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Tentative plans for the new Carlton lounge
Sean Zimmermann reports from last night’s ESC meeting.
The majority of the meeting was spent discussing the new election bylaws of the ESC constitution. As reported last year, the ESC will begin holding public e-board elections this year. Under the changes, the members of the senior class council will choose one of its members to serve as the Elections Commissioner and chair the elections committee, which would run the general elections. The majority of the debate focused on whether the new elections should use a ticket system or an individual candidate system. Under the ticket system, the entire e-board would be elected as a single ticket/party, whereas under the individual system, students could still have parties, but voters could pick and choose candidates from different parties. Ultimately, the council voted against the ticket system.
ESC, in collaboration with their graduate student counterpart EGSC, has submitted a proposal with improvements to Carlton Lounge. The proposals includes calls for new (non-wobbly) furniture, increased outlets, and improved WiFi.
Alumni Affairs and Pre-Professional Development Liaison Bora Kim spoke with CCE about showing average SEAS GPAs alongside other student GPAs to employers. There are concerns that engineering students are treated unfairly by CCE, as Columbia College students on average have higher GPAs. Therefore, if a CC and SEAS students apply for the same position, CC students will appear better on paper.
Swanky improvements via Wikimedia Commons
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@cce system Great blog this.
@Anonymous Dean a while back said
CC: ~3.55
SEAS: ~3.05
@Anonymous Because they have skills.
@Anonymous Ugh, then why do engineers get all the jobs?
@SEAS Because there are GPA cut-offs to jobs. I.e. 3.5 for some jobs. It takes much more for a SEAS student to get above 3.5 than a CC kid; therefore, the SEAS student ends up getting the job because he is more skilled and smart in other areas of the resume.
Of course this is a generalization and I am talking about on average.
@Anonymous The issue of GPA’s is ridiculous. An employer should be able to tell the difference in a candidate whohas seven high level physics courses versus a student who has taken French Literature (sorry), the same way the college did originally to accept you. This is why Harvard, Princeton, Brown have massive grade inflation, but I think it comes back to bite them as everyone knows this. Columbia’s curriculum and core courses are much more rigorous than what students typically take at othre schools.
@Anonymous You don’t know what you’re talking about. Princeton has grade deflation.
@hmm Our transcripts do indicate the percentage of “A” grades in each class with more than a certain number of students. Are you not aware, or are you perhaps too young to have ever requested a transcript? Anyway, I don’t think that one can readily determine whether students are given undue leniency in the determination of grades from a consideration of aggregate grading statistics across an entire university or division of a school– you need to attempt at least some examination of the actual programs. That’s why one might say that the Princeton grading policy is particularly flawed– and if you believe so, as I do, then you too should likewise find this proposal by the engineering students to be wrongheaded. The only way that one can attempt a fair comparison of two different students’ academic programs is by actually looking at their individual records– something that employers are already capable of doing, as the first poster noted, to the extent they choose to. Headlining the documents with average student GPA almost in fact disincentivizes sucha review– and creates precisely the problem it was presumably intended to solve. Students should not get credit for the ease or difficulty of other students programs at their school, but for their own, which albeit difficult is not impossible to assess. As the poster above noted, the notion that an employer will not be able to distinguish a 7-course per semester courseload peppered with “advanced aerodynamics” and “spoken language processing” from a 4-semester focus on the finer details of Esperanto is pretty nonsensical.
@SEAS “Our transcripts do indicate the percentage of “A” grades in each class with more than a certain number of students.”
Did you forget Columbia is more than just the College?
@Anonymous Also, most employers don’t require transcripts. Hence all they see is GPA in terms of course work.
@Anonymous The core is rigorous? The core is a joke and a GPA boost. The average core class gives almost everyone a B+ or higher.
5 credit language classes?
@Anonymous The core is rigorous? The core is a joke and a GPA boost. The average core class gives almost everyone a B+ or higher. Add in the language requirement and a 3.5 Poli Sci or Econ major is below average.
@hmm Whatever it is that you are studying, it isn’t rigorous enough to prevent you from repeating yourself within a span of three minutes.