Hi all!
I was wondering if anyone could speak about Wellesley Grade deflation? How hard is it to get As, Bs?
Is it possible to get at least a B in every class??
Thanks!
It’s hard to know what is “possible” for any one student, but I don’t think there is an assumption that if you show up and do the work, you will get some kind of a B. That assumption is true on a lot of campuses but not Wellesley. You can still work hard and end up with a C. Shadow grading is supposed to alleviate some of the pressure on first years to allow them to explore academically without being penalized. I wish shadow grading had been in place when my D started. She is a junior now. Her first year GPA was the lowest she experienced, and she has been on an upward trajectory since then.
Hi, not sure if you decided to ultimately enroll at Wellesley, since this thread was started quite a while ago. I’m a rising sophomore at Wellesley, and I would like to put in my two cents about “grade deflation” at Wellesley.
Yes, the courses are certainly very rigorous at Wellesley. Especially if you attended a high school where you found it really easy to attain As, you will definitely have to put in many times the effort than you’re used to. However, I find that there is often a misconception about “grade deflation” at Wellesley. Although I’ve only spent one academic year at Wellesley, I’ve taken a balance of humanities and STEM courses (some include computer science, math, economics, and writing) and I have rarely seen or heard of professors actively lowering your letter grade in a course or too strictly restricting the number of A’s permitted in a given class. In fact, in most classes, professors actually curve up (due to the difficulty of many courses).
For example, in my math class, I was so sure I was going to get a B+ or A- because I’d been getting mostly upper-80s and a few lower 90s on assessments, but I ended up getting an A because it turns out everyone else was struggling just as much if not more. I’ve encountered this in an econ class as well. Some departments or professors have lower or higher standards than others when it comes to what the “optimum” average in a given class should be. In my math class, I would think he wanted the average to be a B+ (as is the maximum permitted by the grading policy in lower-level courses), but in my computer science class this semester, the professors aimed for a ~75 average on all the exams and did not curve anything.
One exception I can think of is ECON 103 (economics statistics). I never took this course, but my friends told me that so many people were getting “A’s” at one point that a 90 on a test was considered a B+. ECON 103 is a traditionally easy (read: easier) course, so in my opinion it’s natural that the professor would have higher expectations grade-wise for what is considered an A. I guess this is where grade deflation comes in.
In my experience and from what I’ve heard, you will rarely encounter this because typically the courses will be far too difficult for anywhere close to the majority of the class to score in the 90s.
Sorry for the tangent, it just sort of bothers me when people complain about grade deflation, since I’ve mostly heard of and encountered curving UP, rather than down.
As for how easy it is to get A’s, this certainly isn’t Harvard (LOL, something is wrong with that institution) and it really depends on the person, but it’s not uncommon at all. I think people who have good study habits and work ethics, are naturally bright and a fast learner (which is most of Wellesley), and hold high academic standards for themselves will get mostly As and A-'s. A lot of people tend to get B+'s because, as I said, that is what most professors set as the average in a given course, and it’s natural that most people will be average (normal distribution). Personally, I’ve gotten all As with the rare A- (counting the shadow-graded period), but am still waiting on one grade (CS LOL) for this semester, so fingers crossed!
Hope my spiel helps!
I had a very negative experience with grading at Wellesley. I graduated from my high school with almost all As except for one B.
In my courses, I was curved down when on the threshold. In one case my professor went out of his way to give me a B on an important assignment, even though my partner received an A, without a single comment telling me why and NO FEEDBACK on my assignment.
In another course, I was on the threshold and had I scored a little higher on an exam I would have had the next higher letter grade. In fact I had scored EXACTLY the number I needed until my professor went back and changed the grade for some reason.
In my language course, every section had to take the same tests, but my professor was so severely and constantly behind on the material we never had more than a day or two to prepare, and everyone’s grades suffered accordingly.
In one of my math courses, the professor only based his grade off of four timed, in class exams. So if you are not a good exam taker, you are completely out of luck in that course.
Professors often returned my papers with mostly positive comments with one or two brief and nonspecific corrections, yet I still received a B and not an A. This was a common theme. My assignments were returned with hastily scribbled notes like “?” and “this is wrong” (<–direct quote) and I was left unsure about how to improve on my next assignment.
In all likelihood there was a good reason why I wasn’t getting As, but the professors consistently failed to give me helpful feedback. I never felt like anyone expected me to improve my grade over the course of the semester. From my perspective, it appeared that my professors considered me to be an average, unimportant student who wasn’t struggling but simply wasn’t going to get an A. I sent an email to a prof asking about why I received a B- when I followed all of the instructions for the assignment, and in her response she kept repeating that “B is an average grade” and listed several things I should have done that were never outlined in the instructions for assignment AND that she had not included in the initial evaluation sheet that she returned. I would feel depressed and slack off for weeks and keep getting Bs, then work intensely for weeks and still get Bs. It just seemed like I was being evaluated again and again and it was all up to me to figure out what I was doing wrong.
So yes. You can get a B in pretty much every course. But you will probably not be sure how or why you ended up with that grade and you will probably not have any idea how to improve your grade next time.
I am not exactly sure how many students were in the class of 2015, but if the college has 2300 students, we can say it was approximately 575 graduates.
Of these, 18 graduated summa cum laude, 50 magna cum laude and 90 cum laude.
So perhaps 27% of the class graduated with a GPA of 3.60 or higher.
^Yes, this information is accurate. About 25% to 30% of the class gets Latin Honors.
As for @astris, I’m not sure why you had such a negative experience, but have you tried asking professors for feedback? In my experience, professors have always been very willing to give me feedback, and sometimes they even go out of their way to do so when I ask for it but never have the time to go to their office to retrieve a past final exam or something like that.
@absentions as I said, I emailed a couple of my professors about my grades and they responded by dodging the question and reassuring me that I was “doing average.” True, but not helpful.
Maybe other students and professors are used to a different approach but at my high school, I never needed to go out of my way to ask teachers to do things like briefly explain why points were taken off. That was just something to expect when you got an assignment back. I had a professor who handed my presentation partner and I the exact. same. evaluation back and gave me a lower grade without explaining why, and then again failed to explain why when I sent him an email asking for clarification.
(I’m sorry if I come off as bitter. I’m just very frustrated that I had to deal with a whole year of these weird things happening in my classes, and everyone I talked to about it would try to defend my professors and imply that I was probably just being a bad student.)
My daughter is a rising junior at Wellesley, although she is doing a year abroad this upcoming year. I don’t think grade “deflation” is a real thing. I just think that professors there have a more realistic grading system than that in place at other top schools. Some do grade on a curve, which makes it more competitive in those classes. But everyone gets the grade she deserves.
If you think the professor was unfair, take it up with him or her. D had a horrible astro professor last semester, and finally ended up going to the dean when the prof was not responsive. This had to do with his introducing new material on tests, and using material from courses that were not supposed to be prerequisites. He got horrible evaluations (these do count at Wellesley) and will likely not get tenure. (D was the only non-astronomy major in her class and yet they all said he was the worst prof they’d ever had.) I bring this up just to point out that the administration is responsive to unfair practices, whether they are about grading or teaching or anything else. But you do need to have specific things to report.