<p>For example, is a 3.7 GPA at Princeton regarded as highly as a 3.9 GPA at Harvard?
Another example, if one wants to get a job after undergraduate school, and is competing with someone else with a better GPA(from another college), does he have a great shot of getting the job?
How much is the legend about grade deflation at Princeton true?
If your grades are bad, in spite of your intelligence and hard work, how do the students have a good happy time at this institution?</p>
<p>Anyone???</p>
<p>If you get a good GPA, then this question is irrelevant.</p>
<p>If you have a not-good GPA, then no one could tell you the answer to the question anyway, so your fears are still irrelevant.</p>
<p>I couldnt tell you about the deflation or the Harvard/Princeton GPA conversion chart you seem to be looking for, but I’m sure a 3.7 at Princeton could work anywhere he/she wanted to.</p>
<p>@FutureVpFinance: I wouldn’t go that far.</p>
<p>Provided that you receive honors designations that place you in the top quarter or top tenth of your class, you won’t have to worry about GPA.</p>
<p>@kwu: The only university-wide honors designation is Phi Beta Kappa. All Latin honors designations are given only within departments and, consequently, only take departmental grades, junior papers, senior theses, and departmental exams into account. Quintile ranks are not officially released on students’ transcripts, either. </p>
<p>@OP: That is precisely our main concern with respect to grade deflation. Many Princeton kids vie for the high-powered internships and jobs that are so popular with students from Harvard and Yale; however, many feel that our current grading scheme puts us at a disadvantage for these positions. In the eyes of employers, there is little difference between H,Y, and P where prestige is concerned; hence, it is generally assumed that a Princeton GPA of 3.7 is compared to a 3.7 at Yale and Harvard. When one takes Princeton’s tougher grading policies into account, this would seem to put us at a disadvantage relative to other applicants from Harvard and Yale.</p>
<p>Lower GPA will mean less impressive resume, which will follow you throughout your 20s.</p>
<p>Princeton has a pamphlet (I’m not sure if it’s on the internet, they sent it to me in the mail) that show the data on the acceptance rates to law/med school and employment rate of it’s undergraduates and it has been relatively unaffected. Of course, due to the recession, it is down a little, especially in financial jobs, but no more than it has been across the board at other institutions. Princeton sends a pamphlet explaining the system with every transcript sent to a potential employer/law school/med school, so all the admission departments and corporate recruiters know about it.</p>
<p>No offense, but I doubt any of the 30+ investment bankers I interviewed with received a pamphlet from Princeton (fyi, most firms do not have one person whose full-time job is to interview and make hiring decisions - the people who you would be working under will be the ones interviewing and making decisions). If by “corporate recruiters” you mean the human resources people, who cares since they have no say in whether you get the job? If you meant the professionals involved in the recruiting process, then that’s ludicrous because there are hundreds of millions of corporate professionals out there, and I don’t think Princeton wiped out a forest to print pamphlets to send to every single corporate employee in the world.</p>
<p>The letter on grading policy is included with any official transcript that Princeton sends out, so probably accompanies the transcript to the desk of anyone looking at it. Those who hire repeatedly, will have read the letter once and only glance at it to be reminded of its message. It’s impossible to say what affect the information will have, if any, in a particular situation, but whether someone does or doesn’t get hired from HYP, probably has a lot more to do with other factors that a .2 difference in gpa.</p>
<p>Are you kidding me, a 0.2 difference in GPA can easily be the difference between hire and non-hire in the competitive environment of the industry I’m going into (finance). The difference between a 3.5 and a 3.7 is so damn large on a resume, it could easily be the difference between bulge bracket job and unemployed at graduation. Sorry to burst your bubble, but no one who had any real hiring capacity had any clue about grade deflation, except the ones who were Princeton alums. No one ever mails transcripts anymore either when applying to jobs, at least not any that I’ve applied to both on and off TigerTracks (including consulting jobs and a wide range of finance jobs). You think that Vice President looking over your resume also checks to make sure your calculated your GPA right? Nope. HR takes care of that, and their influence is so small it’s like an ant trying to move a mountain. Not that the ant would even care to work on moving the mountain because of “grade deflation” anyway.</p>
