Not every college offers 20 different variants of the same course. At my non-elite college, all math/physics/chemistry/engineering majors took the same intro calculus class taught by the math department. There was no separate calculus for math majors and calculus for engineering majors.
This is a lot less true than you think it is or maybe it even goes in the other direction. At my large, not very selective public u, a high percentage of the class would get Ds/Fs in intro chem/calculus/physics/engineering courses. The professors had an almost Darwinian survival of the fittest attitude in those weed out courses.
If you care about grades, most colleges grade on a curve, harder to get A’s if surrounded by bright students.
If you consider things like research opportunities, schools with driven students are competing for same spots. Same for on campus recruiting for jobs.
Professors do consider the clay they have to work with.
My S1 transfered from a local public to Cornell.
At the public, he asked a prof why she was teaching mainly material from
the prerequisite class, and not the topics on the syllabus.
She indicated that most of the kids did not really understand the material
from the prereq. She offered to meet with him in office hours to cover the more advanced topics
that were supposed to be covered in the lecture. After going to Cornell, he has not found such
accomodations. In fact just the opposite, very little help or interest from profs. You are thrown into the deep end of the pool and told to swim, no instructions, no life preserver.
Yes MIT, Cornell, and a few others are much harder than your generic local college.
The words in a textbook may be the same at most colleges, but you dont pay this much money just
to read textbooks. You are paying for the overall experience, which varies.
A more academically selective college may have increased academic rigor in its courses compared to a less selective college. However, that does not necessarily mean that it (or all of its departments) will have that.
An example can be found in the intermediate microeconomics economics courses at various schools:
Cornell: Single variable calculus required (3030).
Penn State: No calculus required for standard course (302). Single variable calculus required for honors course (302H).
Florida State: No calculus required (3101).
UCSC: Multivariable differential calculus required for both standard course (100A) and math intensive course (100M).
UCSC is the least selective of these schools. But the other more selective schools do not seem to be willing to offer their economics majors a more mathematical treatment of intermediate microeconomics like UCSC offers (and requires).
@ucbalumnus - Your example illustrates another point. UCSC is less selective because it is one of nine UCs. Californians have many choices, and the most competitive students choose the most selective, i.e., Berkeley and UCLA. However, at the end of the day, UCSC is a UC, and it has higher standards than most public universities across the country. So someone trying to find a correlation between selectivity and standards at publics across different states won’t find any meaningful trends.
To add to UCB’s post 163, at the time my sister n attended his UG,m5 classes in physics were required. Such a requirement is not universal.m
“A more academically selective college may have increased academic rigor in its courses compared to a less selective college. However, that does not necessarily mean that it (or all of its departments) will have that.”
I’d agree with this. It may be true, but I get offended when people ASSUME it’s true. Anyone who doubts the rigor of my school is welcome to come take my classes for me.
Some of Ivies are known for grade inflation where as some of state flagships are known for grade deflation. Does money buy better grades at more selective colleges to keep the paying customer happy ?
And some top 25-30 practice grade deflation, too. It’s by school, not by tier. And by dept or program. Faculty expectations, as well as prep of indivudual students, some expected bar.
“Fit and thrive,” not have top grades in your one hs.
At a school like Harvard there are extremes in classes. There are classes like Bro Bible and there are classes like Math 55. The average grade is A- so pretty much no one has to worry about grades. It is impossible to flunk out of Harvard. The level of the student body is very high so as a student you get to interact with some of the smartest kids in the country. Outside of the contacts you will make the opportunities abound. As a Harvard student there are summer internships available all around the world. A place like Caltech on the other hand may be academically more difficult than the Ivies
Sometimes I hate autocorrect. Yes, Caltech required 5 physics courses.
I think the problem is assuming that “academically difficult” is necessarily a good thing
I think post #162 by @blevine illustrates the problem. At the state school her son was underchallenged, but when he approached a professor, she offered to meet with him in office hours to go over more difficult material. But after her son transferred to Cornell, he found the course work indeed more difficult – but also “very little help or interest from profs” and sense of being “thrown into the deep end of the pool and told to swim, no instructions, no life preserver.”
Which school offered the better education for its students? Harder doesn’t equate with better if students who are capable of doing the work are being discouraged or weeded out, or if the pace and lack of support leaves them able to manage to pass the course but without fully understanding all concepts.
Wouldn’t it be best for all students to have a combination of caring profs and available course options to challenge without overwhelming?
My daughter found her college to be very rigorous and challenging – but she also generally had very supportive and caring professors. It was the thing that struck me most when I visited her and met several of her profs over the years.
If the goal is to be able to humblebrag by making a point of how difficult the work is…then the most academically difficult schools would certainly afford plenty of opportunities. But if the goal is for students to learn – then the reality is that human beings typically don’t learn well by being placed under stress and bombarded with information
This is very YMMV as there are some students who actually thrive on and yes, even enjoy learning in this type of academic environment. Saw plenty of such students at my public magnet which has been likened by many fellow alums as sink or swim with little/no handholding.
