<p>how good is the political science department at reed?</p>
<p>How good do you want it to be?</p>
<p>good enough that if i get a B or something (i heard there's a lot of grade deflation at Reed) and get a great GRE score i can get in to any graduate school i want.</p>
<p>I could be wrong about this, but my feeling is that Reed probably isn't a good place if you're worried about grades. They don't even give them out. You just get written teacher evaluations. They do record a grade somewhere so you have a transcript for grad. school, but when I did my overnight at Reed everyone seemed really chill about the traditional idea of grades, and more concerned with learning just for learning's sake. Everyone also stressed that you better be motivated by more than grades because the work load is intense. Reed has a great reputation with grad schools and some of that rep is probably because that they know that Reed students don't just work for grades. I want to go to grad school too but the main reason I like Reed isn't its reputation with grad schools but the fact that people there seem to care about ideas and learning more than they do about grades and getting into grad school.</p>
<p>As for the quality of the political science department at Reed, one of the future PhD tabulations puts Reed in a tie for fourth place:</p>
<p>Academic field:Political Science and Government </p>
<p>PhDs and Doctoral Degrees: ten years (1994 to 2003) from NSF database<br>
Number of Undergraduates: ten years (1989 to 1998) from IPEDS database<br>
Formula: Total PhDs per 1000 graduates </p>
<p>1 Swarthmore College 10
2 Haverford College 8
3 Princeton University 8
4 Pomona College 7
5 Harvard University 7
6 University of Chicago 7
7 Oberlin College 7
8 Williams College 7
9 Reed College 7
10 Wesleyan University 6
11 Bryn Mawr College 6
12 University of the South 5
13 Whitman College 5
14 Amherst College 5
15 Yale University 5
16 College of Wooster 5
17 Stanford University 5
18 Georgetown University 5
19 Claremont McKenna College 5
20 Carleton College 5
21 Smith College 4
22 Middlebury College 4
23 Franklin and Marshall College 4
24 Tougaloo College 4
25 Wellesley College 4</p>
<p>(courtesy of interesteddad, <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/archive/index.php/t-193524.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/archive/index.php/t-193524.html</a>)</p>
<p>nah, i'm not worried about grades. and i heard that grad schools know that reed doesn't practice grade inflation.</p>
<p>tied with oberlin. that's both a good and bad thing, since i'm trying to decide between reed and oberlin.</p>
<p>
[quote]
good enough that if i get a B or something (i heard there's a lot of grade deflation at Reed) and get a great GRE score i can get in to any graduate school i want.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I attended Reed many a moon ago, majored in polisci, got more B's than A's, and got into every grad school and law school I applied to (only two grad schools applied to, however, Princeton and Wisconsin; law school at Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley-Boalt Hall).</p>
<p>You can go anywhere from Reed, in just about any field, because you'll have an excellent education, great research and writing skills, a respect for ideas (and skepticism toward the conventional wisdom).</p>