- #36
Cod
- 325
- 4
I won't lie, mine was horrible before I joined the US Air Force. I had a 1.8 GPA after 2-years. Hopefully I can find a school to accept me now that I have an AA degree and military experience.
mattmns said:We have an A+ that is worth 4.33
hat's stupid. there needs to be some sort of standard by which GPAs and grades are determined to make things fair.
mattmns said:At my school, getting 98+% does not guarantee you an A+, in fact they are quite rare. For example, I finished Vector Analysis with a 102.5% highest in the class, and did not get an A+. Also when I took Linear Algebra I was nearly perfect, finishing with about 99%, but still no A+.
The key to getting an A+ is going to your professors office hours and talking to them and showing extra effort (asking questions that were not assigned, but are of interest to you). Nearly every time I have done this I have left the class with an A+ (of course you do need a high grade in the class in addition to this).
mattmns said:At my school, getting 98+% does not guarantee you an A+, in fact they are quite rare. For example, I finished Vector Analysis with a 102.5% highest in the class, and did not get an A+. Also when I took Linear Algebra I was nearly perfect, finishing with about 99%, but still no A+.
The key to getting an A+ is going to your professors office hours and talking to them and showing extra effort (asking questions that were not assigned, but are of interest to you). Nearly every time I have done this I have left the class with an A+ (of course you do need a high grade in the class in addition to this).
JSBeckton said:WOW read the disclaimer, just anwser the question man. You seem to remember everything BUT your GPA.
JasonRox said:mathwonk has it all right.
I failed mathematics in high school, and now I'm a 3rd year math major on the Dean's List.
I can do bad in classes in university too. I have 2 C's, but I'm sure I understand more than the fellows with A's.
JSBeckton said:Then that means that most likely you do not work as hard as the students with A's. What other reason could there be?
I work 30 hrs a week and attend full time, I have never received a C. I believe that grades are only half of the equation but it does say something about your work ethic. I know many people that are not really smart but are willing to put in the extra time to get good grades.
In my opinion, I would hire the hard worker before the genius with C's.
Sure there are exceptions, but overall the hardworker is a better investment.
whitay said:But would you be innovative?
Without innovation you cannot move forward. So would the hardworker merely be a monkey in the long run?
JSBeckton said:You are assuming that everyone with good grades is not really smart, just hard working, that's not the case. And to clarify, this is only for hiring someone with no experience, after that, who cares about grades? And its usually not the recent grad that a company depends on the be innovative.
CPL.Luke said:hmm granted we are polling from a very select sample, but this poll seems to reflect more on the fact that grades are being inflated more than anything else. If you have a 3.9 or a 4.0 it means that your school is not grading you hard enough and is in fact holding you back,if you take into account that a lot of the people here come from top institutions already, then the fact that the largest subgroup in the poll had between a 3.9 and a 4.0 is very indicative that the system is broken, and isn't challenging people enough.
personally I think anything above a 3.7 ceases to be indicative of performance and shows that the institution is failing the student in that they aren't giving them enough challenge.
JasonRox said:I can do bad in classes in university too. I have 2 C's, but I'm sure I understand more than the fellows with A's.
JSBeckton said:How can you have a 4.0 when you admit that you sometimes do bad in university classes and have 2 C's?
JasonRox said:Isn't a 4.0 an A average?
That's what I have.
cristo said:I'm not familiar with the US education system, but how could one achieve 102.5% in a maths exam? Is this not a fundamentally flawed method of marking?
BobG said:That's grade inflation at its best. Call the hardest couple of questions bonus questions so the most often missed questions don't lower anyone's grade, they just increase the grade of the smartest few in the class.
Or, alternatively, quite a few teachers take the most commonly missed question from one test and make it the bonus on the next test. At least that does serve a purpose, even if it inflates grades.
Grade inflation at its worst is when students get to toss out their lowest test score. That helps the worst students squeak by to a level they might not be prepared for.
mathwonk said:Jason Rox, I urge you to try to do something to challenge yourself more, before it is too late.
I spent a long time in my youth saying things like " well there is no telling how good I could be if I only worked, why I already understand the material better than most fellows with good grades."
I bragged about skipping class, then reading the other guy's notes in one night, and passing the exam.
Then I began to slide down the slippery slope of poor performance, and only after a hard period did I realize I was holding myself back by not really trying to see just how good i could be when I did work hard.
When I did work as hard as I could, I was still not at all the genius I had pretended to myself to be, but happily I was certainly a lot better than I had been when I was goofing off.
And eventually I had a lot more fun. the competition out there is terrific. if you have any chance of really being good, you need to do all you can to realize that potential.
When I got back into school and started working, my first grade was sort of an A+ in a non honors course. After celebrating briefly, as I think I said elsewhere, my next step was to get back in the honors sequence and take some harder courses that I could not ace so easily, and try to ace them too.
It took a few semesters, but
thats when i started moving up the ladder toward the level of the really strong students.
good luck!
mathwonk said:tackle one of the great books recommended here,like milnors morse theory, or something else/ well be glad to recommend if you say what interests you and at what level. you are obviously very gifted, and you have a bright future.
mathwonk said:we were recommended by ed brown jr to read milnors topology from the differentiable viewpoint in first or second year grad school. it is wonderful. a better starting place than the morse theory book.
there is also a detailed and beautiful version of this material written for undergrads by guillemin and pollack, but milnor is the master.
the undergrad version has complete proofs, i.e. more trees, while milnors is more forest.
you might try reading milnors book, topology from the differentiable viewpoint , and bring questions to your prof.
mathwonk said:well topology is the study of spaces on which only continuity makes sense, while differential topology is the study of spaces on which derivatives also make sense. topology from the differentiable viewpoint is the use of derivatives to draw conclusions which hold for the topology.
i.e. add more structure, get more hold on the situation, but with the goal of obtaining more fundamental information. the poincare conjecture is a prime example. it is a question posed only about the topology of a 3 manifold, but it was solved by using differentiable tools.
i.e. the goal was to show every simply connected compact 3 manifold is topologically a sphere. but it was shown that every such manifold could also be given a differentiable metric structure. then in 1984 hamilton proved that if a differentiable 3 manifold with a metric was also positively curved, then topologically it is a sphere.
hence one could prove the purely topological poincare conjecture by showing that every metric on a compact simply conected 3 manifold can be deformed into one with positive curvature.
i do not know if this is the way the actual proof by perelman went, but it would be plausible.
mathwonk said:check out my posts 17, 21 of the thread how many mathematics do we need?
(how to obtain topological information from critical ponts of a single function. eg. any compact manifold having a smooth function with just one max and one min, is a sphere.)