Re #38
Harvey Mudd is known to have course content that is outlier rigorous even compared to other highly selective schools. Check the calculus course materials there, for example.
My DD is a Regent Scholar at Cal and she has stated on several occasions that she feels like everyone in her class is smarter than her. I have to believe that a class with this student makeup must be designed to be more challenging than the equivalent class being given at Cal State East Bay.
If the difficulty was the same, why do we see so many threads about kids wanting to take things like O-chem at home over the summer? And why do so many of the posters who advise the pre-med kids on this board keep telling them to go to a college where they won’t be in over their heads?
All classes can be taught at varying levels. For English, how are the papers graded? And are there any papers? For STEM subjects, are kids tested on what they learned in class, or are the tests full of “push” or “stretch” problems that they have never seen before (but if they work hard they can come to the right solution).
Depends on the class and individual students. There were many students at my LAC and the Ivy grad classes I took who managed to read EVERYTHING assigned without skipping a beat.
Even in an undergrad semester when I had ~1400 pages of reading a week along with a 5 credit foreign language class, I managed to complete them all without issues while holding a part-time job and having much more free time for ECs/hanging out with friends than I did as a public magnet HS student.
Not necessarily. For instance, a regular course at Columbia University’s is 3 credit hours and the typical courseload is 4-5 classes(there are some semesters when one will need to take 5 to finish undergrad in 4 years).
Comparing a CS class at a top research school already mentioned in this thread vs. a top 10 CA community college: My student said that the same material covered in an entire semester’s CC class was covered in the first week at the top research U. I don’t know how all the transfer students deal with these differences, if they are going into a STEM major at least.
Due to lack of standardization of CS courses among the UCs and CSUs, it is very common for CC students in California to need to “catch up” on frosh/soph level CS courses after transfer due to lack of course articulation between their CCs and UCs and CSUs. It is sometimes a little better for CCs near a particular UC or CSU, since the CC sometimes copies the courses from the nearby UC or CSU.
Engineering majors sometimes have similar issues with courses other than math and science. Frosh/soph level math and science courses are typically more standardized, so they match up better and are less likely to be needed to be taken after transfer.
See http://www.assist.org to see for yourself.
@LivinProof Our S is a Regents at another UC and he said basically the same thing this quarter, that everyone else was getting it except him. So she’s not alone in being hard on herself.
I posted this in another thread several months ago, but the same course can vary greatly in difficulty from one year to the next at the same school. For example, a freshman engineering CAD course used to do some relatively simple designs, turn in the Solidworks files, at that was it. Last year it was changed to design a more complex object (a robot), plus they had to create the parts from the design, assemble it, and program an Arduino. Much more work for the same class and number of units. Both versions of the class satisfied ABET accreditation.
So it’s no stretch of the imagination that a school where students are more capable can have more challenging “equivalent” classes than a school where the students need to learn at a different pace.
Aside: Kids who think everyone but them is getting it may be seeing what has been called “Stanford duck syndrome” or just “duck syndrome.” The idea is that everyone appears to be gliding effortlessly across the lake, but below the surface, their duck feet are paddling furiously.
Great discussion here. Thanks.
As a former professor, yes, the level the students are at influences the amount of explaining you have to do. If the whole class is quick to pick things up, you can move through material faster.