@tutumom2001 – the low student:teacher ratio is one reason why I keep suggesting we look at more LACs. D18 usually has good relations with her HS teachers. In fact, it looks like her STEM teachers have finally gotten her out of the funk she’s been in for over a year (mainly due to a disastrous social life). They recommended her for an exclusive summer program at StateU and are sending Freshmen to her for paid tutoring in Honors Bio. This appears to have gotten her motor running again.
As highlighted in the thread @ucbalumnus alluded to. I define difficulty more by cognitive complexity of tasks given to students whether it be the exams or GRADED problem-sets. I emphasize graded because I have seen professors give rigorous non-graded problem sets only to see the exam and realize that they were basically hand-waving when it came to cognitively complex problems or even complex material.
You can cover lots of material, but students, especially those fresh out of high school, may not find it too difficult assuming it is mile wide and inch deep. Typically the structure and pace of language courses are a good gauge. I know many more selective schools teach them at a fast pace (and typically curriculum/syllabi and assignments per course are standardized across sections) and assess students in many ways, some with high cognitive complexity.
As I said about STEM, it gets really complicated and really depends on the teacher/department and lesser so the school. You are more likely to find instructors requiring high cognitive complexity in departments that typically had a strong emphasis on the teaching mission (for whatever reason. like a physics department at a school with a very solid engineering program will have more instructors with more rigorous instruction than one that does not. A chemistry or biology department that feeds a more reasonable chunk of students to doctoral programs as opposed to health, and is also relatively large, may have more rigorous instruction). Also, usage of lecture track faculty in STEM can increase the amount of courses with rigorous instruction. Exception, some very top and well-funded STEM programs can pull off having an instructor with rigorous standards while also running a top research program because the graduate students can often pick up the slack and teach at a high level themselves in recitation or problem solving sessions. This is not at all the case at many other “elite” schools where a tenure track instructor is limited by time and the capabilities of their “help”. At such schools, strong lecture track faculty get top undergraduate students and set up programs to use them to run TA sessions as many grad. students in said programs cannot teach at that level since their background from their own UG institution is not up to par for the course. I also think many honors colleges do a good job (much like LACs, smaller is better when you expect faculty to challenge students. No teacher wants to grade hundreds of complex assessment items…)
There is also the issue of curricular reform in STEM (picking up around the country, now in more than just large publics). In some cases this will lower the intensity of courses and sometimes it may increase (perhaps due to new, more challenging content covered).
Humanities/Social Sciences: Purely department/program depended. Usually departments that want to offer an option for students that want more consistent intensity/academic engagement will isolate top faculty (who are usually known for their teaching as well as research) into a special (maybe it is based in a certain area of the discipline) or honors curriculum(like how Harvard has the Social Studies track or the Honors English curriculum) . Outside of that, it will be hit and miss even at elites (even more so than STEM where certain norms in grading are often maintained at a departmental level, meaning that at many elites, maintaining these grading norms will result in more cognitive complexity as a greater share of students can likely handle more).
@droppedit , there have been a few discussions on whether it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big one, and as is the case for most things, it depends on the fish and it depends on the pond. But there are many situations in which a student will thrive as a result of being at the top end of the his/her milieu - whether it’s being noticed by profs, feeling more confident or less fearful, or whatever. There are other kids who set their standards based on those around them, and that student may be better off surrounded by high achievers. He/she will run only as fast as the train they’re trying to catch.
As others have noted, a lot of it is about the learning environment. A student who knows how to seek help, advocate for him/herself, and learn material on his/her own will do just fine at a big university in large classes, and those who prefer anonymity will definitely like the large lecture approach. Students who prefer more engagement in the classroom, who learn by participating, and who like the personal connection with profs may do better at a LAC.
One of the reasons there are so many schools out there is that there’s a good fit for everyone. The best thing you could do for your daughter is help her discern where she thinks she’d be happiest and thrive.
