Should university subjects scale like vce?

[TrueTears]

I'm pretty sure for most post graduate courses (especially in mathematics, physics, economics, finance, econometrics etc), picking easy subjects would not do you any good at all. Even if you picked easy electives to boost your GPA but the unit has absolutely no relevance to your graduate course, then the uni would not even consider you. So the system is fine as it is, if you applied for an honours in finance scholarship, the committee will ONLY consider your finance units grades, and they won't even consider your first year grades, same for mathematics, if you applied for a phd at princeton for pure mathematics but did art subjects for your undergrad electives and scored higher in them than you did in third year pure maths units, most likely the committee will not consider you. All in all, committees for post graduate entrance and scholarships are human, they WILL look at your transcript and other information rather than simply looking at a GPA measure.

[Tomw2]

I think your idea is that "easy subject" applicants are generally less capable than others; my point is more about taking easy subjects tactically.

No, I was referring specifically to strategic subject selection and did not mean to imply anything about the aptitude of those who choose easier subjects in the hypothetical scenario.

My point was that there is minimal advantage in the practice, particularly when there are multiple criteria for further entry, e.g. MD, DDS etc.

[EvangelionZeta]

A friend of mine in academia told me that they scale marks across different universities (eg. Monash marks compared to Melbourne ones) when considering grad school applications, for PhDs at least. Not sure about how legitimate this is, but he seemed fairly confident and is usually very credible so here's some food for thought.

[MagicGecko]

LOL Imagine getting a raw distinction and it scales down to a credit, that would be gay as! 

[Planck's constant]

Picking subjects for the sole purpose of boosting your GPA sounds like a dumb idea to me.
Who are you trying to fool anyway?
Challenge yourself and learn a useful thing or two. That's my opinion.

[watto_22]

Picking subjects for the sole purpose of boosting your GPA sounds like a dumb idea to me.
Who are you trying to fool anyway?
Challenge yourself and learn a useful thing or two. That's my opinion.

From what I've read, I think it's the reverse scenario.
People are avoiding subjects for the sole purpose of not 'ruining' their GPA.
Surely these subjects should then be scaled up to encourage enrolment.

[pi]

LOL Imagine getting a raw distinction and it scales down to a credit, that would be gay as! 

Try to not use the word "gay" in that context again.

Thanks.

[MagicGecko]

Try to not use the word "gay" in that context again.

Thanks.

my bad, thanks for the head up.

[Tomw2]

From what I've read, I think it's the reverse scenario.
People are avoiding subjects for the sole purpose of not 'ruining' their GPA.
Surely these subjects should then be scaled up to encourage enrolment.

To do that and to justify the policy, the institutions would need solid evidence that significant numbers of students are in fact doing this. What constitutes 'solid evidence' and 'significant' in that context is elusive and getting any reliable data would be virtually impossible anyway as there are not enough people enrolled in individual unit/majors at each institution to get decent stats .