<p>I have heard a couple rumors (or is it true?):
Harvard & Princeton: harder to get accepted, easier to get high GPA
Penn & Cornell: easier to get accepted, harder to get high GPA</p>
<p>any thoughts? hit me with your list of rankings</p>
<p>Princeton is currently working on grade deflation initiatives, so therefore it will be harder to to get "high" GPAs (i.e. 4.0's) - for an Ivy of its caliber, though, i consider 3.0 high.</p>
<p>If you're worried about your GPA, you don't belong at any of them.</p>
<p>If you're named after your "mini", you don't belong anywhere. How's that?</p>
<p>Anyone with actual thoughts on this?</p>
<p>Well I think many people at the Ivies are interested in GPAs. You can claim GPAs don't matter for jobs, but they are clearly important for graduate school especially law and medical school. So I would hope if you are looking to continue in education that you care about your GPA.</p>
<p>What you learn and how you apply that knowledge is way more important than if you got a B+ versus an A- in the class.</p>
<p>Cornell is the toughest Ivy by far. An article in the Boston Globe a few years ago found the following percents graduating with honors:
Boston Globe (Oct. 7 & 8 maybe 2001) At Harvard, honors are given to almost all graduates. The October 8th article has a table which lists the percentages of seniors graduating with honors in 2001 at different schools:</p>
<p>Ivy League: Harvard: 91% Yale: 51% Princeton: 44% Brown: 42% Dartmouth: 40% Columbia: 25% Cornell: 8% (Penn's info is not available)</p>
<p>Non-Ivy League: Tufts: 52% BU: 39% Johns Hopkins: 35% BC: 29% Duke: 28% Stanford: 20% </p>
<p>Part of the reason might be that the other Ivys are primarily Liberal Arts but Cornell is heavily science, math, and technology (35% roughly, compared to 5-15% at other Ivys roughly). It almost deserves to be Cornell Institute of Science and Technology but that would diminish the excellent reputation in humanities and social sciences. I think it is well-documented that grading is toughest in science, math, engineering, comp sci, and econ courses. There is a big difference between the math- and non-math disciplines in terms of grading. Dare I say it? I think the math-based disciplines are just plain harder.</p>
<p>There might be other factors that I have not mentioned. This could make for an interesting discussion.</p>
<p>Cornell students have complained about the disadvantages of tough grading. GPA is used by grad schools for initial screening and by prospective employers for screening candidates for interviews. From what I hear, the administration is not budging.</p>
<p>Cornell is by far the most academically challenging Ivy league school. Brown is completely a joke with their pass/fail system of grading and no requirements. The grade inflation at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton is ridiculous.</p>
<p>How many people at Harvard could graduate with 4.0 or above GPA?</p>
<p>The classes should be challenging enough and not inflated enough that the answer to that should be "Not nearly as many as currently are"</p>
<p>princeton is actually beoming very anti grade inflation. in fact, there are charges of grade 'deflation' going on, as it were. many departments have now implemented a program which allows only 35% of students to recieve As. pretty radical if you ask me.</p>
<p>Perfect if you ask me ;)</p>
<p>we'll see in a few months :)</p>
<p>"Brown is completely a joke with their pass/fail system of grading and no requirements."</p>
<p>What are you even talking about? If Brown were such a joke then why is it a top university? I don't think you know what you are talking about. The classes are just as rigorous as any other top school.</p>
<p>"No requirements" is for the students to take what they want, by the way. That has nothing to do with grade inflation, etc....</p>
<p>"At Harvard, honors are given to almost all graduates."</p>
<p>Isn't it possible that this is partly true because the students are so outstanding?</p>
<p>id like to see you kids get straight As at harvard/yale/princeton</p>
<p>princeton has a grading curve which would screw your ass over</p>
<p>lol agreed.</p>
<p>This is long but I thought the OP might be interested:</p>
<p>When the Boston Globe ran a series of articles by Patrick Healy on grade inflation a few months ago, all eyes laid on Harvard University, for, to its chagrin, Healy exposed its dirty little secretthat since the Vietnam era, rampant grade inflation has made its top prize for studentsgraduating with honorsvirtually meaningless. Apparently, in its Class of 2001, 91 percent of Harvard graduates received the distinction of honors. At the other Ivy League schools, the number is much lower: Dartmouth, 40 percent; Yale, 51 percent; Princeton, 44 percent; Brown, 42 percent; Columbia, 25 percent; and Cornell, 8 percent. The University of Pennsylvania does not release statistics because Penn administrators believe it would violate students privacy. </p>
<p>To receive honors at Harvard, the standard is questionably low. Harvard requires only a B-minus average in ones major to be awarded cum laude. To earn honors in a major at Dartmouth one must write a thesis that is the product of work that is greater in depth and scope than that normally required for the major and generally have an average of at least a B-plus in the major and at least a B in all courses. One can also earn general honors at Dartmouth through grades only, but it is limited to the top third of the class.</p>
