<p>Upper division courses universally have a higher GPA than lower division courses, so CC transfers actually have an advantage. The “GPA killers” are usually the calculus series, physics courses, and computer science courses at most colleges. CC transfers usually miss all of these classes.</p>
<p>The disadvantage to a CC transfer is that University Calculus (for example) is usually much more rigorous than CC Calculus. So in a Calculus-based engineering course, the straight-through university students have an advantage over the transfer students because of the better calculus background. Also, transfer students are usually hammered with major courses in their last two years, while straight-through students spread those classes over three years.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you look at average class GPA’s by level, you’ll see senior courses usually have a .25-.5 higher GPA than freshman level courses. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter to me. If it’s high, you might as well put it.</p>
<p>That is very good to hear! I’m breathing a sigh of relief actually!!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>a MAJORITY of community colleges have “watered down” versions of these courses. Not ours, by a long stretch. Actually we have 2 different versions of Calculus (Math 160/161 called “Calculus for Business and Biological Science majors”. The Math 190/191 series is for “science and engineering majors”.). </p>
<p>Besides this, there are many students at our CC that complain that by CC standards our math, physics and chemistry courses are unnecessarily rigorous. Furthermore, on the other transfer board there are boat loads of people talking about how easy the CC courses are, with tons of “extra credit” etc. etc…but I’ve yet to see ANYTHING even REMOTELY close to that at my CC (with the exception of some “general ed” courses I’ve taken). </p>
<p>At first, I did not look favorably upon this, because my reasoning was that the admissions officers have no clue that we are one of those “off-the-cuff” CCs that have professors that go out of their way to introduce rigor in the coursework (this only applies to the Math and Science dept. BTW). So when they look at a “B”, they simply assume one got a “B” in a so-called “easy” CC-level course. However, now I can see the “hidden advantage” in this, which you have articulated above!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is most certainly a disadvantage in terms of “squeezing a ton of courses in a short period of time”, but if, as you say, the upper-level engineering courses are no more difficult than say a Differential Equations, Linear Algebra or Multivariable Calculus course, then life is peachy.</p>
<p>I do disagree strongly with the notion that COE classes get any easier or less hard. Yes, the statistics of freshman–> senior gpa increase are very correct, though the bar is certainly not lowered, instead students reach the bar; though others will just give up, most reach for it you know; some fall and adapt quick, others fall and make it by junior year, others give up; this is the way I see it every day. This being said, my input is that I think the main dis-advantage that CC transfers face coming into the middle of the COE curriculum is they don’t really have an opportunity to rise to the occasion so to speak.</p>
<p>Reread my post. GPAs are higher for upper division courses; that doesn’t mean upper division courses are easier or require less work. It’s actually the opposite.</p>
<p>GP, just wondering- when you indicate that GPAs in higher-level courses are .25-.5 higher than for freshman-level courses, do the freshman-level statistics you cite include only those who eventually finish 4 years, or everybody enrolled in freshman-level courses, regardless of what they end up doing (fail out, transfer to another major, or continue on)? I’m not really questioning what you’re saying since I don’t have a broad basis to go on, just that it’s a little different from m own experience,most others I graduated with and/or have interviewed. There is typically some improvement over the years but not usually as dramatic as a 0.5. Of course, even for juniors and seniors there may be more going into the GPA than just upper-level major courses, and your improvement potential obviously depends on what you start out with in the first place (kind of like what happens in a bowling league I guess).</p>
<p>Before you go counting your lucky stars, consider this.</p>
<p>I went to CC before coming to Purdue. The CC I went to consistently claimed that they are a state recognized superstar in the mathematics dept in terms of CCs. Many times I heard about how our math dept competed with the top universities in the state and faired well.</p>
