@bernie12 lol yes that was my attempt at humor/sarcasm. But really, all I can tell you is that the Dean did not say that comment in jest and closed her message with “We will demand a lot from you.” My S can attest this is true.
@PurpleTitan I was basing my statement solely on comparing my S against his friends’ academic ability and if he were at their schools taking the same classes as them he also would have made their school’s deans list…that’s all. Again, he and his friends have been competing academically throughout HS comparing grades, test scores and AP exam scores. He has always surpassed them. That’s all I have to say about that 
They still do compete across the miles, lol.
I am aware semester gpa requirements do not need to be 4.0 to make deans list…typically for 12 credits it’s 3.5, which he just missed at his school but would have gotten 3.5 gpa had he taken the courses his friends did at their respective schools (again basing it on the fact none of them took linear algebra and non-intro statistics).
@bernie12 
just in case you were wondering and so you didn’t have to search all over the place. Plus to help other high schoolers in their college consideration:
https://cals.cornell.edu/academics/advising/faculty-staff/grading
I know it doesn’t speak to course grading but so far from his stem classes it’s been tough
@CALSmom :
I’m pretty sure you would find that most of the underclassman courses there are, in fact, curved. Particularly the larger intro science courses.
Things may have changed, but not that much.
Also, Dean’s list standards at your son’s U actually vary there by college. Or at least they used to.
Re # 394, curve on a particular exam, maybe, but I’m not sure that the final grade distribution for a course is always really solely up to the Prof, for the large intro survey courses . It may be imposed by the department, for all sections of that course. At least as “guidelines”.
I remember the young, non-tenured faculty member teaching our intro chemistry class asked for our suggestions at one point. When asked, he said he couldn’t change the text book. (Which was co-written by a tenured professor there). I doubt he would have felt secure enough in his position to go against a recommended grade distribution policy either. If such existed.
Re #393: “stats with upperclassmen”::
IIRC there are about four different intro statistics courses somebody might take there, offered by various of its colleges, with varying degrees of mathematical sophistication and, likely, student mathematical capability and interest. D2 took one of those classes as a senior, to meet her math distribution requirement. She no doubt selected the least challenging one, provided that it fit in her schedule, since she had no real interest in the topic.(She is very good at math though). A class full of upperclassmen like her would likely not have been as strenuous as some of the other stats courses. Other than, upperclassmen may have developed better study habits in general. But that’s not specific to statistics. And there were countervailing factors, ie many students in the class with little interest and not math geeks. So the extent to which the mere presence of “upperclassmen” can be used as something to whine about, legitimately, probably varies a lot.
@monydad when did your D graduate? Was she in CALS? The deans list for CALS is 3.5 gpa
He took a biological stats class creating statistical models using R to program
@CALSmom: “I was basing my statement solely on comparing my S against his friends’ academic ability and if he were at their schools taking the same classes as them he also would have made their school’s deans list…that’s all.”
OK, but my point is that that doesn’t tell you much about the rigor as the criteria for Dean’s List could vary (by quite a bit) between different schools.
To give an example: At the Ivy-equivalent I went to for undergrad, graduating with honors in engineering was very difficult. I believe you needed a 3.7 GPA and at a school that was known for grade-deflation, only a handful would get them. Meanwhile, at Harvard, they hand out Latin Honors like candy. I believe over half the class graduate with some form of Latin Honors. Which is more rigorous? I don’t think you can tell at all simply by whether some people graduated with honors at school A and another group graduated without honors at school B.
Given the audience, could you ever see the Dean saying anything different?
re:#403:
A) 2011. I think.
B) No.
re stats that is definitely not the course she took.
I don’t know if that one is considered “hard”, or not.
I imagine they all “use R”, depends on what “to program” means.
Which we shouldn’t get into here, IMO.
@PurpleTitan so are you suggesting that the OP shouldn’t base class rigor as a criteria for being “academically difficult” and instead look to the deans list requirement? I see the point you’re trying to make but you just pretty much agreed with my stance which is that stem classes (and thus their respective departments) will be more rigorous than humanities classes and therefore harder to make the deans list.
The big question then is: is graduating with honors in Latin from Harvard more difficult to achieve than say Michigan, UCLA or OU?
@CALSmom: Huh? I’m saying that you can’t judge rigor by Dean’s List, which was what you were doing.
As for graduating with honors from Harvard vs. graduating with honors from UMich/UCLA: Who knows. I don’t know how hard it is to get honors at UMich/UCLA. I do know that over half the grads at Harvard graduate with honors and that the vast majority of admits to Harvard aren’t there solely because of their academic chops. Athletes are probably around 20% of the H student body. Add in all the other hooked admits, and you’re over half the H student body. Now, plenty of the hooked admits would be stellar academically as well, but add that all together, and how would you be able to tell if graduating with honors at H would be harder than graduating with honors at a top public?
Why are we adding hooked admits with the athletes @PurpleTitan…
I was a hooked admit, and just ended my first year with a 3.94. The assumptions that we can’t compete with our peers in college gets annoying.
@saillakeerie lol honestly I didn’t think about it and when she said that it did take me aback. I mean, convocation was so rah-rah, informative, we’re-here-for-you type of thing then BAM she says that. Geez, the kids are already stressed wondering if they’re gonna hack it
@TheAtlantic: Did you miss the part where I said “Now, plenty of the hooked admits would be stellar academically as well”?
There are athletes who get a 3.93 GPA too, and undoubtedly, hooked admits to H would be pretty good academically, but I think you’d admit that there are unhooked applicants who are just as good academically as hooked admits to H but go to UMich/UCLA because they don’t have a hook.
