GPA

Quick reminder that pass/fail requests are due today. CC students have to turn in this form to Kent, while Barnard students can submit theirs on eBear. Get it in by tonight and erase that nightmare midterm forever.

Being a Columbia student is hard. We can all attest to that. Midterms are just now finished and finals start in about a month. During the past few weeks, you have probably seen students more flustered than at other times—they stay in packs and are unusually unstable around this time of the year. It seems to me that, more often than not, these neurotic students are pre-professional students. The stereotypical pre-professional student is high strung and unwaveringly concerned about final grades instead of the actual material learned. This begs the question: "What is he really doing it for?" GPA is quite important to these students. However, graduate schools want to see that you are more than your MCAT score, your LSAT, or your GPA. You are not merely a multitude of statistics. I do understand, however, that with increased competition year after year, minute differences in statistics like one's GPA can seem like the determining factor in receiving that all-important acceptance letter instead of the dreaded rejection letter to your dream graduate school. What else can determine if one gets into medical school, for example? Many would say it depends on the undergraduate school you attend and even which major you choose. This meticulous consideration about majors sparks a debate that is all too well known by most Columbians. The ongoing intra-Columbia College and Columbia College vs. School of Engineering and Applied Science competition, the focal point of many a discussions and an op-ed printed earlier this week, is more difficult to understand. Despite having some quite accurate points, the argument of unequal grading between the respective schools falls short on a fundamental level. Some might argue that the humanities grading system is a lot less stringent. However, because different professors teach the same courses, syllabi and grading scales are changed almost every semester, and the caliber of students can vary greatly from semester to semester. Even within the same course, there are undoubtedly sometimes two people of the same caliber who get a B and an A-. That .67 point disparity is admittedly quite large especially when both students are competing for the same graduate schools, summer internships, research opportunities, and scholarships. Whose fault is it then? It is no one's fault. Inherent subjectivity is a part of college that may not be fair, justified, or, in truth, understandable. Connie Miller, a noted public speaker, probably said it best, "Objectivity has about as much substance as the emperor's clothes." What many fail to recognize is that prospective jobs, summer employers, and graduate schools do look for that total package, and your academic statistics are only a fragment of their decision. The choice in major, too, is a contested discussion that ultimately falls flat. CC and SEAS both have demanding major requirements. What certain departments in CC lack in major requirements, the school as a whole makes up for it in its Core Curriculum courses. Both generally demand much more than other equivalent colleges and universities. Within the bounds of CC, there is a myriad of majors and concentrations to choose from. If you prefer critiquing Molière and Lope de Vega, try the major in comparative literature. If you want to thoroughly learn about the damaging health effects of benzene, majoring in chemistry might be for you. Deciding which majors are more difficult doesn't matter much, since it is ultimately your choice. For example, if you are a biomedical engineer, thought by many to be the "toughest" major for a Columbia undergraduate, take honor in the difficult road that you have chosen. Don't, however, judge others for his or her "easier" choice of major and probable higher GPA. The decision is based on personal strengths and weaknesses, and graduate schools are indeed aware that some majors do require more effort. We are all future graduates of Columbia University and should be proud of our intellectual diversity. It is also oddly conspicuous that there is not more SEAS leadership and participation in Columbia's clubs and extracurricular activities. Each club should strive to have an equally representative population that is comprised of students from both CC and SEAS. Since SEAS is more technical, perhaps its students are less inclined to seek positions of leadership in anything deviates from their set track. I am actively involved in Columbia University American Medical Student Association, coordinating a 25 person HIV/AIDS education service trip to Panama this spring break. I am also a coordinator for Community Impact's Columbia Kids where I spend every Saturday with 20 kids from Harlem and Morningside Heights. Do I have time to whole-heartedly commit myself to two extra-curricular activities? Probably not. But I make time for them because both represent two of my non-academic passions—health advocacy and children. If you're doing what you love, you find time to do the thing that means the most to you. So, yes, there is an "uphill battle" not only for pre-professionals students, but for everyone. And it's called Columbia. The author is a Columbia College sophomore and a pre-med student with a double concentration in pyschology and human rights. She is also the coordinator for Community Impact's Columbia Kids and Service Trip Coordinator for CU Global Health.

