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Re: Grades at Princeton (Was: UCLA physics course (non-rant))



At 8:07 PM -0400 10/12/99, Jon Bell wrote:
On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Richard Tarara wrote:

Before you get too excited about this, you'd have to know the _average
grade_ in education courses at the institution. Around here they run about
an A-, so a higher required GPA loses some of it's apparent strength. As
with (apparently) most institutions, the sciences here run near or at the
bottom of the average grades in departments.

I happened to read in today's newspaper a report that Princeton is
considering eliminating the A+ grade which carries a weight of 4.3 in GPA
rankings. Some people feel that it's become too common and is fueling
grade inflation there. And some departments give more of them than
others. The worst offenders apparently are... get ready for this... the
science and engineering departments!

--
Jon Bell <jtbell@presby.edu> Presbyterian College
Dept. of Physics and Computer Science Clinton, South Carolina USA

(scratching his head in puzzlement... )

I don't have a solution for your puzzlement, but the phenomena are about
the same at Rice. The mean grades in courses are very reliably
Humanities>Social Sciences>Science>Engineering. But the greatest number of
A+ grades are in science and engineering! Can anybody with a statistical
background tell us how or when to say "Bimodal"?

Richard Grandy
Philosophy
Rice University