There may be differences in expectations in terms of writing skills, weekly reading loads, levels/rigor of assigned reading materials, assumption of knowledge of readings that may/may not have been covered in HS, etc.
However, with exceptions of schools with known reputation for high rigor/workloads such as Caltech, MIT, UChicago, Swat, etc I’m not sure the differences is as stark on average as some…including some HS teachers/GCs lead their students to believe*. Especially if we’re talking top 10 vs top 20 or even 50.
That assumption of stark difference is in my observation, more valid when comparing the elite colleges with lower-tiered directionals such as the CUNYs I've visited during the early '90s or some of the intro college-level community college classes my friends taught. And even then, that wasn't always applicable as there are some strong students in those schools due to finances or overprotective helicopterish parents who insisted they remain local for undergrad.
This experience matched that of a college classmate who after taking first year Chinese at our LAC(Oberlin) intended to skip straight into third-year Chinese by taking the second year Chinese course at his in-state public university in the upcoming summer.
Upon consulting with the Chinese language Profs, he found it was a non-starter as his in-state public U’s Chinese language classes were taught at half the speed of our LAC’s which would leave him woefully unprepared to do well enough on our LAC’s Chinese language placement exam to be placed into its third year Chinese class for the coming fall semester.
In general, students taking foreign language courses after acquiring some knowledge of the language from either course work taken at a different school or some other way (e.g. heritage speaker) should consult with the language instructors at the current school for proper placement.
A lot of years ago I took an Electromagnetic Theory course,3 credits first semester of junior year. The same course was offered at the State U as a 4 credit graduate course and they only did about 2/3 of the book.Things may be more standardized now than they were back then, but, knowing kids who have experience at both types of schools, I would gather they are still measurably different.
It sounds like the pace may be the differentiator at top schools rather than the difficulty of the material itself. I think D18 would be okay in that scenario (assuming she gets her time management under control). What I don’t want is a ton of busy work dumped on her.
@Magnetron - Was your EM class an advanced one? I took “Electromagnetic Engineering I” in Fall junior year as an EE at UT-Austin back in the Stone Age. It was dreadfully boring with Smith charts, etc. Got a “D”. That disaster turned out to be pivotal moment in my life.
I teach at a “directional” state school. The intro physics course I typically teach is definitely at a lower level than the equivalent course at the local research U. We cover less material at a less challenging level. As much as I might want to more closely approach the research U equivalent, I would be doing so with the likelihood of utter failure of my students. To paraphrase the profound Rumsfeld - you try to teach the students you have, not the students you wish you had.
If the students at the schools you are considering are in vastly different ability sets from one another, likely the courses they are taking are gauged accordingly.
It’s all over. I did one MS Comp Sci at a respected vanilla state school and my MS Human Factors / Interdisciplinary at a highly ranked public. I thought the highly ranked school was easier, mostly because I liked the subject and we had brand name faculty.
My older daughter did her BA Architecture at a respected state flagship and is pursuing her M.Arch at a highly ranked public. Opposite experience from me, the demands of the ‘elite’ school dwarf those of her previous school.
Having said that, there’s a lot of ‘it depends’. When I did my undergrad CS in the vanilla state school, the programming assignments were very serious. Like, write Facebook in a weekend serious, or something like it. We compared with friends at much more respected schools, and their assignments were much easier. But I can’t extrapolate from that obviously.
I think my old cubemate (PhD CMU EE) said it best. He said, having been a TA at CMU for a while… At elite schools, even the ‘bad’ students are very good. At your typical school, the bad students are, well, bad.
@droppedit , I went upstairs to help jog my memory to see if I recognized which book was common for both the polytechnic undergrad and the state u grad course. I have 3 potentials: Paul/Nasar (Intro, not the one), Cheng (probably this one), and Hayt (could be this one). I also have Balanis’ Advanced book from another course I took…
In the humanities and arts, I think there is more reading and the reading is more dense. Expectations in terms of quality of work may be higher. Most students learn how to NOT read everything assigned, and at the Ivy I know about, students organized their own study groups, and so on. The difficulty is balanced by stimulation and the cross-pollination possible in many college environments, private and public, but possibly more at top schools.
