Replying to several completely unrelated things here...
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Originally Posted by simfish There are problems with the state system - among them - the socialization system tends to make people conform to the traditional undergraduate education track in the state schools. It's certainly a lot easier to be motivated when all of your peers are highly motivated and when you have grades from difficult classes to motivate yourself. But that sort of motivation is an external sort of motivation that will hurt one's performance in graduate school - researchers should be motivated enough to pursue problems independently of whoever the hell their peers are. |
I agree with this totally -- I would compare it to trying to lose weight with a trainer and trying to lose weight by yourself. As motivated as people want to be to lose weight or to learn the entire Western canon, it's just so much easier to sleep in and miss your workout or just not get to the end of that tricky paper. It's much easier to stay with it when you have other people to keep you accountable.
Interestingly, I think that professional researchers are still very much reliant on their environments to stay productive, at least in my experience.
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Originally Posted by Big Brother 1984 And I'm not being too hopeful when I say Caltech students are overall, of higher "quality" than MIT students. This has basically been asserted on CC (especially on the Caltech forums), and one statistic doesn't lie:
Caltech:
SAT Critical Reading: 690 - 770 99%
SAT Math: 780 - 800 99%
MIT:
SAT Critical Reading: 660 - 760 97%
SAT Math: 720 - 800 97% |
But I believe these are admitted student statistics, not enrolled student statistics. Someone can correct me if I am misinformed, but I believe it's pretty standard for schools to report the admit stats rather than enrolled. That's not to say that Caltech or MIT actually has higher numbers (because those sorts of small difference peeing contests are uninteresting to me), but it seems that the final numbers would be affected by some of the factors discussed in this thread.
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Originally Posted by pebbles I mean that because the vast majority of caltech students are into pure sciences and the majority of MIT students are going into engineering, academic goals differ and placement into grad school is not necessarily a good point of comparison. (most engineering grads don't go to grad school right away, is what my impression was, where as an undergrad degree in math/physics with no phd is pretty much a deathtrap) |
Well, also, the actual MIT grad placement statistics aren't given (nor am I even sure that they're collected). About half of MIT undergrads go directly to grad school, but there's no data on what they
want to do.
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Originally Posted by Perplexitudinous MIT is bigger and therefore may have more applicants competing for the same number of spaces in top grad schools, which could hurt MIT on this measure |
Nah, it seems to hurt students from other schools rather than students from MIT. Grad schools aren't too concerned about taking lots of people from a single school vs. taking people from a variety of schools -- of the 70 first-years in my PhD program, 10 of us are from MIT.