<p>Thus, when Healy asked Dartmouths Dean of Faculty Jamshed Bharucha what he thought of Harvards high honors rate, his response was a supercilious but truthful: It wouldnt ever happen at Dartmouth. Yet how does Dartmouth compare to the other Ivies in terms of grade inflation itself?</p>
<p>In some respects Dartmouth has gotten relatively better. Due to a measure passed in 1994, Dartmouth has since added an extra notation beside the grade students receive on their transcripts: the median grade of each class and the number of students enrolled in each class. This way, if a student receives an A grade in a class, but the median grade is an A, meaning half of the class received an A or A-plus, an outsider reading a transcript will know that the grade is not very significant or not as meaningful as an A grade in a class with a median grade of a C. This theoretically should quell the tendency for students to enroll in classes only because the professor has a reputation for giving easy As. It should also help to reduce instances of professors giving out unearned, high grades to boost enrollment into their classes. </p>
<p>Columbia adopted a similar system in 1996 where the percentage of A grades for each course is marked on the transcript. Harvard, on the other hand, considered such a system, but could not push it through the academic committee process.</p>
<p>Brown and Stanford dropped the D and F grades entirely out of their system during the 70s. Ever since, a Brown student has yet to fail a course. If a course is not satisfactorily completed, no record of the failure shows up on the students transcript. Some say this has lead to a grade compression. Without the D and the F grades, professors are forced to give the poorest students at least a C. This, of course, pushes the rest of the grades up if the professor is going to be fair to the better performers. Since an A is the highest grade possible, the top performers remain where they are while their lesser peers join them. Stanford reinstated the D grade in 1975, and in 1994, after a study showed that nine out of ten grades given out at Stanford were A or B grades, the university reinstated the F grade, albeit as a less foreboding No credit.</p>
<p>Despite Dartmouths best efforts, a comparison of statistics of recent class years shows that Dartmouth grades are about just as inflated as the rest of the Ivy League.</p>
<p>In the 2000-2001 school year at Brown, A and B grades constituted 44 percent and 25 percent, respectively, of received grades, while only 5 percent of grades received were C grades. Twenty-three percent of the grades were Satisfactory, similar to Pass in a Pass/Fail system, and three percent were No credit. </p>
<p>In the same time period at Harvard, 51 percent of the grades were A and A-minus grades, with 54 percent of humanities grades, 50 percent of natural sciences grades, and 43 percent of social sciences grades, respectively, being A-range grades.</p>
<p>Dartmouth, while not releasing recent percentage information on letter grades and thus precluding a direct comparison, does release the median grades for all courses with more than 10 people each term. A Review analysis of the data revealed that during the 2000-2001 school year, 49 percent of courses had a median grade of an A-minus, B-plus, or higher, meaning that in nearly half of all courses, half of the enrolled students in each course received an A-minus grade or better. Further, out of the more than 1,200 classes held that year, 114 had a median grade of an A, and 403 had a median grade of an A-minus, while the lowest median grade was a C-plus to which only one class took the title. Overall, the median grade was just a little less than an A-minus.</p>
<p>All this stands in stark contrast to the grades given out at the Ivies just a little more than ten years ago. Over a ten-year period at Brown from 1989 to 1999, the percent of A grades rose 9.5 percent from 34.3 to 43.8 percent, while B grades fell 4.9 percent, C grades fell 2.6 percent, No Credit grades fell 1.1 percent, and Satisfactory grades fell 1.9 percent. At Harvard the percentage of A grades given has increased sharply from 23 percent in 1986 to 49 percent in 2001. Over the same ten-year period at Brown, at Dartmouth the average GPA has increased by 0.10 from 3.21 to 3.31. When the Daily Dartmouth investigated grade inflation in 1999, registrar Thomas Bickel admitted to a 0.01 annual increase in GPAs since the late 1970s, remarking, I have been tracking grades for almost 20 years and the inflation has been steady over that period. </p>
<p>The GPA increase at Dartmouth is even more pronounced, however, when compared to 1968 when the average was 2.7 and 1958 when the average was 2.2. In fact, the largest increase in grades at Dartmouth and other colleges occurred over the Vietnam era. One prominent theory is that during the 1960s, as the draft boards loomed over campuses nationwide, sympathetic, anti-war professors boosted student grades as something of a protest knowing that a bad grade could call into question a draft deferment.</p>
<p>Professors generally acknowledge the problem of grade inflation. Horst Richter, Chair of Dartmouths Engineering Department, admits, It is existent everywhere, but we try to control it. As inflated as grades are now, however, trends show no indication of a slow down in the rate of increase of further inflation into the future. And since the highly competitive nature of the Ivy League makes a unilateral move by any single university unlikely, the situation will likely worsen for the foreseeable future.</p>
<p>tore, I repeat again, the classes should be challenging enough that not everyone is getting A's.</p>