Johns Hopkins University

Horrible experience. The arbitrary GPA cap forces professors to sabotage their own work. They deliberately include exam questions on stuff they never cover or in some cases have nothing to do with the class. Example: I had a question about molecular biology on a investments quiz. You rarely see what you did wrong on exams because they might need to change your score to curve under the cap. So first off, this means you don't get better because you don't know what you did poorly on. Secondly, you can... Read More get 28 of 30 questions right, but if they need to get under the cap, they'll just go back and mark some right answers wrong. If you don't know they are marking correct answers wrong, you can't file to challenge your grade. So they just won't let you see it. There is an overreliance on generic copy/paste group work assignments. This makes it easier for them to grade in segments rather than individually. This allows them to deliberately stack the deck too. For example, in the Fixed Income class, they put everyone who work in fixed income together and those without a business background together. TA's openly admit this is to make grading to the cap easier as the FI professionals are more likely to do well and those without any business background are likely to do poorly. Because there is a GPA cap, this essentially meant, the grades were preassigned before anyone did a single assignment. This is what Carey considers "rigorous." The proctoring software bugs out all the time. It's so inconsistent that some professors just choose to ignore it. The IT infrastructure is a joke. My.jhu crashes all the time. It will show courses you're not registered for, account balances for other students rather than your own. To their credit, the IT team will work hard to get it fixed, but it's always temporary. Not worth the money at all if you're not going to work in the North East where the Hopkins name has the most impact.