<p>I thought, thats great - meanwhile I earned around a 99% in my math classes while taking 18-21 credits/term. I do believe that I got a good education there and was adequately prepared for university level classes My point though, is that I dont really think the problem is that CCs dont teach, but rather that they dont prepare you for the demanding work load and brutal curves. When I got to Purdue I was shocked at how hard it is to earn a good grade basically about 10-15% of students in a given class earn an A. In the math/physics classes youre looking at around 300 people/class, many of whom took AP classes in high school, scored above a 700 in math on their SAT, and have already seen a good deal of the material. In short, being in the top 10% at a good engineering school is much, much harder said than done. I have taken less credits, worked twice as hard, and earned considerably lower grades at Purdue. </p>
<p>You will have missed most of the weed out classes by the time you transfer, but dont kid yourself into thinking youre in the clear. Each of my classes at Purdue requires 2-3 times the effort it took to get an A at CC in order to get a B. Your GPA will most likely drop quite a bit but if you keep it above a 3.0 you will have no problem getting a job.</p>
<p>I agree with purduefrank. I think you will be in for a rude awakening when you start taking engineering classes at a traditional university. I definitely wouldn’t say that upper level engineering classes are no more difficult than calculus and differential equations. You will find that the people who can’t handle engineering are no longer around so the competition in these courses will be much higher. Compared to a community college, I think you will find that the students in your classes will be at a completely different level.</p>
<p>Even if you do NOT graduate with an exceptionally high GPA, you will still get a job…provided your areas of expertise are in demand. Now ONCE you get that job, dedicate yourself to being good and pile on those years of experience.</p>
<p>The more years of experience…the less higher your GPA needs to be for graduate school.</p>
<p>I didn’t even have an overall 3.0 GPA as an undergrad. I got some experience and took graduate engineering courses as a non-degree student. I aced those courses. I mean most graduate engineering curriculum will have:</p>
<p>If I was a math major and was already project leading/managing projects…what the hell is a Statistics and Project Management course to me as far as difficulty? My I.T. area was databases so I take a graduate CS course in Database Systems and BOOM…4.0 GPA in grad school.</p>
<p>Petition that to graduate admissions and you are in.</p>
<p>I agree, that even though my CC’s Math and science dept. is substantially more rigorous than MOST other CCs out there, it’s probably still a couple notches below the top Universities in this respect (especially one of the ones I’m hoping to get into - UCLA, Berkeley etc.). In my second semester calculus course (Math 191), there was a student from Berkeley, taking the course at our CC. He had taken freshman Calc at Berkeley and thought the difficulty level was “roughly about the same” to quote his words. He actually ended up with a high B in the course, even though he supposedly got an A in the freshman calc course he took at Berkeley. I’m relying on anecdotal evidence like this to compare our courses and get a rough estimate as to the quality of material taught. Although I realize that this is not a 100% reliable method, it should at least be adequate to give a “rough idea”.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Thanks for enlightening me on this! This just reinforces what I had ORIGINALLY assumed and brings me back to square one! The varied responses on here had me a bit confused! (or maybe I misinterpreted them).</p>
<p>What I don’t have a clue about is the UPPER-LEVEL courses, and the thing that TERRIFIES me the most, is the dreaded “CURVE”, which I think is an EXTREMELY unfair way of doing things. It pitts people against each other. We are here to advance one COMMON goal: that of scientific exploration and advancement. Not to determine who has the best “cunning” to outdo the other.</p>
<p>Since one is not aiming for a FIXED TARGET (such as a 90% score or 95% score for an A), but rather having your A determined by competing AGAINST EACH OTHER, it encourages cut-throat and dishonest behavior (I don’t know if the rumors are true, but I’ve heard, that at Berkeley and UCLA the students are extremely cutthroat and some even go to the extent of intentionally sabotaging other people’s work in the labs, to gain the upper hand.</p>
