[HN Gopher] Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating ...
___________________________________________________________________
Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7
(A-) GPA
Author : universityguys
Score : 184 points
Date : 2022-05-27 16:14 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (features.thecrimson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (features.thecrimson.com)
| antisthenes wrote:
| Well, obviously.
|
| How else would you "hire only the best" otherwise?
| supernova87a wrote:
| I have a related observation from the perspective of graduate
| programs in the US.
|
| One surprising, and sensible thing, that I noticed in working in
| the UK was that PhD defenses of students were conducted by
| professors from _other_ universities. In that sense, there was an
| external standard that prevented simply passing students for
| "sentimental" reasons or lowering the bar unilaterally by the
| student's own department. And I certainly knew of cases in the US
| in my department where people got passed much more leniently, and
| it's hard for your own professor to tell you that you're not fit
| for a PhD. (ironically (?) when it does happen, it seems the bad
| news comes at the last step, rather than along the way, much to
| the publicized and frustrating feedback about grad programs that
| appears in discussion often).
|
| Of course in the US there is no way that you could coordinate, or
| have universities be incentivized, to have external examiners
| evaluate and pass/fail their students.
|
| It probably all relates (in some tangential way) to the waning
| desire to engage in standards-setting for admission or
| graduation.
| pmyteh wrote:
| UK universities also have 'external examiners', who are
| academics from the same subject area in other universities.
| They're tasked with providing moderation feedback to try to
| keep standards for each (taught) degree classification roughly
| comparable between institutions. (They also provide input into
| course design, warn university highers-up if the programme is
| going off the rails, and other things).
|
| It's far from perfect, and standards do vary from course to
| course and institution to institution, but it's better than
| nothing. And not all in one direction, either: after the first
| year of the MSc programme I (later) took, the external
| examiners' report said that our department had marked very
| harshly, and several excellent students deserving of
| distinctions (and who would have got them in other
| universities) had been denied. The recommendation was to
| actually award the highest marks in the future.
|
| I'm directing my own new MA programme next year, and I'm
| curious to see what feedback I get. Marking, where there's no
| established disciplinary body of knowledge to get through and
| assess, is decidedly non-trivial to get right.
| cebert wrote:
| After you land your first job, does your GPA even matter? In
| every recent promotion opportunity for me or potential new
| position at another employer, what my college GPA was has never
| been relevant. What seems to be much more relevant is my
| experience, accomplishments, and whether I am a good fit for the
| position.
| crmd wrote:
| The GPA doesn't matter once you are mid-career, but I'm amazed
| at how a prestigious university brand helps marginal candidates
| get through the filter to an on-site interview 20+ years after
| graduation. I was helping a company scale their solution
| architect team last year, and the CEO said of one candidate
| with a resume full of huge red flags, "why would we not
| interview him? He went to MIT!"
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I 'm amazed at how a prestigious university brand helps
| marginal candidates get through the filter to an on-site
| interview 20+ years after graduation_
|
| Is there evidence for it not remaining a strong signal?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Is there evidence for it being a strong signal in the first
| place?
|
| Once you have work experience, either from your first few
| jobs, or for some from internships, then your school rarely
| matters. It's not like you learned some revolutionary thing
| that is exclusive to MIT 20 years ago, or that whatever you
| learned is even applicable for that matter.
| gharman wrote:
| I'll raise my hand as a data point. MIT, about 20 years
| out. It still seems to carry significant weight. I don't
| even work in the field I studied, so it's definitely not
| about any particular material I may have learned there.
| My conjecture is that association with the MIT brand
| implies that I must be a sharp cookie and someone worth
| paying attention to.
| universityguys wrote:
| I feel like Harvard and MIT, those two universities in
| particular, carry a very unique cachet. Other elite
| universities may not be so worth it.
| qiskit wrote:
| > ... then your school rarely matters.
|
| ... then your gpa rarely matters. But your school always
| matters. Not only in terms of network, but in terms of
| reputation, prestige and even camaraderie. Especially the
| higher you go up the ladder when more and more people
| tend to be graduates of top schools.
|
| Nobody will ask about your GPA as you get further along
| in your career. But everyone will ask about your alma
| mater. You eventually stop putting your GPA on your
| resume, even if you had a 4.0. But you always put the
| college you graduated from.
| mateo1 wrote:
| I've been out of uni for a few years and have forgotten a
| stunning amount of material that I worked hard to learn
| during my time there. In 10 years time, anything you
| haven't been using, you forget.
| universityguys wrote:
| Yes. Elite hedge funds, private equity firms, etc. all care
| about academic credentials. Even within quant firms lots of
| Harvard grads will look to see if a candidate is a "Math 55er"
| and the grade received in the course if so.
| jeffbee wrote:
| "Elite" wall street guys just hire their pals from Yale, and
| their kids, and their friends kids, as long as they went to
| Yale. Even if they are as dumb as rocks.
|
| The only thing less objectively "elite" than the American
| investment firm is the American House of Representatives.
| universityguys wrote:
| This is true. It is simultaneously true that many of these
| people have excellent credentials from a signaling
| standpoint. e.g. Shaw loves their Rhodes Scholars
| chollida1 wrote:
| This hasn't been true for the past 20-30 years, or ever
| since the average trader switched from a Lacrosse player to
| a physics grad.
|
| Been in the industry for 20 years and never seen nepotism
| on the trading floor.
| [deleted]
| jeffbee wrote:
| I think you're overestimating the fraction of the wall
| street population that is on the algorithmic or technical
| side of the game compared to the traditional side that
| simply provides no value to their clients.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > lots of Harvard grads will look to see if a candidate is a
| "Math 55er"
|
| Makes sense. Given what I know of the course material, it
| seems like a very solid indicator of the mathematical
| capabilities of a person.
| trauco wrote:
| It does to go to grad school, and to get fellowships.
| dhosek wrote:
| It matters for grad school and for teaching jobs (transcripts
| are part of the application packet for K-12 and post-
| secondary teaching positions), but otherwise it doesn't
| matter.
| trauco wrote:
| Well, doctors and lawyers, as in some of the most powerful
| people in the country (supreme court justices, etc) have to
| get graduate degrees.
|
| Maybe it doesn't matter for software engineers, but it
| matters a lot for the power structure of our society.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| For engineers, if you have a good internship or two under your
| belt when you graduate, I'm not sure your GPA really matters
| even for your first job. But, GPA definitely matters for what
| internships you can even apply for. So having a good GPA
| certainly makes it easier to get a good internship, and having
| a good internship on your resume makes it easier to get a good
| first full time job, which make it easier to get your second
| job, etc.
| xxpor wrote:
| This is why I'll never work for NVIDIA. They required a 3.5
| GPA for interns and new grads, when no one else did. Screw
| em.
| bayindirh wrote:
| No. My GPA didn't matter when I got my internships or got my
| job, because esp. in CS, GPA doesn't measure motivation,
| curiosity and eagerness to try.
|
| I always failed math classes, but I transform to something
| different if I have to apply that math. I get a +3 modifier
| instantly.
|
| Same in programming. I can tackle much harder problems than
| my peers, but my grades didn't show that.
|
| Result? I got my Ph.D., work at a reputable institution, and
| I'm happy. I'm also continuing a side academic gig.
|
| I personally don't care about GPAs of people I interview too.
| [deleted]
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| I don't think your experience is representative. Certainly
| your dismissive "no" is unwarranted.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Certainly your dismissive "no" is unwarranted.
|
| Sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive. I've written
| this comment on mobile, in a short time, which proved to
| be a bad idea.
|
| I wanted to say "I don't believe GPA to be a good
| indicator regarding capabilities and intelligence of a
| person". That dismissive sounding "No" was a direct
| answer to
|
| > I'm not sure your GPA really matters even for your
| first job.
|
| And, I tried to say "No, it doesn't matter from my
| perspective".
|
| > I don't think your experience is representative.
|
| It's certainly possible. I was not an ordinary student
| when I was an undergrad due to both my past and my
| interest in computers.
| LargeWu wrote:
| No, but Ivy League matters a lot, in certain circles. It's
| supposed to be the gold standard degree.
| blagie wrote:
| If you ever want to go to e.g. law school, yes it does.
|
| Part of the reason for grade inflation is that it helps with
| those sorts of admissions down-the-line. US News looks at
| median GPA when evaluating law schools, which has a bunch of
| trickle-down effects, one of the major ones being that law
| schools weigh GPA very strongly.
|
| That problem is not exclusive to law schools.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Law schools weigh GPA very strongly.
|
| They say that, but they don't. When someone is rejected they
| will say it was because of a low GPA. But people are accepted
| based on their LSAT scores. Do well on the LSAT and your
| undergrad GPA is almost meaningless.
| lkfsfldkjfslk wrote:
| During my three years of working in law school admissions,
| GPA was a primary factor at my school and all the peer
| schools I knew about.
|
| Each school would set a target median LSAT and GPA for the
| year's class because they were weighted heavily in the US
| News rankings. Applicants with both scores at or above the
| target median would get scholarships, applicants with one
| number at or above the median would be presumptively
| admitted, diverse applicants with solid numbers were
| admitted to fill out the class once LSAT and GPA were set,
| and then there would be a half-dozen or fewer judges' kids,
| politicians' kids, etc.
| blagie wrote:
| <-- This is exactly the process. I've seen scatter plots
| of LSAT and GPA for admitted students to many law
| schools, and discussed the process with people in
| admissions.
|
| I get the comments about better processes for admitting
| better / more diverse / healthier / whatever students,
| and it's trivial to come with them, but so long as US
| News wags the dog, that ain't happening.
|
| Corollary: If your LSAT score is good enough, GPA is
| irrelevant for admissions. If your GPA is good enough,
| LSAT is irrelevant for admissions. Both need to be high
| for scholarships.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Law school or really any graduate school.
|
| It's kind of laughable that we still rely on GPAs. The
| solution would be to convert college grades into a kind of
| item response theory measure of fitness for each student
| (equivalent to like the degree of difficulty of test
| questions). You could do it within a school so that you can
| create a better measure of ability that controls for
| difficulty of majors or individual classes.
|
| You could create one nationally as well, though getting data
| combined together would be a pain. Something like SAT/ACT/GRE
| scores might help when comparing between schools. Or grades
| of students who transfer schools.
| alar44 wrote:
| I've never put it on a resume and I've never been asked. After
| the 1st job, (at least in the tech world) it seems to be 95%
| experience and the accomplishments you can point to. Ymmv.
| trauco wrote:
| "Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are
| good-looking, and all the children are above average." ~ Garrison
| Keillor
| mywittyname wrote:
| The population in general continues to grow much faster than the
| number of people admitted to Ivy League schools. So it stands to
| reason that the few who manage to get in are going to
| uncharacteristically intelligent and driven, even compared to
| previous Ivy League cohorts. Which will drive up GPAs.
|
| Honestly, if the median GPA at Harvard was less than a 3.5, then
| that would raise questions. Because it means that either grading
| is unfair -- i.e., grading on a curve, rather than on an
| understanding of the material -- or that students aren't as
| capable as the school's reputation implies.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| > uncharacteristically intelligent and driven
|
| Or they had the right skin color [1].
|
| [1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/16/admissions-
| suit...
| carabiner wrote:
| Harvard students of today are enormously more effective and
| likely intelligent than those of before. Some of that is due to
| technology making schoolwork easier, but also because of
| population growth like you said. In the 1950s, you could get
| into Harvard with one AP course scoring a 3:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/nyregion/nyregionspecial2...
|
| Today you might have 5's on a dozen AP courses and be fully
| rejected (not waitlisted).
| NonNefarious wrote:
| Grade inflation, review inflation. It's rampant. No wonder people
| graduate and then have a meltdown when their poor or mediocre
| performance on the job gets called out.
|
| People are too dumb to understand what "excellent" means, now.
| Why should I feel like an asshole if I don't give EVERY Lyft
| driver FIVE STARS, BEST EVAR!!!111!!!
| bombcar wrote:
| Amusingly enough, in a mass-review situation like with the Lyft
| driver, there really are only two options, 5 star or 0 star (or
| whatever the lowest is) - as everything else is sub-optimal in
| actually affecting the rating.
