<p>Ah, they name-check my dream school in that article (Reed). Nostalgia aside, I have some mixed feelings about this. In one of my English classes this past semester, I’m about 98% positive it was impossible to get less than a B- if you went to class and turned everything in. In that case, I’d hope there would be a little higher standard. But on the flip side, I was very worried about my History class because I was concerned I wouldn’t make the professor’s 10% allocation of As. </p>
<p>BTW- how did everyone do last semester?</p>
<p>I did ok but not as good as I hoped I would. Econ 101 kicked my butt but I am content with my grade and I could have gotten a better grade in Women’s Studies but I underestimated the midterm. </p>
<p>I agree with the English 101, I don’t feel like I was graded to the same standard I would in other classes. I think that will make me less prepared for other classes in the future, but it was nice to have a really easy class.</p>
<p>I think this is splendid news. I’m sure if UNC ups the ante, but provides more detailed information on transcripts, many of us will be at an advantage (in part, due to the recognition and respect that rigorous grading systems receive–Wake Forest, case-in-point).</p>
<p>^^ I wouldn’t have minded if it were ENGL 101, but it was an elective, so I thought the bar should’ve been a little higher, but maybe that’s just me. </p>
<p>My semester went pretty well, but I regret dropping my stats class (since I just have to take it this semester anyway) and not taking an LFIT. All my grades are excellent, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and apply to the honors program… so we’ll see! I hope next semester goes well.</p>
<p>A similar paper talking about grade inflation at Harvard.</p>
<p>[The</a> Truth About Harvard - Magazine - The Atlantic](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/03/the-truth-about-harvard/3726/]The”>The Truth About Harvard - The Atlantic)</p>
<p>I fully support a little extra info in the transcript. Honestly, I feel like GPA by itself means nothing, considering that certain departments grade more easily than others; at UNC, a 3.5 for an Anth major is not the same as a 3.5 for a Chem or Math major. So I don’t see why a little added context to our GPA’s will hurt.</p>
<p>ArtemisDea - save the LFIT till later. They tell you you have to take it by sophomore year but it’s not true. I actually took mine during summer school after sophomore year (if you ever take summer school take LFIT then) and it was so, so awesome. I had aerobics every morning at 8 and it was actually a really great work out. I literally lost 5 lbs.</p>
<p>This whole issue is a tricky one. When all the students in a course are doing a great job at doing what they need to do to learn/master the material and there’s a bell curve, that can add in a lot of, in my opinion, unwarranted stress. One of my best friends had the curve in every course she took at William and Mary and it seemed to be a bit of a killer… but I don’t have a lot of faith in the way people appraise the difficulty of coursework.</p>
<p>In my experience at Carolina, every course is different. I worked my tail off all semester to make an A- in Bio 101 and Chin 490. No grade came easily in any Chinese course, beit the language courses or “Chinese Culture through Narrative”. In Social Psych I literally didn’t study for the final and made an A, in Child Developmental Psych I devoted entire weeks to studying for tests to make an A.</p>
<p>I would be annoyed if the grade distribution were posted for my upper-level Chinese course. At this point, we’re all majors and we all care deeply about the language. I’m proud of all of the work/years of studying we’ve put into the language at this point, and I bet that there were several A- grades in my small class. Yet to make that grade I needed to put in hours and hours of translating for each class day, as did my cohorts. What’s more, there were heritage learners in that class who grew up speaking Mandarin and I imagine they didn’t have too much difficulty making As. It’d be misleading to say that I was in the 80th percentile (or where ever I was) in that class for making an A-.</p>
<p>^ Cloying, that is quite possibly the greatest thing I’ve ever heard! I didn’t know I could take my LFIT in the summer, that’s so perfect! (I’m pretty close to UNC so I could just suck it up and drive there). I was considering taking ECON 101 during the summer so I could avoid taking STOR 155 and ECON 101 together, but those extra-long lectures might be killer. </p>
<p>Also, would it be weird if I took 2 FYS next term? (I took one last term, so this would be three total). Is this frowned upon?</p>
<p>Glad to have good news.</p>
<p>It’s hard to say with summer school - if you just take one course you could easily do 101 and you’d be just fine. I’d try and weasel into Byrns’ honors section (I did that my first semester, I was actually an honors student but he had no idea, I just asked if I could switch into it at the end of his first regular lecture course) but if that doesn’t work if you just take LFIT and Econ then that’d be fine.</p>
<p>And it wouldn’t be weird - take as many of those seminars as you can. They’re awesome.</p>
<p>cloying - who was your prof for Child Development? I think my roommate might be taking that next semester… just curious.</p>
<p>I took it with Heilbron, I don’t think she’s teaching next semester. I actually really loved her and she wrote one of my recs.</p>
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<p>I’m curious - why would this be misleading? So you worked hard, and other people started from a higher base, but isn’t the grade supposed to represent the quality of the work you do? If the work is better than 80% of the group, then I don’t think it’s at all misleading.</p>
<p>I know what you’re saying, but it’s because within that class there were two sets of students who had vastly different skill levels, which wouldn’t be explained in a statistic like a percentile. Let’s say all the heritage learners, who make up 15% of the course, made As (which I’m pretty sure they did) with absolutely no problem, while the rest of the class makes poor-ish grades. When viewing the heritage learners’ grades, adcoms would probably be more impressed than they should be, considering the relative ease for the heritage learner compared to the rest of the population. Meanwhile, for the non-heritage learners, attaining an A is nearly impossible… there may have been one person in that course who was able to do that. This course is literally being canceled after this semester because it was too difficult. Still though, those making the A- grades don’t get to bask in a higher percentile rank, because there was a tier of students who are simply at an ability we could not approach by any amount of studying.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that the statistic is wrong, and am generally the last person to whine about grades, but here it doesn’t reflect the entirety of the situation. I could see similar cases where students who have taken a lot of Chemistry at other colleges in high school would come to Carolina and take 101 or 102 just to ace something with a tricky bell curve. I actually have a friend who took four semesters of Chemistry at Guilford College, but then started over at Carolina so his GPA would be stronger for Med School. Honestly, I don’t think that’s a terrible thing to do at all, BUT I could see this kind of system being exploited.</p>
<p>Isn’t the reality of the situation that the heritage learners just speak better Chinese than you? Why shouldn’t that be made clear in the grade?</p>