Nearly half of all college grades are A's

[mrcockburn]

Shouldnt scoring A be scoring 100% correct(or very close to it)? I kinda doubt that half are scoring 100% correct on tests and if they are, it only shows that the tests are way too easy and dont leave room to get better for people doing alot of studuying and/or are naturally gifted with the subject.

90-100% is an A.

Although technically, 90-94% is usually an A-.

Average grades for tests in my class range from 50-70%. And there is no curving.

 

[rhinosaur]

This problem can be boiled down to retention. Students who get Ds drop out. Most schools are navigating a huge budget crisis and need paying students to keep them afloat. If you give dumb and/or lazy D students Cs they will stay and they will pay. It's not that admins see this as super moral, but what would you do in their shoes? Don't forget how many hard working, committed, growth-oriented students they also have a responsibility for. Resources have to come from somewhere to make sure they have professors, classrooms and labs, electricity to run huge campuses, etc.

Not entirely retention, it's also about reputation. As a grad student TA teaching Phys Chem, there was definitely a motivation to go easy on them: Your undergraduate GPA will, in effect, haunt you-- and by proxy, the school-- for the rest of your life. Since this was a large public university getting lots of taxpayer money, they weren't all that concerned about retention. Personally, though, I'm a hard-ass, so after going easy on them, my grade distributions found a nice middle ground somewhere around 60-70% average, if I recall correctly. It was possible to get an A, and several people did each semester, but you had to earn it the hard way.

 

[King sns]

They said only one person of 56 graduated my class with an A. (But warned us ahead of time that people who normally ace things will not do so in the program- leading to a lot of nervous breakdowns of course.)

 

[mrcockburn]

Yeah my GPA is a shitty 3.1.

Can't be that easy to get A's...or maybe I really am that dumb.

 

[citizen cane]

Who in their right mind would spend several times more money on a 'private' education if they weren't expected to get better grades than they would at a 'public' institution?

My thoughts exactly. I doubt employers will actually pay attention to this, so graduates of private colleges will likely continue to reap more benefits from name recognition. My guess is it all comes down to this for a lot of students deciding whether to go for the economical college choice or the costly choice with similar academic standards...but maybe I'm giving people too much credit; they do a lot of dumb shit.

 

[prplchknz]

Yeah my GPA is a shitty 3.1.

Can't be that easy to get A's...or maybe I really am that dumb.

shut up 3.1 isn't bad. I'm not mentioning my gpa because it's embarrasing but i will say it's less than 3.1 but i had external factors that are just now being addressed.

 

[NPcomplete]

Yeah, I should add that this was in biology. I can't really speak to what it was in the arts. Unlike most people I didn't actually find that I got higher marks in the psych/sociology classes I took than I did in my hard science classes - about the same really. In some cases I actually did worse when the expectations for essays etc were unclear (whereas biology is very straightforward marking-wise!). On the other hand, I studied substantially less for the fluff courses, so maybe that's why.

Haha oh man, yes. Apparently adding graphs that show the decreasing volume of the Pyramids throughout the ages in a paper is strange but adding pictures that could be interpreted in a zillion ways is not. Also taking 1 page to explain something that should require only 1/3 of a page (or less) is thoroughly encouraged.
/little rant

In my engineering classes, the published averages would be between C+ and B+. I think there was an A- average only once and that was for the fourth-year thesis but that's understandable, since profs can be extremely selective when accepting to supervise students. In grad school, most students would get at least an A- though, probably for the same reason as the undergrad thesis A-.

My elective classes from the arts department were different. You could get good grades with less effort (I felt) but there was no definite trend with the class averages. Some were still in the C+ B- range whereas in other classes, it would be in the B B+ range. But I did hear of some classes though which pretty much guaranteed at least an A but it was hard to get in because of the long lists..

So I'd say it depends.

 

[mrcockburn]

shut up 3.1 isn't bad. I'm not mentioning my gpa because it's embarrasing but i will say it's less than 3.1 but i had external factors that are just now being addressed.

I personally think that simply passing suffices, but if you want to get into an Ivy League MBA program, you won't even be looked at with less than a 3.7.

And external factors...yeah. That's a grade killer. I work 60+ hours a week on top of being a double-major, and I'm also an officer at a Greek organization and am trying to work on a patent (which got rejected, sigh) and am also pursuing certain hobbies.

