<p>i know that harvard and princeton have insane grade inflation
i KNOW FOR SURE that yale's classes really depend - yale math for example. A's are very rare</p>
<p>is mit curving helpful? do 4.0s exist? what is about average?
how do they do cum laude, magna, summa?</p>
<p>is it that stressful as the rumor goes... mit = Ds and Fs
truthfully, how hard is it for the AVERAGE ADMITTED APPLICANT?</p>
<p>princeton actually has a new grade deflation campaign.</p>
<p>
[quote]
how do they do cum laude, magna, summa?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>They don't. </p>
<p>"[MIT] does not award ...Latin honors upon graduation the philosophy is that the honor is in being an MIT graduate. </p>
<p>On the other hand, MIT does have a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, and selection is largely GPA-driven. Many MIT departments also offer Institute Awards to outstanding graduating students. Hence, while MIT doesn't formally offer 'honors', one can infer that certain people got de-facto honors through PBK selection and/or Institute Awards.</p>
<p>According to MIT policy, curves are never intended to hurt the class as a whole -- if, for example, class average on a test is 95/100, professors won't penalize everybody for doing well. Curves are only supposed to be set when it is helpful to the class, and I've always seen that policy followed.</p>
<p>MIT does not = D's and F's. (How would anybody graduate if that were the case?) In most classes, class average is set at a B or B-, so I think average GPA is approximately 3.0(/4.0), if not slightly higher (since humanities classes tend to give disproportionate numbers of A's).</p>
<p>It might be worth noting that +/- modifiers are internal only at MIT -- that is, if you get a B-, it's noted on your outside transcript only as a B and is factored into your GPA as a B. As a person who gets more minuses than pluses, I think this is a super system.</p>
<p>People with perfect GPAs do exist, but there aren't very many of them. (I don't know any.)</p>
<p>Isn't MIT's gpa system out of 5.0? SO A=5, B=4, etc? How about the other top schools, like Harvard and Yale? Is it out of 4.0?</p>
<p>depends on what classes you take. take lots of theoretical math and you will not have a 3.0 (out of 4).</p>
<p>pebbles -- does that mean you will have above or below?</p>
<p>me personally?</p>
<p>probably way below.</p>
<p>you generally? I guess it depends on whether or not you believe analysis to be more difficult than american history.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Isn't MIT's gpa system out of 5.0? SO A=5, B=4, etc? How about the other top schools, like Harvard and Yale? Is it out of 4.0?
[/quote]
The system is out of 5.0. A=5, B=4, C=3, D=1, F=0. (Don't know what happened to the 2.) I always translate when I'm talking to someone from another school -- unfortunately, it's not possible to say "I got a 4.5 at MIT" and pretend that it's only out of 4, because it's not.</p>
<p>On graduate and professional school applications, they will always ask for the scale used at your school, and you will dutifully select the "Five-point scale" option. Or else they will ask you to convert your GPA, and being the intelligent person that you are, you will dutifully convert</a> it to a four-point scale.</p>
<p>Isn't D a 2 not 1 (That makes a difference, lol..)? Mollie, do you know if medical schools such as HMS ask MIT students to recalculate to 4.0 scale?</p>
<p>Hahaha. It says
[quote]
Note: a record not containing F's or O's can be converted to 4.0 scale by subtracting 1 from the 5.0 result.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It should, instead, say
[quote]
Theorem A record not containing F's or O's can be converted to 4.0 scale by subtracting 1 from the 5.0 result.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I've heard of some medical schools asking for your grades in your freshman year as well. So your A=B=C for pass/no record could possibly come back to bite you?</p>
<p>I'm not positive, but I think I remember hearing that MIT -- in those exceptional circumstances -- will release the otherwise shielded frosh grades. Don't take my word for it though. Can mollie (who surely knows some premeds) confirm?</p>
<p>Allegedly Johns Hopkins Medical School gets or tries to get the grades from first semester freshman year.</p>
<p>In the large classes I have taken, mostly in Course 6, the "curve" is always there--meaning that if you get class average on everything you will get a B. If you get about 10 percentage points above on everything you are approaching A range. If you get 10 points below you are might have or almost have a C.</p>
<p>I think the curve is a sound academic policy. How else would you know how hard to make the test? You could have tests like in high school where all the methods are explicitly given to you and the problems are straightforward and 90% is an A, but that doesn't really require analysis and problem solving.</p>
<p>In classes of 100 people the curve will work well. Obviously in classes of 5 or something, a strict curve should not be followed.</p>
<p>Some classes rank you and if you are in the top 30% you get and A, next 30% a B and the next 30% a C.</p>
<p>At MIT many classes grades are heavily weighted towards the final, even given more weight than they claim. I gotta go, but I can discuss this more later if you are interested.</p>
<p>The only medical school I'm aware of that asks for freshman grades is Johns Hopkins. In the event that an MIT student applies to JHU Med School, he or she has to run around campus and get written permission from each department in which he or she took classes first term freshman year, allowing them to release the hidden grade.</p>
<p>
[quote=<a href="http://web.mit.edu/career/www/preprof/medadmissions.html">http://web.mit.edu/career/www/preprof/medadmissions.html</a>]
Although not common among the majority of medical schools, Johns Hopkins University does request to see your freshman hidden grades. To release pass/no record grades contact each individual academic department and have your released grades sent to the MIT Careers Office (12-170). Your released freshman grades (not your official transcript) will be sent with your recommendation letter packet to the schools you apply to. Please submit the Hidden Grades Form to the Careers Office to indicate which grades you want to be sent to schools.
[/quote]
Johns Hopkins tends to get fewer</a> applications from MIT premeds than other schools of its caliber, probably because nobody wants to go to all that trouble.</p>
<p>I would assume that all applications ask you to recalculate, or ask you to name the scale used at your school (which is effectively the same thing). I have to admit that I don't understand the confusion here -- we don't have "weighted grades", we just use a different GPA scale than most schools. In order to ameliorate confusion when speaking to someone from a different school, we convert. End of story.</p>
<p>kevtrice, just curious, if the average for classes in course 6 is set to a B (4 / 5), then where exactly is the grade deflation? I think a B average for an engineering class is pretty normal.</p>
<p>Are there any classes that are centered around a grade less than a C? Also, what are most classes centered around?</p>
<p>asbereth, I don't think MIT science and engineering are particularly grade-deflated relative to other schools -- but we come off as grade-deflated in the final analysis because we have very few humanities majors. Humanities departments tend to be the grade-inflation culprits, and schools where grade inflation is rampant tend to have high percentages of humanities majors. Ergo, grade deflation at MIT.</p>
<p>tropicalisland, I have never heard of a D-centered class. That wouldn't be terribly practical for the professor -- half the class wouldn't pass. Most curves are set around a B or B-.</p>
<p>I will note that curved classes are rarely the scariest classes to take at MIT. Some classes (ie Unified, the aero/astro sophomore core class) aren't curved -- they're straight-scaled and way more scary. In a class curved at a B-, almost everybody passes, and a percentage of them get A's. In a straight-scaled class, you don't have any guarantees like that. (And while you may think, oh, but in a straight-scaled class everybody can get an A! ...that's not usually what happens.)</p>
<p>I don't think the engineering classes are necessarily grade deflated. IN fact the average GPA here is between 4.0 and 4.2. However, apparently half the grades given at Harvard are A- or above--probably due to the high amounts of humanities majors as MollieB said.</p>
<p>So the average engineering grade given is a B (not low by any means for engineering), but people at MIT work so hard that the average is difficult to obtain.</p>