|
| They should switch to a "would you ride again y/n" instead.
| woodruffw wrote:
| At least in the context of Lyft, the problem is that The
| Algorithm (tm) punishes drivers disproportionately: a handful
| of bad reviews (which could amount to a couple of passengers in
| bad moods on a single day) might mean being permanently banned
| from your source of income.
|
| (The entire idea of "reviewing" a rideshare is ridiculous to
| begin with: you can't select the driver you're matched with, so
| the it's not as much a "review" as it is a way to
| algorithmically punish non-employees.)
| robotburrito wrote:
| A friend who got his MS at Penn State then went to get his PHD at
| American University was told by his boss when grading students,
| that he had to give "Genteleman's Cs" to people because their
| "parents paid a ton of $ to get them here." He/She was used to
| giving out real grades at state schools.
| chernevik wrote:
| Harvard admits a lot of people not actually capable of doing the
| work. Rigorous grades would expose those people. The patterns
| among those people would embarrass the policies driving those
| admissions, and expose the school to criticisms, probably unfair,
| that it prefers to avoid.
|
| Better to give everyone an A and avoid all the controversy.
|
| This is almost certainly deteriorating the overall quality of the
| education available at Harvard -- why kill yourself to get the
| same A as everyone else? Even if professors want to encourage
| excellence, how can they signal it?
|
| When I graduated in the mid-80s, Ivy League grads were distinctly
| more capable than those from my pretty good school. From what I
| see this is no longer the case.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| If you are a professor at an Ivy League school, your life will be
| much easier if you go along with grade inflation - i.e. don't
| create tests and assignments that are too difficult or
| challenging. Otherwise it'll be a constant battle over points on
| assignments and tests.
|
| The kids going to such elite institutions (similar to the British
| public school program for the posh) probably mostly came out of
| private high schools that also inflated grades, and if SATs are
| used, they probably had SAT tutors - so they're going to be used
| to getting top scores on everything, and will complain mightily
| if that changes.
|
| I don't really think the point of those schools is to really get
| a top-notch education, anyway - as with the British system, the
| point is to network with other children from wealthy elite
| families, which is a launchpad into the upper circles of
| government, business and media. The Atlantic spelled it out
| recently:
|
| _The answer lies in the specific nature of Ivy League elitism,
| which is an aristocracy of networks. Ivy League graduates make up
| 0.4 percent of the country. They are significantly
| overrepresented in Fortune 500 C-suites, in the House of
| Representatives, in the Senate, in academia, and in the media._
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/ivy-league...
|
| As far as anyone who wants a useful education in
| technology/science/math/engineering, you really want to go to a
| research-centric school that's small enough to allow you a chance
| to work directly with active research groups - even in a menial
| position. If you want to go onto graduate school, that experience
| is more valuable than anything else. Grades and GRE scores also
| matter, and will help with things like paid fellowships, but not
| nearly as much as hands-on experience with a real research group.
| Also, always take the harder series - a C grade in an advanced
| physics course for physics majors will mean more than an A grade
| in the softer version for non-majors, for example.
| universityguys wrote:
| most students at harvard and other elite universities come from
| american public schools, for the record. very high
| concentration of rich preppy private school kids, yes, but
| majority is still public.
| brewdad wrote:
| How many of those public school students are coming from
| exclusive suburban districts that may as well be private
| given the cost of living within the district's boundaries? I
| would guess the majority. Sure the random star from small-
| town Illinois will get in alongside 20 kids from a Chicago
| suburban high school.
| Metacelsus wrote:
| In spring 2020 I was a Harvard TA for organic chemistry lab
| (well, actually "teaching fellow" because Harvard is
| pretentious). The grading was extremely lenient, basically
| everyone got >90%.
|
| (Although in this case it didn't affect GPA because everyone got
| "emergency satisfactory" grades . . .)
| supernova87a wrote:
| I read actually here on HN some years back (or was is Slashdot?),
| a good explanation of how Japanese undergrad programs have a
| similar problem about inflation, manifested by contrast in why
| they are very focused on taking attendance at college courses.
|
| Anyone who gets into a top Japanese university by definition has
| done well up to that point. And the university has an obvious
| interest in maintaining (or making it seem to outsiders /
| employers / future students) that their graduates are top ranked.
| So it would not be good to be having 1/2 your class
| "underperforming". Therefore grades are inflated and as a result
| students often just phone it in. (also knowing that their careers
| ahead are mostly set if they minimally apply themselves and show
| up)
|
| So at that point, all they can do is mostly grade people on the
| small differences in performance, monitor their attendance to
| catch and flunk out the worst behaviors (completely skipping
| class), and live with the system they have.
|
| I would be glad to find/read that post again but I think I've
| lost where it came from...
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Honestly, I can't blame 'em. Expecting full effort always is
| re-testing the students you already know to be smart over and
| over so the bean-counters know how to rank them. Once you have
| your certification of "in the top of the smart bucket", classes
| should mostly be pass/fail past that point instead of
| monitoring for minute differences in behavior.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| The year is 20XX...
| jonahbenton wrote:
| All the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all
| the children are above average.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| In order to maintain an exclusive and elite image it has to
| surpress skills and talent to only promote its top performers,
| even in a place where its top performers out pace the brightest
| of a normal college.
|
| Elitism at its finest. We could get so many amazing people if
| Harvard didn't cut people short.
| pas wrote:
| wat? we already have a myriad of amazing people everywhere, and
| these elite certificate mills are largely irrelevant for making
| the world better anyway.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| My current university has a different problem, namely that there
| is no grade curving even though they are supposed to curve and
| adjust the distributions.
|
| The grades get mapped to ECTS, but the ECTS distribution does not
| match the actual distribution of the courses. I have a 'D' that's
| in the 80th percentile, and a B that is in the 95th percentile.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| That's not useful either
| MafellUser wrote:
| At Columbia you can score an A+ which corresponds to a 4.33. So
| you can graduate with a 4.33/4.0 GPA [1].
|
| Comparing GPAs across Universities is just pointless.
|
| [1] https://www.registrar.columbia.edu/content/grade-point-
| avera...
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Wouldn't that just be 4.33/4.33? My university has a similar
| system, with A=4 and A+=4.3, it's just that it's written as out
| of 4.3
| MafellUser wrote:
| Nope, on the transcript it's /4.0. It's absurd I know.
| tricolon wrote:
| And each department (and sometimes class or professor) has
| their own policy about whether they ever grant an A+.
| medvezhenok wrote:
| And at MIT the maximum grade is a 5.0 (A=5, B=4, C=3... etc)
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Same with high schools: some weight an A+ in an AP class as a
| 5.0, which means HS GPA needs to be normalized by each
| university's admissions committee.
| [deleted]
| jimbob45 wrote:
| It's Harvard. They go _way_ out of their way to ensure that they
| only select students who will succeed at their school.
|
| Perhaps it's not grade inflation that's the issue. Perhaps it's
| time to set aside the outdated ideology that grades must always
| adhere to a bell curve where some percentage of the class must be
| failed and some percentage must be passed even if the class is
| comprised of 35 perfect clones of Albert Einstein.
|
| Even further, what an asinine system to begin with. What good
| does a grading system based on the success of one's immediate
| peers do anyone? What information does that offer anyone? Maybe I
| got a 4.0 from Harvard but, if we using a bell curve system of
| grading, that may tell you that I was in a particularly weak
| class or that I actually was the strongest student in Harvard
| history. You'll never know.
| universityguys wrote:
| Right, but it makes no sense that Harvard's grade distribution
| is so different than schools with similarly strong student
| bodies like Princeton, Columbia, UChicago, Berkeley, etc.
|
| Also keep in mind that a very, very large portion of students
| are legacy / recruited athletes / very wealthy donor parents.
| sideshowb wrote:
| Dunno how Harvard works but where I work in the UK, in the
| unlikely event we had a cohort full of Einsteins they would all
| get firsts (hoping we're smart enough to recognise genius when
| we see it lol). We have an absolute sense of what each level of
| attainment should look like, and don't grade to a bell curve.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| You don't have to fail with a curve. You can set it so only
| outliers fail or get an A. That means most people will be
| getting a B, but it is still more useful.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| More useful for what? The goal isn't necessarily to identify
| the strongest student. The goal is to teach them material.
| The grade should represent mastery of the material. Some
| material can be mastered by every student.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| More useful for the instructors. If they can't separate the
| outliers and stratify the student results they might want
| to look at how they are testing.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Some subjects should be masterable by any student that
| gets accepted to Harvard. IE everyone should get an A in
| certain courses.
| [deleted]
| pcurve wrote:
| only 8.9% has GPA of 3.5?
|
| At Cornell, getting GPA of 3.2 got you on Dean's List for
| engineering school.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm a college drop out and such so maybe I don't know.
|
| But I've never been in a situation where anyone asked / cared
| about someone else's college grades. IF they graduated or not
| they cared about... but that's it.
|
| Is anyone asked this / had experience where it mattered?
| dhosek wrote:
| Even the if they graduated didn't really matter. My last
| semester of college I could have failed every class except a
| survey of American lit and still graduated.
|
| I failed the survey of American lit1 (didn't finish the final
| paper).
|
| For the next three years, I circumlocuted my way around the
| fact that I didn't actually graduate2 until I finally got
| credit for that last class and got my diploma through an
| independent study with my academic advisor. Nobody actually
| checked to see if I graduated and the presence or absence of a
| BA wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't gone to grad school.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. I was working full time while taking classes full time which
| is not a recipe for academic success. I passed the other
| classes I was taking, at least.
|
| 2. For the record, this was my second of four droppings out of
| college in my checkered academic career.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I didn't go to Harvard. I studied maths at Cambridge in the U.K.
| and grade inflation was definitely a topic there. The university
| felt that their purpose was to produce good _researchers_ and
| grades (in the U.K. you get a 'class' for your degree - 1, 2:1,
| 2:2, or 3 - rather than a GPA /transcript) at the end of
| undergraduate degrees reflected how good a researcher the
| university thought you might make. In maths they would give about
| 30% of people a first (it was important to control this number as
| it roughly corresponded to the cutoff for doing the fourth year
| masters degree which was, of course, called part III), about 30%
| a 2:2 or 3rd (mostly 2:2s), and the rest a 2:1. In humanities
| subjects a far higher proportion would receive a 2:1 with a
| smaller percentage receiving firsts and a select few receiving
| 'starred firsts'.
|
| The issue was basically that the university did not want to do
| grade inflation and students felt that they were ignoring the
| fact the the grades they chose had a large influence on the lives
| of the majority of students who did not go on to become
| researchers. Students felt disadvantaged compared to their peers
| at other universities where they felt they would more easily get
| higher grades (either due to a higher proportion set by the
| university or some sense of superior ability).
|
| I guess one big reason for feeling disadvantaged is not really
| knowing how employers work (or, more importantly, how good
| employers work). Lots of common seeming options claimed to be
| 'institution blind' in hiring new graduates which meant that they
| would look at the degree class and assume that a 1st class degree
| meant the same at any university and that a 2:1 was the minimum
| standard. This also meant totally absurd recruiting pipelines
| (because you can't easily filter out applicants based on their
| CVs you need to add bullshit tests like 'how many times can you
| click your mouse in a minute' to reduce the size of the pool
| before interviewing).
|
| Obviously the trick would be to find the places that knew more
| about the system at Cambridge and not tipex that name off your
| CV, or especially those who would consider it a stronger signal
| than it should have been. But this also has disadvantages; it
| seems not great to end up at a company working with many people
| with a similar background.
|
| The other main point of contention I remember was whether it was
| easier to get more alphas (or good marks) by studying pure maths
| or applied maths.
|
| Perhaps a good thing about the system was that grades were not
| really assessed per-course and homework was not assessed so it
| was mostly designed to be pedagogical rather than doable without
| much imagination.
| ejb999 wrote:
| "We won't rest until every student graduates with an above
| average GPA".
