Are Harvard students GPA-driven?

2bornot2bivy
Sat, 31 Dec 2011 15:26:30 +0000

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.