<p>It may also be a matter of students gearing up for college-level work. the MIT report carefully documents the belief that the low freshman grades are due to difficulties in adjusting to MIT’s expectations of quality and volume of work. Once the students make it through freshman year they are up to speed and produce a high proportion of A’s. The same phenomenon may occur in the broader list of courses at Harvard. So far, the MIT report is the only one I have seen that provides this detailed look at grades by class year.</p>
<p>Among the biggest problems that I see with the WSJ feeder ranking is the very limited number of schools used (five only in each of medical, law and business) and the increasingly high weight given by admissions committees to postgraduate work/life and correspondingly less weight to the undergraduate college. This is particularly true for MBA programs as the typical MBA student attending a Top 15-20 MBA school has worked for 4-7 years and the centerpiece of his/her application is NOT the undergraduate academic record, but rather the postgraduate work and success. Furthermore, many top law schools and even medical schools now want their students to take a year or more off following undergraduate and before graduate school. This lessens the impact of the undergraduate college name and focuses more on the individual and what he/she will bring to the graduate school environment. As a result of this limited universe of graduate programs and the lack of consideration given to the critical postgraduate work/life experiences, IMO the WSJ Feeder School ranking has very low utility and credibility.</p>
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<p>Not true Alexandre. If you look at those stats again, you’ll notice several NE LACs that send between 5 and 9 students to Michigan Law (including Amherst and Middlebury).</p>
<p>True. My bad. Still, the numbers aren’t as prevalent as you would imagine, considering that’s the total number of students represented in all three years of the Law school (over 1,000 law students).</p>
<p>My experience as both a student many years ago and a faculty member at a LAC, is that profs tend to give higher grades to students in upper level courses that are part of their concentration so I agree with siserune. They aren’t as forthcoming with those grades with students who are only taking courses as part of a school wide requirement. This is particularly true of premeds. I have know a number of professors who will nail premeds because the profs feel that the students are only taking the course as a requirement as opposed to having a general interest in the course.</p>
<p>As a former premed, I agree with DocT’s perception of faculty attitudes. </p>
<p>It will be difficult to sort out the effect of freshmen gearing up for college level work and freshmen taking introductory courses.</p>
<p>Hawkette, I agree that the limited and debatable selection of top prof schools reduces the validity of the study. On the other hand, I don’t think that Yale and Harvard law are debatable as top law schools, and their results are strikingly similar to those of the WSJ findings as a whole. </p>
<p>The issue may be that focusing only on the handful of top programs may be biased in all sorts of ways. Particularly in law, where people seem to care forever about where someone went to school, the options available to graduates of the traditional top schools really are greater than those who came from even slightly less prestigious places, even if their legal abilities are identical. Look at the current make up of the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>In medicine, most people who react to this with a “who cares?”. Not only might you get lots of arguments about which are the 5 best medical schools, but you would get even more debate about whether it matters. A graduate of any of at least a dozen schools would get as close a look from a residency committee as would a graduate of Harvard. Everyone knows that financial considerations drive medical school enrollment. I would wonder about the judgement of someone who took out $150,000 in loans to go to Hopkins over in-state tuition at Michigan. Consequently, although Hopkins is a better medical school, I would not consider a Hopkins grad any more appealing, since the fact that they went there told me as much about financial situations as academic ability.</p>
<p>I would be more interested in mean LSAT and MCAT scores from applicants by college. </p>
<p>I agree that business schools seem to want work experience, further diluting the significance of college. However, since they are looking mainly at first jobs, college may influence first jobs their graduates get.</p>
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<p>Uh, I never said that what I was presenting was numerical data. I simply said that it is the opinion of some that Harvard grades easily.</p>
<p>Furthermore, you have still yet to present any numerical data either. Frankly, so have most of the people who have been posting here. If you’re going to ask me for numerical data, then I think you should do the same. Otherwise, your posts are equally as much “a joke” as mine are.</p>
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<p>And again, when exactly did I make this claim? Please point to my quote where * I myself * specifically made those claims. Can’t do it, can you?</p>
<p>I am simply providing a news article about what some people think. I am not responsible for what they think.</p>
<p>But of course, I did provide data. Lots of it. What is the point of quoting the uninformed when the facts are available to anyone who bothers to look?</p>
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<p>Uh, somehow I doubt that these are really the “uninformed”. Just because the article didn’t actually quote any specific data that served to inform the opinions of the people in that article doesn’t mean that the data doesn’t exist. This is, after all, the Dean for Undergraduate Education at Tufts we’re talking about here. I strongly suspect he does indeed have data that supports his opinion. Heck, he probably has better data than we do. If nothing else, at least he, with an academic reputation to protect, is out there being quoted in the media using his real name. He’s on the record. Can anybody here say the same? Be honest - who do you find more credible, an actual named academic who is serving as a dean of a rival school, or a bunch of anonymous handles (myself included) on a public Internet forum? </p>
<p>Like I said, if you really want to get down to the bottom of this, why not join me in an email to Inouye? We can ask Inouye why he said what he said, and what data he has to back it up. Whatever reply he provides (if any), we can post back here on this thread. I see no harm in asking. Surely, you’re not afraid of what the reply might be. </p>
<p><a href=“http://ase.tufts.edu/faculty-guide/faculty.asp?id=cinouye&deptId=gerrusasia[/url]”>Tufts University;
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<p>Neither.
I trust real data.
Which has already been provided.
What else do you want?</p>
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<p>What is your point, given the data that has been posted? Apparently grading at Harvard is far from harsh, but in line with the practices of most of its direct competitors, as judged by the incidence of A/A- and of honors degrees (both around 50 percent these days). Web search for “grade inflation Tufts” shows about 50 percent honors degrees at that school in some years subsequent to the comments by its dean. Whether they, like Harvard, have dropped the number in recent years, I don’t know. But at the time of the dean’s comments, they were putting Latin on degrees about as often as Harvard’s current rate. Again, what is the point of referring to the guy at Tufts?</p>