Wharton and CAS curves

Poeme
Fri, 23 May 2014 04:36:22 +0000

@Madaboutx‌ it’s not harsh for a kid to have to experience having to work hard for a B, it’s reality. Getting a B in a class doesn’t mean that you aren’t smart or can’t later master the material, it just means that you didn’t do as well as you wanted on the exams/assignments for a class. The sooner students learn this the better. If you really want to achieve great things, you will have to be able to conquer many obstacles in your way. The sooner you can learn how to do this the better.

My high school did not inflate grades, in fact I was in a math class that led to Calc BC junior year which only 40 students out of the 1000 students in my year took. Despite these students being some of the very best math students in the school, my teacher freshman year gave very few As and even Cs and Ds! Did it make me feel insecure when I didn’t get an A in freshman year math? Absolutely, it made me think I was horrible at math. This obviously had no basis in reality given I majored in physics at Penn and even minored in math. What was really going on was that the rate I processed information was no where near fast enough to finish the test.

While it was very discouraging to experience this my freshman year, it just made me stronger and more resilient. A lot of the students here seem to lack that or don’t learn it until later on.