Question about Cornell Life

LazyKid
Mon, 01 Aug 2011 04:17:09 +0000

I really think Cornellians should get over their defensiveness. Yes, Cornell has a problem with grade inflation. Yes, Cornell has started to address it. Step 1 was removing the median grade reports from the internet. I don’t mind if it institutes a school-wide grading policy like Princeton did. If the school has a problem, let’s not turn a blind eye to it. Princeton didn’t. Cornell shouldn’t either. And certainly, we shouldn’t be spending our time scaring prospective freshmen about how hard the school is.



I agree with norcal that there is a large ‘myth’, whether among students or non-students, that Cornell is like hellish hard. It is just not true. However, I did not run into many individuals constantly complaining of Cornell’s supposed rigor or difficulty. It may be becasue I was not math/science major. People in general seemed content with workload and their grades weren’t too far off from their expectations. However, my roomate in Soph year was an engineer, and I remember he did complain a lot about rough grading and brutal problem sets.

One of my ex-girlfriends went to Princeton. She seemed to have hard feelings with grade deflation policy at Princeton. In fact, she told me that many students complain constantly about their grades, like they would’ve gotten A’s at Brown or Yale instead. And, MIT is known to be a living nightmare among many students due to insanely harsh grading. At MIT, there is a largely circulated phrase among students, “IFHTP” - meaning, “I f-ing hate this place”, which reflects the school’s rough grading and coursework. So, I don’t think that Cornell is the only school with a population not happy with grading or school’s difficulty.