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| This based on a highly biased self-reported sample.
| kashunstva wrote:
| My wife was an undergrad at MIT (course 5.) When she went to
| apply to med school she had a ton of explaining to do because MIT
| in those days - maybe now too I don't know - graded on a curve.
| Not in some verkakte inflate-everyone mode but fitting everyone
| to a desired distribution. Every other university was already
| inflating grades.
| anm89 wrote:
| I mean don't they get 10000 applications already from a
| preselected group of mostly very good and smart students and then
| filter for the top 3 percent? Most of those kids are going to
| show up to class and do the work. I'm not saying that there is no
| grade inflation going on but they have created a system designed
| to select academic freaks(yeah I know, and a bunch of rich kids)
| who value grades above all else.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Tangentially related and for sure I'm not always a Malcolm
| Gladwell fan but this one seemed interesting.
|
| Why You Shouldn't Go to Harvard
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo&t=12s
|
| Acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell has some advice for teenagers
| looking into college.
|
| "If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to
| Harvard," he says. Harvard is filled with the smartest people in
| the world, and perversely that makes it a dispiriting place to go
| to school.
|
| At Harvard, the lower tier students are as smart as the top tier
| students at an average school. However, the lower tier students
| get just as discouraged at Harvard as the lower tier students at
| an average school. The result: They don't get their degrees in
| math or science. The problem is that even a smart kid struggles
| to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the
| kid feels inadequate and drops the degree.
|
| This is crazy, because as Gladwell points out, a science and math
| degree is the "most valuable commodity any graduate can have in
| today's economy." He says that "as as a rule of thumb, your odds
| of successfully getting a math degree fall by two percentage
| points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of
| your peers."
|
| So, if you're a kid and you have a choice between, Harvard and
| the University of Maryland, go with Maryland because its SAT
| scores are 150 points lower on average. That means you have a 30%
| better chance at getting your degree. However, most people will
| still choose Harvard, even knowing this, says Gladwell. Why?
| Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious
| institutions.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| _Anecdotally_ , degrees from the Ivy Leagues are not nearly as
| indicative of intelligence and aptitude as they used to be.
| They still function as great signals for prestige and
| networking ability, but they no longer translate to "this
| person _must_ be a genius, they went to Harvard /Yale".
|
| The source of my anecdote are the discussions I've had with the
| the recruiters at my company. They've also told me that
| Harvard/Yale graduates are way more likely to be prima donnas
| and leave the company after a short time in order to advance
| somewhere else.
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| I'd slightly amend your statement.
|
| The _smartest_ undergrads in the county are still at your
| HYPSM universities.
|
| However, the _median_ intelligence at these schools has
| definitely dropped drastically as these schools are putting
| less of an emphasis on SAT scores and the like.
| twofornone wrote:
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Ivys have always prioritized diversity over merit. The
| diversity they valued used to be wealth and power instead
| of just merit, now they've expanded that to include
| cultural diversity too. But make no mistake, these
| universities were never just looking to accept the smartest
| students.
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for using HN primarily for
| ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop.
|
| Please don't create accounts to do that with.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Ivy's aren't the top schools for stem. MIT/Stanford/CMU are
| where the stem geniuses want to be, and after that the top
| public schools are probably more desirable than ivys because
| they're so much cheaper. I went to UIUC cs over uchicago and
| northwestern because of the price differential. By far the
| largest value ad ivys provide is networking with the soon to
| be rich and powerful. Seems like aspiring stem students
| realize that's not as important in their field.
| universityguys wrote:
| This isn't true, it's a strange assumption often
| perpetuated online. Looking at cross-admit numbers actually
| published by Stanford's Faculty Senate, for example,
| Stanford's biggest overlap is with Harvard, Yale, MIT, and
| Princeton, in that order. It's a matter of pedigree - for
| undergrad, where grad school subject-specific rankings do
| not matter, there are an high concentration of very good
| STEM students at HYP; Harvard likely has the biggest
| concentration of excellent STEM students out of any
| university in America based on Olympiad winner matriculants
| and grad school outcomes, other than MIT. HYPSM lose
| virtually no students to universities other than between
| themselves, looking at the cross-admit numbers.
|
| Schools like CMU, Berkeley, UIUC, etc. have different
| overlaps.
|
| edit: This is just cold, hard data. Undergrads do not
| choose CMU/Berkeley/UIUC and whatnot over Harvard, Yale, or
| Princeton. Despite higher grad school rankings.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Are you counting stanford and MIT as ivy? If so then
| sure, but at least based off my experience, cs students
| that were accepted to ivy as well as stanford/mit/cmu
| always choose stanford/mit/cmu.
|
| I'd love to see your data about whether students choose
| ivy vs. top state. I wasn't aware that existed so was
| just speaking from my experience knowing > 10 people
| choose U of I over ivys, including harvard.
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| > cs students that were accepted to ivy as well as
| stanford/mit/cmu always choose stanford/mit/cmu
|
| I got a full ride to both Princeton and CMU for CS, and
| chose Princeton because I preferred their program. I was
| not the only one to do so.
|
| Blanket statements are dumb ... typically :).
| [deleted]
| rmah wrote:
| "must be a genius"? Did people ever think this? While I went
| to university many decades ago, the whole "he went to
| Harvard, he must be a genius" would have seemed like a bad TV
| sitcom trope, when I was young. And still today.
|
| Are students at top tier schools like that smarter than the
| average bear? Sure. Geniuses? I guess a few are, but most of
| them are just pretty smart + hard working + reasonably
| disciplined. Which is a pretty good combination that will
| help most people in their life.
|
| Sometimes I get the feeling that some people expect that if
| they meet someone who went to an ivy/stanford/mit/chicago and
| that someone doesn't blow them away with their uber-genius
| greatness, that those schools' reputations must be total BS.
| IMO, that's unreasonable.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| This has been obvious since 1865. We only have a United
| States because self-educated Abraham Lincoln picked up the
| pieces left by elite New Englanders like Buchanan and the
| justices who decided Dred Scott.
| gaze wrote:
| I'm a postdoc at MIT, did a PhD at Yale, and my undergrad at
| UCSB. This is absolute nonsense, much like everything Malcom
| Gladwell says.
|
| It's true that after 4 years of feeling like you're special in
| high school, it's a bit of a shock feeling mediocre at a top
| school. That's reality, though. There's a lot of smart people
| in the world, and the sooner you get over it, the better.
| Suggesting you take some path through life to insulate yourself
| from feeling insecure about not being the smartest person in
| the world is truly loser behavior.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I wouldn't say someone should choose the University of MD over
| Harvard, since many potential employers would not know how to
| map a 4.0 MD GPA onto a Harvard scale. If you're between
| Harvard and Penn, and Penn gave you a great scholarship, that's
| a bit easier. Maybe for UC Berkeley even. But if you get too
| far out of the ballpark people will (1) assume you didn't get
| into any top-notch schools, and (2) not know how to compare
| your success at a lower-ranked school to moderate success of
| your peers at top-rated schools.
|
| Full disclosure: I went to the top-rated college I got into,
| and purposely chose not to go to the top-ranked law school that
| I got into. The difference wasn't huge (UCLA vs Michigan), but
| it did mean I wasn't in the top-10. But I saved a bunch in
| tuition, and that allowed me to have the flexibility to leave
| the law several years later and bootstrap a startup. OTOH,
| maybe I would have had an amazing legal career had I gone to
| Michigan!
| anonporridge wrote:
| Pair it with the idea that the primary filtering signal of
| top tier schools is in the admission, not the graduation.
|
| Something like 99% of Harvard end up graduating, so simply
| having a Harvard degree doesn't tell me much more about you
| than simply having an admission letter. If you were admitted,
| then it's almost certain that you'll get a degree.
|
| So, if instead you hold onto your admission letter, as proof
| of ability, and then go to a lower tier school where you can
| be more certain to be one of the biggest fish in the pond,
| you get the best of both worlds. Hell, even include a list of
| "universities admitted to" on you resume to signal the brand
| name to employers that aren't smart enough to realize the
| brand doesn't matter much anymore.
|
| Then again, why would you want to work for an employer that
| still puts stock in college brand names over individual
| ability?
| gnicholas wrote:
| I did consider the possibility that one could say "I got
| into Harvard but went to X because..."
|
| This could have made sense before Harvard's financial aid
| became so generous, but now they give loads of aid to
| middle- and low-income students.
|
| It would sound a bit weird to keep saying "I got into
| Harvard...", likely for the same reason you mention at the
| end. Who wants to be an eliteness snob? Unfortunately there
| are many such people in the world, which is part of the
| reason their cachet persists.
| universityguys wrote:
| I have known multiple Stanford students who still bring
| up the fact that they "also got into Harvard." It seems
| that if you get into Harvard, you should just go. The
| brand name is too powerful.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Unearned cachet only gets eliminated if the people who
| are actually competent begin persistently mocking people
| who put stock in it.
|
| I've taken to laughing when someone proudly states that
| they went to a brand name school.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| No, its because 10-20 years after you graduate, no one asks you
| for your GPA at Harvard but they certainly think you are a
| genius just because you went there (you could graduate with a
| 2.0 GPA). As opposed to average state school guy with a 4.0
| GPA. Many years after you graduate, you regularly get asked
| where you went to school but rarely asked "what was your GPA".
| This isn't even mentioning the type of whiz kids or socially
| powerful people you can befriend at these type of institutions.
| Steve Ballmer is smart but if he didn't meet Bill Gates, i
| doubt he would ever have become a multi billionare.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| Harvard and Yale have 10x horrible negative character
| connotations compared to MIT or UChicago, and it gets worse
| all the time.
|
| McNamara (Vietnam), Kissinger (illegal bombing of Laos),
| Clinton (impeached), Bush (WMD lies), Ted Cruz and other
| senators who literally can't pass 7th grade science. I can
| continue for an hour.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| For even the "elite", character connotations take a back
| seat to "ability and drive", which neither of those people
| mentioned are lacking. To the average person, most of them
| probably don't even know too much about who Henry Kissinger
| was or what he did, the see Harvard and think "ohhh smart"
| lumost wrote:
| Having worked with many top tier graduates from many top
| schools, I think we need to dispense with the idea that
| academic performance is determined by intelligence.
|
| In my experience it was highly correlated with work ethic, many
| top tier graduates would come in with a push to work
| exceptionally hard. Sometimes they'd come in with an attititude
| that they'd "made it" and not work hard enough.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I don't think that is what science agrees with. IQ correlates
| pretty strongly with educational achievement. You can
| disagree with IQ all you but one thing it pretty surely
| doesn't measure is work ethic.
| havblue wrote:
| Is this more about ivy league schools being the most
| prestigious or is it about finance and law fields causing a
| brain drain of the smartest people in the country?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain
| prestigious institutions.
|
| I've heard there are employers that have an irrational
| attachment to certain prestigious institutions.
|
| Also if you've always been the smartest at your school you
| might not realize you won't be the smartest at Harvard until
| you get there.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| I went to a mid tier undergrad and was easily among the
| smartest. I went to mit for grad school and was... still among
| the smartest although the bar was much higher. Luck factors
| into a lot of things. But the top decile of every school is
| probably great. The bottom decile is probably totally
| uninterested in learning.
|
| It's the median that's interesting. My undergrad median was
| deeply disappointing. Couldn't write a simple paper. Literally
| did not understand how to construct an argument.
|
| Grad school median was solid and impressive e
| wesleywt wrote:
| You don't go to Harvard for an education, you go there for the
| network you will build. Grades mean nothing when you are
| friends with a guy who's Dad owns billion dollar companies.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| I thought Harvard was just a terrible school for uppity people?
|
| There are maybe five U.S. senators with Harvard degrees who
| can't pass a 7th grade climate science unit.
|
| You don't see this from MIT, Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern.
|
| I can't really imagine a worse school. Except Yale.
| HuShifang wrote:
| I'd wait a few years on Chicago -- my impression is that
| they've been undergoing some pretty profound cultural shifts
| regarding admissions and grading, i.e. their rigor is getting
| more performative and less real (and it was always at least a
| _little_ performative, or at least, rooted in being just a
| little gratuitously mean).
|
| EDIT: Not coincidentally, it was an admin brought in from
| Yale who got this ball rolling.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| True, all of the top schools have a problem with either
| attracting or nurturing unethical clowns of blockbuster
| proportion.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Can't pass or are unwilling to pass?
| vkou wrote:
| On the one hand, passing it would get them a good grade 7
| test score.
