poor grades?

[jd212]

I read a blurb today that one of Harvard's All-Ivy guards on the basketball team has to leave the school (or at least the team) because of poor grades. Now, can someone explain to me how that works at Harvard? Does that mean he didn't make the honors list?

[Adam \'01]

Maybe he kept showing up at MIT lectures by accident. :-))

[RichS]

How does it work at cornell?

[Adam \'04]

Professors give C's, D's and F's more frequently than A's. How does it work at Clarkson?

[Greg Berge]

I seriously doubt our professors give F's more often than A's.

BTW, did anyone else go to a school district that gave E's and not F's?  Mine (District 3 Long Island, Huntington) did.  I think it had to do with self-esteem (i.e., F = "Failure", although by extension what did they think E meant, "Easy Going"?).

[Adam \'04]

Wines?

[CUlater \'89]

I think Adam meant that, cumulatively, there are more C's, D's and F's given than A's.

[Adam \'04]

Exactly!:-D

[Give My Regards]

Yeah, my school district (Central Bucks, near Philly) gave E's and F's for at least one year.  F was the usual failing grade; E wasn't given too often but was meant to acknowledge the student who at least put some effort into the course, even though he/she didn't pass it (so E stood for "ehh, you tried.")  I don't believe there was any difference cume-wise between an E and an F.  No, I don't know what the point was, other than self-Esteem.

[gwm3]

I still don't think it's true that there are more C's, D's, and F's at Cornell than A's.  I think Cornell's curve is skewed very heavily towards A's and B's. (I know of no one at Cornell during my time there that had a GPA below 3.0 for their whole four years.)  C's are outliers, D's and F's virtually impossible to get without some effort.

Obviously this is just my personal observation.  I challenge someone to produce some hard evidence to refute it.

[Beeeej]

[q](I know of no one at Cornell during my time there that had a GPA below 3.0 for their whole four years.) C's are outliers, D's and F's virtually impossible to get without some effort.[/q]

*giggle*  I guess I did work pretty hard at it.

Luckily, I'm taking law school a little more seriously.

Beeeej

[curoadkill]

Five seconds on Google produced:

Data

Data cataloguing grade distribution between 1965 and 2000 reveals that the number of A's awarded to Cornell students has more than doubled in percentage while the percentage of grades in the B, C, D and F ranges has consequently dropped.

In 1965, 17.5 percent of grades distributed to students were A's, while in 2000, A's constituted over 40 percent of the grades received by Cornell undergraduates. This dramatic data strongly suggests that the University is experiencing the phenomenon of grade inflation.

http://www.cornelldailysun.com/articles/5320/

[gwm3]

See, there's no need to look anything up when you can make a correct generalization from personal experience alone  :-P

[Jim Hyla]

[Q]In 1965, 17.5 percent of grades distributed to students were A's[/Q]Yeah, back in the good old days when an A was an A.:-D

[Adam \'04]

From my personal experience in large science classes, at least half the class gets a B- or lower. The median is usually set exactly at a B/B- or C+/B-. We are graded strictly off of the median by the total standard deviation. I don't know what kind of classes you and your friends took, but I know for a fact that getting a dev. in a science class is not all that easy. You do the math and tell me the percentage of the class that gets an A.