<p>I’ve heard that many schools have huge grade inflations, which would greatly help in the long run for applying for grad school. I know that many state schools (especially UC’s) are hard when it comes to grades. Just wondering if anyone can name some schools with good grade inflation. Thanks</p>
<p>Harvard, Stanford and Yale</p>
<p>From:
The Atlantic Monthly | March 2005
THE TRUTH ABOUT HARVARD</p>
<p>It was hard work to get into Harvard, and then it was hard work competing for offices and honors and extracurriculars with thousands of brilliant and driven young people; hard work keeping our heads in the swirling social world;hard work fighting for law-school slots and investment-banking jobs as college wound to a close ... yes, all of that was heavy sledding. But the academicsthe academics were another story. Whatever nostalgists think, there was never a golden age when students did all their work and attended every lecture. When Aquinas held forth in Paris, and Heidegger in Freiburg, lazy undergraduates were doubtless squirreled away in their rooms, frantically skimming other people's notes to prep for the final exam. What makes our age different is the moment that happened over and over again at Harvard, when we said This is going to be hard and then realized No, this is easy. Maybe it came when we boiled down a three-page syllabus to a hundred pages of exam-time reading, or saw that a paper could be turned in late without the frazzled teaching fellow's docking us, or handed in Cquality work and got a gleaming Bplus. Whenever the moment came, we learned that it wasn't our sloth alone, or our constant pushing for higher grades, that made Harvard easy. </p>
<p>No, Harvard was easy because almost no one was pushing back.</p>
<p>Dang,</p>
<p>I wish people would STOP quoting that guy who wrote
"The Truth about Harvard"... it is such B.S....
and he is just using the Harvard name to make himself rich.
Just because he was an intellectually lazy a-hole
who coasted superficially through his coursework does not
mean he is representative of the university as a whole...
I was a physics & astro joint concentrator, and studied my azz off
non-stop... as many of my fellow students did... we weren't grade obsessed... but were driven to master the subject matter for the sake of deeper understanding... and it's not just the sciences... I had friends in philosophy, english, psychology, social studies, sociology... who took their studies very seriously... i knew relatively few grade-obsessed students (except, understandably, the premeds)...</p>
<p>Now was there grade inflation? Sure... but it wasn't completely unjustified... the vast majority of my friends were incredibly driven and hard-working... never satisfied with doing the minimum required.
It was hard to get an A... then again, it was hard to get a C (outside of the sciences)... the general rule was: work hard, get a B+, slack off, get a B-.</p>
<p>You raise a good point about an "n" of one, but the issue was grade inflation, not Harvard students. Probably a more telling number is that, the last I heard, about 90% of Harvard students graduate with honors. Grades are interesting. I am not opposed to everyone getting A's if they are given on a standards or criterion referenced basis. In fact, I think this fairer than imposing a curve on a group that that shows minimal variation. On the other hand, if one simply provides high grades because the person attending "deserves" it, now that is a problem.</p>
<p>I thought that in the past two years Harvard, Stanford and Princeton all had made a concerted effort to stop the grade inflation, because the grad schools were on to them.....</p>
<p>idad,</p>
<p>true, a few years back, approx 90% graduated with some kind of honors...
but let me explain how that worked... there were 4 levels of honors:
3 of them were "real" honors, the other was a joke... no offense, but that's what everyone knew</p>
<p>(1) Summa: less than 5% get this... required very high GPA (>3.85) and a senior honors thesis in most cases (a few dept. didn't require thesis for honors, but most did)
(2) Magna: approx 15% get this... generally required a senior thesis and a GPA
around A- or A-/B+ (>3.55) depending on the department
(3) Cum: approx 20%, generally required a thesis, GPA of B+ (>3.25)
The exact cut-offs for the above depended on the specific department.</p>
<p>Here's the kicker:
(4) Cum Laude General Studies: no thesis required at all, GPA of B- (2.7)
A good 50% of a graduating class got this level of honors.</p>
<p>The reason why so many received honors was this last category... it's not that everyone had super high grades, it's just the bar was set so low on this last level of honors. </p>
<p>Regarding grade inflation in general... if grades were inflated so much, how come Harvard generally only produced one to three 4.0 graduates every DECADE?</p>
<p>Here is an article about the efforts of the "Ivy Deans" to meet the concerns of grade inflation. The Ivy Deans comprise the eight Ivy league schools plus Stanford University, the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a couple of years old, but interesting nonetheless:</p>