Though the Dean's List at Barnard could soon be more exclusive, under a new proposal, students would have twice as many opportunities to make the cut. The Barnard Committee on Honors, a sub-group of the Committee on Instruction which makes recommendations on academic policies, has proposed to raise the minimum grade point average requirement for the Dean's List from the current 3.4 GPA for the academic year to a 3.6 GPA for one semester. After meeting last Friday, the Committee on Honors submitted the proposal to the COI, which will then consider the changes. Should the COI approve the proposal, Barnard faculty will review and act on the proposal, and officials said a final decision will likely not be made until next semester. Administrators said that several factors are driving this potential shift. Currently, in order to make the list, students must be enrolled at Barnard for the full academic year and complete 12 letter-graded points each semester. Though the proposal mandates a higher GPA, students would have the opportunity in the fall and spring semesters. Dean of Studies Karen Blank said the proposed policy would increase the value of being on the Dean's List. "We want the honor of making the Dean's List to be meaningful." The requirement, she said, would also open the door for those previously excluded due to the year-long requirement, including study abroad students, Jewish Theological Seminary students—who sometimes take classes for only a semester—and seniors taking fewer than 12 credits. Across Broadway, the requirement is a 3.6 GPA per term at Columbia College, a 3.5 without any grades lower than a C at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and a 3.5 minimum GPA at the School of General Studies. Kathryn Yatrakis, dean of academic affairs at Columbia College, said that it's important for the list to be selective. "If Dean's List is to mean something, it should be an academic mark of distinction," she said. "This raises the question of whether or not it is such if 60 percent of the student body receives Dean's List designation." Victoria Rosner, academic affairs coordinator for GS, added, "I think you want to feel that attaining Dean's List status is a true mark of distinction." Students had mixed feelings about the possible change. "Raising it to a 3.6 would encourage us to work harder," said Kate Welsh, BC '13, adding that it would present a new challenge. Nora Machuga, BC '12, said that the tougher standard makes sense. "I can understand why with cases of grade inflation they would want to make it more challenging." For some, having a chance every semester sounds appealing—Dorothy Kadar, BC '12, said she was frustrated that choosing the Pass/D/Fail option automatically stops students. "One semester allows more flexibility." news@columbiaspectator.com

At least 8 percent of Columbia's 5,934 undergraduates received straight As or A-pluses last semester, according to a document leaked to Spectator on Wednesday. The spreadsheet, which was leaked from an advising dean to his advisees in an apparent email gaffe, listed 482 students in Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Science who received at least a 4.0 during the fall 2010 semester. The spreadsheet included students' names, GPAs, UNIs, years, the names of their academic advisors, and majors. According to the document, 372 of the students were in CC and 110 were in SEAS. Spectator verified information with several students on the list. The document also indicates that the more senior the class, the more straight As reported. The highest number came from the class of 2011, which had 156 students on the list, followed by the class of 2012 with 147, the class of 2013 with 101, and the class of 2014 with 75. Two students had 4.33 GPAs, which means that they earned grades of A-plus in each of their classes last semester. A plurality of the students listed are "undecided" on a major. However, of the students who have declared majors, those majoring in economics form the largest bloc, with 39 students. That category encompasses all of the economics majors, including students participating in joint degree programs with mathematics, operations research, philosophy, political science, and statistics. It was followed by political science with 20 students, and then English with 17 students. Mechanical engineering, a relatively large department in SEAS that 43 students majored in, last May, only had one student make above a 4.0. Several students who received the email said they were not worried about their GPAs being released because of the relatively low number of students who received the list as an accidental attachment from their adviser. "I am not particularly concerned with others knowing my GPA for last semester. If GPA actually meant something, then maybe I would be," Justin Vlasits, CC '11, wrote in an email. "As it is, there are really no grounds for complaint." Sarah Ferguson, CC '11, said she also did not have any hard feelings about the error. "I'm not much bothered by 'the leak.' It was clearly a mistake, and I can't imagine anything coming of it," Ferguson wrote in an email. "To me, it just was further proof of huge grade inflation." abby.mitchell@columbiaspectator.com

