<p>Ah, never mind then. I was going on the colloquial definition of, basically, scary-rigorous.</p>
<p>MIT isn't Pass/Fail. It is Pass/No Record/</p>
<p>CalTech doesn't issue grades the 1st 2 semesters and then is Pass/Fail for Freshmen year.</p>
<p>The following is a post that illustrates one graduate school's opinion of relative grading school to school. I'm sorry that I can't attribute the post to the poster, as that information seems to have been lost along the way.</p>
<p>This information is 10 years old. Does any one know if there's an updated version?</p>
<p>QUOTE:
Here is the info from the posting. Sorry, but there was no link.
In 1997 UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law
did a ranking of the toughest schools to get an "A".</p>
<p>Are they still ranking the schools accordingly?</p>
<p>The L.A. Times ran an article 7/16/97 "Grading the Grades:
All A's Are Not Created Equal "on how the admissions dept.
from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall re-formulated the law school's
applicant's G.P.A. The formula ranked each college
according to how its students perform on the standardized
law board exam, the LSAT, and how common a certain
G.P.A. is at that school.</p>
<p>The following is UC Berkeley's rankings of toughest schools
to get an "A"</p>
<p>Swarthmore 89.5
Williams 89.0
Duke 88.5
Carleton 88.0
Colgate 88.0
J. Hopkins 87.5
Chicago 87.0
Dartmouth 87.0
Wesleyan 87.0
Cornell 86.5
Harvard 86.5
Middlebury 86.0
Princeton 86.0
Bates 85.5
MIT 85.5
Haverford 85.0
Pomona 85.0
Virginia 85.0
Amherst 84.5
Reed 84.5
Vanderbilt 84.5
Wm & Mary 84.5
Bowdoin 83.5
Tufts 83.5
Vassar 83.5
Bryn Mawr 83.0
Hamilton 83.0
Oberlin 83.0
Rice 83.0
U. Pennsylvania 83.0
Clrmt. McK. 82.5
Yale 82.5
Brandeis 82.0
Northwestern 82.0
Colby 81.5
Michigan 81.5
Notre Dame 81.5
Wash. U. 81.0
Barnard 80.5
Columbia 80.5
Stanford 80.5
Brown 80.0
Georgetown 80.0
Smith 80.0
Wellesley 80.0
Emory 79.5
U. North Carolina 79.5
Whitman C. 79.5
Rochester 79.0
UC Berkeley 78.5
UC San Diego 78.5
Illinois 78.0
SUNY Bing 78.0
Texas 78.0
Trinity U. 77.5
Boston College 77.0
UC S. Barbara 77.0
Wisconsin 77.0
Florida 76.5
U. Washington 76.5
Santa Clara 76.0
Geo. Wash. 75.5
UC Davis 75.5
UCLA 75.5
Colorado 75.0
Michigan State 75.0
Boston University 74.5
Cal Poly SLO 74.5
Massachusetts 74.0
Penn State 74.0
Iowa 73.5
Purdue 73.5
SMU 73.5
SUNY Albany 73.5
BYU 73.0
Minnesota 73.0
Ohio State 73.0
Oregon 73.0
UC Irvine 73.0
Indiana 72.5
NYU 72.0
SUNY Buff 72.0
SUNY Stony 72.0
Mills 71.5
American 71.0
Arizona 71.0
Loyola Mary. 71.0
Maryland 71.0
Fordham 70.5
Kansas 70.0
Syracuse 70.0
USC 70.0
Arizona St. 69.5
CS San Diego 69.5
Catholic U. 69.5
Oklahoma 69.5
Pacific 69.5
Hofstra 69.0
UC Riverside 68.5
Utah 68.5
CS Chico 68.5
Miami 68.0
New Mexico 68.0
San Diego 68.0
CS Northridge 67.0
Pepperdine 67.0
CS San Fran. 66.0
CS Sacramento 65.0
Hawaii 64.5
Denver 63.5
CS Fullerton 63.0
CS Hayward 63.0
CS Long Beach 63.0
CS San Jose 63.0
CS Fresno 62.5
St. Mary's 61.5
CCNY 59.0
CS LA 58.5
Howard 57.5
San Francisco 57.5</p>
<p>^Boalt's study probably doesn't apply to engineering schools since most law applicants tend to be liberal arts majors like history, english, poli sci, or internation relation.</p>
<p>I found BC grading to be spot on. My fiance (hard sciences/pre med major) found extreme grade inflation at BU.</p>
<p>^ BU has taken steps to rectify that, I believe, with unofficial grade deflation through gently recommended curves. Google the NYT article.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Its no coincidence that these two schools, including Harvard rounded off the top 1,2,3 for highest suicide rates during the 1990's.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Uh...Harvard is very inflated, so your correlation fails.</p>
<p>Pretty much any tech school is going to be hard grading wise.</p>
<p>Either the class is covering too much material or the instruction sucks. Furthermore, there are far too many college classes that proudly announce that x percentage of you will recieve a C or lower. This is simply an attempt to suck scholarships out of enrolled students so the funds can be used to attract a new group of chumps. We had an TA explaining how to track your grade during the semester and he became confused and had to call on another staff for assistance. A scam. If you want to seperate the chafe from the wheat, why not just have a battery of tests before admitance. Money, that’s why. At the expense of thousands of young careers and lives each year. The sum that is academia.</p>
<p>spare me any comments on spelling grammar - sleepy time</p>
<p>^^Agree, mostly, with nnizy. Grading on a <em>strict</em> curve seems pretty flawed. Really, it’s impossible for everyone in the class to truly understand the material, and get no grade below a B? I know in my CS classes, lots of professors grade on a “scale,” rather than a curve: they look at the distribution data, and it doesn’t typically fall into a bell-curve, but rather in “lumps:” the kids in the top lump get A’s, the next lump or two B’s, the next one C’s, and anyone below that fails (cause we don’t give Ds, as they’re basically a failing grade). This ensures that, regardless of grades or numbers, the kids who are in the top of the class get an A, even if that happens to be the majority of the class (yes, this is possible: if there is very little spread between grades, then there may only be two lumps, and most the class can fall in that first lump, meaning most succeeded in the class… which is a good thing and should be rewarded).</p>
<p>And some of our toughest classes are not curved, for example Orgo. This class had strict cutoffs, because the professors felt that people need a base knowledge in order to pass, and so despite the incredible difficulty, and the grades that would be more generous to grade on a curve, no curve was given because, it’s felt, if you aren’t able to get X percentage, you really don’t understand the material well enough for an A, even if you’re better than 95% of your class. Strict curves increase competitiveness and decrease collaborativeness, because you’re directly competing with your peers for a limited number of grades. Without a set number of each grade, there’s no reason not to help others, and get helped yourself, so that the general comprehension, the sum of knowledge gained by the entire class increases.</p>
<p>Duke is pretty harsh with deflation, from what I’ve heard.</p>
<p>Actually, it is a professor at Duke who has raised concern about how many A’s and B’s are given relative to 20 years ago, especially at Duke. He has published his findings on his website gradeinflation.com. If you scroll down to the bottom you can click on the schools and see the data.</p>