Quote:
Originally Posted by IKE
Typically below 3.0 in college is a warning sign that a person either couldn't cut it or had priorities issues. There are a lot of great engineering students that forget that they are their for an education).
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This is somewhat off-topic, but I'm wondering, have the rest of you found this to be true? Does getting less than a 3.0 indicate you're "not up to snuff?"
When I was an EE major in the 1980's, I took quite a few classes where the median was set at the dividing point between C and D. In several classes, it was announced on the first day of class, "In this class, 50% of you will not pass. That's mandated by the department, and it's a promise." I was told that one reason for the 50% attrition requirement was that 500 freshmen had declared themselves as EE majors, but there was only enough lab space for 240 students annually for upper-level lab courses. By the time I was a junior, most classes had a median set at a more sane level, typically at the dividing point between B and C. But that still meant that half the people earned C's or below, so a 3.0 GPA was not that easy to maintain. The school I attended is large and well-known (it's ranked by US News & World Report in the top 10 in engineering among national universities), so it's not "some weird school no one goes to." While I'm not particularly gifted as an engineer, I worked pretty hard -- typically 70+ hours/week on classes. Some of my more talented classmates bemoaned the fact that they were also working 70 - 80 hours/week and earning even worse grades that I was. I seem to recall that the department-wide GPA for undergrads was reported at 2.4. The consolation was "if you can just graduate from here, you can write your own ticket" and it's true that after graduation, many students with grades in the 2.2 - 2.5 range seemed to get decent offers.
Have grading standards changed in the last 25-30 years? The reason why "typical grades" concern me is that my son is applying to schools where some of the merit-based scholarships require maintaining a 3.0 GPA. As a freshman at the aforementioned school, this would have been very difficult to do. In fact, maintaining a 3.0 in that environment might almost be an unrealistic burden to place on a student.
I'm wondering if my experience was an atypical "blip" at a strange time in the history of a school with poor lab facilities. Or is it true that standards and expectations in engineering courses are still much higher than in other disciplines?