A simplified view of ambiguous data, the Spectator's initial report on the number of students earning A-level grade averages last term was regrettable. The strong thrust of the article, "Beyond Straight A's," is that the quality of A-level work must have declined for so many undergraduates­—482 at Columbia College and SEAS—to have earned these grades. Hence, the article ends by quoting a CC student, "To me, it was just further proof of huge grade inflation." That day's front-page graphic, a long list of tiny "A's" illustrating the abundant supply of the grade, added an implicit echo to the quote. But this picture of the data is presumptuous—the fact that so many people get certain grades says nothing conclusive about the meaning of those grades until the actual courses and the larger academic context are considered as well. The Spectator article shows how such sensationalized and sound-byte renderings like "grade inflation" both conceal the nuance behind academic life at an institution like Columbia and carry an even greater risk of marginalizing whole sections of our community. For example, a scandal about "grade inflation" may forget the large majority of students who strangely missed getting A's. We might forgive a B-level student who came away from Spectator's shiny graphic of A after A after A with a more diffident and uncertain sense of his status at Columbia. "If the A is easy, why did I have such trouble getting a B?" Questions and doubts like these should find no occasion in genuinely educational settings where exploration, risk-taking, and imperfection are the accepted prerequisites of intellectual growth. The hasty inference that an abundance of high marks can only mean low standards is dangerously insensitive to students who did not attain these marks. We should not be surprised to find that the source of "grade inflation" laments is so often an academic super-elite. It is the Ivy League's translation of Ayn Rand: "We're on strike against your creed of unearned duties...I ask for nothing less than what I earn." The problem with the "grade inflation" charge is that its underlying desire for a single, common, "gold" academic standard is at odds with the diversity of a large elite American university like Columbia. All of the adjectives in that description­—large, elite, American—contribute to the diversity of Columbia students and the many academic backgrounds they bring with them. Students come from competitive feeder schools, under-performing public schools, and international programs with entirely different academic systems. Multiply this level of diversity by the fact that many classes at Columbia include students from different colleges within the university—CC, SEAS, GS, and BC—each which has its own mission, constituency, and admissions process with varying emphasis and competitiveness. So asking a professor and his or her TA's to impose one uniform and meaningful grading "currency" is like trying to set a common currency for the economies of Greece and Germany. There's bound to be some inflation or deflation. At a certain point, shouting "grade inflation" is just a divisive way of saying the obvious: we are a happily diverse and complicated community. None of this is to say that in any particular class, the grades may not be determined more or less fairly. But that question must be referred to the courses themselves. A statistic like the one above may mean many things including and besides "grade inflation." And whether or not it means grade inflation may not be the most pressing question to ask. Alternatively, does it mean that all students, regardless of their background, find a sufficiently wide outlet for their potential here? Does it acknowledge the value of taking risks? Does so much attention to students getting A's represent a community that acknowledges that value? At the very least, we should be sure that our interest in the issue is consistent with the inclusive and nurturing premises of undergraduate education. This is just some, and definitely not all, of the essential context that must be considered before a discussion of academic assessment at Columbia will bear ripe and edible fruit. The author is a senior in Columbia College majoring in history.

