University students offered a B- to drop course

[StarLightDeath]

Employers like people with a well rounded education, thats why people with a bachlor's degree usually earn more than someone with an associates degree.

They take people with a 4 year degree because 4 year degrees have more prestige and typically higher academic standards. It has nothing to do with being a well more rounded person. If I were to hire you to work for me I wouldn't give a **** about whether or not you know about the rest of the world. I just want to know if you have talent and can get the job done.

[Apocalypse]

Whatever happened to 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, 70-79 = C, etc? Why the hell should people even pay attention to GPA on a resume anymore?

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Originally posted by StarLightDeath
They take people with a 4 year degree because 4 year degrees have more prestige and typically higher academic standards. It has nothing to do with being a well more rounded person. If I were to hire you to work for me I wouldn't give a **** about whether or not you know about the rest of the world. I just want to know if you have talent and can get the job done.

And thus the decline and fall of western civilization.

Ok, maybe that's a bit much, but still...

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by StarLightDeath
Universities are a joke in general anyway. You spend 2 years of your life learning useless **** that you are never going to use or care about. Then they always make sure to put in some dumbass multicultural diversity bull**** requirement like african american studies. They also have every possible rule ever imaginable guaranteeing you a dropped course and loss of money at some point along the line. Universities are nothing more than a ****ing beaurocracy and everyone has become a number as they run you through. What's worse is that they have a virtual monopoly since pretty much everyone these days gets a degree. I won't even talk about the books and their little scheme of changing 1 page in the book to make it a new ****ing edition and making the cost of the book astronomical. You guys whine about corporations, how about some whining about Universities which are these days nothing more than a corporation themselves.

So you flunked out then, did you?

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Apocalypse
Whatever happened to 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, 70-79 = C, etc? Why the hell should people even pay attention to GPA on a resume anymore?

What's really funny is that you don't realise that the percentage grade is just as arbitrary as the letter grade. It depends entirely on:

1) The difficulty of the course material
2) The level of the exams
3) The level of the assignments
4) The grading scheme
5) The assholishness of the grader (less of an issue in the sciences, but sometimes still plays a part)

[Apocalypse]

Yeah, I know it's an arbitrary grade, but it's just another major difference between schools

[KrazyHorse]

You have to know the school to know what a GPA means. If you go to a **** school that teaches watered-down courses then getting a 3.9 is no big accomplishment.

If you go to a school which teaches undergrad courses at a level far above the average (with the upper-level undergrad courses as difficult as most introductory graduate classes) then it counts for a hell of a lot more.

Graduate schools tend to know what the major schools' grades mean in terms of preparedness in their specific field. Employers shouldn't really be too interested in GPAs unless the candidate majored in something very specifically useful (say, an engineering or accounting degree) and they know the reputation of the school in that specific field.

Go to some ****ty little liberal-arts college and take a Bachelor in Communications and of course your grade is inflated with respect to the guy who went to U of Chicago who studied mathematics...

[KrazyHorse]

The courses are all graded on curves anyway, in my experience. The percentages are just guidelines. The teachers in honours classes aimed for a class average between a B and a B+ at McGill. The teachers in non-honours classes aimed for between a B and a B-. They tended to make everything far too hard so that if they had to curve they could curve upward. Making it too easy meant curving downward, which would always run you into complaints from the students.

If you were to take raw percentage grades from the upper-level undergraduate classes I took then the average grade was often in the low 60s, which would then be bumped up 10% and marked as a B to B+. Of course, you have to expect that when the final exam you took was worth 60%, and 3 of the 5 questions on it were well into what I would consider (looking back on it) graduate level.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
5) The assholishness of the grader (less of an issue in the sciences, but sometimes still plays a part)

What kind of grader are you?

[KrazyHorse]

And the "well-rounded education" that I see in kids coming from US schools means that most of them are horribly unprepared for graduate school. So much so that most of them have to take a semester or two of undergraduate courses simply to pass their qualifying exams. They also do extremely poorly on the GRE subject test because they simply have far less experience in their chosen field than do students from other countries. They might have done 60 credits or so of University level classes in mathematics and physics. I did well over a hundred. No wonder they have trouble when they hit the intro grad classes.

US Universities need to stop wasting the time of people in the sciences with bull**** liberal arts requirements. A bright 18 year-old in a field like physics is going to do his best work in the next fifteen years. He has precious little time to waste. An extra year or two in graduate school due to complementary requirements at his undergraduate institution is a tragic loss to him and to the field. He has a huge amount of stuff to learn, and very little time to learn it in.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
What kind of grader are you?

Mean compared to others at Hopkins. Nice compared to graders at McGill.

Luckily for myself and for the students I'm now on a full research assistantship, so I no longer have to TA any classes.

[KrazyHorse]

I used to TA a 300 level EM class during the year, and I TAed 100 level intro physics classes during the summertime. The intro physics kids were very whiney about their grades in addition to being far stupider than the average physics student. These are both very bad buttons to push on me. I had a TA from another class section come up to me and tell me that his students were afraid to come complain to me about the marking of exam questions (we each marked exam questions across all sections) because I was "mean".



However, I will note that my class section had by far the highest average on all the exams they were given. I frighten people into learning. Fear-based education

[DinoDoc]

KH = bad ass?

[Apocalypse]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse

Graduate schools tend to know what the major schools' grades mean in terms of preparedness in their specific field. Employers shouldn't really be too interested in GPAs unless the candidate majored in something very specifically useful (say, an engineering or accounting degree) and they know the reputation of the school in that specific field.

Its just that there are top level grad schools which do use GPA to weigh heavily on the application.

And just to get it out of the way, yes my GPA is not the best but standardized test scores are kick ass.

[KrazyHorse]

The graduate schools will, if they don't have their heads up their asses, handicap your GPA based on the school you went to and which course of study you completed.