Are Harvard students GPA-driven?

Elanorci
Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:24:08 +0000

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:

John Harvard (5%): 256 Recipients

GPA Cutoffs:
Rising Sophomores: 3.953
Rising Juniors: 3.959
Rising Seniors: 3.963

Harvard College (10%): 227 Recipients

GPA Cutoffs:
Rising Sophomores: 3.890
Rising Juniors: 3.916
Rising Seniors: 3.926

So ten percent of the class has a GPA above ~3.9, and five percent above ~3.96. Pretty high.

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.

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.

Hope this helped? It’s hard to answer these questions - the answer is almost always ‘there’s a huge variety, and it depends.’