<p>So basically, you’re constantly chasing a MOVING TARGET, with no rules set AT THE BEGINNING, and it’s more like “playing the lottery” rather than aiming for a CLEARLY DEFINED objective. Luck plays a huge part in this so-called “game”. If you happen to be extremely unlucky and are in a class full of geniuses (or charlatans, for that matter), you’re completely doomed. OTOH, if someone happens to be in a class full of mediocre students, they just got the winning ticket. How is that fair??</p>
<p>If you can expand a bit on this and give me more insight into whether my assumptions and what I’ve heard is true, I would truly appreciate it!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I have never shied away from hard work, and am prepared to “go for it” with the most extreme dedication and perseverance. However, sometimes, even this is not enough. To keep one’s gpa above 3.0 you need at least some As (say, for it to be around 3.2-ish). Then (since you come from a similar CC background), is getting at least some As a doable thing in these upper level courses??</p>
<p>victor, I can see how you would be confused. On the one hand, as has already been said: GPAs do not tend to decrease as you advance through your program, they actually tend to increase. Opposed to that, you have what you might call the “CC factors”. Problem is, it’s impossible to predict what this will mean in any individual case, factors involved include the particular CC, the particular Uni., professors, specific course of study, and naturally the individual himself. Again I have no systematic information, just anecdotes. From them, I can’t draw any conclusions for you.</p>
<p>1) My wife is a college professor. She ends up teaching a good number of CC students from a particular school. These students get As in CC and then Cs and Ds at her school. The students are shocked and tell my wife they’ve never been challenged so much and done so badly in their lives since they transferred.
2) I work with a number of engineers who spent 2 years at this same CC before transferring, often to some very good engineering schools (Top 10 or 20). Almost without exception they say their preparation was great and they had no problems with later GPAs, even seeing them increase as mentioned above.
3) When I was in engineering school I was acquainted with several people from CCs (different CCs now than mentioned above), including having a few as lab partners. They tended definitely not to be in over their heads, but I believe their GPAs suffered a bit (because they were middle-of-the-pack basically at Uni., whereas they had to have very high GPAs in CC in order to transfer in the first place). So I don’t know what to say, other than in your case it sounds like you’re pretty well-prepared. Try not to worry too much, just do your best and react to what you find. Even if your GPA were to go down somewhat (not saying it will), you should do fine in your career. If you’r pulling close to a 4.0 now, I should think you could stay above a 3.0 later with the right effort. I think the problem with my wife’s students is that they kind of refuse to accept the change in what’s asked of them.</p>
<p>The “shock factor” is what really hurts many CC students. Students that attend a good university were probably good high school students and didn’t have to work hard to obtain good grades. So when they get to college, they continue with their HS work ethic, start failing tests, then quickly realize that they need a new work ethic to adapt to the new environment.</p>
<p>CC students have the same reaction, but two years after the straight-through students. By the time the CC students realize the ramp up to a more challenging program, the other students have already adapted. Also, the CC students tend to be older and are therefore are more “set in their ways”. It’s even worse when someone transfer from a lower ranking school to a higher one (say a math/science regional school to an engineering research university). These students are more resistant because they’ve seen success at a post-secondary level using their old work ethics.</p>
<p>If you’re going to make the transfer, you should do a few things:<br>
Assume your math preparation was terrible and you will struggle. You may or may not actually struggle with the math at your new university, but you need to start by overcompensating - study excessively, go to office hours, set up study groups, etc. - then cut back on the overcompensation as you get more comfortable.