@PurpleTitan I saw exactly what you said, and you framed them as exceptions to the rule. I don’t see why the bulk of URMs are being equated with athletes. Saying I’m an outlier doesn’t make the argument any more palatable.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about in the second half of your post. Are you saying these people would have gone to H if they were hooked, but were denied specifically because they were not hooked?
@TheAtlantic: I meant what I said: “There are unhooked applicants who are just as good academically as hooked admits who went to H but go to UMich/UCLA because they don’t have a hook.”
I didn’t think that statement was terribly hard to comprehend . . .
@PurpleTitan You don’t have to be so condescending. I really don’t understand how your question relates to my statement. My point is that the logic of equating athletes and URMs/Hooked Applicants is bad. Many people that could attend ivies matriculate to different institutions and perform well there instead.
Yes hooked and unhooked applicants can perform equally well, that’s literally my entire point. I’d be performing just as well if I was at UGA or Vandy, as would an unhooked student. You’re the one that made it seem otherwise.
@TheAtlantic good for you! Congrats!
@PurpleTitan
You seem to know quite a bit about Harvard and their practices. Unless you work for admissions or are on staff there I have to take those statements with a grain of salt (no offense).
@CALSmom : Cornell STEM pretty much grades like Emory, VU, and JHU and looks like it is a similar level in many courses from what I saw (which for the most part is a good thing). You will see many STEM courses with B-/B means and medians especially at the intro/weeder level. Some will just come out that way and some will be scaled/curved to it.
At Emory, we have an equivalent to the stats course you mention (they have a lab section and stuff), but it is kind of a “catch all”(as in biology, neuro, and several social sciences now require the course) and likely has a B-/B median (though this class also has mostly “upper classmen” as many of the STEM majors that are required to take it can wait because it is not a pre-req of any of their other courses unless majoring in a social science). However, it doesn’t need a curve because there is an integrated lab section and HW assignments. You let some less inclined students screw up and get the mean on exams (on a bad one could be 75 or so) and the HW and lab should bring those folks to B-/B. The effect @monydad points to is real I am sure. Courses like general chemistry, bio-calc, econ. and biology will vary greatly with instructor in terms of raw intensity (cognitive complexity), but will try to stay in range of recommended distributions. The ones that produce exam averages that put their course mean below B- will usually curve or scale until it becomes B- (same at VU and JHU). The ones that are above will usually straight apply grades. However, biology and chemistry freshman courses (from what I remember when I went and from what I had reported when tutoring students since then) are actually prone to having cut-offs moved upward in the case of a section that had an instructor that wrote exams that made their section mean go beyond the recommended averages (for bio likely B, and for chem B -).
They would basically somehow look at the instructors’ exams (because for those 2 intro. courses you basically have a couple of faculty monitoring that stuff behind the scenes) and determine if they were an awesome teacher or if they were just simply much less rigorous than other sections. However, usually what would happen before such an instructor gets “caught” being less rigorous, is that said instructor would write an unusually challenging final (vs. midterms) to crash the grades down to whatever is regarded as an acceptable level. So again, you are right that it isn’t easy at these types of schools, but I cannot say for how any of them stack up to each other in certain courses until I have seen the coursework (I have seen an “ok” amount at least at intro. and intermediate level to kind of establish whether or not there were certain instructional and assessment styles that seem more common in certain departments at certain schools than others and in the case where they had a course website, you can see not only materials but often how grading is done and how well students are doing).
@PurpleTitan : I am actually glad to say that other than the B-School (and nursing?), only departmental honors are awarded at Emory. You meet some threshold GPA and complete an honors thesis. Your level of honors depends on quality of defense and results. This seems to reward intellectual engagement more than just raw numbers that can be manufactured by many. Employers and PBK for example can usually tell what a high/competitive GPA is, you don’t need an extra mark to demonstrate that the GPA is high lol. Why H would want to throw them like candy is kind of stupid. I doubt it would provide any edge to anyone outside of prestige driven careers (in which case, usually announcing that they pulled X amount of Harvard grads. is enough. They don’t need to have honors based on GPA and the GPA must have already been competitive to gain access to these jobs). Maybe it is a clever way for them to signal differences in students while letting the grades stay high? Don’t know. As for the other person, I would not draw any correlates to slight differences in academic strength on paper in HS and predicted performance at another rigorous college. Of the list they came up with, “maybe” 3/5 I would give a “true” to, but the other 2 are toss-up (as UCLA is known for strong math and statistics depts and USC is likely to be as random as any other private on a per professor basis).
@TheAtlantic: “I’d be performing just as well if I was at UGA or Vandy, as would an unhooked student. You’re the one that made it seem otherwise.”
Huh? How can you read what I wrote and draw the conclusion that “I think otherwise” when I make it pretty clear that I believe a student who is as good as you academically (so you could substitute yourself there) could very well end up at UMich/UCLA instead of H?
@PurpleTitan You conflate athletes at top schools with hooked applicants. You then assume that these hooked applicants are the ones that operate the lower academic rungs at these institutions, and make it easier for the other students to make the Dean’s List.
I don’t see a warrant for these arguments.
Hooked students at top schools should still be able to perform well at public institutions, unless your argument is that they would not be accepted on their own academic merit at either institution.
The assumptions that hooked applicants 1) are the worst performing at top schools and 2) couldn’t perform comparably at public unis are prerequisites for your argument making sense that they make it easier for other students to make the Dean’s List.
You try to add in that there are “exceptions” to the rule, but you never actually prove the rule.
I’d argue that on balance, students at top private schools would be able to gain admittance into top public schools, and your argument that this applies to all groups except hooked applicants isnt something you’ve proven.
@TheAtlantic: How is #2 a prerequisite? Did I ever make the argument #2? No. So please stop putting it in my mouth.