@PurpleTitan I didn’t say you made the argument :). I said they’re prereqs for your argument making sense.
The point is that there’s no need to make a distinction between hooked and unhooked students’ academic performance. Hooked applicants sometimes choose to attend high ranking for public and other times choose to attend top privates, the assumption that they lower the bar at top privates but not at top publics is unfounded, if they’re capable of performing and being accepted to both institutions.
Interestingly what this has done is: Intro. courses remain very easy (they have become much larger so instructors have to stick to easier FR and short answer questions or MC only if they are lazy) but can end up curved downward versus traditional scale (like easier courses in the b-school who always used this curve). Some instructors who were traditionally well-liked for being both easy and good instructors have now actually become rigorous in intermediate and upper division courses perhaps to end up with grades that only get curved upwards as opposed to downwards. The easy instructors that are left over or those who do not rely as much on exams now have A cut-offs near 96 or so as they are guesstimating that such a cut-off will yield something similar to the recommendations.
STEM is a lot harsher, especially chemistry and physics. Most grades will be some sort of B, but heavily concentrated between C+ and B (any of those grades). B+ for general chemistry for example is known to usually start at the top quartile (they either design exams from the get go that yield something like that or they give a couple of more challenging ones that allow them to suddenly achieve it or scale until it is that). Many instructors are adept at knowing what types of items will shift the distribution one way or another. Like to yield 70-75 usually means they put an okay amount of higher level items on exams. Substantially below 70(65 or so) usually indicates that there were either more of these or that they were simply very challenging even to top performers. A person yielding 80+ is generally giving pretty straight-forward assessments with maybe one or 2 curveballs or higher level items (though in a course like organic chemistry, sometimes no truly higher level items are necessary to yield between 75-80 because most students are much newer to it than they are at say math, regular chem, and biology).
@TheAtlantic: Actually, #2 wouldn’t be a prerequisite. And I never made the argument that publics would not lower the bar.
Your reasoning ability is odd, to say the least.
In fact, it’s downright kooky.
If you looked at my original statement, it was that a lot of unhooked applicants of your academic ability would go to publics (because publics have a lot more slots to fill, so they would take those unhooked applicants while H could afford to be choosy and take hooked applicants with the same ability). I said nothing about the ability of hooked applicants to get in to publics. At all.
And you’re the one who conflated “hooked” with “URM” which is another poor leap in logic (especially at a place like H, where there are a lot of hooked non-URM admits). I actually had in mind the progeny of famous/rich/powerful people when I mentioned hooked students at H (where we should expect the overall academic ability to be worse than among non-hooked students or even URM considering that the pool of progeny of famous/rich/powerful people is considerably smaller than the pool of non-hooked applicants or even the pool of URM).
When he attended, the lowest level honors only required maintaining ~B+ or higher average and nothing else.
Heard Harvard reformed the system some years afterwards partially due to concerns that far too large of a proportion of each graduating class was graduating with honors.
@bernie12 nice info. So can I redeem myself with my original statement that “I guarantee that my S would have made dean’s list at his friends schools”?
I think we can all agree the more selective the school the harder in general the classes will be? Especially STEM classes? Or let’s tell the OP “your guess is as good as ours”??
One example is Reed College which despite having lower selectivity and IMO screwed up lower rank than warranted from USNWR is one of the most rigorous colleges I’d rate well above my undergrad LAC(Oberlin) or the grad experience I had at an elite(Columbia).
Reed, along with colleges like JHU, UChicago, MIT/Caltech/CMU, Harvey Mudd, Gtech, Swat, Cornell, etc…are colleges which have a merited reputation for having unusually higher academic rigor/quantity of workload even among colleges with same/higher admission selectivity.
Also, while STEM is popularly regarded as more rigorous/harder than non-STEM courses, this also depends highly on the student. I’ve known of many STEM students who made it a point to take humanities/social science equivalents of Rocks for Jocks or Physics for Poets gut courses* because they hated long reading assignments or writing papers.
Also, while it’s no longer the case, up until the end of the 1990’s it used to be the case that among Columbia U’s constituent undergrad colleges, the easiest college admissionwise other than GS was the School For Engineering and Applied Sciences(SEAS) provided the student’s grades/SATs were heavily lopsided in favor of math…which was the majority of the classmates at my public magnet. SEAS required a far lower minimum GPA/overall SAT theshold for admission than Barnard or the College back then.
Examples of such courses at several friends' universities included: "History of the automobile", "Computing and Society", Humans and [insert name of STEM field], etc.
