Reply to Washington and Lee University- what are the kids like??

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There's definitely that southern WASP-y Garden and Gun culture, but also a lot of kids from NY/NJ/PA. Diversity is living on the Mainline vs. McLean, lol. Ultra preppy, wealthy students who are actually smart and study a lot.

There is a strong work hard, play hard culture aka partying is very important. The school has made it difficult to have alcohol on campus so students rent houses out in the country, leading to some terrible drunk driving tragedies.

https://roanoke.com/news/virginia/drunken-driver-in-crash-that-killed-w-l-classmate-to-serve-3-years/article_04e2fbc4-a08c-5b07-a8cc-1776a45d7521.html

I think what would give me pause about W&L is that the profs grade very hard. So GPAs are lower, putting students who want to go to grad school a disadvantage. The counterargument is "oh, they'll be impressed by the W&L degree" but...hmm.[/quote]

Very few schools really grade hard any more, and that included W&L.  According to Gradeinflation.com, a website that collects average GPAs at schools, the average GPA at W&L was 3.44 in 2015.  In comparison, William & Mary was 3.33 in 2014, UVA was 3.32 in 2013, Virginia Tech was 3.15 in 2015, JMU was 3.15 in 2013, and ODU was 2.75 in 2014.   [/quote]

But that doesn't tell you anything really.  When you accept people who got mainly all A's in HS and are in the top 3-5% in SATs like W&L, W&M and UVA do, it should be fine to have benchmarked standards about the content/skills rather than a curve.  Now that schools are so narrow in their bands of selectivity, the schools that admit top applicants really should have much closer to all A's--if there were some national standards in each field.  But the reality is profs implicitly sort of reset the curve for the students they have.  So a student at W&L or W&M or UVA who is given the B- is likely doing work that would get an A from JMU/GMU.  I say this as a professor who has had to re-calibrate my grading as I have moved from teaching at universities with different levels of students.  If you teach at a place like ODU, you're going to have some obvious cases of kids who don't come to class, can't do the work, etc. that make a wider range. But the A student there would probably be making C's at a tougher school.  But if you teach a  liberal arts college like W&L or W&M or a highly selective flagship like UVA or a rigorous program like engineering at VT-- the students are all in the top percent of the nation.  But some will do work that edges out among the others and that becomes the A, while those whose work would earn an A elsewhere, get the B- to A- range.  Of course there will always be some who just don't get a subject or skip class a lot and those are the C's-F's, but they are very rare at these top schools.

This is why, in my own graduate admissions process, I look carefully at the rigor of the school attended and argue against flat GPA cut-offs.  [/quote]

It tells you there has been significant grade inflation as pretty much all institutions have had increasing average GPAs for a 50 year period.  It also calls into question the statement regarding W&L that "GPAs are lower, putting students who want to go to grad school a disadvantage".  They are actually a bit higher than W&M and UVA and are in line with other schools of similar selectivity.[/quote]

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