Rigor of Rice's Grading system?

zSquared
Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:55:19 +0000

If my experience here so far is any indication, Rice doesn’t practice grade inflation at all, even if the average undergraduate GPA is quite high.

In one of my math classes, for instance, there is no partial credit for wrong answers–and it’s enforced very literally. There’s no curve, either. This is “sort of” a graduate-level course filled with half undergraduates, half graduate students (in mathematics). I say “sort of” because it’s offered as a 400 level course. The math department here puts a number of courses designed to prepare graduate students for the Ph.D. qualifying exams in mathematics as 400-level for some reason.

Rice has some mechanisms in place to help you out, though. During your first semester (either as a freshman or a transfer) you can drop any class up until the last day of classes with no consequences. You are also allowed up to four pass/fails in non-major classes, and if you end up doing well in a class that you had declared pass/fail you can revert it, take the good grade, and get the pass/fail back.

Further, I’ve been a student both here at Rice and a pretty ordinary state university (I transferred), and I can say that the professors I’ve had here at Rice tend to be a lot more open to extra credit projects, etc (including the professor who does not give partial credit). That said, most of my classes are advanced/graduate-level math courses, so this could be a peculiarity of the math department here–I don’t want to make any undue generalizations.