Urgent: Is Davidson too hard?

AlmostThere2018
Thu, 29 Oct 2020 22:06:33 +0000

My daughter is a current student at Davidson so I’ll chime in. The case making around grade deflation is hard for me to concretely grasp b/c GPA is really just a number – it represents a distribution of grades and does not measure or account for the underlying student work that goes into getting certain grades, if that makes sense.

What I mean is that two colleges could have similar mean GPAs but the amount of student effort to attain those grades is not the same. I think what @hesmith96 might be saying is that b/c expectations are very high at Davidson, and because Davidson attracts top students, students put in a lot of work at the college. They likely feel that to attain the same As and Bs at another college they would not have to put in the same amount of work.

** But** this is a pretty difficult thing to know/say for sure. I feel like I’ve seen a study comparing how many hours students study at colleges somewhere along the line? Not sure.

Anyway, my basic point is that GPA is not a great indicator of a college’s difficulty and that grade deflation is not, in my opinion, a very good term to communicate what we’re talking about.

Anecdotally, my daughter has done very well at Davidson. She works extremely hard. Her friends mostly also work extremely hard. She had a handful of friends her first year who really struggled, but most did fine. As @hesmith96 says, they seemed to adjust to the workload overall. It’s part of the college’s culture.

Is this technically grade deflation? Probably not. Are there high expectations and do students work really hard to get those As and Bs they end up getting? Absolutely. Do they work harder than at other schools? My gut says yes, but I can’t point to any evidence to support that.

Finally, I have zero knowledge about how difficulty compares across majors, just for the record.