<p>Just wondering…
I know that the university of toronto has a pretty harsh grading policy which sets the avg to 66-67%…</p>
<p>Those with the drive to make an A, will make an A. Most of my classes have a class average of ~70%. I have no clue why, other than the others are literally not trying at all. You don’t have to be a genius to get A’s, just have a disciplined work ethic and learn how to actually study.</p>
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<p>There are millions of instances of invalidation of this claim; there are many students who work very hard toward an A but cannot make it – a strive whose successful yield would be made more feasible if there were in place at the school what the OP refers to as an easier bell curve. It’s a fair question.</p>
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<p>I know, and I’m not invalidating it. What I am saying is that even at the ‘easier’ schools the bell curve is ~70%. My school in particular.</p>
<p>No, it’s a lazy question. If you want easy, go into something other than engineering, and for the rest of our sakes, make it something where your laziness won’t lead to a catastrophic bridge failure or something.</p>
<p>This is a lazy question. Just take two years at any engineering school and then go get a job as a lab tech. We don’t want you signing off on a bridges.</p>
<p>Gee you posters are tough! I would guess that a school that offers engineering but is unranked or lower ranked might accept weaker students and thus might present weaker competition. If you assume that the instructors don’t want to fail everyone, then weaker competition should help you look relatively better. I can’t say it’s a good plan or that I know a school that would fit the bill, but it is just a thought.</p>
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<p>Not really. The original question is akin to “Where can I go to school to get the most credit for the least work.” Do you want someone like that designing any of the products you use, let alone ones where your life could be in jeopardy if it fails.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that if you are a lazy engineer, at best you are going to have a crappy, boring job, and at worst you will kills a bunch of people.</p>
<p>If you were about to wheeled into surgery for a life saving operation, would it comfort you to know that your doctor went to a school because it offered the easiest bell curve?</p>
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<p>In my first semester course averages were around seventy. Its not that hard to get a decent mark. As already mentioned above you just have to work at it.</p>
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t medical schools consider GPA such an important factor that people who plan to go to medical schools often take easier majors to get higher GPA’s?</p>
<p>They do, which is part of the problem with med school. They would be much better served by weighting GPA less. Luckily, the bad eggs are usually weeded out in the M1 and M2 years.</p>
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<p>By far the most prominent example would be a certain school in Palo Alto. That’s not even a close call. While, granted, it’s not easy to receive A’s, by the same token it’s practically impossible to actually fail.</p>
<p>Palo Alto College? ;-)</p>
<p>U of T also is one of the only transcripts I’ve read (when selecting students for our grad program) that actually puts the class average grade right beside the student’s received grade. So it isn’t that relevant where they set their average, because one can see- and will be interested in- how you personally performed relative to that average (rather than absolute grades).</p>
<p>Starbright, that’s an excellent first step (and I believe Dartmouth does the same).</p>
<p>But I think even that is not idea is not entirely sufficient, for, in practicality, the average course grade inflation is all too easily ignored As a case in point, the LSDAS takes all student transcripts and essentially standardizes them into a common ‘grade’ format for the consumption of law-school adcoms; that process effectively removes all information about your school’s standard grades. Granted, while a copy of your official transcript will also accompany the LSDAS-standardized grade report, it is highly questionable whether the adcoms will read that transcript, or even if they did, whether they would care. I believe that the med-school admissions process uses a similar procedure. Similarly, the Marshall Scholarship committee - which enforces a 3.7 GPA cutoff - won’t care whether you reached that cutoff because your average course grades were easy or difficult. All they will see is that you either did or did not reach that cutoff. </p>
<p>One thing that schools could then do is normalize their grades by comparing the assigned course grade compared to the average grade to calculate a ‘processed transcript grade’. For example, if the average (university-wide) grade was a B, and a prof assigned you a grade of A- in a class where the median grade was an A, then since you actually performed worse than average, your transcript should reflect a worse-than-average grade. Hence, since the university-wide grade was a B, the normalization process would then assign you a grade of, say, B-. </p>
<p>Granted, even that process does not normalize for the fact that certain courses (and by extension, entirely majors) simply have more talented and more dedicated students than others. Clearly it is easier to obtain higher relative grades in a course where the other students are of low quality. But some normalization is still better than none at all, which is what happens now.</p>