Day 79: Grades!

The hot topic of the day was the release of our P1 grades. After it was released, it was the only thing people were talking about. Not even the snake charmer and fortune teller who were on campus as part of the DESI week celebrations could steal the headlines.

Grades here at INSEAD are calculated using the Z-score with a GPA of 3.0 being the mean score (only among your peers on the same campus). Your own score then reflects how many standard deviations you are away from the mean. So if you got a 4.0 then you are 1.0 standard deviation higher than the mean. Conversely, if you got 2.0 then you are 1.0 standard deviation lower than the mean. As long as you get a score greater than 0.0, you pass the class (i.e. if you're within 3 standard deviations less than the mean, you pass). To my knowledge, everyone passed except for maybe 1 or 2 people who didn't cross the line on Finance. It's not enough to pass though, you need to get at least 2.1 for your core courses so as not to be hauled up in front of the academic committee.

Given the grade non-disclosure policy, no one has to reveal anything about their grades if they don't want to. Not just to external companies but to internal requests as well. Most of the "poets" I know who were pretty worried about the exams did pretty alright. Generally I'd say that people are pretty pleased with their results. Either that or the people who aren't pleased are hiding in the corners away far away from everyone else. =(

I'm guessing that people are recalibrating themselves now and their effort levels for the next set of exams which are due in just under a month's time (O_O I know!!!). Some will certainly be gunning to ace these next set of exams and claw their way into the Dean's list (top 10% of the cohort) while others may perhaps be adopting a more holistic approach and figuring out how many weekend trips they can afford and still get the GPA that keeps them out of trouble. ;)

And at the end of the day, just remember that our statistics professor in P1 showed us empirical data that there is very little correlation between GPA and salary after INSEAD. Outside these 4 walls, grades don't matter. It's what you learn here that counts, and what you learn here isn't confined to knowledge gained from books.