Aeggie

Some schools grade pretty hard... are there any sites where you can access information like this? For example, some programs at some schools (Business at USC, for example), give out a fixed amount of A's, B's, .etc... this seems counterintuitive to their students who want to move on to grad school because some capable students will be penalized for having particularly talented classmates... Berkeley, I hear, is a tough place to get one of those 3.7+ UGPAs as well. I'm not asking where I won't have to work, of course not, but I do wonder if there are schools where my work is unlikely to yield the best results. Especially situations like predetermined numbers of A's, .etc...

Wildflower

Harvard, Yale and Stanford are supposed to be pretty decent at grade inflating their constituents/students. If you can get in, you should be ok. Moreover, Harvard seems to have a maternal tendency towards its undergrads, as it admits a large number of them into its own LS.

Aeggie

I haven't applied to Harvard or Yale, but I am sending something Stanford's way (I would add them, but I don't have enough SAT II tests under my belt).

Know anything about Northwestern, USC, Columbia, IU, or UF?

Or, an online resource to find the average UGPA of schools?

sakky

http://www.gradeinflation.com

I don't even think it's a simple matter of having a predetermined number of A's, but rather a larger sense of how difficult it is to get A's. If you want to talk about talk, then I would assert that two highly difficult schools are Caltech and MIT.

DRab

My friends at Stanford think getting B's is cake, and getting a C is like failing. But if you want an A, it is not so easy, really. Not so easy at all, they say.

Hanna

I strongly discourage you from making this a factor in your undergrad decision. Go to the best school you get into, however you define "best" -- the place that has the right academic programs and that feels like home to you.

calipharius

I disagree. I think that this should be a factor considered in one's college search. Though I think I am receiving a great education at my current institution, the grading procedures alone have compelled me to send out transfer applications. I have been in classes where no a single student was given an A. This is not to contend that it should be a primary determinate, but rather that it should definitely be considered in any holistic evaluation of a given school. One finds many schools (on Sakky's link) an average GPA of 3.4 or higher. At my school, a 3.66 puts me well into the top 10%. That is an appreciable difference, if you ask me.

ericmeng

I go to Princeton, and ditto for what Drab says.

nspeds

The same for Georgetown.

CIA_34

I completely agree with calipharius.

calipharius - what school do you currently attend and where are you thinking of transferring to?

kfc4u

well, Business at USC isn't meant to help you for grad school... most ppl who graduate from marshall go work in the working world, and some may get an MBA, but MBA admissions isn't primarily GPA-driven. so maybe that's why they are as conducive to giving out GPA's that help ppl get into top grad/law programs.

bad schools to avoid would be most publics. A's are attainable but not necessarily easy, B's are very common, C's aren't surprising, and there will be occasional D's or even F's. they really could care less what your GPA is; it's your job to swim in their "sink or swim" environment.

kono

The truth of the matter is that grades make a huge difference for most grad schools. Grad schools are well aware that ratings of their schools is based on published gpa averages. Grad schools simply cannot quantify the difference between universities and colleges with regard to grade inflation or deflation. Furthermore, the difference within a given school can have a huge difference on your GPA. There are profs who think that a C is a good grade, and another prof at the same school teaching the same class will only give a C to a really poor job.

In my opinion, grade deflation hurts all students at the school from moving on (grad school or jobs as employers can't quantify your GPA). Grade inflation helps the slacker student as a higher percentage of them get B's instead of C's (and yes, as noted above at a school like Stanford the students that get A's are working really hard).

sakky

Is it really that they cannot, or that they just don't want to? I would tend to lean toward the latter.

boethian

a lot of the times you cannot because you have different bodies of students that give you different numbers, and how you quantify the bodies of students is very hard. for example a small private LAC like carleton has an averga gpa of 3.35 while university of florida has an averge gpa of 3.2. which one is harder? your qualitative judgment would prolly tell you that carleton is harder. how can you show this with statistics? do you use other numbers like SAT or hsgpa to show you that carleton's student body is better? how much weight do you assign these? what if the student population size affects overall gpa? how much weight do you give to the size? what about school requirements? some are more strict than others and affect gpa. how the heck do you factor those in? you have no controls, its not like you can take students and put them in several schools and see how they do, the problem is kinda hard.

sakky

I agree that the problem is hard, but simply from a qualitative perspective, you can glean some trends. For example, I think even the most hardcore Stanford fanatic would concede that Stanford is probably easier than Caltech.