Complaints about Columbia's A+ policy are nothing new. With every new class of Phi Beta Kappa inductees comes a new round of anonymous Bwog comments, bashing the system and the "injustice" it breeds. And, to be sure, those comments are not always without merit. As it stands today, most schools have transitioned away from the system used in Morningside Heights. Indeed, Columbia and Cornell are the only Ivy League schools that still award A+ grades, weighted at 4.33 for calculating GPA. It is clear that Columbia needs to change its A+ policy. The question is how. The Office of Academic Affairs has declined to reveal the precise distribution of A+ grades, but a report released by Columbia to the Law School Admissions Council reveals that the average GPA among Columbia's undergraduate population is a 3.55, and that about 3 percent of Columbia undergraduates have GPAs above 4.0. The arguments against the A+ are as convincing as they are numerous. The thrust of these complaints is that the best students in a hard science are more likely to receive an A+ than are the best students in the humanities, and that this discrepancy unfairly undermines humanities majors during the selection processes for Latin honors and Phi Beta Kappa. Although the selection process for both does involve subjective elements such as recommendations, the system is still heavily dependant upon GPA. In order to be eligible for valedictorian or salutatorian, for example, a student must have a GPA above 4.0. The process seems even more unfair when one considers that certain academic divisions, such as the Chinese department, have standing policies not to give out the grade of A+. What can be done? There would seem to be two options. The first would involve eliminating the A+ designation entirely, so that the grade of A is the highest available. This policy—used at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth—would guarantee that the strongest students in every class receive the same grade. Alas, in a world where A-range grades (A+, A, A-) are handed out to nearly half the students in every class, the complete elimination of the A+ removes the ability of the professor to indicate that a student's work is truly exceptional. Under this system, the student at the 76th percentile of a large lecture would receive the same grade as the top student in the class. The second option would be to keep the A+ but to weigh it as a 4.0, and to require that an A+ be somehow justified by a professor. Such is the system at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, where professors may only assign an A+ after explicitly explaining to the administration why the standards for an A have been surpassed. The use of such a roadblock, such that assigning an A+ becomes patently inconvenient for a professor, has gone a long way in limiting the use of the grade to the few situations who truly deserve it. Adopting this policy would also extend an advantage to Columbia students who apply for admissions to graduate schools. Many admissions boards, such as the Law School Admissions Council, will reweigh an A+ as a 4.33, no matter how it is treated by the student's university. Thus, the nominal use of the designation would give Columbia applicants an inter-school leg-up in graduate school admissions, without contributing to the intra-school unfairness that has caused such strife at Columbia. There remains the difficult question of how to navigate Columbia's bureaucracy on an issue as complicated and loaded as university grading. Two years ago, when the call for A+ reform was at its fever pitch, Barnard Professor Herbert Sloan was quoted as suggesting that changes were "under consideration by the relevant faculty and administrative bodies." Exactly what that meant was unclear, and it remains so today. Although the exact chain of authority is unsurprisingly nebulous, it would seem that the committee with jurisdiction is the "Task Force on Undergraduate Education"—a deeply ambiguous, interdisciplinary panel of professors who have spent the last four years "[reviewing] broad aspects of undergraduate education." Despite the committee's shrouded and opaque inner workings, no one could say they haven't gotten things done—both the sweeping 2009 changes in the Major Cultures requirement and the university's response to the 2007 hunger strike were based on the recommendations of the Task Force. If the Task Force wanted to change the A+ policy, they could. But, like so many other decisions affecting Columbia undergraduates, this one is likely to be made behind locked doors in Low Library. And so, for those of you who are bothered, know that the solution does not lie in anonymous internet comments or half-baked complaints to your friends. There is a way to get this changed—simply contact one of the 35 professors on the Task Force, ask to have a chat, and change their minds. James Dawson is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. He is a Columbia University tour guide. Low Politics runs alternate Tuesdays.

With the first day of classes about one week away, here's what you need to know to get grades that resemble those As you accumulated in high school. Make sure to spend time on CULPA (culpa.info), Columbia's student-run take on Rate My Professors. It's full of nuggets of information that will aid you in preparing that color-coded spreadsheet of potential classes you're tempted to make. The website's reviews cover every aspect you'll need to take into consideration: professors' teaching styles, some course syllabi, and advice for both morning people and night owls. Remember, even though the site is an amazing resource, you shouldn't hesitate to supplement your CULPA searching by talking about classes with your adviser and upperclassmen—and do some Googling, especially for younger professors or TAs. Once classes start, know that Columbia students have access to a whopping 22 libraries. Changing your study location from week to week can make the process a little less monotonous. Of course, Butler Library is the most convenient study location to freshman dorms—and by far the most crowded. To circumvent the chaos of traditional study rooms during midterms week, though, try heading for the Butler stacks located behind the librarians' desks. Don't wait until one semester of your first year has already flown by to use them—even though the stacks get a bad rap as being dark, secluded, and creepy, they are always conducive to concentration. There is no Wi-Fi in the stacks—and there are, therefore, no distractions. Alternatively, the library in Avery, Columbia's architecture building, is one of the best-kept secrets on campus. It's conveniently located above Brownie's Café, a cash-only spot in the building's basement. No food and drinks in there, though—if you like to snack while studying, head to the library in Kent, the East Asian studies building, instead. Also, take full advantage of the fact that Barnard's Wollman Library and Butler are so close to each other. You'll often find that books that have been checked out of Butler end up across the street. This information will prove useful during University Writing, when you take on the 3000-word research paper for which UW is famous. The Writing Center can also be surprisingly useful for revising those papers—just make appointments early. As for Lit Hum, don't worry about reading every word, and do get your hands on the study guides for midterms and finals that generations have spent days compiling for you. Remember: just going to class gets you ahead. And your GPA doesn't matter as much now anyway. sonalee.rau@columbiaspectator.com