The top schools give 4 credits for each course, making 4 courses the norm for full-time. Publics I know give 3 credits for each course so 5 classes is the full-time norm. I was told that this is because the public school classes are less intense and burdensome, or cover less, or whatever, but the rigor of the education is certainly there with 5 classes per term.
I would not hold my child back from what he or she wanted, within the financial limits of our family. And financial aid is amazing at some top schools. I felt the way you do, about one of mine, but he made his choice and though he was occasionally stressed, he had a great experience.
In my personal experience as someone who has been a student both at a great school and a just okay school, there is a difference. The teachers aren’t necessarily better, but the demands placed on the students are greater at a more academically challenging school.
I have taught or TAed at 2 public state schools, 1 Ivy, 1 middle tier (but surprisingly less selective) private school. My courses were in the social sciences. The poster who said that the Prof can move at a faster pace at the schools that are more selective is correct. However, for large intro classes, even at the Ivy, one can’t expect that much of students who are just taking the course to fulfill a core requirement. The idea from a departmental perspective is to make the intro course entertaining in order to draw more students into that major.
As students traverse to upper level classes, the workloads and expectations diverge. At the less selective schools the students need a lot of support, and even with hand-holding they resent being graded down for poor writing or research habits (citing wikipedia, not making a cogent argument, disorganized prose, misinterpreted data.) Students in these schools request study sheets and reviews for exams, and if they don’t get them they complain. The honors students may feel bored at times at the slow pace necessitated by reviewing concepts covered in previous courses. At more selective schools, by the time students are in upper level classes it is allowable by administration to assume they have basic work and organizational habits in place. Hence, more ambitious projects can be assigned and assumptions about cumulative knowledge can be made.
With that said: I attended a public state school for undergraduate and received there a superior education in my chosen field, which allowed me to get into a very selective doctoral program. However, that was in the 1980’s. Back then undergraduates were allowed to enroll in graduate classes at will. I am not sure how common that is these days – at places I have taught it is rare but not impossible.
Algebra based, but the majority of the students hope to be Engineering Technology majors. The others are bio or gen ed. I can’t speak for the calculus based courses as I haven’t taught those here.
Just a bit of anecdata, but my kid reports that it is very common for kids to take certain classes (orgo and calc seem to be big ones) at a college near home during the summer rather than having to take them at Princeton.
My DS17 had an interesting experience last year being in two college Discrete Math classes on the same day that taught the same topic (graphs and/or trees; I’m not an expert). One was a class he sat in on when we toured Harvey Mudd. The other was the class he was taking at our local California community college.
He said that the Mudd class was much more proof-based, while the community college class taught how to use them and do whatever computations. He was not lost in the Mudd class and felt the homework problems were quite doable, so his preparation for a topic in the middle of the semester was fine. That community college class transfers to our local UC as the prerequisite for a very proof-based junior level CS class he’s taking now on “Automata and Formal Languages.” (Again, I have no clue about the content, but it looks tough.) He’s doing fine in that class and finds it the most interesting class he’s ever taken. So again the community college class must have been sufficient preparation, even though he thought it was a bit dull at the time.
When I taught at a lower ranked state university, I could not make my class too difficult. I would lose too many of them.
Now I teach at a higher ranked state university, the quality of students is on average higher. More importantly, the tail is not that fat anymore. The same class is now designed to be more difficult. This is also exactly what most students want; they want to be reasonably challenged.
Note that I do not impose any curve. But my grade distributions have been quite the same for the Universities that I have served: about 15-20% A, 20-35% B, 20-35% C, 10% D and 10-15% F for required field core courses.