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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the reccomendation! I am a bit confused though. Is 'a first' the top score on an exam or like a suma cum laude?

Free link to the book here:

https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945/w...

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People sometimes talk about it in terms of exams in the sense that they'd achieve a first overall if that exam was 'it', or that it brings their average up etc. - but strictly speaking you can only achieve first class (or any other) honours for the degree as a whole. It's commonly (but not necessarily) >70% overall. Equivalent to achieving some high GPA range.

American translation: graduating with anything other than a 4.0 or a 1.0 is wasted.

Or rather between them, yes. (Or a bit lower than 4.0, that's perfect right? Or do you not have to get full marks on every exam to achieve that?)

4.0 would mean that you got a letter grade of "A" in every class. In the US, that usually means you got a final grade of 95% or higher in every class.

95? I have never seen that. 10 point seems to be the most common (A=90+).

At my school, 90, 91, and 92 were considered an A- and worth only 3.7 grade points.

That’s a little more normal. In my state Grades 1-8 ran on a 7pt scale. A was 93+, B was 85-93

In high school maybe. All my stem classes in college were graded on a curve. First exam freshman year was physics. I walked out thinking I failed. There were questions I did not answer. Later that night they posted raw scores. Mine was 48 pts out of 100.

I was ready to withdraw and reconsider engineering as a major.

Later still they posted the cut offs. 40 was the cutoff for an A. Avg was 36 and the cutoff for a B. My 48 was the 4th highest score.

I would have preferred the British system

C is often the lowest passing grade — so, same saying really.

Oh got it now, thanks!

Here in the US we have a saying of " C equals Degree", so kinda the exact opposite of the UK saying. Strange!

I have always known it as "C's get degrees" but that's sort of a crass expression, not really the equivalent of the quote which is presented as "life advice" for the enrichment of those that receive it.

"C's get degrees": The bare minimum to get the credential is the optimal use of resources.

"You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything between.": Either excel at school to maximize your achievement or don't worry about your grades and simply pursue whatever comes your way from the opportunity to be there to enrich your life.

Amusingly along those lines, I once had a prof in my Ph.D. program tell me that if I was getting all A's in my coursework, I was doing it wrong. (I.e., not spending enough time on research.)

This is pretty common at other places - my PhD advisor was exasperated that a polymer chemist would get an A in Physical Chemistry II, when I had a national lab collaboration to work on, a fellowship to write, and a first-author paper to get out the door.

In retrospect? Yeah, I probably should have taken a B and finished relevant things faster. I have almost zero use for my understanding of the mathematic accounting of the particle-in-a-box.

Of course in grad school a C is a failure, so the wiggle room is slightly less generous.

Talk about grade inflation…

Back in my day it was “Ds get degrees”.

First = highest undergraduate degree classification in the British system.

Universities in the UK treat a degree from the US with a 3.7 or 3.8 or higher GPA as equivalent to a first according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_c...

"First" means "first class honours" aka. the highest designation of degree. The US equivalent is summa cum laude, yes.

It's not quite equivalent in that it's more standardised and every university uses it. I think it's more accurately equivalent to 3.x GPA or above; probably you could find graduate entry requirements (though most are probably fine with at least a 2:1/upper second) stating exactly that as their equivalent admissions criterion.

Let me rephrase that. An Oxford first is equivalent to summa cum laude from an Ivy League.

Yes, the standard for graduate admission around the world (and also other things, like undergraduate research awards in Canada) is upper second.

Not the same — Oxford first means top third of the class, roughly. Summa at Harvard is top 5%, a much higher bar.

Yes. I think the top 1/3 of Oxford undergrads are on par with the top 5% of Harvard undergrads.

This is not true of other places which award Firsts.

Your first sentence is interesting, why do you think that?

I got a 2:1 from Imperial, guess what I think is on par with top 5% at Harvard ;)

I'm only kidding, but more seriously it's certainly not all equal, and few are really in a position to compare any two, nevermind several - it's a bit of a joke that we then make 'a 2:1 in an engineering or related subject' or 'at least 3.5 GPA' or whatever a requirement as though the institution and cohort doesn't make a difference at all.

Harvard takes in a lot of students on the basis of athletics, legacy, and other non-academic considerations. While I've seen students admitted to specific colleges in Oxford due to family ties, that has always been a matter of which college a student attends; I've never seen someone get in that way who wasn't already going to be admitted to the University on academic grounds.

If you look at the top 1/3 of Harvard students who deserve to be admitted on academic grounds, you end up with a much smaller pool than "top 1/3 of Harvard students".

It’s not like the legacies that get in are unqualified. You can look at any of their resumes, they still have stellar grades, standardized test scores, extracurriculars and more. Legacies aren’t just dumb rich people, their parents just went to that top tier school (and I’m sure you can imagine just having parents that highly educated can be a leg up in how they raise you their entire life). In fact, legacies can often be overqualified and should go to a more competitive school but are guided into the legacy school by their parents / guidance counselors.

At Harvard, about 12-15% of recent classes are legacy. Zero are admitted on the basis of athletics alone, that is literally the tenet on which the Ivy League was founded.

Even if you were right, though, it’d be an odd take — even if 25% (or 50%!) of Harvard students were admitted noncompetitively, they would simply not be part of the top 5% of Harvard students? Like they’re not diluting the top 5%, they’re just not in it.

I stand by “top 5% of Harvard” is a higher bar than “top 1/3 of Oxford”. But I will grant you that these are all based on GPA anyway, a rather noisy measure of even academic ability, let alone anything else we might care about.

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