<p>FYI, Fail is much funnier when I say it. You...well... diminishing marginal returns...</p>
<p>Just a statement about the curve at Wharton. Yes, it exists, whatever the admissions department would have you believe (my stat professor made a pretty good joke about that when he wrote the curve up on the board.)</p>
<p>I'm going to be speaking in very broad strokes here so forgive any generalities, but for example. In a history or English CAS course that's graded based on essays (and yes, I know a lot of CAS courses are not graded based on essays... it's just an example), the distribution of grades will be curved (even if unintentionally) by the grader. But it will be curved mainly upon who is a better writer. The problem with the Wharton curve is exemplified by Accounting 101 this year where (as I was told by a sophomore in the class), the AVERAGE grade on the midterm was a 96%... that's in a class where the average score is curved down to a B-. Or in one of the intro-level finance courses where in an attempt for force the mean score down to a 50%, the professor put a question on the test that required upper level finance knowledge. The mean score on the exam ended up being a 70%. You see this in classes like Math 104 too where you have all the Wharton and Engineering freshmen come in their first semester and a lot of kids go the entire semester without missing a single point. That screws over people who miss even a few. The fundamental difference with the curves is that most Wharton classes (and engineering ones too) are courses in which there is a literal right answer, which will always make for a more punishing curve.</p>
<p>TSATF... is the 96% being a B- legit? I mean that is pretty scary to think about. One careless mistake and you can be getting a C (which seems quite easy to happen). I just don't see how a few points deducted = a few letters lower.</p>
<p>it really depends on your major</p>
<p>I would like to see any wharton student who would actually want to put themselves through the hell of o-chem and p-chem</p>
<p>I've thought about this a lot. I would say this: excluding the athletes, who are expected to be dumb and are usually found in Wharton, the dumbest kids are generally from CAS. THERE ARE NOT A LOT OF THESE. The VAST majority of CAS is extremely smart, and on par with most of Wharton. It's simply that Wharton is, excluding the athletes, far less likely to have those "dumb" students who probably don't deserve to be here in the first place.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I have found no real difference between the Wharton and CAS kids. Occasionally I'll meet a real type-A personality who's clearly from Wharton, but that has very little to do with his or her intelligence. They simply are quicker on their feet in social situations, etc. Doesn't mean that a sharp engineer couldn't **** them up in any math or physics class, or a CAS-er couldn't write circles of essays around them.</p>
<p>Full disclosure: I am in CAS. I also want to point out that I my SAT scores put me near the 80th percentile of all students accepted to Penn, which should be somewhere in the top of the Wharton range as well, and I was very highly ranked in my selective, private HS class, and I still have a bit of trouble maintaining A's against my fellow so-called "weaker" CAS students, than whose my SAT scores are technically higher, etc. Not everyone here is a type-A, overtly intellectual, charming savant, but they're damn smart. Remember, most of them are the wait-listees of HYPMS. On any given Sunday, they could have been accepted to those schools instead.</p>
<p>Anyhow, those are my $0.02. Feel free to weigh in.</p>
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<p>Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: top of the bell curve
Posts: 588
RE:
"it is much easier to compete with weaker students."....strongly disagree here. Wharton students tend to have more hooks/connections. they are sports recruits, legacies, have parents high up in finance, have more leadership experience, etc. but their academic credentials are not appreciably different from those of CAS students.
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<p>i agree. as a wharton kid myself i must say. all the hype that w/ kids are smarter than cas kids is ********.</p>
<p>but if you are leaning business and can get into wharton. go whartonits easy to go wharton to CAS but extremely difficult to go CAS to wharton</p>
<p>This is the credited response.</p>