Quinnipiac: "Which candidate do you think is most intelligent?"

[pnwmom]

10. You are comparing apples and oranges. Harvard is well known for passing out

Last edited Thu Nov 28, 2019, 02:53 AM - Edit history (3)

honors degrees like popcorn. In 2004 when Mayor Pete graduated, 90% of its students graduated with some level of honors.

In sharp contrast, Stanford doesn't give honors for GPA's, but it does note a degree with "Distinction" based on the GPA -- only for the top 15% of the class.

But there is one school they had in common: Booker was awarded a degree with honors from Oxford, but Buttigieg wasn't (according to Wikipedia.)

And Yang's degrees were from Brown and Columbia. (Wikipedia doesn't mention honors.) How you can pretend Yang's and Buttigieg's academic records were any stronger than Booker's is beyond me.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/:~:targetText=Last%20June,%20a%20record%2091,a%20Globe%20study%20has%20found.

HARVARD:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/4/30/rising-GPA-cutoffs-honors/

A 2002 Faculty vote set 60 percent as the maximum portion of each class that can earn honors. That policy change aimed to make Latin honors more exclusive — more than 90 percent of the Class of 2004 graduated with honors.

Last June, a record 91 percent of Harvard students graduated summa, magna, or cum laude, far more than at Yale (51 percent), Princeton (44 percent) and other elite universities, a Globe study has found.

While the world regards these students as the best of the best of America's 13 million undergraduates, Harvard honors has actually become the laughingstock of the Ivy League. The other Ivies see Harvard as the Lake Wobegon of higher education, where all the students, being above average, can take honors for granted.

It takes just a B-minus average in the major subject to earn cum laude -- no sweat at a school where 51 percent of the grades last year were A's and A- minuses.

Yet Pedersen also admits that grade inflation is real. As at many schools, at Harvard, the A to F grading range has unofficially turned to an A to B- minus range. As a result, the university's current honors requirements make Harvard unique: It inevitably rewards grade inflation with honors.

STANFORD:
https://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/undergraduatedegreesandprograms/#honorstext

Distinction is awarded to 15% of the graduating class based on cumulative grade point averages.