<p><a href=“http://ls.berkeley.edu/undergrad/colloquia/04-11.html[/url]”>http://ls.berkeley.edu/undergrad/colloquia/04-11.html</a>
<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/~odoc/grading_proposals/index.html[/url]”>http://www.princeton.edu/~odoc/grading_proposals/index.html</a>
<a href=“http://registrar1.princeton.edu/data/common/cds2003.pdf[/url]”>http://registrar1.princeton.edu/data/common/cds2003.pdf</a>
<a href=“http://cds.vcbf.berkeley.edu/[/url]”>http://cds.vcbf.berkeley.edu/</a></p>
<p>I certainly agree that on student academic credentials MIT is more comparable to Harvard and Princeton than is Berkeley. The only problem there is how to compare the much different proportion of science and engineering majors. Grades are often higher in social sciences and humanities than in science. MIT and Caltech have much higher proportions of science majors and lower proportions of humanities and social science majors than the more broadly-based colleges. This makes it hard to compare GPA’s at these technical schools to those of colleges with a wider range of majors. One of the sources above gives grade distributions at Princeton by major division, but I don’t know of comparable data for other schools. There is a report about Cornell that comes to the same conclusion, but the effects were small and it reports regression coefficients, rather than actual GPA’s by field. I’ll see if I can find the reference.</p>