Median Grade Report, A&S Majors

Just for fun, I decided to run a few calculations on the average median grades in six popular Arts and Sciences majors. Average median grades are calculated by averaging the listed median grades for a given department. Here are the results:

I decided to confine my figures to these six majors for a couple of reasons. First, they’re six of the more popular majors that incoming freshmen and current rising sophomores might be deciding between. I also avoided including cross-listed courses when I did these figures, so I tried to stick to majors that had enough non-cross-listed courses to insure that the figures were somewhat informative.

The results are interesting, although not too surprising. Economics is a bit lower than I expected, Government is right about where I would have guessed, and English is ridiculously high at 3.7. (This might be due to the high number of FWSs that are listed under English, but if you look at the Median Grade Report that I used, I’m not convinced that this makes that much of a difference).

But I caution everyone against reading too much into these numbers. I think these numbers do accurately represent the kinds of grades students get in these majors, but keep a couple of things in mind: I only used one MGR to do this, every class was given equal weight regardless of how many students were enrolled, and I only counted classes that were not cross-listed across multiple majors. For incoming students or those who haven’t picked a major yet, it’s also important to realize that these numbers don’t tell the whole story when it comes to the difficulty level of these majors. Math looks pretty average at 3.5, but I can tell you from personal experience that I put more work into getting the median in a 4000 level Math course than I did to get an A in any of my Econ or Gov courses.