|
| On the other hand, not passing it lets them keep their job.
|
| This seems like an easy decision, especially for someone
| smart enough to finish a degree at Harvard. /S
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| So we are saying that Harvard and Yale are
| overrepresented when it comes to leaders of superlative
| moral depravity, perfidy, and mendacity?
| vkou wrote:
| No, I'm saying that our process[1] for choosing
| representatives selects for people that aren't suitable
| to lead.
|
| [1] Many other processes share this problem, to varying
| degrees.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| I can agree with that take. "The processes" ideally would
| filter the less suitable to more marginal positions of
| influence.
| HuShifang wrote:
| I went to Harvard (for grad school) and taught there as a TF; I
| also have lots of experience of other private and public
| schools. I don't think Harvard's lower tier students are as
| smart as the top tier students at an average school. Let's set
| aside the egregious legacy or athletic admits. Is the second-
| lowest quintile of Harvard students smarter than the top
| quintile of "average school" students? More polished, yeah,
| sure; more cunning (not necessarily in a negative sense, but in
| the sense of understanding how to work the system, how to give
| evaluators what they want), sure. And maybe by the end, there's
| more difference than there was coming in, thanks to competitive
| motivation and other network effects. But admissions are
| something like a lottery, and I would say that the mean
| "smartness" of Harvard students is not much different from that
| of a generic selective private school (let's say, Harvard's
| second-lowest quintile would be the middle quintile at another
| reasonably selective private school), and that the top
| percentiles at a generic public school would perform quite
| comparably to Harvard's top quintile (even if Maryland has a
| lower mean, as Gladwell notes).
|
| Are there very smart people at Harvard, and other prestigious
| liberal arts universities? Absolutely. But there are lots of
| people who are merely above average and lucky, by dint of birth
| or chance, and some people who aren't even above average. (FWIW
| MIT and Caltech have much better claims to being filled with
| the smartest people in the world -- rigorous standards of
| admission, no legacies, NCAA Div3 athletics, etc.)
| javajosh wrote:
| I worked for JPL/NASA on contract for a few months, the place
| is packed with Caltech grads, but most of them performed much
| like any science-y person in a big bureaucracy. This probably
| says more about what you're trained for vs what you do -- I
| mean, how many working programmers need to know what Bessel
| functions are? The answer is 0 because those analytical jobs
| are inevitably farmed out to experts anyway. My own
| interpretation is that there's a certain (middling-high)
| amount of capability you have to demonstrate, and once you've
| done that the extra doesn't matter.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I used to glorify these schools until I worked in finance,
| where basically everyone went to a top 5 usa school. They
| were quick, organized, efficient with their work, on the
| ball, competitive. But intellectually superior? Not really.
| They were definitely smart, but the traits that got them into
| those schools werent raw intellect.
| kube-system wrote:
| Ivy Leagues' admission process rewards students who are
| outgoing and do a lot of different things.
|
| You can't tell from a high school transcript whether
| someone got an A because they're brilliant and didn't have
| to study at all, or whether they got an A because they
| studied hard.
|
| Most of my friends who went into ivy leagues were outgoing
| and did tons of extracurriculars and studied hard. My
| friends who were naturally brilliant either stuck to the
| subjects they liked, and ended up getting their doctorate
| at a state school, or they had had their success derailed
| for some other reason.
| taneq wrote:
| This is really interesting, because it feels like it lines
| up with my own experience but I'd like to see how someone
| else quantifies it. What do you mean by "intellectually
| superior"? What does "raw intellect" even mean? What are
| these nebulous not-intellect-but-contributing-to-GI-score
| traits?
| achenatx wrote:
| hard work can compensate for a lot when you are solving
| problems that have already been solved with known answers
| (e.g. school) . When you are solving totally novel
| problems with no known solutions things get much harder
| and you start to be able to separate high performers.
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| I went to a mid-tier school. The low-tier Harvard students
| are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my
| school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum.
| Your peers influence your intelligence. Being surrounded by
| smart people, i.e. people with novel and interesting ideas,
| makes you smarter. The second reason is that the choice to go
| to Harvard is itself a smart choice. So people who make that
| choice are likely smarter than those who don't make that
| choice. I was in the top-tier of my school. The first time I
| was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I
| entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the
| quality difference. The experience permanently readjusted by
| aptitude scale.
| jrockway wrote:
| I agree with that. I went to a low-ish tier school (UIC)
| and was not particularly motivated to do anything. My
| classmates just wanted to be drunk 24/7, I wanted to go
| build robots and stuff. It wasn't the experience I was
| looking for and dropped out. I wish I had at least chosen
| UIUC. The corn fields aren't that bad, in hindsight.
|
| I did get to take a Unix Security Holes course with DJB.
| That was the first semester I was there, and that was kind
| of another mistake. When you're doing 400 level classes
| your first semester, it sucks when you have to go back to
| the basic 100 level classes to complete an arbitrary
| requirement for your degree. (Had to take "Intro to Java"
| taught by a chemistry professor. He did not know how to
| program. Huge waste of time and the state's money.) I have
| avoided a number of security pitfalls in my own work
| because of what I learned in that class, though, so it was
| definitely worth taking. Set me up for a career of accurate
| and bug-free code ;)
|
| (Incidentally, what precipitated me dropping out was the
| Unix Security Holes course. The homework for the class was
| to find 10 security flaws in existing software. This was
| quite the easy task back in 2004. I found a bug in the
| course registration system. The vendor that made it was
| infinitely appreciative, patched it instantly, and sent me
| an iPod as a thank you. The school was very mad at me and
| tried to have me expelled for violating their computer use
| policy ("hacking"). It was a client-side XSRF issue though,
| so technically their computers weren't used, and I
| obviously investigated the flaw responsibly; the system
| wasn't destabilized, no production data was changed, etc.
| DJB fought hard for me and I didn't get expelled. Also got
| one of the highest grades in that class! The school did
| silently block me from using computers in computer labs and
| using the course registration system, though, after DJB's
| rage had blown over. I didn't have the will to fight it, so
| I just left.)
|
| TL;DR: go to the best school you can get into and afford.
| You won't regret it.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I actually found the opposite...
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| A lot of ivy league kids come from upper middle class
| families where it is kind of expected that you set high
| academic goals and try to attend prestigious institutions,
| their parents generally take an enormous amount of interest
| their success and continually guide them.
| somethoughts wrote:
| If you can get beyond the clickbait title - what Gladwell
| is really trying to say is there are likely many highly
| qualified students who enter top tier university as STEM
| majors but select themselves out of STEM majors and into a
| generic liberal arts degree.
|
| He's essentially saying at a societal level/personal income
| level - a STEM degree from a mid tier school > generic
| liberal arts degree from a top tier school. Particularly if
| the recipient is not truly passionate about the liberal
| arts degree and is using it as a backup plan.
|
| I think what you are experiencing is a bit related to
| survivorship bias. You are being exposed to the people who
| passed the gauntlet of getting into the top-tier school and
| graduating in presumably STEM. Of course those folks are
| smart and there are reasons you'd be blown away by them.
| kevstev wrote:
| What specific differences did you see? I was also at a mid
| tier school, though I did have a scholarship, and was
| intimidated when I got a job working alongside an MIT grad
| and a PHD from Yale. The MIT grad was a very good solid
| guy, and the Yale guy was also solid, I'd be happy to work
| with or hire either again, but there was no 10x difference,
| maybe more like a 1.3x difference at best between the team
| average and the MIT guy.
|
| In general the phds I've worked with were tbh below the
| average- they always seemed to be big on ideas but less so
| on actually implementing them and following through.
|
| This was from my days in the finance industry, working in
| algo trading/hft, but I will admit I was definitely in a
| tier below the groups that were absolutely minting money,
| but these were coveted jobs.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| > The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is
| itself a smart choice.
|
| It may be a smart choice, but not all smart people who try
| to make that choice get in.
|
| > The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier
| universities is when I entered the industry. I was
| absolutely blown away by the quality difference.
|
| I've worked in software engineering with Harvard, Stanford,
| and MIT students. The only difference I saw was during
| their first couple of years out of undergrad where the
| people who went to prestigious schools had more confidence
| to jump in and solve problems. After those first two-ish
| years, people's abilities correlated more with who they
| were and not where they went to school.
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| > It may be a smart choice, but not all smart people who
| try to make that choice get in.
|
| But not all top students in mid-tier attempted to go to
| Harvard. So if you were basing the "smartness" of these
| two populations based on this single decision alone, then
| the low-tier students at Harvard would be smarter because
| 100% of them attempted to go to Harvard, which was a
| smarter choice than the choice made by some of the
| students at mid-tier universities who chose not to apply
| to Harvard.
|
| > After those first two-ish years, people's abilities
| correlated more with who they were and not where they
| went to school.
|
| In my experience, peoples' first few years out of college
| has a huge effect on their career trajectories. People I
| know who had high salaries out of school continue to have
| high salaries. People who didn't get good entry-level
| jobs continue to struggle (relative to the rest of the
| pack, they're not starving).
| universityguys wrote:
| "I've worked in software engineering with Harvard,
| Stanford, and MIT students. The only difference I saw was
| during their first couple of years out of undergrad where
| the people who went to prestigious schools had more
| confidence to jump in and solve problems. After those
| first two-ish years, people's abilities correlated more
| with who they were and not where they went to school."
|
| Have you considered that the students whom you are
| working with were among the bottom quartile at their alma
| mater? The very best tend to take unique paths.
| ABCLAW wrote:
| >The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than
| the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that
| students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your
| intelligence.
|
| You might be conflating class signaling with intelligence.
| I've dealt with plenty of people from Harvard that did not
| impress in the slightest, but oh boy were they good at
| getting their suits tailored.
| elil17 wrote:
| I had a choice between University of Maryland and a much more
| prestigious institution. It should have been a no brained
| because of the tuition alone but I struggled with it at the
| time. Being around people who care about things besides school
| was super healthy for me and I'm so thankful I made the right
| choice. (Go Terps!)
| epolanski wrote:
| You missing two key things you want from Harvard:
|
| - a better CV - a better network
| sideshowb wrote:
| If "we" means "employers", the student attachment to those
| institutions is not irrational.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I agree - I think that the employers in STEM themselves have
| figured it out and combine convenience of proximity/quality
| of STEM as the decision point/size of recruitable pool. In
| fact the secret hack is probably to figure out the university
| recruiting schedules of your target companies and work
| backwards. [0]
|
| I do think society in general and finance/medicine/law (which
| are harder to analyze based on test scores/leetcode and have
| more fuzzy needs for network effects) still uses legacy
| measurement techniques for "worthiness".
|
| The top US 10 universities producing tech staff:
| https://www.techrepublic.com/article/top-10-universities-
| tha...
|
| The report identified the following universities as having
| the most graduates become employees at major tech companies,
| along with the number of employees.
|
| University of Washington (16,786 employees)
|
| University of California-Berkeley (13,260 employees)
|
| Stanford University (12,973 employees)
|
| University of Texas-Austin (11,049 employees)
|
| University of Southern California (9,071 employees)
|
| Arizona State University-Tempe (8,320 employees)
|
| Carnegie Mellon University (8,274 employees)
|
| Georgia Institute of Technology (7,961 employees)
|
| University of California-Los Angeles (7,829 employees)
|
| University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign (7,671 employees)
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The list is funny. Every listed tech firm's employees come
| mostly from the region they were founded. There's a lotta
| bias in that list.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Even with that definition it may still be irrational as a
| student, or at least short-sighted. The further you get in
| your career, the less it matters which school you went to.
|
| Employers may be interested in your schooling if you're fresh
| out of school, but after that, they're much more interested
| in your work experience.
|
| I went to community college and then transferred to an fairly
| inexpensive 4-year college. In my first job I got a huge
| amount of work experience and leveled-up to the senior
| software developer title.
|
| Maybe an employer after that first job would look at me
| suspiciously for my choice of schools, but they really
| shouldn't.
| robertakarobin wrote:
| This is really interesting! I started my Stanford undergrad as
| an engineer. After my first Calculus class, I switched to
| American Studies because it was one of the least engineering-y
| majors available. Then I dropped out in my Junior year. That
| was over 10 years ago. Now, ironically, I work at Google as a
| software engineer -- the only one on my team without an
| engineering degree, let alone without a degree at all.
