The extraordinary silliness of college GPAs

[ucbalumnus]

@QuantMech

In my view, the right way to assess an American undergraduate education is through the transcript (and if it were possible, the actual syllabus for each of the courses). Back when I applied to MIT for grad school, they wanted a list of all of the textbooks we used for each science/math course. This makes good sense to me, although it is imperfect in assessing the course level.

Would not be surprised if this type of evaluation were common among PhD program admissions, since departments are familiar with what the undergraduate course work taken to prepare for PhD study should be like. But law schools would be a different story and probably do not want to evaluate every applicant’s combination of courses from different undergraduate schools.