Rising senior here. I’m looking to apply to many T20 schools including HYS. I plan to do premed.
Just curious, do all colleges grade on a curve? Meaning that a certain amount of students get an A, certain get a B, C, etc with no regard to the actual mastery of content? Or do most colleges follow the HS route and just give grades based on how well students performed on exams? If you guys could, please drop some colleges from the T20 that grade on a curve vs not a curve.
Also, how intense is the grade inflation? I know at Wash U, for example, they have tough weed out classes for freshman and massive grade deflation (one of my friends dropped out of the premed track after his GPA got trashed). Harvard on the other hand practices grad inflation and a lot of people have A’s. Do you know what the average premed GPA here is?
TL;DR: Can you guys, off the top of your head, just list a few colleges in the T20 with grade inflation/deflation and if the majority of their premed/science classes are based on a curve or not?
Keep in mind that since I’m premed, I’m more interested in the science courses. Ik people like to say that humanities courses have more inflation/not on curve compared to Ochem for example
@NoKillli The data on that link is for accepted students’ HS GPAs, so not germane to what OP is asking. Further, that GPA data is self-reported by students, so definitely not of high veracity for any purpose.
Went to a Princeton tour a few years ago and heard it just implemented grading curve a few years earlier. Asked the tour guide what would happen if applying to post graduate schools with lower GPA than other applicants from comparable schools without grade deflation. The tour guide’s answer was that Princeton would issue with the transcription (if request, I guess) a letter stating it competitiveness of its students and above certain GPA (probably 3.2) was already considered a very studious student there. She also said besides it’s Princeton so graduate schools and employers knew already.
D is in a T14-15 school and it has grade deflation too, especially in its premed weed out classes. She said the Chemistry class there was much much harder than her AP Chemistry, despite she spent lots of time on the material and labs. It probably crashes many premed oriented freshmen’s dream to become doctors.Anyway, the grading curves actually bumped up D’s CS class grade a notch last semester after the instructor added a few points to the final for each students due to the difficult of the test. So not all grading curves are bad.
Back in my day, the curve usually did students a favor. I only remember one test where it didn’t and an 89% was a C. Most of the time the mean was like 30% so the entire class would have failed without it.
My guess is the answer is going to vary by college, and then by course within the college. IME, if a curve is applied, it is on the final grade, not test by test. I have also never had a class where an instructor would give a A if everyone in the class got a final grade of 94+ (or whatever cut-off the professor set at the outset).
That said, most of my intro STEM classes had a curve.
This is a good example of how anecdotal evidence about grade inflation is often bunk. The average GPA of pre-law students at Harvard and Wash U is 3.69 and 3.65, respectively.
You’ll find far more variation in grading practices between departments at Harvard and Wash U than between the two universities as a whole. At Berkeley, for example, the average GPAs of cognitive science majors (3.16), mechanical engineering majors (3.31), political science majors (3.41), history majors (3.52), and art majors (3.67) vary quite a bit.
Wisconsin publishes a great distribution report. You can find it by searching for “UW Madison grade distribution report “. They don’t use pluses or minuses, however, they do have two intermediate grades The AB(3.5) and BC(2.5). The grade distribution for the five chemistry pre-med prerequisites for spring 2018 are:
Chem 103: General Chemistry I
A: 24.5
AB: 12.1
B: 26.6
BC: 12.2
C: 16.8
D: 5.9
F: 1.8
Chem 104 General Chemistry II
A 28.7
AB 11.2
B 25.1
BC 12.0
C 15.6
D 6.4
F 0.9
Chem 343 Intro Organic Chemistry
A 21.3
AB 9.9
B 26.6
BC 7.9
C 24.6
D 5.8
F 3.0
Chem 344 Intro Organic Chemistry Lab
A 28.4
AB 9.5
B 39.1
BC 15.6
C 6.2
D 1.2
F 0.0
Chem 345 Intermediate Organic Chemistry
A 22.8
AB 9.4
B 29.4
BC 6.9
C 25.1
D 4.2
F 1.9