<p>Any comments from students about the grading policies at Yale? Do grades seem inflated? Large curves? Small curves? Harsh Grading?</p>
<p>the grades are not capped, for one. much better than harvard and princeton, who both report their grades to the media!</p>
<p>good job not answering his/her question at all</p>
<p>bump........</p>
<p>in my experience, the grading's pretty decent. there will *definitely*be harsh graders (i have several friends who had really hard TAs, etc.; i was just pretty lucky and didn't run into many of them myself), and there will be easy teachers, but let's sum it up as: if you do the work, you shouldn't find it <em>too</em> hard to get a B+ or an A-. But you will have to work for an A.</p>
<p>In more detail, here's how the grading broke down for my classes this year:</p>
<p>Chem - 1st semester, the prof. essentially guaranteed that half the class would get some form of an A, the other half B's. 2nd semester, the prof. didn't guarantee anything, but made every effort to help students get A's - ie. he essentially let everyone drop their lowest test score, and he had this policy that if you scored higher on the final than you did in the rest of the class, your final grade became your class grade. THat class was probably pretty evenly split between A's and B's, too.</p>
<p>Physics - don't know; prof. didn't usually release grade distributions, although I'd suppose it was somewhere around 40% A's, 40% B's, and 20% C's (second semester, probably 50% A's, with the rest B's and maybe one C; this was phys 260/261, so a lot of people dropped after first semester because it was too hard)</p>
<p>History - depends; first semester the prof told us the <em>median</em> grade would be an A- (i quote: "If you're here at Yale, you should be capable of doing A- work"), second semester it was probably a B+/A-, but lower for people with my TA (she was a harder grader than most of the others :p)</p>
<p>Language - don't know for my german class, but my english 120 class probably averaged somewhere in the B/B+ range... really depends on the teacher, though.</p>
<p>i've heard there are some classes where the teacher implements a mandatory curve (like frosh econ, i think? that's supposed to be HARSH), but i'm not exactly sure how prevalent that is.</p>
<p>... does that help at all?</p>
<p>that correlates with what I was told at Yale.</p>
<p>they simply stated they don't release grades to the media...if Gandhiji understood me, that means there has to be some type of "it's not impossible to get all As"... unlike princeton and harvard where they DON'T believe you need to have that A.</p>
<p>it's one of the things that makes Yale so appealing.. you deserve an A if you want it.</p>
<p>no, you deserve an A if you work for it... you deserve the A- if you just want it :p</p>
<p>quiet, you. :p</p>
<p>athena and bingo,
I'm planning on applying to Yale EASC- Psych. major.
Is it better if I take AP Psych. senior year or AP Chem?<br>
I already took Bio H, Chem H, AP Bio, Physics. Do you think it's necessary to take another year of Chem??
O Yeah, I took General Psych. at a community college this summer (already finished).</p>
<p>
[quote]
I already took Bio H, Chem H, AP Bio, Physics. Do you think it's necessary to take another year of Chem??
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Not unless you're planning on being a pure science major, which it sounds like you aren't. The only thing AP chem is really good for at Yale is placing you out of intro chem, which if you're a pre-med or are interested in one of the more intensive science majors can sometimes be a good thing (but you'd still have to take a full 4 semesters of chemistry anyway, it'd just be more advanced), but otherwise, I wouldn't worry about it. If you are planning on taking chem once you get to college, and if you do end up at Yale, chem 118 is a lot of fun (at least, in my opinion), and it's a good refresher course (without being overly review-ish) after chem H.</p>
<p>If you're planning on majoring in psych, but not on going the pre-med path, I would go with AP psych. It will give you a bit more of an exposure to the discipline and will either let you place out of intro psych in college, or, if you feel like repeating the course, will give you a bit of a head-start over many of your classmates. The only major reservation I woudl have to taking AP psych is if the teacher is bad - mine certainly wasn't the best, and if I could do it all over again (heh), I would have taken AP econ instead and taken Marvin Chun's psych class at Yale. Probably would have been a much better experience...</p>
<p>No matter what you take in high school, Yale asks students to fulfill the natural science & quantitative reasoning requirements while at Yale, and if you like chem, it fulfills both of these requirements... so unless you would be planning on taking a ton of other science courses, waiting to take chem again might be teh way to go.</p>
<p>The only other thing to consider - as Yale is notoriously hard to get into, look at the other schools you're applying to and see what makes sense with their placement/credit for AP policies. What makes sense for Yale might not make sense for other schools, so... yeah.</p>
<p>Sorry, reading that over, I'm not sure it made much sense. Did it help at all? If not, what can I do to clarify it?</p>
<p>Thanks Athena.
So you're saying that if I'm not really going to focus on hardcore science in college, I shouldn't take AP Chem. You made perfect sense- don't worry about it hehe. Thanks for the advice on Chem. 118~ I really hope I get in. Do you know how good the psych. program is at Yale?? What have your psych. classes been like??</p>
<p>Athena, </p>
<p>I took a community college course on General Psych. Do you think that it would be repetitive to take AP Psych?</p>
<p>The hardest thing about Yale is getting in. My friend who is there says he's on a "four year vacation" and that the school really isn't tough, but more... crap... forgot the word... "interesting"</p>
<p>Basically, you meet new people and look at things a whole, new way.</p>