Remember: your GPA will be calculated out of relatively few semesters. As a result, one bad semester can ruin your GPA and cost you $50,000-$100,000 in future earnings. Make sure you’re on top of your grades constantly.</p>
<p>I understand your point, but that’s just not good advice. </p>
<p>First, you can’t assume that everybody is like you [meaning, that I gather from your posts that you pretty much just had a good time in college and ended up doing well in life]. </p>
<p>I have met numerous millionaires who didn’t go to college at all, others who partied through school and ended up just fine, but you just can’t take very isolated incidents and extrapolate those results onto the general population. The bottom line is that just barely graduating isn’t good enough unless you have excellent skills in some other area, for instance; people skills, leadership qualities, abnormal computer skills, or other things that the vast majority of students don’t have. I have a good friend that has around a 2.1 GPA and can’t find an internship to save his life – this, despite the fact that he has more personality and people skills than 99.99% of engineering students. When it comes time to graduate there is an extremely high chance that he’ll have to move back home for a few months while he searches for any company that will give him an offer. So much for options, at least initially. So, in the end he, and people in his situation, lose a lot. They graduate later (lost income), re-take classes (costly), don’t have any internships (loss of about 3K/month for 3 months each summer), spend time living with their parents after graduation (lost income and pretty embarrassing IMO), don’t have any options (or very few), are more likely to get hired into a position with less upside, the list goes on… Not to mention that the door is all but closed if you ever decide you’d like to go to a decent grad school.</p>
<p>No one in college talks about their HS GPA, but they sure do talk about where they went to college. </p>
<p>It’s the same thing with a career, and people here seem to forget that. A chemical engineer hired by Exxon out of college is going to have a very different career than a chemical engineer hired by a 50-person local tar plant in rural Appalachia, even if both work in tars.</p>
<p>I graduated with a 3.49 GPA in college. I studied very, very hard and worked hard for my degree. No, I didn’t party or goof off or anything like that.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that a high GPA isn’t good to have (it’s why we all went to college) but am saying that getting any GPA (low or high) in engineering is better than not graduating or transferring to a liberal arts major. </p>
<p>You may limit your options to some extent immediately out of college, but if you want a particular position, a low GPA won’t prevent you from doing what you want.</p>
<p>A low GPA won’t necessarily doom you to a life in your parents’ basement, but it can severely limit your options out of college. For example, you aren’t going to go work for Google or Space X or Exxon or whatever else with a 2.6 GPA, you are going to work for some small company and have to build your reputation up from there.</p>
<p>It is kind of like building a tower and trying to build it as tall as possible. The person who starts building on lower ground (low GPA) can still reach the same height as the person who starts on higher ground (high GPA), but there are going to have to do some catching up first. It may take the low GPA person 5 years of experience to be qualified enough to get that job that the high GPA person got right out of school.</p>
<p>Getting a bad GPA will, at the very least, postpone your dreams.
When companies hire people, it is basically like investing in the stock market. They do all the research and try and make the best choice they can. A ton of factors get looked at, but end the end, it is still a risk. There is no 100% fool proof way to predict how an employee will actually perform. Still, to help minimize that risk, they look for factors like experience, GPA, school attended, etc, etc, and if one of those factors is severely lacking (like a bad GPA), then it will take the other stuff to make up for it, and usually, the thing that best outweighs GPA is experience, so the low GPA graduate would have to go get experience at a smaller, less selective company and prove that they are worth the investment from the more selective company a few years down the road.</p>
<p>I read this post of yours in another thread and what you say here does not sound like the same explanation you just gave, and neither did your post in this thread. You seem to have some belief/hope about the implications of school work in the job market, whatever your reason, I think that perhaps your words could be chosen more carefully. Yes, graduating is better than not but I think you’re setting the bar pretty low with that argument.</p>
<p>If you have the aptitude to get good grades in college, I sure encourage you to get good grades.</p>
<p>But if someone else doesn’t have the aptitude, I still encourage them to finish out college and graduate in engineering regardless of whether they have a good GPA or not.</p>
<p>Both students have an opportunity to find gainful employment in engineering. Both can get hired on by Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Rayethon, and Exxon as an engiener. The only person who doesn’t is the one who doesn’t complete engineering school.</p>
<p>But you already know this because you said you have a brother who landed a job and never told the employer about his GPA. If his employer never asked, did they really care if it was a 2.2, 2.9, or 3.2?</p>
Absolutely. Although I think the perceptions of employers (etc) always take on a sort of probabilistic nature. No one thinks all Exxon employees are badasses.</p>