Just how cut-throat is UCSD?

<p>I heard from my counselor today that she remembers an incident where she visited UCSD and bumped into someone at the library buying/borrowing all of the books for a certain course. Apparently the person wanted nobody to have the resources to study well so that the curve for a test/quiz would be easier.</p>

<p>Does this type of stuff happen all the time? I knew UCs and public schools were competitive, but I didn’t know that people would spend that much effort into messing with others. </p>

<p>Also, are there a lot of cheaters? I presume that like in any competitive school (and in the major I chose, Chem E), a majority of the students cheat, but what I’m really asking is if this makes life harder to a noticeable degree. Sorry if I sound a bit incriminating, but let’s be realistic here…</p>

<p>That story’s been repeated ad nauseam, across campuses countrywide. How would your counselor even know (especially as a visitor) which courses required which books? And at campus libraries, course books on reserve are checked out for 2 or 3-hour slots at a time, and they’re handed to the students by a librarian (or student assistant) who retrieves them from a protected storage area. Plus, you check it out with your ID card and number – it’d be impossible to deplete the library’s stash of books for course X. </p>

<p>I’ve also never had a course that had required materials on reserve at the library. Your textbook and lecture notes are plenty to study from.</p>

<p>As for cheaters, yes, they exist. They exist everywhere. Some professors don’t really have the effort to prosecute them, others will happily haul the offender to the Academic Senate and get them expelled. And you can’t write off the possibility that one of your classmates will turn you in. Carl Hoeger offers a “bounty” for turning in one of your classmates w/proof of his or her cheating – meaning extra credit for you and lots of trouble for them. Don’t even think about it.</p>

<p>Well that’s reassuring :)</p>

<p>In my high school there usually isn’t a curve so most people cheat for a simple grade and don’t really affect anyone else. In college, it’s probably completely different, right?</p>

<p>Almost all my college courses have been curved, but then again, I’m only a freshman right now. I know of some cheaters, and they often get better grades than the honest ones, so I’d say it’s still a problem :confused: I absolutely hate the cheating, but it’s a problem everywhere.</p>

<p>@1x612nt13 Yeah, I don’t know how that would happen. You can only check out course reserve books for 3 hours at a time and if you’re even a minute late you will be charged a $10 fine. That fine drastically increases as the minutes pass by. It has happened to me before.
Also, most people have their own copy of the book so I don’t think that would make a huge difference even if it were true.</p>

<p>That being said, it’s true that many of the classes at UCSD are graded on a curve. If it weren’t, 70% of the class would literally fail Ochem.
Yes, unfortunately some students do cheat. For example, my chem prof said a group of students were recently caught after buying fake UCSD ID’s from China and having other students impersonate them during an exam. However, there are incredibly strong penalties for getting caught. Many professors will take action so that offenders will be literally dismissed from the university.</p>

<p>I honestly don’t think the cheating is so bad that it will affect your grade if you study well. If you put in the work required for an A I don’t feel like a few cheaters are going to drastically affect the curve to the extent that you’ll receive an A- instead.</p>

<p>I dont find it cutthroat at all. I can’t think of a single person who wouldnt want to help for the reason that it might hurt their curve. Yes, most classes are curved so in a way it’s competitive, but i think most schools would do this too.</p>

<p>But i would like to note that the average UCSD GPA is significantly lower than the average GPA of UCLA/UCB students because of grade inflation. The other UC’s are about a 3.0 gpa like UCSD though.
Source: [National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/]National”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/)</p>

<p>I didn’t find it cutthroat at all. I’ve had positions at some schools like Duke where competition is more obvious among the students.</p>

<p>@AndrewL: UC Berkeley is actually notorious for grade deflation in a few departments. Same with UCLA. If anything at all, getting a good GPA at UCSD should be slightly (if at all) easier. The average GPA is still similar to LA and Cal because the applicants at Cal and LA tend to be either smarter or more hard working.</p>

<p>Well according to that site, their average GPA is over 3.2 while the other UC’s are 3.0. I don’t know about either school being notorious for grade deflation but the site suggests otherwise. The average student there being smarter is already implied by the name of the school and it should not be inflated by their average GPA too.</p>

