18 Comments
Percentage of A-range grades out of all grades for Core classes
Heard enough of the word “transparency” yet? We don’t think so! Many Columbians (apparently) have long been calling for more transparency in the grading system. CULPA’s vague and biased info on grading policies is just not enough.
Although A-range percentages for classes are available to employers through Columbia transcripts, information isn’t available to students prior to taking classes. Daniel Liss, CC ’16, is hoping to remedy that through his new website, Grades@CU, which allows students to enter into a database the A-range percentages available on their transcripts. The goal is to compile this information for all classes at Columbia and make it available to students.
Liss hopes the site will clarify some of the grading practices at Columbia, such as whether different sections of the same class taught by different professors are graded similarly.
We think this could be a really valuable resource for those who want to take the easiest classes possible at all times and who only look at the grading section on CULPA anyways. Downloading your transcript is easy via SSOL—there are even instructions on how to do so on Liss’s website—and entering in your information should only take a few minutes. The website will launch the search function at about 500 submissions. According to Liss, the site received 235 within the first few hours of his making it public. The power of Facebook, y’all.
Graph courtesy of Grades@CU
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18 Comments
@AHamdi5 I would like to reference people to FERPA:
1) http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_and_Privacy_Act
Grades@CU will likely require a waiver from student to allow them to release information from their transcripts. (This world is weird)
@Haha LOL FroSci #whyCUwhy
@thomas doesn’t work for GS
@GS It works just fine. However the fall semester courses aren’t updated yet.
@Anonymous We need more grade inflation like Princeton and Harvard where all you need to do is breath to get an A.
@Anonymous Princeton’s super grade-deflationary actually. Way worse than Columbia
@Alex Good luck on your Campaign Liss!!!
@enterprising journalist brb telling Huffpo about this so they can do ANOTHER report about how ivy league students do nothing but laze about on their trust fund money and accumulate A’s since we all bought our admissions anyway.
But seriously, I can’t for the life of me understand how this could possibly be a “good” idea or at all address an existing problem.
@Anonymous YEAH STUDENT SELF-GOVERNANCE IS SO DUMB
@Anonymous Gathering legal information openly cannot possibly be a bad idea. Either it is unambiguously useful or it draws attention towards a broken rule.
@That's A laughably misguided false dichotomy. Welcome to the real world, kid – where issues can never be resolved that simply.
@Anonymous Then some other student will write another article for HuffPo saying that isn’t true, and that everyone here works very hard, and it will be shared all over Facebook and Arianna Huffington will add another few dollars to her hoard. HuffPo is like entropy, man. No matter what happens it just keeps on getting bigger.
@nerdy hi i am nerd. give me a+ please.
@Juan Ocampo This is a horrible idea. The only thing that it will do is encourage students to look up prospective classes and professors in the database and join the ones where they are most likely to get an A. Conversely it will encourage professors to grade more easily so more students join his/her class and get good reviews. It adds fuel to the fire of education for a degrees sake
@Anonymous Yeah, like that doesn’t happen already. At least systematizing the process draws attention to the ridiculousness of it.
@Anonymous That assumes (and at Columbia this is a grand assumption) that most professors are actively looking to a) have large classes and b) please their students.
@This is kind of ridiculous, and contributing to the perception of widespread grade inflation when SURPRISE, there’s anything but that in hard sciences and engineering.
@You da man Liss Very clevuh idea…