<p>how hard is it to obtain GPA of, say, 3.60 or higher?</p>
<p>also, are students mostly supportive of one another or more like a cutthroat competition?</p>
<p>I don't know what your school is like, but I go to a rather competitive public high school. Friends that graduated from my school and are now at Penn say that their classes are a lot easier than their high school classes, and have rather high GPAs. </p>
<p>Also, with regard to cutthroat competition, my friends all say that it's only competitive if you hang out with competitive people.</p>
<p>thanks, any other input?</p>
<p>Well, I'm from Quebec and we have an extra year of pre-uni studies here (sort of like a grade 13). A girl who's now a frosh at Penn was in the same honours program that I am in right now, and she said she did significantly less work her first semester than she did back here in secondary school...and she had a 3.68 first semester. That seems pretty good to me.</p>
<p>Oh! Another thing--you might want to check out this thread : <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=163321%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=163321</a>. It really depends on the major, too--esp. engineering!</p>
<p>it depends what your major is and on the individual, but in my opinion its sort of difficult. I'm a science major though, so maybe its just me. But its not impossible, people do it.</p>
<p>Science majors, Wharton, Engineering, Econ and Math majors generally tend to have lower GPAs than do the others from what I have observed as a student at Penn. Of course, within each major there are ways to pad your GPA, which is possible and is done under Penn's curriculum that falls between open-ended (eg Brown) and concrete (Columbia). Therefore I would say first major than the specific curriculum you chose.</p>
<p>i am a current penn student. i think your gpa is highly dependent on the type and number of courses you take. there are students who take tough classes in order to really learn something useful and there are those who take the easiest classes and keep a high gpa. but there are also those who take hard classes and put in a lot of work and sometimes score very well. so its quite subjective. someone getting a high gpa is not necessarily doing well and one has to take a look at their transcript to see the difficulty level of the classes he/she has taken.</p>
<p>I will say that a BIG part of what determines you gpa is how much you want a good gpa. Penn is not too competitive on the whole. Mostly kids are laid back, and won't kill themselves for the A. So if you put in the extra hours, you can do pretty well.</p>
<p>is there grade inflation at penn???</p>
<p>this is sort of unrelated but i was wandering if i had a 4.0 or 3.9 unweighted gpa at a very poor academic high school and a 3.6 Gpa my soph year at a very good college prep boarding school would be good enough for penn. I plan on taking 3 AP courses next year and also one Honors course so my GPA should be somewhere in the 3.8-3.9 range my junior year. Is that good enough for UPenn if i have high enough test scores? Thank you</p>
<p>bump the above question: is there grade inflation at penn?</p>