<p>Thread title speaks the question–are they? </p>
<p>Of course, this is generally speaking. There will always be some students GPA-driven and others who are more for the learning. </p>
<p>For the GPA-driven, what’s a “good” GPA, “bad” GPA, on rough terms? </p>
<p>Flimsy question, but what sort of students tend to be less GPA-driven (e.g. usually eng. concentrators make less GPA-picky students)?</p>
<p>One of the things that I’ve noticed is, because a lot of students are coming from schools where they consistently get A’s, freshmen tend to freak out a lot because they’re “failing a class”, aka getting a B.
I think with a good amount of effort, it’s not hard to do quite well.</p>
<p>I think Harvard students are primarily “success” driven, where some people have certain definitions of “success” that depend on GPA to varying degrees. Having a high GPA is important for most people, but across a certain threshold, internships and leadership positions and careerish stuff becomes a higher priority for some.</p>
<p>I think it really depends. There’s a huge variety of people. Believe it or not, there is a significant fraction of Harvard students that does not care beyond minimal effort about their GPA. On the other hand, you have extremely ambitious and hardworking pre-med and pre-law students who feel that they have to maintain GPAs in the 3.9s (all three of my roommates are pre-med and pre-law, so this is what I’m most familiar with).
To give you some idea, here are cutoff GPAs for awards given for top five and ten percent GPAs per class year, respectively: </p>
<p>John Harvard (5%): 256 Recipients</p>
<p>GPA Cutoffs:
Rising Sophomores: 3.953
Rising Juniors: 3.959
Rising Seniors: 3.963</p>
<p>Harvard College (10%): 227 Recipients</p>
<p>GPA Cutoffs:
Rising Sophomores: 3.890
Rising Juniors: 3.916
Rising Seniors: 3.926</p>
<p>So ten percent of the class has a GPA above ~3.9, and five percent above ~3.96. Pretty high. </p>
<p>I’d say that a lot of people are GPA-driven, but that those tend to be premedical students, and even they are not totally insane about it. They work hard and are upset if they don’t do well, but they’re not totally neurotic. </p>
<p>Less-GPA driven-ness, IMO, is correlated less with a major and more with what the individual wants to do after college. People who plan to go into the work force right away are obviously less concerned about it. Pre-med/pre-law are toward the top, and pre-academic grad school people (like me!) are maybe somewhat under them. </p>
<p>Hope this helped? It’s hard to answer these questions - the answer is almost always ‘there’s a huge variety, and it depends.’</p>
<p>It also depends upon whether one is a science or a humanities concentrator–disproportionate John Harvard/Harvard College winners in the humanities. Also if one wishes to game the system to get a higher GPA then opting out of, say, Physics 16 to take Physics 15 or Math 23 or 25 instead of 55 (same is the case in most sciences) will give a higher GPA–but at the cost of not pushing one’s self to the maximum.<br>
Also some courses have “forced curves”–where the percentage of As/Bs/Cs are set regardless of the how much a student may have learned. </p>
<p>If you want medical school or some law schools then you will make those decisions to take courses where GPAs can be maximized and stay away from forced curve courses. Other career paths --including academia isn’t as purely quant driven. I would posit that an A- from Physics 16 is much more valuable to a potential Physics PhD than an A in Physics 15. The writer above is right that most students find that being a CrimEd, 'Poonster, member of HRO/Bach Soc, or Advocate matters more to later career options than a GPA number. (Remember that TS Eliot got a B+ in Expos Writing…)</p>
<p>My impression is the kids don’t really discuss grades with each other, thats not cool. They discuss their extra curricular interests and leadership roles (as stated above) as what “defines them”. And D confirms that her premed roommates are taking easiest classes they can specifically to maintain the A average. We’ve encouraged D to take what interests her and not avoid the harder courses if she wants to stretch herself and to not worry about the GPA. That said, she took a course last semester which was very hard and had alot of problem sets and also had alot of grad students in it and she was pretty stressed out midterm. I feared we had given her bad advice and maybe she had overstretched. But once the course was finished, she is very glad she took that course and feels she learned a great deal. So its what you make of it.</p>
<p>scigeek – thought you would enjoy this Crimson article:
[How</a> To Game Your Classes | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/8/20/how-to-game-your-classes-okay/]How”>How To Game Your Classes | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
<p>Just adding to what has been said - it really depends on what you are looking for as the Harvard experience. D has never had a B in her life before entering H. But she declared to us when the school started that she is no longer going to focus on getting good grades but to take advantage of the EC opportunities H offers. Her grades this semester reflects that.</p>