A New Way of Grading Undergrad Forum

[EzraStiles]

Has anyone ever though that undergrad, like Law School, should give notification to where a student's particular gpa is ranked in their major? Like, a student with a 3.3 in engineering would be top 10% whereas a student with a 3.8 in psychology would only be around the top 25% in their major. It seems like this would stop all the arguments about 'hard majors' and actually give students credit for how smart they are relative to the students they actually compete against, and law schools would get more students who are actually smart, not just taking a fluff major to pad their gpa. What do you guys think?

[thesealocust]

edit: n/m

[Richard Rorty]

What if smart people self-select into engineering and dumb people self-select into political science? A top 10% in poli-sci could conceivable be equal to a a top 50% in electrical engineering. This doesn't really solve the problem.

[Welp2277]

Why should every undergrad institution care enough to coordinate with every department and every other undergrad institution to rank their students? It seems to me the problems lies with US News rankings, and undergrad institutions (especially those without law schools) have no reason to care.

[Leeroy Jenkins]

Admissions offices already take this into consideration.

Try again

[EzraStiles]

Thanks guys. I hadn't really considered your objections when formulating my half-shit theory. Back to the drawing board...

[UFMatt]

Here is another hidden factor in tough majors: dropouts. I did a pre-med major with an outrageously high attrition rate. My relatively low GPA at graduation was still fairly high for my major, but it would've been even more impressive if 50%+ hadn't changed majors after 1 or 2 semesters.

The ranking system isn't very accurate, which is unfortunate, but I do think that adcomms look at science/engineering splitters more favorably. They can also take the patent bar, which can't be done if you're a humanities major.