Re: Concerned about grades

[Doug Craigen <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>]

"Bernard G. Cleyet & Nancy Ann Seese" wrote:
> I remember Peter Redmond at UCSB telling me that a C was rather stiff medicine for a grad student (and by extension stiff for Jr's and Sr's).  The assumption is that the D's and F's have been weeded out by the Jr. year and the C's by grad. school.

I wonder how many people are willing to take this to its natural
conclusion - a B is a B is a B is a...  If I get a B in a graduate
Quantum Mechanics class at Yale, that indicates the same level of
ability as somebody who gets a B in grade 11 physics.  Is this really
where we are going, or want to go?  A year or so ago somebody said that
they have actually implemented such grading policies at some Ivy League
universities (no C's).  I would have thought these were the last places
to want to promote this type of thinking. For employers to hold up two
grade transcripts, one from Harvard and one from "some run of the mill
state university", and then decide on the non-Harvard candidate because
they had a 0.2 higher grade point average and were therefore better...
surely this isn't Ivy League thinking!  And how about the flip side?
How many less prestigious institutions will accept that they shouldn't
give out A+'s because they don't get A+ students coming in?

\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\

Doug Craigen
          http://www.dctech.com/physics/about_dc.html