<p>H heard Princeton and Wake Forest are strongly encouraging/enforcing grade deflation. Are there other schools with grade deflation? Are the students at these institutions truly spending more time studying than their contemporaries at other schools?</p>
<p>Our son attends RPI which has a reputation for being tough academically and has coined the term C-vortex to humorously describe the phenomenon.</p>
<p>"The Curve, or as we like to think of it, the ``C’’ Vortex, is the root fault. In large classes, for example, the instructors will be attempting, whenever they make a test up, to insure that the grades achieved will fit nicely into a curve like this: 5% with F’s, 10% with D’s, 70% with C’s, 10% with B’s and 5% with A’s. If this doesn’t work out, then our friend the arbitrary constant will be added to the grades to bring them in line with these goals. In Math classes, there may also be multiplication by a different arbitrary constant, just to prove that the Math department can do arithmetic better than anybody else. </p>
<p>Many of you might be thinking to yourselves, <code>Hey, this is bogus!‘’ Think again. Look over your old physics course work; compare it with what the rest of your class did. Examine your efforts in relation to others while you take Engineering Courses. Think on this: Are you really doing anything all that much better than anybody else? Eventually you will see a pattern that spells</code>2.0’’ for your QPA. Keep this in mind when explaining your performance to the P & M. It is the curse of the curve."</p>
<p>All humor aside, students at RPI do work hard to excel, succeed and sometimes to merely keep their head above water. But that is the nature of most engineering and science majors. However our son has found out that it is not a 24/7 proposition. Yes he works hard from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon. But the weekends are a time to unwind and are typically free with the exception of midterms and major projects. And yes he does watch The Daily Show and the Colbert Repor(sic) every evening.</p>
<p>P’ton’s version of ‘deflation’ is capping A’s at 40% of the class. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Hopkins and the UCs have tough curves, particularly in the sciences.</p>
<p>actually, it is 35% As</p>
<p>Boston University has long been known for grade deflation. I prefer to view it as “grade reality”.</p>
<p>Whoa there, blue. I’m surprised at you. Or perhaps we all need to define terms here. I don’t know how each U defines deflation (if they do), but grading is a product of at least 3 factors: any standards formally imposed by the U itself (such as percentages), the difficulty of the course content itself, and the expectations of specific instructors – which can vary widely. Further coloring all this is the level of preparation/scholarship of the students within one course. That obviously plays into the first criterion I named, but is important whether or not percentages, curves, etc. are applied & enforced. One excellent student can obviously look less excellent in a competitive program which has a high admission bar (all admitted students being “super” students) – i.e., programs within already very rigorous & selective colleges.</p>
<p>35% is correct, sorry for the bad intell.</p>
<p>I don’t know if my daughter college actually had grade * deflation* but 85% of the class was in the top 5% of their high school, with an average GPA of 3.9, but the average GPA of college students is 2.9</p>
<p>Which is probably why my D had troubles with the curve</p>
<p>I believe Uchicago and Swarthmore are equally tough on grading as Reed</p>
<p>I sometimes wonder about the different purposes in grading.</p>
<p>For some it is a way to sort and rank students. For others it is to show that you have mastered the material. It is not unusual to think that a honors HS class can have 60% of a class master the objectives of a curriculum and get an A to show that accomplishment. You might argue the curriculum is to weak in that case but the grade is a by product of the curriculum and not used to rank students. What is the required knowledge here?</p>
<p>ON the other hand, if your goal is to sort and rank students then you will need a curve or a different way to grade and evaluate curriculum.</p>
<p>High achieving students like to compare to each other and parents love to rank, select, and sort. Others prefer to say hey I understand all these concepts and the grade refelcts it.</p>
<p>EK,
totally agree with your post #8. Places like Reed, Swat, Chicago, other upper tiers are going to represent a concentration of students of outstanding achievement, ability.</p>
<p>OTOH, some high schools (not saying your D’s) have rampant grade inflation, with virtually everbody in the class earning an A unless you blow it, in which case you get a B. It must be esp. hard to make an adjustment from such a h.s. to a very grade-deflated college – even if, in a particular student’s case, he or she <em>did</em> truly do “A” high school work. Nationally/internationally selective admissions yields a very different class composition than even a locally selective <em>private</em> high school, let alone a public h.s. – high-rent or low-rent.</p>
<p>Caltech also seems to be very rigorous.</p>
<p>I hate grading to a curve. If colleges have done a decent job selecting students and professors are doing a decent job teaching there’s no reason any student should be failing the course - except for extenuating circumstances such as illness. Grades should reflect whether or not a student knows the material. Period.</p>
<p>“sorry for the bad intell”…</p>
<p>No need to apologize…just wanted to clarify. According to my son, it is per dept. For upper classmen, it could be as high as 40%, but for lower classmen, it could be as low as 30%.</p>
<p>My son’s classes at Boston University have been graded based on grading criteria given as part of they class syllabus at the start of the course. His courses have not be graded on a curve. However, he has had to work hard to earn the grades he has gotten. It’s not all that easy to get an A which is for superior work. Many of DS’s friends were top students in high school and did not receive grades lower than A’s. They have not had this experience in college. Many (in fact most) have gotten their first B’s in their lifetimes and (gasp) even some B- and C+ grades also. DS knows kids who have gotten D’s and F’s too, but he says that has not been that common amongst his friends and those he knows. Still…the grading standards at BU are considered to be more lofty than at other institutions. Simply put, the profs hold their students to a higher standard when grading…but the kids KNOW the expectation up front. I have no problem with this and neither does DS.</p>
<p>Grading whether or not a student has learned the material is called pass/fail. Grading how <em>well</em> a student has learned results in traditional letter grades. </p>
<p>A friend’s daughter attending a well-known LAC was in the group of 46% of freshmen who got straight A’s. The faculty was having a debate as to whether there was a problem with this non-curve system.</p>
<p>Within a particular school each department may have different grading standards as well. For example, in my S’s concentration a 3.0 gets one considered for honors, in another department in the same school it’s a 3.6. About the same percentage of students obtain honors in both. Looking at the various department requirements for honors is often a good way of getting a feel for the grading policy of the department. It is by no means fool proof, but it is instructive.</p>
<p>I can attest to Wake’s grade deflation. It’s crazy…you have to work your butt off for an A-, and in a lot of classes, straight As are unheard of.</p>
<p>The good part is that you can get a 3.0 for the semester and still get Dean’s List, so that’s nice…</p>
<p>Curves tend to devalue good work too often.</p>
<p>If you get a 93% on an exam, you should not get a D because everyone else got a 95%… encouraging students to overachieve to get a grade that their parents back home believe is acceptable is pushing the envelope.</p>
<p>In one of my S’s courses he achieved a 94.5% and received a B+ (95 to 96.9 was an A-). A friend taking a course by the same title using the same text book at another top school, but doing less work, also achieved a 94.5%, received an A+ (though only an A goes on the transcript). The “curve” can, at times, be a little extreme.</p>
<p>D flunked spring semester of Ochem- because she did poorly on final- ( I expect she had slim room for error)
We spoke to the prof- he thought she was doing good work- but agreed that to retake Ochem at same time as writing thesis ( senior year) was too much.
She took a year off- retook the year of Ochem at another school- ( as well as taking biochem & working) and got an A.
Unfortunately, her F would only have been dropped or even averaged if she had retaken it at Reed.
So her F stands- she did graduate though- but hasn’t taken GRE.</p>