MIT vs. Princeton Pre-med (grade inflation)

norcalguy
Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:22 +0000

I actually spent a good half hour looking for statistics from the schools you mentioned but couldn’t find them. If you know the stats, I’d be very interested to hear them. But for the sake of argument let’s say the schools you mentioned have GPAs which are the same as Princeton. Then we have it harder because we are competing against students who are on average more academically capable, and yet our curve is the same.



…except I’m not sure 50 points on the SAT makes much of a difference when you are already talking about high SAT scores. If I let you hang out with two different people for a year, are you going to be able to accurately deduce which one has the 1450 and which one has the 1400 SAT score?

The reason I singled out MIT, UChicago, and Cal Tech for possible grade deflation is not due to the high caliber of students (although their students have high SAT scores) or even by median GPA’s (which are not available) but for their unique academic environments and the uniqueness/attitudes of their students. If I let you hang out with a physics major from Princeton and a physics major from Cal Tech, I think you will be able to guess which is which. There is a different attitude (less pre-professional and more academic) among these students which make these schools tough.

Although you are correct that complete and accurate GPA data for most top colleges are not available (beyond the somewhat sketchy and outdated data on gradeinflation.com) so it’s impossible to assert that one top college is tougher compared to another top college by grades alone. That was my point all along.