My affection towards Hopkins students has more to do with how it implements "grade deflation" to the point where the prevalence of a 92 results in a four point deduction for all students in order to adjust the curve. This is a masturbatory practice by the institution to gratify itself at the expense of the students who will complain and legitimize the notorious prestige of the school. Out of the few Hopkins premed students I have talked to it is surprising how often they doubt continuing the premedical tract due to arbitrarily punitive practices such as these which bring to the fore the trivial and frivolous nature of "academic prestige."
Most students don't face this existential dilemma until they take Organic Chemistry. These people don't understand how the first year of padding allowed them to establish support networks or a schematic structure of how to absorb stress and negative feedback. The dilemma occurs when a lot of academic effort on the part of the student is undertaken for barely passable results. Psychological studies have indicated that the frontal cortex responsible for impulse control and cognitive thinking develops until the early to mid-20s indicating that harshly punitive measures of grade deflation during the early onset of cognitive growth is counter-intuitive to culturing a genuine interest in the area of science. I could go at length about how I feel cultivating a genuine interest in an academic field is infinitesimally more important to cognitive growth than to merely be a GPA robot, but it's an opinion that is worthless because it won't change the contemporary paradigm of degrees being used as a socioeconomic status symbol for career advancement into the middle class.
