A Note About Grades in College

I finally found out all of my grades. I won't be sharing exactly what I got where, but I want to give a short explanation of grades in college. It's not that my grades are bad or anything; I just don't like sharing this kind of stuff with people I don't know. I think my mom prepared me appropriately for what grades in college would be like. She is a professor at Reed College and knows a thing or two about students being disappointed in their performance.

Grading in college is not like high school at all (well, at least my high school). Your final exam or paper in college will consistently count for more than 40% of your overall grade. In high school all my finals counted as regular tests, or maybe a double test at the most. The only class I had with a grading system anything like college was precalculus and statistics (same teacher). Homework only counts for 20% of your grade, which is what all my classes were like this year.

But it's not just the weighting of assignments that makes such a difference, it's the difficulty of the classes. Wikipedia has a great article on grade inflation that is interesting in itself but also gives some very interesting statistics about grades in colleges around the country. Basically, the average grade has gone up significantly since my parents were in school. But the average GPA in many very high ranking institutions still tends to hover between 3.2 and 3.3. That means that the average grade per class is a B+ (remember that those +'s and -'s next to your grade actually matter with college GPAs). For places like the University of Chicago, these were kids who were (or were very nearly) straight-A students through all of high school. The moral of the story: you can't expect to get straight-A's through college, no matter how smart you are. The highest average GPA at any institution I've seen was at Harvard at 3.5. This still means that the Harvard students are averaging between a B+ and A-. For those of you applying to medical school, that GPA will still not get you where you want to go.

The moral of the story: your grades in college are not going to be straight-A's. Even the chance of you pulling off a complete set of A-'s is very low. I got a 3.25 in my first quarter and I'm very happy with that. Considering that at UChicago there is no such thing as an A+ (+4.3 to your GPA), getting 4.0 here is nigh impossible.