud Penn alumna, and now my son is applying, so I was distressed to read such a damning article written by a current Penn student. My son uses collegeconfidential, so I was wondering what you guys and girls thought about this? Is Penn really such a joke these days?
The</a> Daily Pennsylvanian :: Xavier Flory | Higher grades, worse education</p>
<p>I would take the time to read some of the comments at the below the article. There’s a different perspective there. I’ll defer to the more senior Penn students for a more thorough analysis and response to the article.</p>
<p>I think if you looked at the average SAT score it is probably higher now than when you attended. Also, students may not know as much about Europe, but they may know more math and computer languages than before and also more about ROW, (China, India ME, Asia, Africa )etc. So I would disagree with the article. The priorities have changed, but I believe the kids are smarter now than before.</p>
<p>It’s hard for me to fathom that a Penn Alum would read that nonsense and actually tell anyone that they were concerned. Come on??? Are you kidding me??</p>
<p>I am just going to point out that this article was written by a SOPHOMORE student at UPenn. In addition, the author cites only one professor in the strongly opinionated article. </p>
<p>An important skill is to examine the sources and views of the author before embracing the article as revolutionary fact.</p>
<p>The OP is almost certainly a ■■■■■. If not I’d hope his kid is alot smarter than he is,if he hopes to get admitted to Penn.</p>
<p>/\ OP is a woman ( alumna, not alumnus) and I can envision being concerned if it were my alma mater. That being said, the linked article is more of an opinion piece. I wonder how the six or seven female professors in the Comparative Lit department feel knowing that the students have to wonder which one trashed them…</p>
<p>^ Also, this has been a critique of top schools–and especially their humanities and, to a lesser extent, social science departments–for decades. Claims of grade inflation at schools like Harvard, Brown, etc., and in departments in which grading is primarily essay-based, have been around at least since the 1960s. And it’s why recent efforts at grade deflation at schools such as Princeton have received so much attention.</p>
<p>Although this may be news to a current sophomore such as the author of this DP column, it’s old news to us old fogies. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I still have my money on this being a ■■■■■ Penn basher. A more subtle version of recent Penn bashing.</p>
<p>Liberal arts courses at top schools almost universally inflate grades. It’s a byproduct of brilliant kids taking subjective courses. Curves inherently increase competition, which one might argue is antithetical to the concept of a liberal arts curriculum, and I think are more appropriate to competitive pre-professional fields like finance, engineering, or medicine. Besides, if everyone and their mother are inflating grades in these fields, then you’re simply competing against everyone else on a much narrower gamut–a B+ is a relative failure. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, and there’s no benefit to changing it unless it’s accompanied by a wide shift in academia towards a liberal arts curve. In most cases, professors don’t give everyone an A, just few grades below a B.</p>
<p>Regardless of grades, people don’t choose Penn for a stringent core. In fact, many choose it because of its flexibility. People who want to be well-rounded can become so voluntarily at Penn (and it’s more than possible, and rather encouraged). But Penn is also home to many pre-professional kids who chose Penn for the ability to focus on what they love. If the author wants a wide-ranging liberal arts education, it’s more than available to him at Penn. But he shouldn’t be upset that others at Penn, a university founded on pre-professionalism, want something different.</p>
<p>Penn was not founded on pre-professionalism, it was founded to encourage both intellectual and practical pursuits. I think a common misconception is that these things have to be mutually exclusive. You can still get a well rounded education if you plan to attend medical or law school, it just takes more effort. The sectors help guide students in the right direction. The issue I have with them is that you are restricted to classes on the list which means you can’t take many upper division courses to fill the requirements. For example, a lot of Vagelos Scholars have a hard time fulfilling the living world requirement because many do not take intro bio but instead take upper level bio/biochemistry courses. Another thing is that someone who is not a science major can get away without taking a real science class (one that fulfills a major requirement), but science majors have to take classes in the humanities that can be taken by humanities majors to fulfill requirements in their majors. But I think in the end, it is up to the students to design their education. I think the sectors are a nice intermediate between no requirements (like at Brown) and very rigid ones (like at Columbia).</p>
<p>I didn’t read the full article but I read the beginning, and what I can offer is that when I took my writing seminar back in freshman year, my classmates were surprisingly terrible at writing.</p>
<p>While there are a lot of smart people at Penn, I often met people who were just not all that bright at all, and made me wonder how they even got into Penn. </p>
<p>(many of these were athletes, rich kids, or kids from the Philly area, which makes more sense)</p>
<p>Blah, blah, blah…</p>
<p>That article is really poorly written. That almost underscores its thesis about Penn’s standards, though, doesn’t it?</p>
<p>Penn paper seems to be run by bad wanna be journalists.</p>
<p>Just like most newspapers and news channels.</p>
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<p>So you read the entire Daily Pennsylvanian on a regular basis, as well as the student-run newspapers of many other top schools? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>45 percenter - there are always selfrighteous bemoaners when they discover the power to write. </p>
<p>If you look at the writing, the writer is making a sweeping generalization about the education system at Penn. If an editor is paying attention, they should have asked for more evidence as opposed to publishing such a onesided opinion piece with an unattributed quote from an unknown professor and some kid who does not care to know the capital of Germany (thinking of it, I am not sure either since there was an east and a west germany in my student days, they seem to have merged and now what is that capital again?).</p>
<p>So yes, the writer wrote crap deeming an entire school as not meeting its obligations and the editor published it. Bad wanna be journalists with an agenda.</p>
<p>I know at least two kids who went to Penn this year. Really well accomplished, top of the class and so on. Does that make the entire class - no. What the writer said about who he met does not make the entire school either.</p>
<p>^ Perhaps, but YOUR post cast a dubious aspersion on the entire staff of the DP, and on the paper itself.</p>
<p>I am one among many on CC with an opinion and assume those young impressionable minds get the other side of opinions too. 
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<p>DP might be a fine paper but Penn is a finer institution. So think of it as the greater good that I want to make sure kids are not turned off by this story. I am not certain the OP has been trying to paint Penn in a good light.</p>
<p>May be a future journalism student learns not to write da%ning pieces about a school without more foundation to those allegations.</p>