Again, a logical person can only agree to that within clusters. Like VU has higher scores than Cornell. Doesn’t make it harder in STEM…trust me on that one lol, but seriously. You can simply say that undergraduate programs of a similar caliber may have more similarities to schools within their tier than outside. For me, any school with student body 1350+ is anyone’s guess and they as they would all be classified as having elite student bodies (“hard” depends on teaching quality, class sizes, departmental strength and sadly, often strength of instruction oriented faculty as opposed to tenured and tenure track. There is tons of faux rigor to go around even at otherwise excellent schools because some faculty do not know any better). To speculate about schools in and above that range is useless. Below this I would split brackets by 100 points. Like schools between 1200-1300 may have similarities and then 1100-1200. And then you can split it by size and stuff (smaller ones are likely to stray outside of their tier I bet, likely above. With smaller classes, instructors can usually do more of the type of challenging that I consider “good rigor”).
@CALSmom And no, I am not going to massage feelings and “what ifs” about someone’s performance lol. If that brings comfort to you all, fine. But it doesn’t add much to this discussion. However, it does say that you have a good son who is a tough cookie that values a good education because he did what many even at Ivies and elite tier schools won’t, deliberately challenge himself/use his HS strengths and background to place into higher level and just better courses. Unless he is pursuing a super GPA sensitive post-grad. option, I would tell him to work hard, keep it up, and maybe he will hit Dean’s List one day with a challenging course load! I’ve seen it before. I’m sure he can if he works hard and learns for the right reasons.
@cobrat I didn’t know that about Reed. I had never heard of it until I read in another thread about their scrounge table practice (which I find reprehensible).
@bernie12 thank you for indulging me and my tongue in cheek comments. CC can get intense sometimes! Thanks for complimenting my S. I’m very proud of him and all that he’s accomplished. He does work hard and challenges himself. @PurpleTitan, my S is a varsity athlete at his school so I guess we can say he’s hooked plus he is half minority so does that make him double hooked (or 1.5)? I can empathize with @TheAtlantic because I have read on another thread your same comments about hooked admits. It just gives off the vibe that you think less of these types of students. I could be wrong, but that’s how you’re coming off, just saying.
@PurpleTitan : I am confused. What just happened? lol (and look at where the “interesting” ideas are coming from lol).
*Also, I agree that large amounts of students attending wherever including elites can be considered hooked or not particularly academically oriented despite being able to perform well (and a history of doing so). Whether or not a school has more purely academic type admits (not just scores) could very well influence the academic culture and how high faculty are willing to pitch courses (a cultural issue. Students could be capable of a lot academically, but that doesn’t mean they want to stretch those capabilities. Again, places like H, despite having tons of “hooked” applicants especially development and fame cases, is going to find a way to cater to the okay amount of academic and academically oriented admits they have better than a place that attracts a lesser amount of those). How someone extrapolates what you said as “lowering the bar for other unhooked folks” I do not know. There is no need. They may just choose different level courses to begin with. Also, while there are many schools with awesome athletes who indeed do solid academically there is no doubt that at a D-1 school(specifically those that award athletic scholarships and where sports played a bigger role in campus life, etc), there is an emphasis on playing the sport that often leads to more “skewed” course and major selection patterns than the general student body, even among the majority there primarily for a social experience and credentials. I think it has been studied many times. And unfortunately, there have been extreme circumstances like the Chapel Hill case. So when it comes to certain elements of the “hooked” I cannot sit here and pretend I like everything that I see, but I would rather not go further into the issues with D-1 athletics at many schools (hey, at least they bring more apps and selectivity right?).
From what I’ve gleaned, it’s not very different from an unofficial long-standing tradition at Oberlin during my undergrad for students to sneak in indigent/homeless into the dining halls as a small act of kindness for those in need.
Nowadays a hook ( and it’s more than legacy, ethnicity or athletics) is desirable to help you standout as you are competing with other 4.0+ / uber high test scores / quality ECs. What’s wrong with that? It adds diversity. And kudos to student athletes at elite institutions because the physical demands coupled with the academic rigor and travel schedule is insane.
@cobrat I’m all for helping those who are hungry, that’s not my issue. I’m concerned with the spread of Hep A and mono. Allowing this in a dining hall isn’t sanitary. If Reed wants to help feed starving students they should use leftover food from the kitchen that hasn’t been served. In the thread where I found out about this, poster mentioned they make the hungry students stand there to eat the scrounge which I think is humiliating.
@CALSmom : Didn’t say anything is wrong with it and know what it is I was hooked (I am URM). And all elite schools are not created equal in terms of their culture regarding the athlete. I am glad they were admitted but I wish the system worked better so that more of them could feel confident pursuing more rigorous areas. I do not assume that just because someone goes to an elite institution that they are exposed to academic rigor. I simply assume that they have greater opportunities for that exposure.