Ironically, that's why I fuck around here so much - I never get extended time periods to relax, so I keep my sanity by taking mini-breaks frequently throughout my workday.

And skipping class if need be. Which is very frequent.

= death to GPA if participation/memorization of lecture counts for the class.

3 hours of sleep on average probably doesn't help. Now 8 hours would feel like too much. =_=

 

[mrcockburn]

shut up 3.1 isn't bad. I'm not mentioning my gpa because it's embarrasing but i will say it's less than 3.1 but i had external factors that are just now being addressed.

I personally think that simply passing suffices, but if you want to get into an Ivy League MBA program, you won't even be looked at with less than a 3.7.

And external factors...yeah. That's a grade killer. I work 60+ hours a week on top of being a double-major, and I'm also an officer at a Greek organization and am trying to work on a patent (which got rejected, grrr) and am also pursuing certain hobbies.

Ironically, that's why I fuck around here so much - I never get extended time periods to relax, so I keep my sanity by taking mini-breaks frequently throughout my workday.

And skipping class if need be. Which is very frequent.

= death to GPA if participation/memorization of lecture counts for the class.

 

[celesul]

So, a lot of programs judge you on your GPA if you want to go to grad school or med school... My college is known to have surprisingly few pre-meds and no happy ones, not because so few people get A's here, but because the people who fail out of my school could graduate with straight A's in two or three years from a state uni. This realization generally makes us question what the hell we're doing here ^.^ So, there are classes with a lot of A's, but all only give it with a lot of work... We are unable to graduate in four years unless we take classes that give us an official expectation of 40 hours of work per week, at least, which means most people take 45 minimum, which is 5 classes. I dunno. Everyone here got near straight A's in high school. We all aced everything. There are classes where the grading scheme is that the bottom five fail (or rather, the bottom five fail unless they get a certain percent, which has never happened before). Going from easily the top of our high school classes to, for half of us, below average, is rough. A lot of the people I know here have failed classes. It's easier for me to think of people who have failed things than those who haven't. (And the ones who haven't dropped a class they would have at some point, generally). So...

Then again, I go to a science school. If I went to a humanities one, maybe my impression of college grades would be very different. But here at least, they are pretty generous with F's.

 

[crayons]

There wasn't much grade inflation in my major, then again I saw tons of unhappy premeds. I didn't know it but my college bio sci branch was the favored premed major, had I know that I'd pick a different school. Despite this, the average in most of my classes was a C and the valedictorian had a 3.8. No idea about humanities, it seemed at the upper undergraduate level it wasn't cake, or at least it wasn't in ethnic studies.

At my community college grades were super inflated in most intro courses. My first calc class was an exception since only 7/30 passed and the professor refused to address the grades.

I barely cleared a 3.0 in the last 2 yrs of college. That and my limited lab experience (spent most of those 2 years internship hunting) makes me feel extremely nervous about my upcoming application to graduate school. I feel like the adcoms will LOL at my application (and stupidity) and insta-toss it in the trash. I graduated in <4 years so I wonder if that will help me.

 

[rhinosaur]

Everyone here got near straight A's in high school. We all aced everything. There are classes where the grading scheme is that the bottom five fail (or rather, the bottom five fail unless they get a certain percent, which has never happened before). Going from easily the top of our high school classes to, for half of us, below average, is rough.

That's how it is, though. The top High School students are the average college students. The top college students are the average graduate students.

What makes you think you'd get a better grade at the State school?

 

[FDG]

Wow, at my high school grades were definitely not all As. I noticed "grade inflation" only during grad school (master's, not phd), but in my high school class only one person (not me) got 100/100, which is the "perfect" score. Only 3 of us got more than 90/100.

 

[celesul]

I'm quite certain I'd do better because our core requirements (which we complete entirely in the first two years) cover all of the requirements for a math and a physics major at a decent number of state schools. We must take more than 4 classes a term to graduate on time. To graduate, we have to pass quantum physics. These are just the general requirements. The in major requirements are often much harder. However, we get offered jobs at career fairs without even graduating. I want to go into CS, but anyone here can easily just became a quant and make tons of money. So... yeah. I've compared my required workload with others (mostly at MIT and UChicago, but also Ohio State and UMichigan and the Ivys), and I haven't found a workload harder than this.