|
| I never thought of my disillusionment with engineering in the
| context of other students, but rather just as an absolute:
| "Engineering is too hard for me." Taking Calculus at not-
| Stanford may have led to a very different result.
| universityguys wrote:
| I feel like Stanford is a little different. Despite being as
| selective as Harvardm Harvard has a very unique international
| reputation as the world's best university (or at least
| america's best university for the oxbridge lovers)
| robertakarobin wrote:
| Oooh, I know a lot of Stanford (and Berkeley) students who
| would be extremely upset to hear you say that. :)
| hintymad wrote:
| > Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very
| different result.
|
| I doubt it. As my professor used to say, math is math. Plus,
| intro-level undergrad math courses are pretty standardized
| across the US. Similar textbooks, similar problem sets, and
| similar past exams.
|
| There's nothing wrong to feel calculus is hard even if you're
| the top of your high school class. Most people hit a wall at
| certain abstraction level. Malcolm wrote in his book about
| smart people simply not being able to grok organic chemistry.
| Some of my smart classmates could not really understand the
| concept of limit _intuitively_. Some of them dropped out of
| abstract algebra course. I myself dropped out of model theory
| as I couldn 't get why I should even bother with the course.
| None of these failures prevent people from finding success in
| other areas.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Malcolm wrote in his book about smart people simply not
| being able to grok organic chemistry.
|
| I adjusted majors in no small part because of intro organic
| chemistry. Just didn't connect.
| a-dub wrote:
| > Some of my smart classmates could not really understand
| the concept of limit intuitively.
|
| that's because the way it's presented is silly. limits
| aren't the key idea, the continuity of the reals is.
| codethief wrote:
| I disagree, I would say limits _are_ the key idea.
|
| 1. How do you even express the idea of continuity if not
| through limits? (Sure, there's the topological definition
| and the epsilon-delta criterion but those are merely an
| abstraction or a different way of phrasing the same
| idea.)
|
| 2. The key difference between the rationals and the reals
| is that the latter are Cauchy-complete. How do you even
| define (in an intuitive way) what that means without
| referring to limits?
|
| 3. The reals are typically constructed as (equivalence
| classes of) Cauchy sequences, i.e. by their very
| definition they are the limits of their Cauchy sequences.
| a-dub wrote:
| i think, for the purpose of introducing the continuity of
| the reals, for the purpose of introducing limits, one
| could skip any discussion that involves constructing the
| rationals or building the reals from them, at least to
| start.
|
| instead go directly from integers to reals by introducing
| countable vs. uncountable infinities.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| but limits are a key idea, their invention allowed a
| whole class of mathematical problems to be solved
| a-dub wrote:
| sure. and despite all the trouble people have, their
| definition is quite simple. the crux of the problem is
| understanding continuity. if you truly understand the
| continuity of the reals (which is the "real" invention),
| limits can be derived almost effortlessly.
|
| in most calculus teaching, continuity is quickly stated
| and then there's a bunch of rules and these seemingly
| contradictory discussions involving delta and epsilon.
| they're not contradictory if continuity is understood and
| internalized.
| hintymad wrote:
| I used limit as an example. It could be other concepts,
| simple or sophisticated.
|
| I don't think it's about how professors teach, but about
| that people simply can't get some abstractions. Have you
| seen kids in high school who can't do algebra even if you
| find the best teachers for them?
| [deleted]
| cozzyd wrote:
| anecdote: I took Multivariate calculus and differential
| equations while in high school at the University of Nevada. I
| was easily the top student in my classes. I had to retake
| them at Stanford (figuring out how to transfer the credit was
| too complicated). Despite having "taken" the "same" material
| before and the fact that the average grade in the class was
| probably a B or B+, I was below the median in the class on
| the exams and got worse grades in the classes at Stanford. Of
| course this is anecdotal, and the University of Nevada is not
| that great of a school, but no doubt my GPA would have been
| much higher at a school like that...
| somethoughts wrote:
| I think that's sort of what he's talking about. Had you not
| had the experience of calculus and diff eq at a university
| and your only exposure to it was at Stanford with middling
| grades - perhaps it'd probably lead to more existential
| questions of whether you really wanted to do STEM in the
| first place.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Right, I quickly made peace with being a mediocre student
| at Stanford (and, still ended up getting into MIT for a
| physics PhD, where I was also a mediocre student but by
| then I didn't care :) ). I think the people who probably
| suffer the most at are probably premeds, where it really
| might be easier to get into med school by going to an
| "easier" school.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| If there are dull students at Stanford, i am 100% sure
| they are not taking advanced math classes or higher
| physics classes.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the grand scheme of things, I was probably pretty good
| at math as I got through a rigorous Mech E program. But I
| struggled with the more math intensive classes
| (Fluids/Navier-Stokes) and I'm pretty sure I could have
| dealt with an undergrad in physics/math--much less a grad
| program--about as well as I could have flown by flapping
| my arms in the air. But things ended up fine.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Having watched the Gladwell talk a couple of times now - I
| think your experience is really the most indicative of what
| he was trying to say. Many self weed themselves out of
| Engineering and into generic liberal arts studies - even
| though they were top of their high school class in STEM and
| specifically chose the highly selective school for STEM.
|
| And perhaps not all have the mental fortitude to stick with
| it in the background like you did - which is a net loss for
| society.
| a9h74j wrote:
| > Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very
| different result.
|
| Thomas Sowell, in _Inside American Education_ , argues that
| promoting students to more difficult colleges while ignoring
| SATs is not doing those students any favor. A firehose-
| pedagogy accepted by those with SAT scores 200-300 points
| higher can completely demoralize someone who could have done
| perfectly well at a moderately-paced school. However, the
| competition to practice AA leads, he argues, those more
| advanced schools to ignore SAT scores in admission for the
| schools' benefits, but not the benefit of the students so
| admitted.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very
| different result.
|
| I don't know. Calculus (and a lot of CS nowadays) is pretty
| standardized across schools. Same textbooks, similar problem
| sets and curricula.
|
| People dropping out of engineering isn't anything new [0].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJbE-CukPsU
| corner_case2 wrote:
| > People dropping out of engineering isn't anything new
| [0].
|
| What is new is: students were told all their life that
| "they'll make it" in life.
|
| Spoiler alert: not everyone does. Most will never make 7
| figure compensation as a SWE, for example.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| I think if the average person thinks the goal for making
| it in life as a 7 figure comp, 99% of people will never
| be happy.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I've heard this as a reason why HBCU's are so great. Basically
| a lot of African American's come from schools that don't
| prepare them as well for science and math as their peers who
| went to more expensive elite schools. They have to work twice
| as hard because they're playing catch up and thus many transfer
| out of math/science/pre-chem and into less rigorous subjects.
|
| This is one theory as to why HBCU's do such a better job at
| preparing the next generation of black scientists, engineers,
| doctors, and lawyers then other comparable schools.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I know someone who graduated summa cum laude at Harvard. I'm
| not usually one for ranking people by intellect, but she's not
| one of the smartest people I know by a long shot.
|
| Meticulous? Sure. Does she present herself as if she's a
| Harvard grad with the economic status that usually entails?
| Absolutely. But I know several people who graduated from a
| small directional university who are absolutely smarter than
| she is. Same with grads I know from Cornell, Penn, and Yale.
| Maybe the mystical "school where everyone is actually super-
| intelligent" exists somewhere, but if so, I don't know the name
| of it.
|
| Unless your professors are so lazy that they're grading on a
| bell curve, there's no need to be afraid of any class. Test
| scores and project grades are based on rote knowledge and level
| of effort, not innate talent... and Harvard educators are
| usually vastly superior to those of "lesser" schools.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Apply a rule of thumb to outliers generally isn't appropriate.
| While it might be true that generally success rises 2% for
| every 10 SAT points, that doesn't necessarily mean it applies
| to Harvard and U Maryland. Especially due to grade inflation.
| 15 years ago, flagship state schools still harshly curved
| science/engineering classes to weed people out. While Harvard
| give you a gentleman's B+.
| brewdad wrote:
| My kid is attending a flagship state school now. His school
| still very much uses a harsh curve to weed out. A B- keeps
| you on the track to success in your major.
|
| If he decides to go to grad school, he'll be screwed even
| though he's been on the plus side of the curve in all of his
| classes so far.
| uoflcards22 wrote:
| I went to an Ivy League (recently, graduated in last 5 years).
| This describes me to a T. Started out in CS, dropped to a
| libarts major because I felt like I couldn't keep up with my
| peers.
|
| I still work in SWE, and began doing it in HS when I was 17.
|
| Partner and I discuss frequently that I would have been better
| off somewhere else.
| yunohn wrote:
| But GPAs have almost no value, and people don't go to such
| schools for grades. It's all about networking and prestige, and
| wanting to be around accomplished or ambitious people.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with these views, just
| summarising what I've seen.
| acomjean wrote:
| My Mom went to an Prestigious University, when my Mom went
| back to work after the kids got old enough to take care of
| themselves (to some extent..), that degree opened doors. She
| was explicitly told, hey great university when she went for
| an interview. We had a friend in our peer group didn't go to
| state school like us but another "Prestigious University", he
| was a history major (we were engineers), but he never had
| trouble finding work.
|
| I mean Balmer and Allen met gates at Harvard...
|
| Its not the only thing, I suspect it not nothing.
| helen___keller wrote:
| > The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up
| when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels
| inadequate and drops the degree.
|
| In the context of grade inflation, this sounds like Harvard is
| actually one of the better choices and that grade inflation is
| a desirable property of an elite university
| csa wrote:
| It depends, but probably not as much as you would think.
|
| With a grade curve that high, a B usually means one of the
| following:
|
| 1. Tough weeder course.
|
| 2. The person does not really understand the material,
| especially for upper division courses.
|
| 3. Something personal (illness, family issues, personal
| issues, etc.).
|
| For folks who care about grades, like hiring officials or
| graduate admissions folks, they typically know about the
| grade inflation.
|
| It might be a benefit in law school admissions that mostly
| use a strict formula with gpa as part of that formula.
|
| Anyway, if someone is choosing Harvard over another school
| due to GPA inflation, then I have a feeling that they won't
| gain that much at Harvard or the other school(s) that
| admitted them. That seems to be optimizing for something
| fairly minor in the scheme of things.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Because we have an irrational attachment to certain
| prestigious institutions.
|
| Do good employers recruit from Maryland? Will you find FAANG
| and all the investment banks there? How tight is the Maryland
| alumni network?
|
| I didn't go to a school anywhere near as prestigious as
| Harvard, but I did go to one with a strong reputation and it
| means that there is a strong community and good employers
| recruit from there.
|
| The degree is a small part of university.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| On the flipside, nowadays the school matters more than the
| degree. Saying you "went to Harvard" is far more prestigious
| than having a bachelors degree from some forgettable school.
| And most employers don't care about whether or not you have a
| specific degree from any school, they care about whether you
| have any degree from a prestigious school.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Whether to go to an Ivy or not depends on what you're looking
| for.
|
| I went to Iowa State for undergrad and then did a masters at
| Princeton immediately afterwards. I greatly appreciate both
| schools.
|
| At Iowa State, most of my classes were easy. But I pushed
| myself with the sheer quantity of classes I took. I was super
| involved in extracurriculars and still went out multiple nights
| per week. I was one class short of a double major and I spent a
| semester abroad. My only regret is not spending 2 semesters
| abroad. It was an incredible time.
|
| Princeton also did not disappoint. The Graduate School is for
| sure the most intellectually rich environment I've ever been
| in. Academically, it was far more demanding, and pushed me to a
| much deeper level of engagement with my studies. I also know
| that Princeton would have been a way too intense environment
| for me at 18. At 22, it was what I was looking for.
|
| I also went to NYU for another masters program, which was in
| many ways even more different from the first two universities.
| Some people just go there to be at university in NYC, but it's
| a sprawling school with tons to offer and feels physically and
| socially much more integrated with the real world than campus-
| centric universities.
|
| I don't think there's a one size fits all answer for whether to
| go to Harvard or any other school.
