Nerd fight!

How do the Harvard kids do when they go to different graduate schools, law schools, become doctors, etc.? Assuming they do all right, I'm thinking there isn't a lot wrong with the undergrad approach.

Maybe the other schools have professors who revel in being punitive with their grades. Anyone could design a class that guaranteed a certain percentage of kids would fail and a certain (small) percentage would receive A's. Is that serving the purpose of educating the kids, though? In astrophysics 101, for example, isn't there just a base amount of knowledge that if you learn it, you deserve an A no matter how smart the people around you are?

 

I think the "everybody graduates with honors" rep is limited to Harvard. I think most private schools have reps for being difficult to flunk out of. Friends who I went to college with who did graduate work at Cornell, Princeton and Yale all said if they had known how much easier private schools were that they would have gone that route rather than going to state schools. This was based on them teaching undergrads. This was over a decade ago, so it's certainly possible things have changed since then.

 

Sorry I missed out on the era of grade inflation (obviously, if you'd see my transcripts), but since I wasn't going to graduate school I guess it didn't matter. And any time I ever applied for a job no one ever asked me what my GPA was.

 

That's a thing of the past and a dangerous piece of advice to give to younger kids now. Google started the practice, and now all tech companies (and more and more all companies) are falling in line since they all copy Google, of limiting job searches to people with high GPAs from elite schools. I'm not talking about entry-level, either; if you've been elsewhere in the workforce for 10 years and then apply, they go back and look at your college performance. It's a growing trend.

Also, there are fewer and fewer career paths that do not involve some level of graduate school. The days when we could kiss off that idea at age 20 (and Lord knows I did it too) are gone.