This was a post to the Cornell subforum from 2015, by recent Cornell grad @norcalguy :
“Cornell is not grade deflated and is actually grade inflated, like the rest of the Ivy League universities. Average GPA is over 3.4. As late as a few years ago, Cornell published the median grades of each of its classes and the vast majority of classes were curved to a A- or B+ median, including most upper level science courses.”
re #6,
Here’s another one from @norcalguy , from a few years earlier:
"The students at Harvard and Yale are significantly better than the students at Cornell. Therefore a 3.46 GPA at Harvard is probably harder to achieve than a 3.37 at Cornell.
Honestly, Cornell presents a challenge but a very manageable one. I did premed at Cornell and I found freshman year to be the most difficult (most of the complaints come from freshmen who are not used to getting 3.0’s). The later years are VERY grade inflated (and, dare I say, easy) so that the average GPA ends up being 3.4. The vast majority of upper div courses are curved to A’s, A-'s, and B+'s."
Regarding grading at Harvard vs. Cornell, I agree with @norcalguy. When I attended, a friend who was a TA in a freshman class at Cornell had a friend visiting who TA’d virtually the same class at Harvard. The friend read the papers being graded and said that the work product overall was substantially inferior to what she was grading at Harvard. This makes a lot of sense to me, YMMV.
re #7, @CALSmom: so substitute business for creative writing, it’s the same point. It’s a curved class, some people got A’s.IMO it’s not inconceivable that some of those students might have been more invested or more gifted at the material, however marginally. My D2 received her lowest grade at Cornell in a business class at Dyson. She was going on and on about how easy it was, yet in the end she didn’t do that well. Maybe some other students in the class cared more, so put in more effort, and didn’t just put it down as being “easy”…
She worked hard, for sure, but still had time for extracurriculars, jobs, and active social life, and also got great grades.
Moreover she transferred into there, and said the work demands vs. her prior school were essentially the same.
There’s my individual anecdote. But she was a liberal arts major.