Yale discussing whether to change grading policies

Colleges and Universities A-Z Yale University
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<p>Yes, it varies from college to college.
Trinity Hall: A “first” means you are granted free accommodation the year after during the holidays (possibly a cash prize, I think)</p>

<p>Fitzwilliam: You are awarded £300 and a scholarship prize, as well as having first priority on selection of houses (some colleges own houses around Cambridge which students can rent out)</p>

<p>And the list goes on :)</p>

<p>As for CVs, it varies - some students detail what they got in each of the three years (modern languages students in year 1 even get a separate class for each of their two languages), and many put down the highest class they achieved in a year as their overall one.</p>

<p>There is no such thing in Cambridge as a final degree classification. You are awarded a B.A. (Hons). It’s your individual Tripos exams taken that carry a class with them.
Your diploma says nothing more than BA (Cantab).</p>

<p>In research, they probably go by your last year. To progress into PIII Mathematics, you have to achieve a strong first in PII (final year), I believe. As for other conditional offers, they’ll probably be similar, and for consideration they probably go into depth and ask for individual Tripos scores I would imagine.</p>

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<p>Re “final degree classification:” Sorry, just the American way of speaking about it.</p>

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<p>“Re “final degree classification:” Sorry, just the American way of speaking about it.”</p>

<p>Fair enough, it’s a correct term for every other uni in the UK… other than Cambridge (probably Oxford too).</p>

<p><strong>by the way, how can I quote people’s posts, and how can I be notified when someone quotes me / posts in a thread I posted in? At the moment I’m just going through the posts I’ve made, which is horribly inefficient.</strong></p>

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<p>To be notified if anyone writes on a thread that you are interested in, you go to “thread tools” at the top right of this page, and click “subscribe to thread.” you will receive an email anytime someone comments on one of your subscribed threads.</p>

<p>I don’t know how to quote other people’s posts, though.</p>

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<p>TSRPolymath,</p>

<p>Regarding:

</p>

<p>If you remove “XX” from each of two “XX]” below:</p>

<p>
[quoteXX]
how can I quote people’s posts
[/quoteXX]
</p>

<p>you will get the quote shown above.</p>

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<p>@mcat2</p>

<p>Ah I see, thanks. I’m just used to being able to multiquote and then having a panel on the right saying who has quoted my posts recently (so it’s a direct notification of who’s replied to you personally)</p>

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<p>If you use the “Advanced” post option, you will see boxes for Miscellaneous options at the end of your post. One option is to be notified by email every time someone posts in the thread. You can also be notified once a day or weekly.</p>

<p>That’s not as good as what you describe, but it helps.</p>

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<p>@jonri thanks :)</p>

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<p>I attend a University of California campus — highly rated but obviously not in the same league as Yale. I can assure you that there is no grade inflation around here. If you’re a 3.2 student in STEM around here, you’re sharp. I want to explain why grade inflation is a REAL problem, and I’d like to propose a solution.</p>

<p>Grade inflation is a REAL problem because many internships, interviews, and job opportunities have hard GPA cutoffs. For example, don’t bother applying to a major OIL without a 3.5 GPA. Further, even the U.S. government pay scale for entering physical scientists is governed by your GPA. A 3.0 starts you at GS-7, while < 3.0 starts you at GS-5.</p>

<p>Grade inflation is so bad at almost all private universities — take a look at Brown University if you really want to laugh/cry — that it actually has a demonstrable effect on whether the best potential employees are being hired, in my humble opinion.</p>

<p>Here is my proposal. If it sounds complicated, keep in mind that computers can handle this entire proposal in milleseconds. Let professors grade as they will. (You’ll never wring the grade variances out of the system by admonishing tenured folk.) But registrars’ computers shall convert all grades in each class to percentiles. Then, for each student, the registrars’ computers will take each class percentile, weight it by the credit-hours for the course, and tally an overall percentile ranking for every student in each grade level. This is very, very computer-simple, yet effective. When you apply for a job, interview, internship etc, it is your percentile rank that is reported. Every university subscribes to the same easy, reporting system.</p>

<p>This system is very self-correcting, and in particular, corrects many flaws inherent in merely reporting class rank, as it is usually implemented. If you take an easy class and get an A-, it may well be that your credit-hours-adjusted percentile component for that class is the 38th percentile (fairly low). Take O-Chem or Linear Algebra at UC, get a C, and you might well add a 64th percentile component into your overall percentile rank.</p>

<p>I would like to add that I am not getting into the discussion of whether a 93rd percentile student at XXXXX State U. is “better” than a 61st percentile student at Yale. I expect that all top-line employers know the difference. All the employer has to do is look at an SAT, GRE, or MCAT score to know the innate differences between the two students. But what adcoms and hiring managers WILL know from the percentiles is how well the students did — corrected for all sorts of potential errors — within the group of students with whom they chose to attend college. This IS a valid input for hiring managers to know. This IS a fair way to compare students — particularly when jobs, internships, and salaries are on the line.</p>

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<p>@beebthe1 “If you’re a 3.2 student in STEM around here, you’re sharp”</p>

<p>I may be misunderstanding you, but are STEM degrees seen as being taken by more intelligent students then? I mean, they’re not objectively the hardest degrees by any means, just wondering how you guys see them.</p>

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<p>@TSR. Oh, no, I wasn’t implying anything about the merits of STEM or the relative intelligence of STEM majors vs. non-STEM majors. I was referring to the fact that at my school, STEM courses are graded very low. The professors curve most STEM courses around a median 2.3 grade. If you’re a STEM major doing a 3.2 GPA, you’re probably 1 standard deviation above the mean.</p>

