This. No class is impossibly difficult if the professor finds a way to effectively present the material and truly cares about teaching. Students will be motivated to study and that’s real learning while still maintaining the academic difficulty.
Unfortunately, it’s easier to establish ‘academic difficulty’ in another way by blowing through the material like no one’s business and give exam questions that almost no one can reasonably deduce from lectures and homework.
Yes. Yes, they are.
no they are not more difficult. they are hyper competitive to get in…because a lot of people need the name brand validation…apply… but I challenge you to go to a “lesser” school and treat a chemical engineering course or cell biology class as a cake walk. why are name brand schools like harvard or yale better or more difficult?
It depends (on school, subject, instructor, etc.).
As many people here have said already.
OP again here. Thanks everyone for all the thoughtful and insightful feedback. I wanted to take the discussion in a slightly different direction. Like I hinted at in post #56 I am most interested in the ‘so what’ to this question. That is, if you conclude for a given student that their ‘reachiest’ school will also be the most challenging for them (I get it, it’s not that simple - we’ve almost reached 200 posts debating the topic - but bear with me), what are the implications for coaching that student on college choice?
So here’s where my head is right now. If we agree that:
… does it then follow that …
To personalize again, my D is in an overrepresented demographic (white unhooked New England public school girl). While it can be a little frustrating to learn that this will make it harder for her to get accepted to many colleges, can I at least conclude that she is likely to thrive at any school she is admitted to - essentially because her reach schools would be match schools for equally qualified students from a different life situation?
Thanks again everyone.
Too difficult to generalize.
What adcoms look for may or may not correlate well with scholastic success.
You want to ensure the student forced into new levels of stretch is up for it, won’t crumble, won’t start a thread about being desperate cuz she/he got a B or C. Those kids may be better off at a less competitive. That’s the age old big fish/little fish question.
No, that’s not about ORM vs xRM, nor SES. It’s about personal drives and resilience, perspective, etc. Any kid can have this or not. It’s not a matter of hs grades or scores, whether those seem to place her at a most selective. This is where your close, personal knowledge of her is important
@Saint68 let me spin your story back to “at” you a bit. The only box your daughter can check is the one where they are looking for nice, well rounded, high performing students. You probably assume they’re a dime a dozen, but I wouldn’t call them common. I think you can probably assume your daughter can do the work if she’s accepted.
IMO, the most important factor in your daughters ability to succeed will be finding the right fit. Small classes vs. larger ones; research university or smaller college; city, suburbs, or country near or far from home? If you get the right type of school, she’ll be fine.
I can tell you that as parents we worried a great deal about our oldest at a highly selective school. There were several times early on where the results made us question the incredible effort. There was a bit of guilt. Did we arguably force our child into a situation that was just too hard? Now a junior, things are fine and nobody questions the choice of school. It’s a small college, and the social fabric of the institution identified and supported the steps necessary to get over the hump. I doubt that dropping out was ever in play, but the support reinforced the choice of major and has kept us on a path that might have changed had the support not been so complete. When I say support, it is department heads with very impressive CV’s investing the time to really get to know their students. All of that is based on the type of school you select, not the boxes you checked getting in.
My son chose to attend a large school where he was in the top third, deciding to skip over two schools that he would have been in the bottom third. He is an engineering major and was worried the classes might be too difficult being at the “bottom” of the class. Even at this university he struggled with some of the toughest classes, thermodynamics, etc. I am not sure he would have made it through at his top acceptance school.
Keep in mind that many internship opportunities require a 3.0 GPA. They do not ask in the posting if you attend an ivy or lower ranked school… they DO NOT want the application unless you are succeeding wherever you go.
@collegecrazies: On the otherhand, engineering is tough almost everywhere.
No, I think that is a very misguided assumption, because you are making a false generalization about students from over-represented groups as well as underestimating the caliber of students from under-representative groups.
No matter what you think, the kids who have the easiest time getting admitted to the elite colleges are the ones like your daughter. On an individual basis they might feel like they have a harder time standing out (so results tend to seem more random and unpredictable in the eyes of the applicants) – but aside from that, they don’t face many barriers to admission, and students like them are the dominant demographic on elite campuses. (That is why they are “over-represented.”) In other words, there are plenty of them ending up in the bottom half academically.
We don’t know your daughter. If she it the type who is strongly ambitious and always challenging herself, pushing herself out of her comfort zone – then she is likely to do well at a college that provides opportunities for challenge.
But if you have started this thread because you trying to rationalize a desire to encourage your daughter to set her sights higher in her college list, to aim for more prestigious and selective schools than she is currently focusing on … then I think your theory doesn’t hold water. She is just as likely as any other student to find herself in over her head or feel overwhelmed at a college with high academic expectations.