<p>With nearly everything available online these days (electronic journals, books, you name it), it sounds ridiculous that someone is checking out everything in the library just to get the grade. If I were to see that, I would go state’s evidence and notify the professor. Regarding cheating, all universities have academic integrity policies and plagiarism and cheating penalties, which include, but are not limited to, dismissal from the institution. Even the high school kids have to run their papers through TurnItIn these days, whether it is an AP essay or a project for sociology. Final comment: if you managed to get into a university as high quality as UCSD, just do the bloody work. Cheaters usually get caught somewhere down the road. You can find UCSD’s here: [Cheating</a> and Consequences](<a href=“http://students.ucsd.edu/academics/academic-integrity/consequences.html]Cheating”>http://students.ucsd.edu/academics/academic-integrity/consequences.html)</p>

<p>@AndrewL: Having a higher GPA average isn’t relevant to grade inflation/deflation.</p>

<p>Grade DEFLATION is like…at Berkeley, in my friend’s Physics class, a 96% is a B+ in the class. The GPA is going to be lower than what you would expect to get, since even a 90% is still not an A. The students at Berkeley actually deserve MUCH higher grades. </p>

<p>If there was no anti-curve, we might expect the average GPA to be like…a 3.7. But since it’s like a 3.2, this is grade deflation.</p>

<p>At Duke, let’s say an 86% is an A-. If the subject was hard, but the students aren’t reaching the full A scale since the environment is more relaxed than Cal, they might push the curve down, resulting in an inflation of grades. The students who got an 86% don’t deserve the A, but they got it anyways because not enough people are getting the grade.</p>

<p>If the average GPA at Duke was supposed to be a 3.3 WITHOUT the curve, with the curve it’s a 3.5 or 3.6. THIS IS GRADE INFLATION.</p>

<p>The general pattern is that, at expensive, high ranked private schools (Cornell, MIT, Caltech being an exception), there is usually grade INFLATION because they want happy alumni who will donate back to the school. Grades are spoon fed.</p>

<p>At underfunded public schools, the professors could care less about teaching since most of their money is from doing research. They don’t care if their students succeed or not. They just make the course hard and give a curve accordingly. If a test was too easy, they adjust the curve against the students. If it was too hard, they curve the test in the students favor.</p>

<p>Since the students know this, the majority of them overwork, memorizing everything to knowing everything. This causes the professor to either make the test even harder or curve upward, which makes getting an A even harder.</p>

<p>The GPA average by itself tells you nothing about the school’s actual inflation/deflation rates. We need to see what the curves are.</p>

<p>As someone who graduated from UCSD with a degree in math, I beg to disagree with you, AceAites, that average GPA is unrelated to inflation/deflation. If we make a simple assumption that these GPAs are normally distributed and make a secondary assumption that we have equal standard errors across large groups, then shifts in the median => inflation/deflation. If school average A has X GPA and school B has Y GPA, and X > Y, X has relative inflation over Y.</p>

<p>It isn’t until you make further assumptions (or better, have actual datasets) about skewed distributions in GPA. </p>

<p>You’re also making some pretty bold (and erroneous) assumptions about administration only from elite schools wanting to increase endowments and only faculty from public schools putting teaching as a secondary priority behind research–but I’ll get into that later.</p>

<p>@Oyama: The thing is, these GPA’s aren’t obtained in the same environment. If a student earned a B+ at UC San Diego with X amount of hard work, do you think they will get that same B+ with X amount of hard work at Cal or MIT? There’s a slim chance, but most likely, they probably won’t. The thing is that the average GPA at a school at one point in time doesn’t tell you about the inflation or deflation. Just because X>Y does not mean X is more inflated than Y. It means the grades given were, on average, higher, but if the students at that school deserved an even HIGHER GPA than the average, then it is deflated. The grade you get is the result of: the competition and environment (Curve based on class performance or no?), the circumstances in which you earned the grade (Did you work really hard for it or did you slack off?), and the circumstances in which you received the grade (Despite slacking off, did you still get that A?)</p>

<p>If the average GPA at Cal SHOULD be higher, but isn’t because a 93% is a B in the class, then there is grade deflation. The reason why the average GPA is higher at Cal is because despite the skewed curves, the students still manage to get better grades.</p>