| somethoughts wrote:
| This seems to be a pretty pragmatic approach - it avoids
| spending a lot of high tuition dollars and effort on the
| freshman/sophomore generic weeder courses and focuses the
| high return on effort/investment upper level courses that are
| specific to your area of study.
| williamstein wrote:
| View from the faculty POV: I taught mathematics as an Assistant
| Professor at Harvard for five years (2000-2005), and this
| advice seems wrong. It's very generic and abstract, whereas the
| actual mathematics department (students, faculty, preceptors)
| at Harvard at any point in time is made up of real people, most
| of whom are really interesting fun and genuine math loving
| human beings. I guided dozens of students in seminars,
| interesting math research projects, and much more, and many of
| them really benefited from the environment and went on to truly
| love mathematics as a long term career.
| universityguys wrote:
| I agree, even as OP. Malcom Gladwell's writings on elite
| universities have gone viral, and even though some good
| points are sometimes made, many are just stretching the truth
| for clicks.
|
| As for the general grade inflation problem: It is confusing
| that Harvard's grade distribution is so different than
| schools with similarly strong student bodies like Princeton,
| Columbia, UChicago, Berkeley, etc. Especially very, very
| large portion of students are legacy / recruited athletes /
| very wealthy donor parents. According to the affirmative
| action lawsuit, over 10% of the student body alone was on the
| "Dean's interest list," a very elite group of autoadmits, for
| example.
| somethoughts wrote:
| If you can get beyond the clickbait title - I think what
| you'll find is that Gladwell is really talking about the very
| real STEM people, most of who are really interesting fun and
| genuine math loving human beings - who were weeded out in
| Freshman Calc BC or Differential Equations because the bar is
| so tremendously high if everything is graded on a curve at a
| extremely selective university - before you had a chance to
| meet them.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I could make more money right NOW with a BS in _gender studies_
| from Harvard, than I ever could all things being equal with my
| CS BS from a no name public university.
|
| Anyone who takes this advice is indeed self selecting and I
| suppose that's good, because anyone who can't see that
| obviously shouldn't go to harvard in the first place!
| the_only_law wrote:
| But at Harvard that kid can get in good with future elite,
| which is probably more valuable than any silly degree.
| throwaway004455 wrote:
| As a recent college graduate (I graduated last year), I can tell
| that you part of this is definitely due the easiness of cheating
| on exams after school started remote classes cuz of Covid. Every
| class i took in my senior year, there was at least one discord
| group that would share answers during exams. Answers to
| assignments were also frequently shared. I was part of it and I
| don't feel no regrets because college sucks and 90% of my
| engineering knowledge is from me doing my personal hobby projects
| or working in industry.
| hintymad wrote:
| This is not just Harvard, right? Elite schools, especially the so
| called ivy schools, have been inflating GPAs for years. In the
| meantime, they have been putting more weight on "holistic"
| admission over academic performance. So the US has been so
| advanced that academic performance is of secondary importance?
| Leadership is what matters most? Do I understand it correctly?
| universityguys wrote:
| Most of the students admitted have top percentile grades/test
| scores as well. But the competition at the very top is based in
| leadership rather than minuscule differences in testing, yes.
| lordleft wrote:
| Is Grade Inflation really a problem at a top school? Why is it
| surprising that driven students at an elite institution are
| probably going to do well most of the time? I'd take this over
| moronic experiments like grade deflation at Princeton -- imagine
| being _mandated_ to give only a small proportion of your students
| an A in, say, a Calc I class.
|
| I'm slightly annoyed at this discourse because I went to
| Columbia, an institution that seemed hellbent at enforcing some
| vague sense of rigor at the expense of the sanity of most of its
| students. I certainly want to be challenged, and don't want top
| Universities to be glorified country clubs masquerading as
| academic environments, but I also think that what a defines
| substantive and rigorous eduction is at the highest level is
| actually quite hard to pin down.
| universityguys wrote:
| Why does Harvard have orders of magnitudes higher GPA than any
| school with comparable student bodies other than Yale?
| spideymans wrote:
| > Why is it surprising that driven students at an elite
| institution are probably going to do well most of the time?
|
| This only makes sense if you assume that Harvard students are
| unusually academically driven.
|
| Given that Harvard has historical been very eager to accept
| students that have personal relationships with Harvard alumni,
| I wouldn't make the assumption that these students are more
| academically driven than average. A lot of these students will
| see success because of their connections, rather than their
| academic aptitude
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Because there should still be a natural distribution. Even if
| you are evaluating the cream of the crop.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > Because there should still be a natural distribution. Even
| if you are evaluating the cream of the crop.
|
| Why should there be? Let's say all students in the class are
| A students, and would get an A in any other class, then some
| now get a B or C just because their classmates happen to be
| _even better_?
|
| It seems to me that doesn't really reflect student ability
| very accurately.
| [deleted]
| neaden wrote:
| This all depends on if you think a grade at school A should
| be directly comparable to school B.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It's not Dilbert, but one of those 90's geeky newspaper comic
| strips had a gag about this, where the guided tour of Harvard
| takes them to the class room where the last B was given.
| dhosek wrote:
| Weird coincidence: The first time I saw a Dilbert comic strip
| was when I was teaching a LaTeX class at Harvard in 1989.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| The game theory around grades is interesting. I went to a well
| regarded US CS school for a masters, and we were told essentially
| that "Being good enough to get in here means you're smart and
| capable, and being middle of the pack here is still doing very
| well. In order to communicate that to companies doing hiring, the
| minimum allowed average is a B".
|
| I don't know for sure, but I expect most of my decent, but not
| truly exceptional cohort had GPAs much above a B. There were a
| couple courses that bucked the trend. Which ones theses were was
| well known, and many folks, looking to work at FAANG, dodged them
| because of it. I already had employment figured out, and
| optimized for things besides GPA. I was a bit too ambitious,
| receiving a number of Bs, but also learned a ton. Maybe that will
| bit me if someone cares to look back 5+ years at my grades, but
| that's a separate problem.
|
| If you're a professor assigning grades, with little ability to
| communicate the intricacies of your grades to those looking at
| them, what do you do? Accurately assigning grades hurts your
| students, and getting everyone to change is a collective action
| problem.
| runnerup wrote:
| After even 2 years post-graduation those grades will only be
| inspected for McKinsey/Bain/BCG consulting positions and maybe
| some corporate executive-track / future C-suite-potential type
| roles.
|
| Almost no one will ever use them for hiring decisions.
|
| But also curious how much of the grade inflation is driven by
| increasing selection bias. With the bar to get into top schools
| is raised higher and higher, maybe most of the students really
| are earning their inflated grades?
| chernevik wrote:
| It's very easy for the school to fix this. - The average grade
| is a B, class grades will not be accepted until compliant. -
| Publish this policy so employers know this. For a school like
| Harvard they'll trouble themselves to find out. Employers will
| quickly learn that a B, or even a C, still indicates a pretty
| capable person.
| 30944836 wrote:
| I don't see where this statistic controls for people who didn't
| graduate or for people who didn't take classes for which they
| would not be successful.
|
| This average GPA could represent grade inflation. Or it could
| represent increased information symmetry between the difficulty
| of classes and the students themselves, paired with the students'
| interests, determination, and aptitude.
|
| TL;DR: Grade inflation or survivorship bias?
| drewcoo wrote:
| Related?
|
| https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure
|
| My anecdotal experience is that "top" students seemed to be the
| ones obsessed with GPA, often instead of with learning broadly
| and deeply.
|
| I would not be surprised if "top" schools were like that, too. I
| did a state school, so I wouldn't know first hand.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The term "grade inflation" includes an underlying presumption
| that GPAs are _fungible_ and as a gentle reminder: they are not.
|
| You can't directly compare the GPAs between schools or between
| course loads. Like so many other metrics in our lives, just
| because you can get a numerical output doesn't mean the metric is
| universally applicable or "objectively quantifiable" or
| "objectively comparable".
| lordnacho wrote:
| There's no way to know what a grade average means anyway, eg if
| you're employing someone. You don't know if they took easy
| courses or hard courses, you don't know if they were ill or if
| they cheated.
|
| All you can actually do is bring them in for interview and see if
| they can do a reasonable chat about why they want to work for
| you.
|
| Someone who has gotten into Harvard has already bagged a rather
| big prize, but the signalling can't be much more informative than
| that.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| While the college admissions process is by no means a perfect
| system, if you're accepted to Harvard, you're probably a pretty
| darn good student.
|
| If Harvard graded on a curve, such that half of their students--
| who presumably got straight A's in high school--received a C or
| below, would that be more fair? Would it be a better
| representation of student performance?
|
| I suppose the answer depends on the purpose of giving grades. If
| the goal is to see who outperformed who, Harvard's average GPA is
| a major problem. If the goal is to see who learned the material,
| then Harvard is providing an excellent education.
| bradstewart wrote:
| This is always a fun question, and a lot of it depends on the
| material/subject matter, but why not both?
|
| For things like math, science, and engineering--where the
| possible depth of knowledge and understanding _far_ exceeds
| what could be learned in a semester course--I personally think
| exam grades should center around 50. If you 've got 100 points
| to play with, why not use them?
|
| A lot of my classes did, and I always found the challenge
| exciting: what stuff did I _not_ learn about this subject? This
| also gives you the ability to differentiate student
| performance, should that be of importance.
|
| At the end of the semester, things were usually (non-linearly)
| curved up to average around B. The instructors (well, most of
| them) knew what "absolute score" represented enough
| understanding to move on, and anything below that would not get
| curved into a passing grade.
| markusde wrote:
| This is totally right. There are two kinds of classes: those
| with a specific set of learning outcomes to meet (eg. a
| prerequisite course) and those where by the end the in-scope
| knowledge is essentially unlimited (eg. courses where it's
| not unreasonable to prove named theorems on homework or
| exams). The former should be graded with 100% being all the
| knowledge, the latter in a way that gives a fair distribution
| and then scales.
|
| Of course, my fellow university students always push back on
| me when I support the latter :) At the risk of armchair
| psychoanalyzing, I think a lot of them don't want to reckon
| with the fact that there's such an overwhelming amount of
| information out there and so many perspectives to explore it
| from that "100%" in say introductory topology is almost
| completely meaningless as a measure of how much topology one
| actually knows.
| andmikey wrote:
| UK unis are a lot better at using the full grading scale, in
| my experience. 70% gets you a 'first class' [0], but there's
| a lot of room in the 70-100 range to differentiate
| performance. It was a nice system because there's almost
| always space for able students to really push the boundary.
| The idea is that getting >80% is for students doing really
| exceptional / original work.
|
| [0] A "1st" (A) is between 70-100%, "2:1" (B) is 60-69%,
| "2:2" (C) is 50-59%, and "3rd" (D, lowest passing grade) is
| 40-49%. UK degrees are awarded one final grade at the end,
| rather than a GPA, usually based on your last two years of
| study only.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| madengr wrote:
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| At Berkeley, I always heard that other schools (including Ivy
| Leagues) had grade inflation, nice to have data to back that up.
| janejeon wrote:
| Funny thing: in many of the Ivy's, it's well known that the "A"s
| in Harvard are not the same as the "A"s in the other Ivy's, so we
| joke that if you want to get an A, you should go to Harvard.
| jwilber wrote:
| It's well-known everywhere.
|
| http://www.whatwouldmyharvardgrade.be/ isn't live anymore, but
| it was for years. (It just showed a giant "A").
| dqpb wrote:
| Nobody has ever asked me what my GPA was.
| havblue wrote:
| I will note that Harvard extension school weeds out prospective
| students based on whether they get a 3.0, and they will kick you
| out if you fail to maintain that gpa. So at least part of the
| university's grades have a hard floor that prevents people with
| poor grades from getting accepted or graduating.
| [deleted]
| antoinebalaine wrote:
| I reckon grades inflation is going to keep following tuition
| inflation. Can't blame Harvard for this one, most schools have to
| balance the financial impact that academic exigence has on
| families. Going to study in Boston requires enormous effort -
| time-wise and financially.
