November 13, 2024
One of the questions I get asked a lot about is whether students should take courses S/NC. I have to admit that I thought that I had written about this before, but I went through the entries and couldn't find anything coherent, so I figured I would write something. (Whether it's coherent is up to you).
Many years ago, I was leading a committee that was tasked to give a student award for research. We asked the faculty in the department to nominate candidates for the award, and the committee would choose among the nominees.
There were three nominees. I'm going to call them A, B, and C. They all conducted honors thesis projects. A's project, however, was incomplete. They did a good job motivating their work, but at the end of the day, they didn't really do much to analyze their data, so the committee didn't consider their thesis to be as good as the other two.
I personally thought B wrote the best thesis, but I recognize that C's thesis was good too, and definitely above threshold. But I thought B was the clear winner. And that thought was shared by one of the other committee members. But the third person on the committee insisted that we look at the grades B and C received during their time at Brown. After all, the award wasn't just for the thesis, it was for their overall scholarship at Brown. So we did:
Student B had a 3.8 GPA. Student C, however, had a perfect 4.0.
And based on this, the committee decided to split the award between the two students.
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But there are two parts of this story that I'm not telling you. The first is that Student B took exactly one class S/NC (and got an S in it). Student C, however, took 21 of the 31 courses they took at Brown S/NC. They got A's in the 10 classes they took for a grade, but S's in all of the rest. I didn't know that when I was on the committee, making the decision, and if I had known it, I never would have voted for student C.
But here's the other part: Student B applied to graduate school in psychology during their senior year. They got into three different Ph.D. programs, and ultimately decided to go to a very good school (not going to say where, but you would recognize the name of the school) for their Ph.D. Student C also applied to graduate school in psychology. They didn't get in. (They took a position doing research, and ultimately did get into graduate school after a few years).
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There are bunch of reasons why one might want to take classes S/NC. There's less pressure to perform in any particular class, and it gives you the opportunity to explore topics you have never seen before. It's particularly helpful if you are taking 5 classes or if you know you're going to have another class that will be a huge time commitment. There's also some research (such as work by Carol Dweck), which suggests that when you eliminate grades, students become more "mastery focused" and actually learn material more deeply.
I think from a student's perspective (and particularly from Student C's perspective), they were protecting their GPA - using the S/NC option to ensure that they would have a high GPA. And that can work. It worked on our committee, where we didn't have access to student's transcripts, just their reported GPA.
But this doesn't work for something like graduate school applications, or any application where you have to submit your transcript. Those transcripts are evaluated. Two many S/NC and people (particularly employers or grad school evaluators) start to get concerned. Student C clearly took too many classes S/NC (at least for my tastes).
So, how many classes are too many? It's a really hard question. 21 out of 31 was definitely too many for me, but I talked with one of my colleages, and he was fine with it. So, there's definitely individual differences here. My rule of thumb is 6 out of 32. It's a little less than 20% (assuming you take 4 classes a semester). I would not think twice if I saw a transcript with that many S grades. I'm not even sure I would notice if there were 7 or 8. Probably at 10, I would start to think about it. So, again, there's some slippage here.
What about courses in your concentration? A little different. I would go no more than two. Especially, if you are applying for Ph.D. work in that discipline. So, when I evaluate Ph.D. candidates for Psychology, and most of their Psych courses are S/NC, I get a little worried. Two is actually more of a hard maximum for me.
By the way, if you want to know what I value most in classwork when I look at Ph.D. candidates - it's math and statistics. That's the first thing that I look at. Having grades of S/NC in those classes and I get nervous.
Of course, all of this is my personal opinion, not hard and fast rules.
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Finally, a personal note. I did have both Student B and C in one of my low-level introductory classes. I think they were both first-year students. I remember student B because they earned an A in the class, and it was a legit A - not the A- grades that I have to say is an A according to Brown, but a real, honest A-level grade.
I didn't remember that Student C took my class. They took it S/NC, which professors don't know unless they look carefully during the semester (which I did not). Student C would have gotten a B if they had taken it for a grade. Of course, taking a class S/NC means you approach the work differently, and perhaps had Student C taken the class for a grade they would have gotten an A, but we don't live in the counterfactual world.