Penn kills the Dean's List

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Pennsylvania
1

The war against individual achievement continues unabated. I’m embarrassed my alma mater would do this, but even more so by the stupidity of the explanation given.

2

You didn’t really expect them to use rampant grade inflation as the reason, did you?

In your day, it meant something. Nowadays, it’s a participation prize.

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At an institution my D attends, Dean’s List designation is for top 20% of first years and there is definitely no instance of grade inflation. DL is then an indication of an achievement…but it is just one marker of the overall learning and education experience. I don’t know yet whether this change at Penn is beneficial or not but times are changing.

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Hi Ski. That’s actually not true at Penn. If it were, I wouldn’t care. Dean’s List at Penn is a gpa of 3.7 or above for both semesters of an entire academic year - Fall/Spring. No credit if you have a 3.7 Spring followed by Fall across years. Penn isn’t Harvard - not known for grade inflation especially in the sciences and engineering.

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Oops - wrong info…Dean’s List is about 20% of all degree seeking students, not just first years

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6

This always bugged me. Dean’s list is remarkably easy at some schools and very tough at others.

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If you carry this trend to its logical conclusion, schools are going to start eliminating GPA’s altogether. In fact, I think that this has already been done (at least to some extent) at Brown.

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Since Dean’s Lists are often based on GPA, it really doesn’t inform about anything that the student (or someone reading internship applications) already knows: the GPA they accomplished.

I’ve always thought it be more important for parents to tell the grandparents, than for the students to feel “recognized”, or to create opportunities.

It’s more an automatic attribute, like your birthday celebration.

I don’t have strong feelings for or against - I just don’t think it’s a “great loss” in practical terms?

However, I would have done it as a “rolling phase-out” so that people who did put it on their Linked-In for year 1 and 2 don’t suddenly face a “no longer on dean’s list?” scenario.

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