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Yeah you are right about the SAT.
But even at schools like MIT and caltech, you will find some pretty 'dumb' kids as in all schools, but are you just saying Cornell has a lot more?
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Actually, yes. The best students at Cornell can measure up with anyone. In fact, the smartest person I know I met at Cornell (and keep in mind, I attend a top med school where 70% of my class came from a top 20 college). But, unfortunately, Cornell just has way too many kids who struggle (and then whine about the non-existent grade deflation). That makes the academic environment depressing. I found the academics at Cornell to be wonderful and challenging. But, too many students whine about how it's unfair and stressful and cutthroat. Nope. It's because you're not cut out for Cornell.
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If community college transfers were as dumb as some of you all make it out, there is no way the two graduation rates would be this close
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Graduation rates lol Come on, that's not a sensitive measure of achievement. You get a 2.0, you graduate. It's tremendously hard to get a D or F at Cornell. gomestar, a poster who worked in admissions at Cornell and was a transfer himself, even said that statistics show transfers do worse than regular admits (often experiencing an average of a full grade point drop in GPA after going to Cornell).
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Why should Cornell care about the score you got on a college readiness exam if you have already shown that you're doing fantastic in college? You could argue that community college classes might be easier and so not a true indicator of college readiness for a school like Cornell and this is a good point. However, Cornell can refuse to accept credit for classes they deem not rigorous or comparable to a Cornell class, so this argument is moot.
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Because GPA's are not standardized. Cornell has no idea if Podunk Community College in California is rigorous. And most community colleges are not. That's why I advocate more transfers from colleges we know (like BU or NYU), not Southwest Airlines Community College. SAT scores are standardized. If a person tells me they scored a 2300 on the SAT, I know they're not a dumbass. If a person tells me they have a 3.8 at a community college, I'm still not sure.
URM's and affirmative action, I won't get into. That's a powder keg. I'm a proponent of affirmative action. But, just so you know, when the academics get difficult, that's when you see the weaker students struggle. At top colleges, the grade inflation masks the discrepancy in achievement. It is tremendously hard to flunk out of a top college. But, in colleges where there is no hand-holding (like UC Berkeley), the discrepancy in graduation rates between URMs and ORM's is remarkable. In med school (where affirmative action is as robust if not more than in college admissions), URM's flunk out at 4-5x the rate of ORM's (that's from the AAMC's own study).