@calmom That is not at all why I started this thread. Thank you for your thoughts.
The only side note I can add is that I had a brother who attended both a SUNY and then transferred to an Ivy League school. He took physics at both, as it didn’t transfer when he changed schools. And he found the SUNY harder.
@Saint68 Can you clarify what you mean by better college success rate? Do you mean the acceptance rate to a college or making the best college experience?
As for demographics, it depends on major. If she applies for such as psychology, then her demographic will be the overrepresented, but apply for engineering and she will be the minority. A good number of schools separate the applicant pool depending on the major so she won’t always be on the overrepresented side even within her high school applicants.
“Different groups of students will have an easier or harder time gaining admission to a given school - demographics, geography, hooks, etc.”
What? Any kid admitted to a most selective has been vetted that they can fit and thrive, through to graduation. It’s part of the review. Top schools have no sympathy vote.
“Students from ‘overrepresented’ groups will have a better college success rate on average than students from ‘underrepresented’ groups if they all attend the most selective school…”
Nope. A white girl has no better chance of “success” than the next kid, of a different background.
I would not conclude that, and, in my opinion, it doesn’t actually have anything to do with the original question. And I’m a little flummoxed that you would get to this from 13 pages of discussion. I feel like you know how you wanted the question answered (see above) and you’re looking for confirmation of it.
I can’t give you that; I don’t think anyone can because it’s crystal ball territory, not academic territory.
@UpMagic : “Unfortunately, it’s easier to establish ‘academic difficulty’ in another way by blowing through the material like no one’s business and give exam questions that almost no one can reasonably deduce from lectures and homework.”
Isn’t the latter a very American point of view I(I can tell you that the former scenario is more common for “average” and below average instructors at selective schools. Very fast coverage and classically superficial depth. Above average often has fast pace and greater depth/expectations)? I see it in STEM all the time. It mimics the idea that someone should be able to get 100 on the exam. which is just not very “scientific” (science often does not work and we damned sure do not understand it all), so it is typical, especially in European systems and among more rigorous American instructors to write exam questions perhaps slightly inspired by lecture or HW material but that are ultimately different and require some guessing and “fudging” primarily to test to see if any of the students have judgement or creativity beyond regurgitating or applying strictly what they have already been told. For me, the teachers that did this were often FAR superior to instructors who gave “straight-forward” exams (students got over seeing lower grades than normal because tests were not just: “do what I and the problem sets told you but in a time crunch”) because their course and teaching style focused on thinking and problem solving, so of course on the exam, you had to apply these skills to problems that were out of your comfort zone/that needed to be derived from principles unveiled in solving other problems (or from first principles up). This idea that tests should be regurgitation or super algorithm is interesting and American college students, even at elites continue to subscribe to it.
I got a hold of some Oxbridge (or was it Imperial? I forget) exam papers in STEM and it has a preface essentially saying that “these exams are not designed for students to get over 90”. They are testing for than just knowledge. They really want to see if you can do more with it. To separate among brighter students, those are the exams you write. A STEM class with high grades (let us say high 70s low to mid 80s) at an elite typically follow the same old script from HS (exam is straight-forward from book, notes, and lecturers/whatever material. No extrapolation or derivation required) but the material moves at a faster so you achieve a distribution from students merely not keeping up or simply “forgetting” something and not because “some of you only learned the material at the bare minimum we told you and some of you learned at a deeper level” (basically, in the easier case, some just learn quicker or have more photographic memories). The more rigorous instructors separates based on this last case. And I think that type of separation method is more common in stronger departments and at solid schools outside of the U.S.
Those are the types of courses @ucbalumnus alludes to that students often avoid. The more advanced options typically have instructors who not only cover more advanced material than AP/IB, but also have high expectations in terms of the types and level of problem solving skills expected. So these classes are avoided by the masses of those even attending selective institutions.
I feel that I got into two Ivies because of demographics, but when I did matriculate, I had a 3.4 GPA first semester. I did end up with less than 3.0 GPA upon graduation, but only two classes were beyond me and I got D’s in them.
I spent about 5 hours per class outside of the classroom, probably more. That’s 12 hours in class, then 20 hours of studying and doing homework.
The estimate therefore is that the most competitive schools are like a full-time job for qualified accepted students, 32 hours per week bare minimum.
To the OP: Therefore, if your daughter plans to work her butt off, have her apply for reach schools, hope she gets in, and be prepared to work her butt off.
I strongly disagree with the person who says " For example…a student taking calculus someplace is likely to encounter a very similar level of difficulty. Ditto lots of other courses. "
That is bull. The amount of handholding is vastly different at different schools, and even so, it is RARE that Calculus 1 at a community college = Calculus 1 at an average state school = Calculus 1 at an Ivy. I see that in action. As a state school, we are forced to take community college “equivalents” of our courses, but multiple times we get someone who has used the same textbook, but covered half (or FEWER) of the chapters in the course with the same name, for which they got full credit for our course.
