<p>My pre-med roommate said that grad schools will look at classes that were taken as P/NP that could have been taken for a letter grade as C's. What is the validity of this statement? I am in the EECS program and I would love to do grad school CS. I was going to P/NP classes for my humanities courses but now I am wondering whether I should be taking these classes for letter grades. Note that the breadth courses will not be related to my major.</p>
<p>Well, your pre med roommate must be not that very bright.
You can take the class p/np. They won’t really care unless half of your classes are p/np. Even then, they won’t care that much.</p>
<p>Brown lets their first year students to take all classes p/np.
MIT makes their first year students to take all classes p/np.</p>
<p>I am sure other univ have policies like that too. Who cares? It’s just one humanity course.</p>
<p>Thanks for the input. Does anyone have an official word on this?</p>
<p>I am not sure about grad schools - but I do think there is a difference between taking P/NP when you have the option to take it for letter grade. MIT MAKES their students take them p/np. Different schools (grad vs law vs med vs individual ones even) have different policies and your best bet would be to contact them each. I would recommend against taking all your breadth/humanities courses as P/NP as that may indicate that you aren’t well-rounded… but if there’s a couple of hard ones you encounter, then do P/NP. just not all of them.</p>
<p>Graduate (NOT professional) schools will throw out any coursework not explicitly related to your major. Believe me, people who got into graduate school here have heavily flaked on their humanities classes, and nobody cares. </p>
<p>Premed and law schools have more of a streamlined program, so they may or may not care. In particular, </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>they do not really WANT you to be well-rounded. They want you to be personable enough that you’re good to work with, but this has nothing to do with knowing about history or philosophy if you’re doing a chemistry PhD for instance.</p>