[ewanmcteagle]

Why are the students afraid of lower grades? If you don't go to a PhD program, does it matter all that much? I think this emphasis on grades is something we should work to undo. You can learn, you can relearn and get extra help, but if the grades cause you to quit too early then grades are not having the effect we want.

[Kuiper]

A significant portion of the undergraduate population at my school receive scholarships that are recurring on the condition of maintaining a 3.0 GPA. We're talking non-trivial amounts, on the scale of $18-22k scholarship money per year for a school that costs ~$45k/year. For students receiving these scholarships, grades matter significantly, and it can become an economic question of whether they'd rather continue pursuing the engineering degree and graduate tens of thousands more in debt, or switch to an easier set of courses that will allow them to retain the scholarship.

I think a lot of it also has to do with expectations from parents. For a lot of students, graduating with an engineering degree and a 2.5 GPA will leave mom and dad less happy than an English degree with a 3.5 GPA, even though the former is more likely to be useful in the job hunt.

[pnathan]

I applied for a job where the cutoff for applicants was 3.8 gpa out of a 4.0 school. I was a 3.1 something, iirc.

If your future employers are looking for that, you do your living best to pad your transcript to stuff your GPA up.

[astar]

because they've been raised to be that way since preschool? the few friends I have that are on faculty seem to feel that its just more trouble than it's worth to give students low grades, and then face the evals.