A term spent in an exotic locale, replete with little work, plenty of travel, and learning focused on experience.
Or the most vigorous 10 weeks of your Dartmouth career, with highlights including tough classes, tougher grading, and barely enough free time to notice you're not in Hanover anymore.
Either one could describe the experience of the 63 percent of Dartmouth students who participate in the College's 30 off-campus programs.
The College grants each department total autonomy over the design and administration of its own off-campus programs, a policy that allows individual departments to craft a system they feel best benefits their students.
The flip side of this policy, however, is that all study abroad grades are not created equal.
One abroad amenity offered by many departments is the opportunity to take courses at a foreign university, taught by faculty from that university, in addition to courses with the Dartmouth faculty member who leads each trip.
When it comes exam time, however, these professors do not use the letter-based grading scale of the American university system. French universities, for example, grade on a numerical scale from one to 20. British professors use a similar number-based system.
More important for Dartmouth students, foreign professors often adhere to much stricter definitions of academic excellence than their American peers.
French professors designate the highest grade of 20 as perfection. "And they are not joking when they say it is reserved only for God," said professor John Rassias, chair of the French and Italian department.
Such cultural differences make translating the grades students earn from their foreign professors to their Dartmouth transcript tricky at best.
Sometimes the results are less than ideal, in students' eyes at least. Heather Wyckoff '02 described many classmates on her government FSP in London during Fall 2000 as "unhappy" with the grades they received in the two courses students took at the London School of Economics.
In one course in particular, she said, the median -- at a B/B- -- was significantly lower than in a typical Dartmouth government course. Wyckoff said she felt the grades at least some students received did not accurately reflect their effort in the classroom.
Part of the problem, Wyckoff admitted, stemmed from LSE's un-inflated grade distribution, in which top grades require exceptional work. LSE is a school where "an 80 is considered amazing," she said.
Nonetheless, for Dartmouth students who must return to the system of plusher American grades and be judged within it for jobs and graduate school, the lower marks -- however laudable within their original context -- can be difficult to swallow.
"Its not like my grades weren't important to me," said Wyckoff, who is applying for law school this year. If she had known how significant the discrepancy in grade distribution was going to be, she might have had second thoughts on the FSP, she speculated.
Other participants on the FSP found little to complain about. S.J. Gagliardi '02 said while the distribution of grades was probably lower than normal Dartmouth grades, he does not have any complaints.
"Not that I did great, but just a little lower than normal," he said.
There is only so much the supervising Dartmouth faculty member can do to control the grades handed out by other professors, according to government professor Nelson Kasfir, who led the FSP to London that both Wyckoff and Gagliardi went on.
Before the program began, Kasfir said he set out certain guidelines for the LSE professors, who he characterized as having little previous experience teaching American students. Dartmouth students, if they perform effectively, will normally receive grades between B-and A, he explained to them. The LSE professors were then asked to grade accordingly.
While Kasfir acknowledged that some students were unhappy with the grades they received in a particular course, he stressed that since all these grades fell within the range he set, he had no concrete basis upon which to challenge the marks.
To do so when a professor had met his criteria would be interfering in another instructor's academic authority, Kasfir explained.
Students who take courses in a foreign university enter a different academic culture, Kasfir said, explaining he felt culture and not unfair grading was at work in such situations.
Students understand how to operate in one academic setting. Yet the same practices may hurt their grades in another, he speculated.
"Students should assume that [grading] isn't necessarily going to work out as it would at Dartmouth," he advised. "The important thing is to get the experience" of learning in a different academic culture.
There are as many philosophies on how to handle "foreign" grades as off-campus programs.
The French and Italian department solves the grade translation problem by giving the overseeing faculty member the discretion to recalibrate all grades to correspond more accurately to Dartmouth's system.
"If [20] was our A, we would be decimated," Rassias said, referring to the French grading scale.
To be "midstream" on the French scale is considered doing well by French standards, he explained. But to directly translate that 10 to our letter system would not accurately reflect a student's level of achievement in the classroom.
Ensuring that this is not the case is one of the issues the Dartmouth professor is responsible for overseeing, Rassias said.
"It's wise to have that safeguard," he said. "Otherwise you get chaos."
This approach works well on language study programs, where the Dartmouth professor teaches at least one of the courses and spends a considerable amount of time with students outside of class on fieldtrips and other arranged activities.
Students' final grades on the French LSA+ in Toulouse, France were adjusted according to how much a student had improved in French over the term, according to Kate Knowles '02, who participated in the program three winters ago.
"Our Dartmouth prof knew us," Knowles explained. "She knew how hard we worked in her class, and by speaking with us every day, how much our speaking ability progressed. She interpreted our other grades based on that knowledge."
Most students are more than pleased with the grades they receive on LSAs. In a program where as much of the emphasis is on experiencing new culture as learning grammar, workloads are often lighter than that of a typical term at the College.
J.T. Leaird '02 described the Italian LSA in Sienna, Italy as a "big time Lsplay," a student nickname for the laid-back academic schedules of these programs.
"And as far as I know everyone was psyched about their grades," she said.
The Geography FSP in Prague sidesteps the translation issue by having the Dartmouth faculty member do all the grading. Different faculty members from Prague's Charles University teach the Dartmouth students throughout the term, but the Dartmouth professor writes and grades all of the exams.
On the History FSP in London, on the other hand, the Dartmouth faculty supervisor takes a hands-off approach to the question of grades. In addition to an independent study in conjunction with a Dartmouth professor, students on the FSP take one course from University College London and another taught by a freelance professor from another institution. Because the grades given by the British instructors of these courses "come in differently," they are numerically recalculated into letter grades, explained Department Chair Mary Kelley.
"But there is no elevation in the process," she added.
In the end, as in courses at Dartmouth, grade distribution in foreign courses depends on the particular grading style of individual professors. This year's government FSP in London, for example, escaped the disappointing grades that shadowed last year's experience for some students.
Like Kasfir, the program's Dartmouth professor, Diederik Vandewalle, said he explained to LSE professors beforehand what is typically expected of Dartmouth students and gave them an average grade range. Yet this year all the class medians were a B or B+, according to Elena Klau '03.
"[I think] the English professors were much more amenable to our grading curve" this year, she said in explanation of the higher grades.