<p>I happened to have a very strong GPA so I got very lucky, but I know tons of classmates who got crushed because of low GPAs. Everyone thinks life’s all flowers and kisses after you get into Princeton/Harvard/Yale, it’s not so.</p>
<p>When I was a freshman/sophomore and people told me grade deflation’s not a big deal because of blah blah blah, I was skeptical but I had no experience with employment to back up my arguments with. But now I’m a rising senior who has gone through the recruiting process twice (summer internships after junior year is 70% of the recruiting for finance since they usually end up back with the firm they summered with), and I know firsthand how things work. A pamphlet doesn’t make a low GPA go away, believe me. Most of your employers will not be Princeton grads who think highly of Princeton GPAs and lowly of Harvard’s. To most of them, a 3.9 at Harvard beats a 3.7 at Princeton any day without question.</p>
<p>Threads like this revive my desire to transfer out of Princeton.</p>
<p>I always get the sense that people most worried about grade deflation policies are those who expect to be victims of it. If you go in expecting to do well, you work sufficiently hard, and you do as you expected, then the policy is a non-factor. Too many people expect to skate by like in high school and get a 3.9. It won’t happen. At my undergrad, JHU, which is also a supposed grade deflator, I didn’t do well by relaxing. I never expected the grade deflation to affect me because I knew I could, and should get A’s if I put in the work. Bottom line: don’t go in expecting to coast, and don’t go in expecting to fail. If you’re worried about grade deflation affecting you before you even start, maybe Princeton isn’t right for you.</p>
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<p>Randomtech, I don’t want to argue with you because I am not in that world and your experience is your experience but my point was, that at interviews, personality has a lot more to do with the decision, I’m guessing even in/especially in finance. You are probably right that GPA is quite important for the initial screening and getting you to the interview–done by HR as you say, which should be familiar with Princeton’s policy, but interviews exist precisely for employers to gauge the style and personal qualities of an applicant, and as someone who has been through both sides of the interview process, I believe those are the determining factors. (Do you think that same VP you cited is really going to choose based on the number on the paper rather than his gut instinct after talking with the applicant?)</p>
<p>The fact is that jobs are scarce for recent grads from everywhere now (maybe especially in finance?) so there are multiple factors that can rule out a candidate for a position when there are hundreds of applications for each opening, I just don’t think you can attribute the difficulties for Princeton grads to having attended the wrong school.</p>
<p>If you don’t think you can meet a threshold of performance which you consider as ‘success’ at Princeton, don’t go there.</p>
<p>I doubt if any high-powered recruiters or admissions staff at top law and medical schools are so stupid and ignorant as to pass up Princeton graduates for this reason.</p>
<p>“I doubt if any high-powered recruiters or admissions staff at top law and medical schools are so stupid and ignorant as to pass up Princeton graduates for this reason.”</p>
<p>GPA is one of the most used pre-screen criteria to select candidate for interview. Good luck with a 3.1 from Princeton (the average GPA for natural science in Princeton) to apply for med school.</p>
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<p>Trust me, the VP will care about GPA. If he doesn’t then he’s a moron. The VP in charge of recruiting for my group at the investment bank I interned specifically told the analysts in our group, “no, we can’t take this person as a first year analyst because his GPA is too low, and I don’t want to take that risk.” Even though all the analysts strongly supported him, the VP refused to let him into his group solely because of GPA.</p>
<p>Bottom line: GPA matters even when you pass to the interview stage for most interviewers. Obviously personal qualities are important too, but when it comes to breaking into a competitive field, you have to both look good on paper and shine in person.</p>
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<p>You were asked on the other thread to cite your source for this statistic. It seems random to me, especially since the grade deflation policy was established to standardize grading across departments, so that if the average gpa for humanities majors is currently 3.4, it should be around that for science majors as well.</p>