alt Hacker NewsBack when I went to University of Rochester in the early 90's, the entire first year was not included in your GPA. So we still got grades, but they didn't count for anything. But in my junior year, the state of NY told the school that they would lose their accreditation if they kept it up, because they saw it as unfairly raising the GPA of UR graduates versus all other NY universities. So while my class was grandfathered in, the practice was stopped the next year for the incoming freshman class.
Replies
nuclearnicer • today at 1:24 PM
Fascinating. Sort of an interesting experiment between the last freshman of no grades and the first with grades.
Studying my 4 year BSc in Scotland: the first two years didn’t “count” to your overall grade and had more “required” modules/classes (e.g. maths for CS degrees).
This had pros and cons:
- it was nice to have a bit more of a gradual build
- this would probably avoid some of the issues here
- if you are lazy like me: you do bare minimum effort first and second year and then get crushed by both workload and lack of foundational knowledge in third year
- if you apply to a US company, some will want to see your “full transcript” and don’t accept “I was too busy playing CS (Counterstrike) to study CS (Computer Science)”