<p>If I worked hard enough to get a 92% in the class, but end up with a B+ when I deserved an A-, then my GPA drops. If this happens to everyone, do you think that, if the Cal students had the exact same grading curve as UC San Diego or UC Irvine, their average GPA would be EVEN HIGHER? The competition at Cal and UC San Diego and UC Irvine are all different.</p>

<p>If the average GPA at Duke should be lower, but it isn’t, then there is grade inflation. They’re curving the grades up and giving good grades to the students.</p>

<p>Many elite private schools do have a lot of grade inflation. If you have some logical reason/proof why/how many of the private schools (Harvard/Princeton/Duke) do not want to inflate their grades, then please say so. I’m not saying all elite private schools have grade inflation. I mentioned exceptions (MIT, Caltech, Cornell). Even Northwestern has some grade deflation (Organic Chemistry).</p>

<p>As for the “only faculty from public schools putting teaching as a second priority…” I said underfunded public schools such as the UC’s. I’m not assuming that all public schools are like that. In fact, I know that there are absolutely fabulous public schools out there with excellent teaching staff. The UC teaching quality is quite sub par. There are teachers there whose job is to teach, but the majority of the professors there care more about research than teaching.</p>

<p>I dont think you’re getting my point AceAites.</p>

<p>I put in X amount of work, and I’ll get a B at UCSD. If i put in X amount of work, i’ll probably get a C at Stanford. If i also put in X amount of work at a community college, i’ll probably get an A.</p>

<p>My point here is that if you get a certain GPA at a certain school, people will take into consideration the college you attended as well. A 3.0 at Stanford is favored over a 3.0 at UCSD. Prestige of the school should be the only area where a student’s workload should be depended on to make determining the capabilities of certain students easier for employers, and varying GPA’s between colleges will only make this more confusing.</p>

<p>Now if most schools give a GPA at around a 3.0, and one school out of the bunch decides to suddenly give students their average GPA a 3.5, then people will mistake a student’s capabilities because of the inflation. This is what I mean by grade inflation.</p>

<p>I’m hoping you noticed the link i posted. You can clearly see a steady increase in the inflation of the GPA of certain schools while other schools like UCSD has remained steady at 3.0. I hope you can provide an explanation for why this happens. Did students at these schools all tend to work harder these last few years(thus in your opinion, should deserve a higher GPA) while other schools like UCSD had students who performed at the same work load?</p>

<p>You can make the argument that students in the present work much harder than students in the past, thus in your opinion, they deserve a higher GPA. But how will you be able to explain the GPA of students from other schools who keep the average GPA the same while they too work harder as well?</p>

<p>My apologies. That was a bad example to use. Let me try to clarify what I mean.</p>

<p>I do understand what you’re saying. You’re referring to the upward GPA averages of Berkeley. From sub 3.0 to a 3.2. Yes, this would be a slight inflation of grades on Berkeley. But saying that Berkeley is grade inflated in and of itself isn’t true.</p>

<p>What I’m referring to when I say that Berkeley is grade deflated is that the grades (and thus the average GPA) is being pushed down. Even by Berkeley’s standards, grades are deflated in the school, in order to try to reach that average GPA. </p>

<p>If the students at School A really earned an average GPA of a 3.0, but then the grades are curved and raised to a 3.3, that would mean that school has grade inflation. The GPA average we see is an inflation of the grades they actually earned (Because some teachers hand out grades more easily)</p>

<p>If the students at School B earned an average GPA of 3.5 (by their standards not the standards at other schools), yet the curve goes against them and the professor gives out harsher grades because too many people are doing too well, thus making the average GPA at the school a 3.2, well that’s grade deflation. The upward trend is that the deflation is getting less worse (grade inflating throughout the years which is what you were saying), but overall, still with grade deflation. </p>

<p>There are some schools who purposely curve their grades to get higher GPA average while other schools (like berkeley who make the GPA averages lower).</p>

<p>I guess I was getting confused because our definitions of grade inflation and deflation differed (yours a throughout the years term, mine the school as a whole in general). For example, let’s use the economy:</p>