I think the focus students and parents should be:
(as for “likely to do well,” that is up to her. My son has done very well (A-) and very poor (F) in various semesters, and he is the same very intelligent young adult. We are trying to hone in what his trouble was, and it was the hours and the planning that did him in. You cannot start a project two days before it is due if it was assigned two weeks prior. Learning time management is very important for college, and that’s why my other children are all going to summer programs to learn some discipline)
@UpMagic : http://teaching.chem.ox.ac.uk/Data/Sites/58/media/courseinfo/handbook2014.pdf
See page 7. I think it is just interesting how differently they think about achievement. Like 40% as a past. Given the background of Oxbridge students (which begin specializing in HS for the most part), this suggests they write very challenging exam papers. Seems American norms are very self-esteem based. The idea that the smart/academically elite students should always see scores much closer to 100 and that averages should be near 80% in a “normal” or challenging STEM course. 40s-50s are apparently the norm on those pre-lims. My ochem instructor came from Mexico which had more of a European system which partly explains why he writes his exams in a similar fashion. He has a hard time wrapping his head around why students need to see high scores near 80,90,100 on their exams and assignments. My advisor in my MS program who is Bulgarian also does not understand the system and as a physical chemistry instructor has little sympathy or care when averages are low because that is what he was used to (you just put grades on the curve or scale exams individually). Neither was used to instructors putting mostly lower level items and content on examinations.
@Saint68 : Many students kind of just use the selective institutions for their scenery and access to resources and in some cases they may feel “stretched”. The concept is that, in theory, you will generally have much more access to rigorous instruction if you need or want it simply because there will be more faculty members willing to pitch the course much higher than average (often they believe in the students more, have time or a duty to teach rigorously because they are instructional faculty, or have an agenda/institutional pride and believe that they should hold smart students to a certain standards. Sometimes these reasons are combined). But make no mistake, outside of certain holdout departments, you get a lot of variation. As a testament, look at the tenor of these articles about Dartmouth’s quest to “increase academic rigor” which is a small part of its “Moving Dartmouth Forward” strategic plan: http://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2015/03/mcdavid-misplacing-academic-rigor
http://www.dartblog.com/data/2015/05/012050.php
*Also, there are these idiotic or at least questionable speculations (like written by one of the authors above) that occur anytime administration at a selective school addresses issues of academic rigor. And it even happened at Princeton when the grade distribution was instituted for a while. Folks like to say: “But oh no, that means even the STEM classes will have to get harder, now that just isn’t fair”…anyone with common sense should know that the administration is likely knowledgeable enough to understand the grading differences across the departments and the fact that some will be affected much more than others (basically, they do not literally mean across the board). Like I remember some Princetonians alluding to the grades they saw in certain STEM courses post-distribution and they would claim that the deflation policy did that. The fact is, the STEM courses were unaffected and that the instructor they allude to probably already graded like that well before the policy. This appealing to the status of those majoring in STEM subjects as an argument often against increasing rigor. These folks, other than when fishing for easy counterbalance courses would go unaffected by such suggestions (and then there was the mention of how those who want to just party and drink will find a way…well, in a more academically rigorous environment, it may be harder to also maintain high grades while doing so which is kind of the point). And then there is this weird assumption of a bi-modal distribution of student work ethic that I found interesting to say the most.
I believe there was a book (I forget its name) that used Duke course selection and grade data to discuss patterns in highered. The results were naturally sobering and paint a similar picture to the articles above about this tendency to either avoid academic rigor as much as humanly possible or to tightly control your engagement with it. Again, even if your daughter attended a selective institution, in most cases, she has more control than one would think.
as ucbalumnus suggested, you kind of chart your own pathway when there. There are some selective institutions (including STEM universities and some LACs) that are more uniformly rigorous across and within departments, but at most places, you can engage rigorous instruction if you want and you can dodge it when you do not want it (yes, often there are many courses pitched only at the level of say, an average state school in terms of workload and level of exam. You will get a high level of discussion if class is not lecture based, but ultimately one will not have to work that hard). Like if you only want rigorous instruction in areas where you think you can excel, likely other students and RMP can point you in the right direction of an instructor who is rigorous but teaches effectively so that you have at least a fair chance of succeeding . Likewise, if not comfortable in a discipline or you are uninterested.busy with other stuff, there is often a section or instructor waiting that pitches the course at a lower level. The “tailor it” scenarios tend to occur at schools that offer more than one section of courses especially at introductory and intermediate levels where STEM and even some social sciences like econ and political science may try to “weed” out students. Schools more consistently rigorous in a department may only offer a single or maybe 2 instructors.