Anyway, the top 1% of high school students (I'll measure by SAT in this case, even though it's not the best metric. It's correlated though.) are only the average college students at the top colleges. I'm not talking above average. I'm saying that being at the bottom of the top 1% here means you aren't good enough to avoid struggling. Actually, because of the way things are structured, it's more a matter of when you'll hit your limit here, not if you will, even if you are the top of the 1%. I know no one who here who hasn't learned here that they have lower limits than they thought. Even the smartest among us (and the smartest among us are actually geniuses beyond comprehension) find that they cannot do everything.

A state school is not intended to cater to the top 1%. It's more like the top 10% for a good one I think. If I look at the numbers, I'd be at least in the top 10% of a good state school. That's far enough average that I'd probably do well. Also, looking at the numbers is probably good for me... We joke that before we get here, we think we're brilliant. Here, we think we're idiots. After we graduate, we think everyone else is.

 

[Glycerine]

Haha, I regret not trying to get into a more difficult university. The difficulty level of my school seems to be a joke almost and it's a ridiculously expensive private school. I can cram for a few hours without reading much the material and I can still get an A. I have taken some of the "difficult" profs that people have told me to avoid and typically get 90+% with little effort.........I worked harder in high school. One of the profs gives us ALL the questions to the test and people still complain about how difficult the class is.........

 

[mrcockburn]

Haha, I regret not trying to get into a more difficult university. The difficulty level of my school seems to be a joke almost and it's a ridiculously expensive private school. I can cram for a few hours without reading much the material and I can still get an A. I have taken some of the "difficult" profs that people have told me to avoid and typically get 90+% with little effort.........I worked harder in high school. One of the profs gives us ALL the questions to the test and people still complain about how difficult the class is.........

Lucky. We don't even get any study aids, much less answers to go along with it.

This whole fucking thread is depressing me, since judging by it, I'm probably in the bottom 1% academically.

Yet I actually do study at least 2 hours right before accounting tests, and still fail or barely pass. Just don't have it in me.

Fuck my accounting major, fuck school, fuck everything. I'm so tempted to drop out and just hustle my way through life.

 

[Glycerine]

Lucky. We don't even get any study aids, much less answers to go along with it.

This whole fucking thread is depressing me, since judging by it, I'm probably in the bottom 1% academically.

Yet I actually do study at least 2 hours right before accounting tests, and still fail or barely pass. Just don't have it in me.

Fuck my accounting major, fuck school, fuck everything. I'm so tempted to drop out and just hustle my way through life.

Don't be so hard on yourself. You sound like you are constantly busy. For me, even though I find my classes pretty easy, I don't have to do anything but focus on school (I spend anywhere from 2-10 hours studying per test). If I was busy as you, I suspect my GPA would be significantly lower. If you want a higher GPA, become a little less busy. You have to sacrifice for what you want, basically. I basically sacrificed my social life for sleep and grades.

3.1 is nowhere near the bottom 1%... I suspect it's at least in the top half.

 

[Haight]

That's how it is, though. The top High School students are the average college students. The top college students are the average graduate students.

I'm not following.

So the average High School students became the top college students? Obviously, the bottom High School students didn't make it into college, so that's the only reasonable answer.

 

[EJCC]

Speaking as a college instructor, the problem is that when everyone in the community has redefined what those letters mean, to give grades according to the old meaning is problematic. It's like saying "gay" only means "happy." It doesn't, and you can't impose that old meaning onto today's standards without knowingly bucking them.

So true. Speaking as a college student I totally see that. A's are like both A's and B's, B's are like C's, and C's are like failing/D's.

Totally different standard now. I wonder how that came about?

 

[Rail Tracer]

C's get degrees, but there is also the major that you are settling in.

Majors like Nursing? Their mission is to try to fail, every, single, one, of, you.

In majors like art and graphic design, it is less about grades and more about your work. You may get A's, but it doesn't mean your work is great. In fact, even if you get an A in all your classes, it doesn't mean crap if you can't get into upper division graphic design (here.... graphic design is VERY competitive, if nursing is competitive by grades, graphic design is competitive by the small amount of space available and the fact that your work is being graded.)

I'm not following.

So the average High School students became the top college students? Obviously, the bottom High School students didn't make it into college, so that's the only reasonable answer.