<p>My definition: The economy of the US is suffering inflation. (The US Money is worth very little, much less than what it is supposed to be worth)</p>

<p>Your definition: The economy has been going through inflation for a decade now. (The US dollar is worth less and less each year. BUT, for all we know, the US could be suffering from serious deflation and is just recovering with inflation).</p>

<p>Different definitions, I guess. </p>

<p>And no, this isn’t a prestige thing at all. As I’ve said many times, and I will say it again, there are top schools with grade inflation (my definition as a whole, not yours throughout the years). Getting a high GPA at, let’s say UCLA, is probably harder than getting a high GPA at Brown. They don’t artificially lower your grade in order to weed you out. What you get is what you deserve or better, since they do curve grades higher than you would expect.</p>

<p>The only class I’ve taken where grade deflation was a problem was ECON 1. I will never stop being bitter about the midterm I got a 95% on that was worth a B+. Otherwise, most classes grade on a curve that’s fair and usually helps you rather than hurts you. </p>

<p>As for the competitiveness of students- my experience has been exactly the opposite. I’ve actually been impressed by how willing to collaborate students are. In a lot of classes, people will set up facebook groups or google docs to share notes and do the study guide for exams together, and among my friends, I’ve always had people willing to exchange notes, proofread papers, explain concepts I didn’t understand, and generally work to improve each other’s grade in the class, and I’ve been willing to do the same for them. I’m speaking from experience as a polisci major who has taken classes predominantly in the social sciences, so take that into account, but I’ve found that to be the case even in the computer engineering and biology classes I’ve taken.</p>

<p>@AceAites
You bring up valid points, but I find that there are too many assumptions needed to be made about each individual school.</p>

<p>I just find that it makes more sense for all schools too give out an average GPA of about 3.0 for each school, no matter how hard the school works. This way, employers as well as grad school have a better way to judge applicants. Having a school who has students who work extremely hard would then be reflected in the prestige and the name of the school instead. Just my opinion at least.</p>

<p>AceAites, I have a pretty strong hunch you’re using a definition of inflation that deviates from the classic economics use.</p>

<p>Inflation in the classical derivation is the rising of some variable X in respect to a given standard. In economics, this standard is purchasing power. The reason we can continuously raise prices over the years (compare prices from the early 1900s to now) while also saying we’re not experiencing inflation is because the increase in money supply, for the most part, covaried with the increase in both prices of goods and market wages (thus maintaining some standard of purchasing power with respect to units of labor). Inflation happens when the growth of the money supply outpaces wage growth, driving down the rate of purchasing power. Inflation can be modeled using temporal markers to create parity between purchasing power at time 1 and at time X. </p>

<p>What is the standard in GPA? It’s debating, but I argue it’s the standard to which one school considers to be “average”. Average takes on one of two meanings: mean or median. If we assume a normal distribution (we don’t have to make any assumptions about the steepness or dispersion of the distribution), then mean ~= median. If we take a second weak assumption that there exists some standard “average” that all schools should acknowledge, then deviations from this standard (Standard - SchoolAverage) would imply either relative inflation (represented by [Standard - SchoolAverage] < 0), deflation (represented by [Standard - SchoolAverage] > 0), or relative normality (Standard ~= SchoolAverage)].</p>

<p>Given this, we can either exogenously define a standard (say 3.0) or we can compute the actual population mean (arithmetic or geometric mean of all schools in this sample) to standardize all other comparisons. Following this, schools that have a GPA average that falls significantly to the right-half of the distribution are then defined as locales of relative inflation (in that they meet the criteria set by [Standard - SchoolAverage] < 0) or deflation (following from the obverse). </p>

<p>Anyway, I spent way too much time on this and I have a lot of research to catch up on. Whatever the case, you can’t draw logical conclusions about how effort maps onto GPAs at different schools because there are variable effects that go on in every school. There are aggregate patterns that can be inferred by data, but there is no ubiquitous way to quantify how X units of effort map onto Grades in different schools.</p>

<p>^ And this is why I went into science o.O</p>

<p>Haha there’s a reason why I’m doing my PhD at a business school rather than a typical economics department. We’re more onto the application and less into the formal analysis.</p>

<p>And you’re one to talk, nerdstrina :P</p>