bennyonesix wrote:Please enlighten us as to this system and what it selects for.
I found it pretty interesting, so even if you're trolling, sure. I knew about the B-school stuff below but not the others until recently.
The A-F model isn't good at comparing high-level students at the same school in different programs, or students in the same program from different schools. They have different pools of talent. Even if it did, an "A" rating is still putting a lot of people the exact same place. It isn't a 1-10,000 scale where every student in a class's program has an exact rank. To take Nafod's example, A-F doesn't rank Blue Angels, and is particularly bad for comparing Blue Angels to crop dusters.
Your Harvards and Stanfords have a ton of people who are A students. They didn't stop being A students just because they got there, but the talent pool increased. You end up with grade inflation. But recruiting for the postgraduate stuff is incredibly intense for top performers. The top people still get identified.
If you want to get into a top tier economics PhD program, A's at Harvard doesn't it by itself. Maybe you got an NSF fellowship or Rhodes scholarship, or ran a club. You worked with PhD's who remembered you. You took standardized tests. There are a dozen of these things that stand out strongly to the people looking for them.
For those econ or hard science people, some Nobel laureate ends up calling you and telling you to quit fucking around and tell MIT "no." They'll match the stipend with some rich dude's slush fund. And this isn't just happening at top 10 universities, the people elsewhere crushing the "non A-F" stuff are also getting those calls.
I had a family member go to a top 3 B-School, that doesn't permit grade inflation. They get around the potential downside by not releasing any transcripts until after recruitment season ends. Since the same companies recruit every year, when they see a promising candidate they talk to last year's hires and find out if the person is for real or not.
Outside of the top guys, the distinctions between those "with honors" and without is telling. People hiring those folks adjust for this easily.
tl/dr: Recruiting for top talent at high end law schools, PhD programs etc. is extremely competitive and goes way beyond GPA. There are a lot of things going on that the typical "Grade inflation at the Ivy League" article is ignoring or unaware of. GPA is crap for comparing students, because even the top 20% is pretty stratified.
And maybe give us a critique of our elite higher ed system and how its shortcomings trickle down as neg knock on effects for us reg folk who don't know about it first hand.
It's harder to get in to a top-5 school when Upper East Side assholes can put their kids in a grade school where 1/3 graduates end up at Harvard on merit, because they start playing the game when they're 3.
It is disgusting how Trump selected high finance. We will see. It does not bide well at all.
Kudos.
One of the downsides of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to form communities, and sometimes those communities are stupid.
