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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'd always heard that McGill was the most prestigious university in Canada so I was surprised to learn that it has an admissions rate of 46%.  [/quote]

Different model.  Have high/clear/objective standards for admission, no arbitrary cap on enrollment (often driven by dorm capacity in the US), and then use the whole grading scale (not just B- and above).  So fewer lottery ticket applicants, everybody who has done the groundwork and can afford not to work FT post-HS gets a chance at a high quality education, and students get judged/sorted based on how they perform in college (HS achievements have little lingering impact).  Seems like a pretty sensible approach to me.  Would be similar to the top UCs if the system had kept pace with population growth.[/quote]

Not sure where this myth of B- being the floor started. Just not true. I have four in college at a wide range of schools and we’ve seen grades below that. Not many, but they happen. We have one at an “unselective” school and the work he’s doing is definitely not as demanding, but they will happily hand him a C when he doesn’t study or submits a crap paper. [/quote]

Elite privates in the US pretty much have this floor.  Less selective schools (especially public) don’t.  Again, a different model. [/quote]

Possibly selection bias. Grad school kids are generally the best students.

I have one in a top ten SLAC. Again, different from truth. [/quote]

I saw lots of transcripts from SLACs while doing graduate admissions.  There are certainly schools among the top 10 where anything below a B- is rare.  Your kid may be in a program or a school where grading is more rigorous, but the phenomenon I’m describing is very real/striking, especially when you compare kids from SLACs and flagships.[/quote][/quote]

Sorry, buried my comment.

Possibly selection bias. Grad school kids are generally the best students.[/quote]

Problem was we got some really mediocre kids with very high GPAs from SLACs.  In the end, transcripts from some of these schools proved almost useless (when everybody almost always gets some kind of A, GPAs cease to differentiate).  Had a close friend who was visiting faculty at one of the worst offenders and she agreed that grades were uniformly high there.  I never taught at a SLAC, but have graded at two t10 private Us, was an undergrad at a third and have a kid who is finishing up at a fourth and the B- floor has been pretty evident at all of them (though less so in STEM).  Doesn’t mean no one ever got something lower, but generally the attitude seemed to be that a B- was damning enough that what’s the point in making fine distinctions among the degrees of worthlessness?[/quote]

All work below a B- is worthless? Yikes I hope you didn’t intend to sound so dismissive. [/quote]

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