|
| Given the amount of sacrifice required to get there in the first
| place (in my case, I got half-tuition scholarship to a Boston
| school after a three-year prep, my parents sold their appartment
| to help me pay, I took a loan on top of that and still ran out of
| money mid-undergrad), tough-grading and failing assignments can
| definitely put a lower-income student at risk of failing to
| graduate. If professors start playing tough-graders and put a
| student a risk, the school will appear as extorting money tuition
| while failing to keep its promise of providing an education and a
| future to the kid. I definitely had some heated discussions with
| older generation liberal arts professors who couldn't understand
| why it wasn't OK to "F" me for some stupid petty deadline. They
| couldn't fathom that from a student's perspective, the money at
| stake increases over the duration of the degree, in turn growing
| the potential cost of academic failure (or under-performance).
| Harvard is also subject to the problem, it just seems to deal
| with it in its usual magazine-cover-first-in-class-student way.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Non American here.
|
| Are GPAs meant to be comparable between institutions?
| pas wrote:
| they're not even comparable between years
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| You get what you pay for!
| bitL wrote:
| Is Stanford different? I've heard that in this year's NLP class
| (CS224N), 93% was only good for B+ which doesn't sound like grade
| inflation at all.
| universityguys wrote:
| Stanford has grade inflation, but not at the level at Harvard.
| Faculty senate said median GPA is 3.69 (so less than 50% have
| at least a 3.7, despite being just as selective as Harvard).
| And this is after taking into account that Stanford A+ is 4.3.
| bo1024 wrote:
| As a professor, I'll put out there how I'm currently thinking
| about grade inflation in my case.
|
| Classes of let's say "Type 1" have lots of students and very
| specific learning objectives. I need to make sure everyone who
| passes the class is proficient in those objectives. So I focus on
| teaching the baseline expectations. I give assessments where, if
| you understand the material, you get it right. Therefore, most
| students who have the prereqs and try hard get A's. The median
| grade is pretty high along with a tail of people who mostly
| aren't trying that hard. But you don't need special aptitude to
| get an A. Unfortunately that can make the class pretty easy for
| top students, and I'm working on ways to challenge them. But I
| don't need to knock the whole class down to a B just to challenge
| top students.
|
| The other "type 2" classes are upper level where people are there
| to learn hard material and are self motivated. Here students may
| face tougher challenges and experience more failure even when
| they put in lots of time and effort. But I usually give As pretty
| easily. The fact that they're trying hard in a difficult upper
| level class already shows they're ahead of 95% of their
| classmates, why would I punish their GPA for that? And most of
| these students don't need the threat of a bad grade to motivate
| them, they put in the effort because they're interested. Of
| course some students will get bad grades in the class but the
| median is again usually pretty high.
|
| So I find myself a contributor to grade inflation. Employers,
| look less at GPA and more at what courses a person challenged
| themselves with!
| jseliger wrote:
| I have taught at non-elite schools and have observed that,
| particularly in classes without objective tests, there is a
| strong incentive for the professors to grade up:
| https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess...
|
| Unhappiness about grades can also be transmuted into complaints
| and eventually investigations about other matters--a thing I've
| seen happen. There is something to the "They pretend to learn,
| and we pretend to teach" line, in many situations.
|
| (That I am observing this situation doesn't mean I approve of
| it.)
| codethief wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us!
|
| > Unfortunately that can make the class pretty easy for top
| students, and I'm working on ways to challenge them. But I
| don't need to knock the whole class down to a B just to
| challenge top students.
|
| Why not? What's wrong with a B? You said it yourself, most
| people in your class are average, although there are a few top
| people. Why would you assign them the same grade when the whole
| point of grading is to assess how well a student is doing? (Why
| grade anything at all then?) And why rob the average students
| of the honest but very useful feedback that "You're doing fine
| but there are still ways for you to improve"?
|
| For instance, back when I was TA'ing a lab course for some
| introductory physics class, I remember a student coming over to
| ask me why I hadn't given her full points on her lab report.
| She said now she might no longer be getting an A for the
| overall class. ...which, from my POV, would have been entirely
| justified: She had had no clue what she was doing and had not
| understood the experiments at all (no surprise given that she
| hardly paid attention in class), and her lab reports very
| clearly reflected that. How could I ever give her full points?
| How would I have justified that in front of those of her peers
| who were doing better than her because they were working much
| harder (or were at least paying attention in class)?
|
| Obviously, that student had come to live under the impression
| that A's were the norm and that her performance, no matter how
| bad, demanded an A.
|
| But even if one disregards the argument that grades (should)
| provide a measuring stick and feedback mechanism for average
| students as to where they stand, one should still ask the
| question, Why rob the top students of their reward (an
| outstanding grade) when they truly excel? Very good performance
| typically comes with very high costs for the students (lots of
| time is spent on studying), and rewards or at least recognition
| of what they've achieved are therefore absolutely necessary,
| I'd say.
|
| So have you considered that, by makng A's your default grade,
| you might be demotivating some of your top students?
|
| > And most of these students don't need the threat of a bad
| grade to motivate them
|
| Again, since when has a B been a bad grade? It's obviously a
| rhetorical question: B's have gained the connotation of being
| bad grades ever since everyone and their dog have been getting
| A's without having to put in much effort. Grade inflation leads
| to further grade inflation.
|
| I'm afraid, though, your reasoning just confirms (and
| reinforces) this usual catch 22 but it doesn't really justify
| it.
| teagee wrote:
| > Ten percent of respondents who reported having a 4.0 said they
| had cheated in an academic context while at Harvard.
|
| Imagine how many cheated and didn't admit it! A very sad state of
| affairs...
| oxff wrote:
| Cheating is probably the best thing to do. It's a zero sum
| world.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Sure, if you're satisfied with rampant corruption and
| dysfunctional institutions. Let's embrace dishonesty and
| underachievement.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Cheating may be a _rational_ thing to do, on an individual
| level, if we ignore ethics. Outside of that it breaks down. I
| wouldn 't say "best" without a lot of qualifiers.
| blagie wrote:
| My experience is that in recent years, cheating is ubiquitous
| in many elite schools. This goes all the way to the top. Fake
| research data. Self-enriching financial schemes by faculty.
| Conflicts-of-interest. Etc.
| bombcar wrote:
| Though this implies that 10% of the 4.0s don't deserve it, it's
| not proof; a single cheat may or may not have affected the
| grade.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| When that single cheat might have resulted in expulsion if it
| were caught, it implies a pretty significant effect on the
| grade.
|
| It wouldn't actually change the result of the metric (because
| survivorship bias: you don't count students who never
| graduated in the graduated student population), but it
| changes the believability of and the ethic behind the metric.
| Now we can say that at least 10% of the folks who graduated
| didn't earn their grades, and the school's reputation is less
| for it.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| If so many teachers feel that there is grade inflation, why don't
| they mark their students harder or give tougher exams?
| JPKab wrote:
| The modern Ivy League campus is a popularity contest amongst
| professors. Universities are filled with a growing cadre of
| administrators, and the administrators focus on appeasing
| student complaints, always taking the side of students against
| faculty.
|
| Professors are afraid of upsetting students, or being called
| bigots if a person in some protected identity group gets a bad
| grade and complains about bias. This is an inevitable
| consequence of campus culture having a strong belief in guilt-
| by-accusation.
| universityguys wrote:
| This is the argument Professor Mansfield at Harvard uses (the
| bigot part). Inspiration from him or just coincidence?
| ouid wrote:
| This is absolutely not why. There is no incentive for
| universities to tell employers what they think of the
| students attending them, and the intercollegiate talent
| transfer is 99% recommendations and research experience.
| Students don't want it, professors don't care, and the
| general public doesn't pay them to. Universities make their
| money from students and research, not from employers hoping
| for them to report statistics on the people attending. It is
| only their accreditation process which cares, and it doesn't
| care very much.
|
| I think you just want your story to be true, honestly.
| canaus wrote:
| Someone, somewhere, just called out bingo.
|
| Do you have any data to back up the various claims in this
| comment?
|
| A misstep -- amongst many in this comment -- is that you're
| implying that 82% of the graduating class is of a protected
| identity group. Is that true?
| dhosek wrote:
| Student evaluations are part of how faculty retention/promotion
| are determined. Evaluations correlate most strongly to the
| student's final grade.
| bombcar wrote:
| The teachers are often rated on how well their students do, so
| they're incentivized to make sure they do "well" and since they
| control how "well" is measured you have a conflict of interest.
|
| Combined with actually trying to _fail_ someone often getting
| overturned (even my college 20 years ago famously had a "hard
| grader" who would often get her fails overturned), you get
| grade inflation.
| smotched wrote:
| I don't its not so much, these students are the elite of elite
| from around the world (academically). How hard can you make
| something before it starts to become contradictory to actual
| learning.
| blagie wrote:
| There are two types of students at Harvard:
|
| - The elite of the elite, intellectually
|
| - The elite of the elite, socially
|
| A bit over 40% of white kids admitted to Harvard are ALDC
| admits: legacy, donors, etc. Folks like George W Bush (Yale)
| look smart by association with the intellectual elite, while
| smart kids gain access to networks to money and power.
|
| It's a good scheme for everyone involved.
|
| (Note: I do have a lot of insider knowledge about Harvard,
| specifically, but I'm only citing public information)
| finolex1 wrote:
| The 40% number can be a bit misleading because most are not
| George Bush types. In the 21st century, they mostly tend to
| be smart and ambitious students who are children of Ivy
| league educated professionals. These kids have been raised
| in an environment that prioritizes achievement and
| professional success.
|
| Source: Anecdotal experience from the legacies I met during
| college. I don't have hard numbers to back me up, but you
| can look at the 25th percentile SAT scores and they aren't
| too low.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > ambitious students who are children of Ivy league
| educated professionals
|
| This describes Bush to a t. I left out the smart part,
| but I'm not convinced that W is some sort of idiot.
| corner_case2 wrote:
| > If so many teachers feel that there is grade inflation, why
| don't they mark their students harder or give tougher exams?
|
| Money.
|
| If you fail a student, they will take their tuition money to a
| school that does not fail them.
|
| Universities are as corrupt as any church, bank, or local HOA.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| And put the future of growing Harvard's endowment at risk?!
| Besides, do you really want a US Senator or a Fortune 500 CEO
| calling you up to scream at you and make your life hell, or do
| you just want to get back to your research?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If they act as an individual, they're not solving the problem
| in any meaningful way, they're just screwing over their own
| students.
| zzless wrote:
| The problem is such behavior is very heavily disincentivized. I
| am not sure what the main factor at Harvard is but at public
| schools the funding of the university depends most heavily on
| retention. At our university, we are penalized (both in salary
| and other ways) for students that get Ds and Fs as well as
| students who withdraw(with no penalty for the student!) from
| the class. In addition, student evaluations play a huge role in
| this process and the easiest way to get a good evaluation is to
| give easy grades. Guess what kind of grading policy this
| promotes...
|
| By the way, the reason retention, as opposed to the quality is
| valued is also simple. The ranking of the state 'in education'
| is measured by the number of diplomas given out by the
| institutions in the state. So more diplomas---better education
| ratings of the state. Thus encouraging faculty to pass students
| is a rational strategy. I am surprised we are not just giving
| students all As without any tests whatsoever. Would make my
| life so much easier. For a while ...
| juve1996 wrote:
| It's hard to blame any one piece of the system for inflating
| grades - everyone "wins" short term, and that's all this
| country cares about, from top to bottom. Students get their
| piece of paper so they can have at least a not-hopeless life,
| schools get their way overpriced tuition, administrators get
| their raises, companies get to pretend they hire smart
| people, etc. Governments know everyone wants their kid to go
| to college, so they make it easier to get people degrees.
|
| If college continues to be a requirement for most of the
| basic jobs people receive then this will continue. Most of
| the workforce doesn't need a college degree. The things they
| learn in college they will never, ever use, and most of the
| jobs don't actually require critical thinking like is
| constantly waved about whenever these conversations come up.
| zzless wrote:
| Well put. Grade inflation is one of those emerging
| behaviors that is reinforced by the system as a whole as
| opposed to individual players. I think one major problem is
| we equate education with 'college education' which is
| probably quite harmful.
