<p>cornell's gpa seems inflated...it's unheard of for engineering gpa to be that high</p>
<p>At UCLA, in upper division engineering the curve is usually set to B/B- so the GPA hovers around 2.7-3.0</p>
<p>The average grade at CMU in my department was definitely a B-, though we don't use +/- grades, so when you do the weighting that way, you get a B/B+ average usually. Our tests tended to have a lot of cluster at the lower end with the top grades spread out a bit.</p>
<p>I'd say that would be accurate for most of my friends, as my 3.65 was relatively high, but a 3.0 is moderately low. The general consensus of how to get grades was: C, don't do homework, hardly study for tests. B, ranges from doing mediocre work and doing below average to working really hard, and messing up on a test. A, do all homeworks really well, don't mess up on any problems on any of the tests.</p>
<p>I'd say it was equally hard to get a C as an A.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Harvard's website says that until recently, only a 2.83 GPA was necessary to graduate cum laude (the new system is to award honors to anyone in the top 50%).
[/quote]
</p>
<p><em>passes out cold</em></p>
<p>I found some results for my school. I'll just post some Spring Semester 2006 data for engineering.</p>
<h1>on dean's list (3.5+ gpa): 1,804</h1>
<p>total enrollment: 6,466
% on dean's list: 27.9%</p>
<p>Sem. gpa 2006: 3.03
Cum. gpa 2006: 3.08</p>
<p>From these data, it looks like a 3.5 gpa is around 75%ile. Also, engineering ranks 5th out of the 19 academic units (DUS, education, liberal arts, science, etc.) for having the least number of students on dean's list (3.5+ gpa) for that year.</p>
<p>Why don't large public schools (hint: UCLA) also do this... lol?</p>
<p>In the end you're just helping your students reach better places. I don't think grad schools care too much about where you got your GPA from. I think its not too much of a stretch to say that ivy-level schools tend to be harder to get in, and easier to get out of. We've all heard of Stanford's grade-inflation for instance.</p>
<p>It would be nice to be able to concentrate on learning without the prospect of a bad grade looming over your head. I think that hard-working and motivated students deserve at least this much.</p>
<p>electrifice: Do you go to UCLA? </p>
<p>I agree...they should inflate GPAs here too lol.</p>
<p>I agree with the above poster that getting a C is pretty tough in upper div EE. In UCLA in some classes you can fail both midterm and final (by fail I mean get way below average) and get Bs. Only the bottom 5 or so people get Cs here and maybe even C+s.</p>
<p>
[quote]
In the end you're just helping your students reach better places.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Sure, turn people loose on the American industry when they haven't actually proven that they've learned what they need to in order to do their jobs. Sounds like a great idea to me...</p>
<p>aibarr: GPA doesn't correlate with learning at all</p>
<p>I just found a written grading policy for EECS at Berkeley... 2.7 for lower division and 2.9 for upper division.
Grading</a> Guidelines for Undergraduate Courses | EECS at UC Berkeley</p>
<p>
[quote]
In the end you're just helping your students reach better places. I don't think grad schools care too much about where you got your GPA from. I think its not too much of a stretch to say that ivy-level schools tend to be harder to get in, and easier to get out of. We've all heard of Stanford's grade-inflation for instance.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The downside to that is it gets to a point where the high grades don't mean anything. Is it really an achievement to graduate from Harvard cum laude? If half the class gets A's, what does the A actually mean? </p>
<p>Don't get me wrong... I don't think that it's fair that other majors tend to have grade distributions skewed towards the high side and engineering majors towards the low side. It's not so much of a factor for grad school, but it is for professional schools which take students from a variety of majors.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It would be nice to be able to concentrate on learning without the prospect of a bad grade looming over your head. I think that hard-working and motivated students deserve at least this much.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Then we'd all be complaining about how lazy unmotivated students get the same grades as the hard-working ones.</p>
<p>
[quote]
aibarr: GPA doesn't correlate with learning at all
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Artificial inflation of grades, in general, gives companies a false impression that a candidate is more qualified than they actually are. "You're just helping your students reach higher places" that they might not otherwise be qualified to reach... I'm not sure that's a good thing.</p>
<p>Ditto what Ken says with regard to the suckiness of engineering being skewed low. I don't think that the answer is to skew engineering higher, though. (Honestly, maybe we should skew the other guys' grades lower...)</p>
<p>In the end its fine as lots of schools and my school give a grade guide with each transcript where it lists the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile GPAs for all the majors at my school so grad schools can judge what your GPA really means within context. Some schools such as MIT even go so far as to ask what your rank is.</p>
<p>3.25 at UT-Austin (for entire engineering college)</p>
<p>I know GaTech is very brutal but what is it's average GPA for the entire engineering college and for specific majors?</p>
<p>an admissions person told me that grad schools will add .5 to a gatech gpa because they know it is so hard and deflated.</p>
<p>i will just take that with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>no way they are adding 0.5 to any kind of GPA from any university no matter how grade-deflated it is. </p>
<p>I know GaTech's killing its students and i'd understand if it was like .1-.2 maybe, but adding 0.5 is EXCESSIVE.</p>
<p>basically, that means 3.0 GPA kids from GaTech would have been 3.5 GPA kids at MIT and,</p>
<p>no, that's just wrong. what's everyone pulling at GaTech? 2.5 or something?</p>
<p>you can take it with a grain of pepper if you want to.
i'm just telling you what i heard.</p>
<p>Is this admissions person from Georgia Tech or from another university?</p>
<p>so what grad school was this that would add .5 for GaTech kids?</p>
<p>i believe you are talking of engineering grad school, but if we were talking medical schools, that'd mean any kid w/ 3.0 from GaTech would have decent shots at getting into a medical school.</p>
<p>why would we be talking about med school? this is an engineering thread.</p>
<p>How bad is it over at GaTech?</p>