Vanderbilt Bio/Premed major

bernie12
Wed, 07 Oct 2015 13:29:11 +0000

The schools should focus on content and not weird grading schemes to inflate or deflate or uninflate grades. HYP and many other schools embarrass students with the content in the sciences. As in, “let us make lectures and exams that show you how much you don’t know how to do yet and where you need to get”. They may get decent grades at the end, but they will fight their way through it and have to get over not getting 100 (or even 90) on a test. What is humbling to see is when a sophomore or junior science major runs into their first truly challenging instructor content and exam style wise. They have a near 4.0 GPA, got A grades in all other science classes, hit ochem or biochemistry with an instructor that asks for deep problem solving skills, takes first exam and hits the mean (in a class where like a 78-79 puts you in the upper range) or scores even lower. Now THAT knocks humility into the student whether class is curved up or not. Many of course experience this earlier on at elite schools. These are of course the AP credit “babies” I speak of (who get the surprise B in the class they are retaking because they thought it would be a good review or that their AP credit automatically meant “A”). I prefer schools with many teachers that simply tell students that “your thinking and problem solving is not at the level we want it yet” more so than “we give relatively standard but highstakes exams that are not balanced by other components and we don’t curve generously”. Unfortunately, even at many selective private schools the latter is the case for intros. This pack will be weeded out because of grades and the former pack gets winnowed down because they simply get tired of that level of intensity. Typically those in the former category demand a lot more out of class assignments as well that help the grade but add to stress, especially when they are challenging assignments. Regardless of what I prefer, all these top privates have methods of weeding out. Selective schools are actually bigger weedout machines than much less selective counterparts. Even Stanford and Yale, grade inflation and all, manage to get rid of a huge chunk (Stanford actually has a reputation for bad intro. science classes like gen. chem and when I say bad, it used to be very poorly run).