<p>I’ll take a GE course, do almost no work, and get an A — along with almost everyone else in the room. There are no STEM courses at my university in which you can do that.</p>

<p>But in response to your discussion about which degrees are hard ---- yes, STEM degrees around here are definitely the toughest in several respects. First, comparing a most basic measure, some STEM degrees can’t even be completed in 120 semester units; some often take a fifth year to complete, even qualifying for a fifth year of scholarship money. Second, BS degrees simply have less slack for easy courses than BA degrees. A typical BS degree has room for only the minimum number of GE courses. Third, mean GPA for schools at my university shows engineering lowest, physical sciences second lowest, etc. In fact, there is a 0.38 GPA gap between Engineering and Humanities majors. That is statistically significant.</p>

<p>And yes, my anecdotal observation is that STEM majors have to study many more hours per week than non-STEM majors. It has nothing to do with comparative intelligence and everything to do with surviving the curve.</p>

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<p>Hmm, maybe it’s different in the US with the huge flexibility, but something like Economics (at the rigorous universities) certainly isn’t easier than STEM subjects as there’s hardly any scope to pick easy modules at the top unis</p>

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<p>@TSR…I was thinking about economics in the back of my mind the whole time I was writing my previous post. Frankly, even though ECON is categorized as a social science, one could call it a STEM subject for its Math connection. Majors in economics here are certainly among the brightest on campus, but the courses themselves are not graded as mercilessly as STEM courses.</p>

<p>This gets me back to my original points about grade inflation at the privates vs. the publics. It is most pronounced in the STEM subjects, and there are many ramifications — mostly negative — of this situation.</p>

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<p>beebthe1: I like your suggestion, but would suggest supplementing it with something like “strength of schedule” to make the comparison with football rankings. In some cases at my university, the percentile ranking would be a bit deceptive: for instance, real analysis is offered at three levels, and only the strongest students take the hardest course (usually fewer than 10). The grades are pretty high in the course as a result, and percentiles for an A correspondingly not so high. Also, the percentile score of an undergrad taking a graduate course might not be so high, yet that is a good performance. Engineering tends to have more sequential and time-consuming curricula, so this may happen less in engineering.</p>

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<p>"@TSR…I was thinking about economics in the back of my mind the whole time I was writing my previous post. Frankly, even though ECON is categorized as a social science, one could call it a STEM subject for its Math connection. Majors in economics here are certainly among the brightest on campus"</p>

<p>;)</p>

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<p>@QuantMech: You’re completely right. I think all the new sports ranking services of the past 30 years set a great example of how statistical analysis can read between the lines. From ranking shortstops to picking a statistical college football national champion, they cut through the glossy coat to give the top choice. Your “strength of schedule” analogy is perfect, but it would add a labor-burden to the system I proposed. I think you would need to find an easy statistical-proxy to rate difficulty of courses.</p>

<p>Also, I see the problem with the Real Analysis course you described. Oddly, I think what has happened there is that the professor/department wants to deliberately reward the students for taking the tough course. There’s nothing wrong with that under the present system. But if we moved to a system including “strength of schedule”, we would just show every professor that it is to everyone’s benefit to create a curve for his class. Professors would understand that even lower-graded students in his class would get a boost from a “strength of schedule” multiplier. </p>

<p>In a class like that, let’s say they give out grades of A, B, and C only. But if the course is rated as truly difficult we might have a multiplier of, say, 1.9 (1.0 being the multiplier for an average course). Forgetting about the unit-multiplier for the moment, the C student would still get 3.8 adjusted points (2.0 X 1.9). That would be higher, for example, than a somewhat-average course (multiplier, say 1.1), in which a B student would receive 3.3 adjusted points (1.1 X 3.0).</p>

<p>Of course all of these adjusted points are then subjected to the unit multiplier, then bundled by the registrar’s computer to give an overall percentile rank</p>

<p>I would go further (into the past) to put this in context. If someone is making a hiring decision, or a grad/professional school admission decision, he needs valid inputs. Among the usual inputs, innate/achieved pure intelligence can be found from all the standardized tests. Letters of intent, etc., can give valid input on purpose. Interviews can give valid input on a host of in-person intangibles. </p>

<p>But as of now, the use of plain GPA does not constitute a valid input. The variance in average GPA (and course grading policies) between different universities poses a barrier to GPA usefulness and fair hiring/admissions.</p>

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<p>Some professor may just reward the best of the best in his class an A. He may not care whether it is only a very tiny fractional of his students or even none of his students who will get an A from him.</p>

<p>I think this kind of professor does it on the ground that he believes only the very small number of shining stars should follow his step to do the academic work (because there is no need to have too many graduate students in the academia) and the professor is only interested in hunting down those few shining stars. Being an acdemic superstar himself, he could care less about whether, say, 99 percents of students do not get an A’s. If the students do not like his “grading style”, he thinks the students can as well take classes from other professors who do not have this grading standard. </p>

<p>At least in some STEM class (likely in other non-STEM classes as well), working hard does not necessarily result in an A, as some of the professors really want to find some student who has a innate ability and is working hard before he would award such students an A.</p>

<p>The students choose to attend a high-power research university and the students choose to take a class from a professor who is a super high power in academia. So be prepared to accept the consequence of their choices because the professor could care less about those “mere mortals” who just want some good grades from a “good/marketable” major to “help find a job.”</p>

<p>It is therefore sometimes not very meaningful to compare the grades from different professors/schools.</p>