| suture wrote:
| I teach at a community college. We've had declining enrollment
| for 10 years or so. I need a job and these days it's easy to
| acquire a reputation and easy to look up someone's reputation.
| Retention of students is very important since it lowers the
| cost of client acquisition to have a student body that doesn't
| drop out. All of these factors have led to me, more or less,
| passing everyone who takes the final exam. A person has to
| actively try to fail my classes now.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| They don't really care. A professors first priority is to do
| research, second priority is to teach, and last priority is to
| catch cheaters.
| nix23 wrote:
| >A professors first priority is to do research, second
| priority is to teach, and last priority is to catch cheaters.
|
| 1. Make a reputation
|
| 2. Make Money (more reputation more money)
|
| 3. Teach (if they have to)
| verst wrote:
| At research universities perhaps, but at liberal arts
| colleges (not a liberal arts program within a big university
| - that's different) professors actually are there for the
| teaching.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| It's a collective action problem
| Cshelton wrote:
| Some schools, like The University of Colorado's Leeds School of
| Business, have taken aggressive measures in the past to fight
| grade inflation.
|
| They implemented a "hard average" at each grade level. So
| freshmen business course, the average _had_ to be a C-. Soph: C,
| Jr: C+, Sr: B-.
|
| It certainly achieved the goal for the school, as a whole, to
| fight grade inflation... but..
|
| For students, it was very important to be above the mean...
| otherwise your grade would typically get moved _down_. Which isn
| 't the worst, since they compared it to competition in the job
| world... but hard to say that when students are paying an obscene
| amount of money to attend.
|
| The other challenge was the smaller courses, with ~10-15
| students... very difficult to get an A+ in those courses as you
| had to be the top 1-3 in the class.
|
| I think they have since abandoned this grade inflation policy..
|
| But yes, GPA is basically irrelevant now in comparing across
| schools...
| anm89 wrote:
| Yeah, I would actively avoid going to a school like this. This
| sounds like a race to the bottom. Or at least like a race to a
| C-
| JauntTrooper wrote:
| When I was at Princeton they had strict anti-grade inflation
| policy, with no more than 35% of students getting an A per
| department.
|
| It was really demoralizing, and to be honest it's had a negative
| impact on my life. My public high school didn't have a great math
| and science program so I started behind my classmates freshman
| year. It felt like the As basically went to the kids who had
| covered the material before in AP classes.
|
| By junior year I was hovering around a 3.0, and I made the gut-
| wrenching decision that I couldn't go to medical school or pursue
| a PhD in biology because my grades weren't high enough. I decided
| I needed to set my sights lower. Even law school was out,
| basically business school was the only graduate school that would
| take me. I switched my major to economics.
|
| It was devastating to give up on my dream, and I have to admit it
| still stings 20 years later. I adore biochemistry and would have
| loved to pursue research as a profession.
|
| My main problem is I didn't know how to effectively study in
| college. I cruised through high school without ever really
| needing to learn from a book. I didn't really learn how to study
| correctly until a year or two after college, when I took the CFA
| exams.
|
| Let me tell you, learning how to study (at 24) was an eye-opener
| for me, and it still feels like a superpower. I ended up becoming
| the valedictorian of my business school class a few years later.
|
| I've had a very successful career as an investment banker, so I
| ended up fine. But I do think these grade deflation policies can
| be really harmful to the psyche of young students. Sure, there
| are benefits to getting humbled, hitting a wall and needing to
| grind it out, but students come into school with all sorts of
| different levels of preparation and there's a big risk that some
| will flounder.
|
| I don't like relative grading. I think there should be objective
| standards of what you should know, and if you meet those
| standards you get an A. As long as you make those standards
| sufficiently rigorous, it shouldn't matter whether 30% or 80% of
| the class gets an A. Relative grading pits students against each
| other and creates an unhealthy learning environment.
| davesque wrote:
| Very relatable story. I think I've had similar experiences
| throughout my life. I never fit the academic mold very well.
| But whenever I was given the freedom to explore a topic of
| interest without a lot of pressure, I think I always excelled.
| It was fortunate that computer programming classes at my high
| school were basically like study hall. The teachers didn't make
| you do anything. That meant that the handful of us who were
| motivated out of personal interest could take things as far as
| we wanted to go. We weren't constrained by a curriculum. When I
| got to university, I felt like I was way ahead of the game and
| had already learned a lot of the things that were covered in
| freshman comp sci courses.
|
| I think I understand in theory what the point of grades is.
| It's hard to imagine a perfect way of deciding who gets access
| to limited opportunities and who is best fit to take advantage
| of them. However, I know from deep down that my life would have
| gone _very_ differently if I hadn 't been given those critical
| chances to wander. Competition can filter out the people who
| are less innately talented, but just as often filters out
| people who just don't like having to talk over everyone and
| fight for everything all the time. If you're just a shy kid or
| are starting out with a weaker self-image for some reason, you
| can fall to the bottom of the pile really quickly regardless of
| whether or not you're smart or worthy of good things in life.
| That's why I tend to think a certain amount of grade inflation
| is alright; because it unlocks hidden potential in people who
| don't look the part. Maybe in a sense it also penalizes people
| who game the system by chasing grades while missing the real
| point of getting an education.
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| If you are lucky enough to be in a financially sound situation,
| why not consider a career change and try to pursue that which
| you've wanted?
|
| My wife retook foundational courses for med school -- physics,
| biology, chemistry, etc. to pass the prerequisites, and then
| the MCAT. You can take classes at (any?) university, telling
| them they are "non-degree credits" which makes it easier for
| you to enroll.
|
| For a PhD you're never too old. For medical school, likely as a
| "non-traditional" student, you'd have better luck at gaining
| admissions to a DO school than an MD school, despite the latter
| claiming they adore that class of student.
| JauntTrooper wrote:
| I've actually been seriously considering it over the past
| year or two. It's really daunting though.
|
| Career-wise it would probably be a one-way trip. Investment
| banks are notoriously narrow-minded in their hiring process,
| and I doubt I'd be able to break back in once I left the
| industry for a year or two.
|
| I also have three kids under 6 who I like to spend time with,
| including a newborn, and I'm geographically limited to this
| area because my wife owns a business that has deep local
| roots. We have 3-4 good schools within an hour, but if I
| don't get into their programs I'm kind of out of luck.
|
| The grad schools nearby have minimum undergraduate GPA
| requirements of 3.0, and I ended up with a 2.9. I assume
| they'd waive the requirement if I had great grades in a post-
| bac science program and a great GRE, along with my 4.0 from
| business school, but it's unnerving to have so much riding on
| the whims of an admissions department. Plus even if I did
| manage to get in, I worry about how hard it would be to get a
| post-doc position as a 50 year old.
|
| I realize it sounds like I'm just making excuses, and maybe I
| am. I have a comfortable, happy life, and there's a level of
| irreducible risk on this alternate path. As of now I've
| decided I'll start taking some science classes in the
| evenings at the local university next year, once my baby is a
| little older, and see where that takes me.
| massysett wrote:
| As you get older, if you have a good career the opportunity
| cost of going back to school is just too high. As I have
| aged I also realize that the value of pursuing dreams is
| not quite as important as I previously thought. If I am
| providing for my family and have some money left over and
| my job is good, I'm not going back to school just so I can
| have a different career that in the end isn't going to make
| me that much happier.
| achenatx wrote:
| medicine is like being a mechanic for the human body. You
| are mostly doing the same thing every single day and the
| rate of change/innovation is extremely slow.
|
| Science also moves extremely slowly. You can spend your
| whole life studying one aspect of one molecule.
|
| Investment banking might be soulless, but happiness
| ultimately comes from relationships - friends, family, and
| community. The most precious commodity we have is time and
| making a lot of money can generate a lot of free time.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > Let me tell you, learning how to study (at 24) was an eye-
| opener for me, and it still feels like a superpower.
|
| _I would like to know more..._
| andai wrote:
| Also curious about GP's experience. Meanwhile I can share my
| own: until age 25 I was unable to study _at all_. I couldn 't
| even concentrate for ten minutes.
|
| So for me the hardest part was developing the habit of just
| sitting down and studying every day, which I didn't develop
| until years after failing university.
|
| My key insight came from hearing the idea that discipline is
| like a muscle, and as with strength training you must start
| at the appropriate "weight" for you. In my case, that was a
| painfully low 5 minutes of work a day.
|
| I wrote a script to generate a schedule for me, starting with
| 5 minutes of studying (for the whole day!) and increasing the
| time by 2% every day.
|
| By starting with 5 minutes and working 2% longer every day, I
| worked my way up to 5 hours a day this way. The fact that I
| was able to work for 5 hours absolutely blew my mind, because
| when I started I could barely focus for 15 minutes.
|
| I might add that a year of manual labor did wonders for my
| motivation to study. (Perhaps that is what is meant by "it
| builds character?" ;)
|
| As for practical study skills, I have heard very good things
| about this: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
| learn
| willio58 wrote:
| It's insane to me that there are people like you who went to a
| school like _princeton_ and ended up being cut out of your
| dream to pursue medical school or a PhD in bio, where if you
| had maybe just gone to a mid-tier 4-year university you could
| have easily scored top of your class and probably been accepted
| to those same programs.
|
| To me, grades in general seem to have little bearing on how
| driven or knowledgeable someone is on a topic. To limit
| someone's future based on a somewhat subjective measurement is
| just.. wrong.
| lvl102 wrote:
| This resonates with me as well. I went to a school with similar
| grade structure. Exams were hard. And when I saw exams for the
| exact same science classes at MIT and Harvard, I was shocked
| how easy they were. For this reason, I still refuse to
| contribute a single dime to my undergraduate.
| ir123 wrote:
| If everyone inflated their grades then how would getting a PhD
| get any easier? Your uni can grade you on a curve or grade you
| flat, but for a PhD you will have to be stack ranked
| asdff wrote:
| Most PhD admissions committees would probably be fine with
| the 3.0 too if you had a few years of undergrad research
| experience under your belt. Even better if you spend a year
| or two working after undergrad as a lab technician or
| something. That tells potential professors you can start
| working immediately 40 hours a week in the lab on assays you
| already know how to do. Straight A students with no research
| experience are going to be a net drain on productivity for
| months if not longer while they put in the time you've
| already put in learning how to work in a research
| environment. The classes you take in many STEM PhDs are often
| rubber stamp classes anyhow, the focus is on working on
| research outlined in grants.
| LargeWu wrote:
| My uncle taught some classes at Princeton while doing his
| graduate studies. He wasn't allowed to give anything lower than a
| C. This was in the 80's.
| ModernMech wrote:
| tbf in gradschool a C is basically an F. In my program you
| could get 2 Cs before you were kicked out on your third.
| Anything lower than a C was basically a huge red flag and would
| warrant a meeting about the future of the student in the
| department.
| zcw100 wrote:
| My experience as well. It was pretty stupid since it was
| basically pass+/pass/fail.
|
| On the flip side of that red flag is when the midterm average
| was a 20% which means whoever taught the class didn't do
| their job, didn't care and definitely wasn't going to take
| shit for it so everyone passed.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Just to be clear, he was teaching undergraduates in survey-
| level courses.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Ah I see.
| hardware2win wrote:
| Is this even relevant?
|
| What matters is effort/knowledge for given grade
| suture wrote:
| At the Ivy League schools these used to be called "gentleman
| C's".
| shankr wrote:
| In the department, at an Indian university where I studied, the
| professor wouldn't even give anyone A grade even if the whole
| class struggled. It was supposed to be a relative grading. You
| had to score certain minimum percent of score. Our whole
| department's median grade was C.
| booboofixer wrote:
| Shocking. Here's something to compare it to. It is rumored that
| engineering courses at University of Toronto never have an
| average above 70, and if they do everybody gets curved down.
| Confirmed by my probability professor who showed us the effects
| of the curve on everyone's grades.
|
| A 70 corresponds to 2.7 GPA:
|
| https://undergrad.engineering.utoronto.ca/calculate-gpa/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/UofT/comments/672fj3/what_is_the_av...
| universityguys wrote:
| To be fair, U of Toronto is nowhere near selective as Harvard.
| booboofixer wrote:
| Im not sure how that impacts the small/large difference in
| students GPAs.
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