What's happening at Wharton after GND was lifted.

I was pointed to this article in Wharton Journal by this post in the Clearadmit blog.

What i read in the journal is serious stuff. The stuff about people padding up GPAs by scraping through waivers exams in preterm, about people with the attitude of "I come to school to learn and i learn irrespective of my grades" losing out in the GPA race coz of such behavior from the above mentioned group and finally the part where the author says he would not have attended Wharton if he had known this would happen at school - interesting. This is not some person speaking, this is a first year student at Wharton speaking. The author tries to play middle man in the obviously debatable subject. Dropping GND has a few advantages to the people who perform. Someone making into the Dean's list and not being able say that to the recruiters is really wrong, speaking from the perspective of those students. Performing well and not being able to say it is a seriously offensive rule :)

When i was discussing the issue of Caste Based Reservations with my mentor (i was against it and he was for it), he suggested this nice way to use the policy. He said that the government is bound to provide the interests of the underrepresented group, which is true. But it can actually be upto the individual castes as to how they use the policy for their benefits. I was arguing that reservations must be on the basis of the economic situation of families, but he argued that they are almost always on the lower rung of the economic scale also. So he said that it must be the responsibility of the boards of these underrepresented groups to use the reservation based on the financial position of the families under their board.

This was his suggestion - which made sense to me. The Govt allocates percentages of seats in institutions and instead of a rich person of a community (who's had the best of education right from PreKGs) taking up that seat, he must be made to go through the open category and the reserved seat must go to a person who has financially struggled his way through basic education. And when this is controlled by the underrepresented board, there is no external intervention and so no one complains. If the group disagrees regarding who gets what seat, they rot to death fighting within themselves and no one gets affected outside this group :) It made sense.

Similarly - i guess the GND issue must be left to the student body. The school forcing a ban on grade disclosure is doing injustice to the top performers (read dean's list members). The school forcing a grade disclosure means that the "learners" and career switchers are at a disadvantage. So i guess the best way to handle this would be to not force a disclosure and ask the student body to decide who specifies their grade on the resume and who doesn't :)

Aah - if only everything was so simple.
I am sure the folks at Wharton (and possibly the others also) are thinking about different ways to solve this out and whatever is happening is only the system going thru the evolutionary stages.