Duke Grading

<p>DukeBlueDevil919 (or others): Thoughts on taking Orgo over the summer?</p>

<p>Don’t forget that medical schools and law schools will ignore Duke’s mechanism for assigning GPA points and will impose their own hierarchy on it.</p>

<p>For example, Duke could start counting an A+ as a 4.3, but neither medical schools nor law schools will care. Medical schools would still count it as a 4.0, and law schools will still count it as a 4.33, no matter what Duke does. An A- is assigned by Duke to be a 3.7. That happens to be the same thing that medical schools will do, but law schools will count it as a 3.67, no matter how Duke chooses to do the math.</p>

<p>As it happens, medical schools calculate your GPA the same way Duke does, but make no mistake: if Duke changed its rules, medical schools wouldn’t change theirs.</p>

<p>Orgo as a freshman: there is a special section of the first semester for freshman. The curve is set to a B+. You’ll have to take the second semester with the rest of the orgo kids in a class where the curve is set to a B-.</p>

<p>Orgo in the summer: the curves are nicer (I’m not sure what they are), but it’s more intense, since you’re doing both semesters of orgo in a single summer. Though, you could always take the first semester of orgo during spring semester and then the second semester of during the summer, since the chem department is no longer operating on an alternate schedule (where they offer certain classes only certain semesters).</p>

<p>What are the percentage ranges associated with all the letter grades? Sorry if I’m ignorant of Duke’s grading practices, but I’m not a current Blue Devil and I want to make sense of the grades given out ever since I read an article about Duke’s average GPAs going up for decades.</p>

<p>I know that, at my current college, A-s are awarded at 80-84%, As at 85-89%, A+s at 90%+ for instance. The scale at my own college may look a little soft but I think the coursework at my college is more rigorous than at Duke, or Tufts for that matter (per a Tufts professor that attended my college for undergrad; correct me if I’m wrong, but I do not think Duke is any more rigorous than Tufts) or else we couldn’t afford such a soft scale.</p>

<p>It depends on the course and the professor. Grade cutoffs are not set across the board and can be changed based on final grade distribution to match natural breaks. </p>

<p>As for whether Duke courses are as rigorous as university X, I don’t think you can say that for any two universities A and B. Each university has its strong departments and programs and weak departments. Comparing two universities’ course difficulty as a whole would be comparing apples and oranges. </p>

<p>However I will say that grading scale is not necessarily an accurate reflection of course rigor. For example, my medical school has a pretty tough grading scale on par with or sometimes even exceeding the one commonly found at Duke. Yet, my school’s preclinical curriculum is generally said (and has a reputation for) to be pretty intense and rigorous. In fact this has contributed to a (IMHO, false) reputation for being cutthroat and gunner.</p>