As for hooked in terms of what PT was talking about. He is also alluding to the fact that many elites, especially some Ivies and Ivy equivalents often take sort of Aristocracy into account. So if you have some sort of fame or are associated with a famous parent, those ultimately turn into development cases. A lot these may be more prone to credentialism and despite being fine academically are not really there for that which is okay I guess. As for other hooks (and non), their attitudes towards learning may have more to do with family background and the like. Like a gifted lower SES student, if possible may take the academics more seriously because it feels more like an opportunity and less of an entitlement or expectation (the amount of students on CC who act as if they are genuinely entitled to elite private and public schools but especially elite privates is astounding. Just because you look good on paper, that does not mean you deserve it more than the others who look great on paper…or really anything from these places. Now admittedly, some more academic leaning applicants can likely benefit more from the educational environment of some of these places).
One of the main reasons why my S choose his school is for his major. Not that the other two Ivies he considered didn’t have it but he liked the program better at his school. A lot of his teammates are stem majors. Not a lot of humanities or social sciences majors. I think one major that isn’t conducive for an athlete is architecture. It wouldn’t leave any free time for training. So I think the system at at his school works fine. My opinion is if an athlete is going to choose an Ivy or other elite institution to play his or her sport, they are already academically-leaning otherwise they wouldn’t be on a coach’s radar.
Short answer: nobody really knows.
Good instruments to measure the differences aren’t widely available or consistently used.
The best I’ve seen in the past few years is the NSSE survey. The survey instrument is designed to assess “engagement”, not rigor per se, but it does cover some aspects of course rigor (/work load) such as the number and length of writing assignments. AFAIK most of the Ivies and many peer schools have not participated. The findings apparently are not published in any way that lends itself to college ranking.
Soon after the first round of assessments (maybe ~3 years ago) USA Today published some scores on a web site.I noticed what appeared to be a correlation not between “engagement” and selectivity, but between “engagement” and school size/type. LACs tended to get high scores whether they were highly selective (like Middlebury) or less selective (like Centre). Big research universities tended to get lower scores (even the rather selective/prestigious ones that participated).
Nevertheless, I think that within virtually any top ~100 college or RU, you can find about as much or as little rigor as you want. Personal effort, and variations among courses and departments, probably matter much more than the variations among top schools.
Seems like most typical “hooks” other than URM correlate to more advantaged family situations than the typical applicant. The biggest one (development) is obvious. To be a recruited athlete often means considerably family support and money to cultivate the athletic skill. The minor one of legacy also correlates to advantage, since all legacies are kids of college-educated parents (correlates to higher income and higher emphasis on educational achievement at home). Only the minor one of URM correlates to less advantage than the typical applicant.
According to the Arcidiacono study, weaker students switch from hard programs to easy programs to protect the GPA, and hooked students are more likely to do so than non-hooked students. He found the natural sciences, engineering, and economics “more difficult, associated with higher study times, and are more harshly graded than their humanities and social science counterparts”.
@Canuckguy : Meh, but is it surprising? I suppose in the sense that since being hooked has an ethnic component as well (as in URMs are hooked), if they follow such patterns, forgot about attempts to diversify certain fields without making the undergraduate work in it easier. The only thing is, STEM careers are often less GPA sensitive and more experience sensitive, so often perseverance and a desire to catch up or improve as I would imagine students at an elite institution should have, can lead to a salvageable GPA that gets them a solid job or even a decent grad. school offer. Furthermore, a meh GPA, unless going into the health professions can be mitigated by research, internships, and other experiences. Again, I think students are just used to thinking that only very high numbers can get them access to opportunities which isn’t exactly true for STEM fore example. If only more students were slapped out of high school mode earlier. Even the humanities and social sciences should do it to some extent.
Also, I’m sorry, but you do not need an 800 in math to succeed at Rice in most STEM subjects. I imagine it as helping in math and physics, but really anything competitive will do. I would certainly hope that they do not give courses that can distinguish that much between students who scored high on SAT math vs. super high. Usually in introductory classes, there is a threshold to be met and beyond that, most folks can succeed. Beyond that, AP/IB exposure and performance will help tremendously if you do not have a very high math SAT. You may at least have the work ethic and discipline in specific subject areas. Also this idea of so easily flunking out of hardly any elite school is hilarious. With most more difficult grading disciplines, you just need to be decent not necessarily at or near the top.
Even the idea that you need a near perfect GPA to get into law and MBA programs is hilarious looking at today. High ones definitely help but it generally appears that they need not be as high as they used to in order to gain access to top programs.
Work ethic is more important than “smarts”, in everything.
I had a mediocre GPA, but strangely enough, after my first job, nobody said “oh, you went to an Ivy League school - and what was your GPA there?”…
Conversely, a high GPA at Podunk U. won’t get you someone to ask for that GPA later in your career, they will look at Podunk U. and say hmm, never heard of it… Not, OOO, they got a 4.0 GPA at a school we’ve never heard of!
