Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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In technical fields this is usually reliable (someone who went to CMU or MIT and graduated probably put in a pretty high baseline level of work), but in more liberal arts fields school quality correlates much less to a baseline quality level. At my alma mater (Amherst), for example, the easiest course of study would be to take 4 humanities classes / semester, spend 12 hours/week in classes, write 3 papers/semester for each, and then you're done. 50% of the student body does this. The hardest would be to double up on lab sciences (physics + chem, for example, or physics + neuroscience), which entails about 20 hours/week of classes, 30-40 hours/week spent on problem sets, 2 midterms and a final.

I've heard that Harvard is similar: the grade distribution at Harvard is roughly 10% As, 80% Bs, and 10% Cs. Getting an A at Harvard implies that you really did a lot of work, but getting a B could imply everything from "You really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically nothing from your undergraduate education."

Grade inflation has really made these inferences even more difficult; for example, the median grade at Harvard is actually an A- (not the well-balanced distribution you hypothesized).

No, the most common grade at Harvard is A or some variation thereof. See the Carol Joyce Oates interview.

It's possibly gone up since I was college-aged; this was from when I was living in Boston and hanging around a bunch of Harvard students in 06-07.

The grade inflation has been going on at Harvard for longer than that. Best not to rely on anecdata over data. Especially since the group of Harvard students you hung out with was likely far from a random sampling.

The median course grade at Harvard has been A- for over 20 years.

It's inflated, but then again, how much Harvard coursework mastery is actually necessary for your job?

In the state school I went to in the 90s, they were acolytes of the bell curve.

Mastery or not, if your score bumped you out of the curve, you were getting a B.

Friends in Ivy League schools would get As or incompletes.

>"You really did a lot of work but just missed the cutoff" to "You learned basically nothing from your undergraduate education."

Or maybe they learned exactly what they needed to do to game the system. Does doing a lot of work correlate to learning more? Seems both sides of the huge distribution got the same perceived outcome, just one did it easier.

Parent poster is speaking from the perspective of a hiring manager trying to evaluate the candidate. From that perspective, the critical question is "Will this person perform well at my company if I hire them?" Gaming the college degree system and learning the domain-specific information needed to perform well at a job are very different skillsets. Assuming a small team with a focused mission, general work ethic and ability to quickly absorb information correlate well with the latter, but not the former. (In a big company where nobody knows what anybody else is doing, the correlation often goes the other way and ability to game the system correlates better with success, but usually those don't have individual hiring managers evaluating resumes.)

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