While I wasn’t one of those types of students, I’ve been around enough such types of students to know they do exist and would not enjoy being in a more nurturing environment they’d regard as “too coddling” and “not challenging enough” for their tastes.
@andyzhou20 : Maybe in a “clustering” sense. Like if you separate STEM universities, LACs, and R1 universities from each other and then clustered them by reputation you will find some correlation, but within each cluster, this gets questionable (low resolution). Like I can post the material for some STEM departments of my alma mater versus a NOW much more selective but similarly ranked institution (both elite privates) and you would end up surprised (I found that my alma mater had less intensity in lower division physics courses, similar in math at all levels, slight edge to the other school, biology was different pedagogically at each at all levels with mines focusing more on experimental biology in the curriculum and theirs being more content/memorization heavy courses in lower, intermediate, and upper division. Neuroscience told the same story as biology. Chemistry had a HUGE advantage for nearly all analogous courses even when comparing several instructors. These differences existed well before now and make sense. My alma mater has a bigger pre-health/life sciences subscription so much has been done to modernize chemistry, biology, and neuroscience courses whereas the physics and math at the other school serve an engineering school, so you expect at least a slight edge) if you buy your theory (and note that my alma mater is not the only other elite but less selective that is known as equally or more rigorous in these areas). This is primarily because the more selective school only became super selective more recently. Typically, academics do not necessarily change with student body, especially since we are talking two schools that were already regarded as academically elite private universities for at least a decade (and maybe more). Their rigor versus each other and other schools will vary by department and will reflect the traditional (as in, in the past) strengths in terms of undergraduate teaching at each. So within this particular elite cluster, further increases in selectivity of either are not predictive or influential.
- Idea is that within the clusters of schools in terms of reputation and general undergraduate caliber (which beyond a certain threshold may not neatly correlate with selectivity as this also assumes that selective schools today were always that selective. Changes in admission office and marketing strategies can greatly influence this especially if a school is already within a certain bracket), the standards per department likely existed in the past OR are being influenced by current institutional culture and context. Like if their is a big push to change pedagogy in certain divisions at one school within a cluster but not another, then yes, it is extremely possible that a less selective school will not only be more rigorous, but also just do things better. Oftentimes class and section sizes can over-ride how much a faculty at even an elite university wants to make their course, especially if they are tenure track (junior faculty have good reason to content deflate and grade inflate. Keep decent evals and keep undergraduates out of face so that they can write a book or run a research lab) or have tenure and run a very large, successful research program (just keep the undergraduates out of our face by making them happy).
Often how “smart” the students are is less determinant in this consumer culture of ours especially in light of incentives (or lackthereof) for faculty to teach well and rigorously. Most teachers don’t say: “Wow, X just added another 20 points to an SAT mean that is already 13XX/1600 or 14XX/1600 and decreased its admit rate 5% because it got X many more applications, I think I will finally put that really challenging problem on the test that I never would have last year or maybe make my problem sets harder”. What can happen, for departments within such schools that care about undergraduate education, is that a teacher may decide to design another course to perhaps serve the more ambitious students among these high scoring students. So you end up with the type of tiering of courses you see at places like HYPM. It isn’t the selectivity versus the students’ attitude towards learning. Like two schools may have the same scores (or even different scores), but one school has more students that chose it for its location or social climate and another has many more that chose it purely because of more academic aspirations. The latter school will tend to create more avenues or have more professors that are more willing to push students harder. Just a difference in culture that could not be predicted by looking at the scores.
Part of the issue is also that people are not always the best judges of whether they can handle the “drink from a firehose” type of education. They think that by taking classes in HS, they already drank from the firehose, and that simply is not true. Now the kid who took all APs and did EC that took extensive time, and got As in a super competitive HS, maybe they are prepared for an intensive college. But APs in a less competitive HS with minimal EC committments, could have same AP scores but not ready for intensity.
So it’s not just “are there more difficult colleges” but would a kid turn them down and believe it’s not best for them ? I can’t imagine my S having turned down Cornell, but I can see it was not best for him. The school he transferred FROM, he got a full free ride, which was also tough to turn down, but he gave it up for something equally attractive but inappropriate in a different way. So go ahead and rank the schools by difficulty, how much does that help kids make decisions ?
I’d say the correlation between selectivity and academic difficulty is pretty high if you’re looking at all colleges nationally; I’d guess .6 or .7ish. But the correlation shrinks drastically when you compare one selective school to another.
Also, lots of students, even at more selective colleges, are not looking for increased academic rigor. For example:
a. It is common for posters here to recommend unconditionally retaking one’s AP credit (instead using using the college’s old final exams to determine whether it is a good idea to skip or retake as allowed by the college).
b. When a college offers different versions of the a course with different levels of rigor (e.g. honors courses, courses that require more math prerequisites, etc.), it is uncommon for students to choose the more rigorous one if not required by their majors.
Even though many of the students at more selective colleges chose the most rigorous options while in high school, many choose the opposite in college. In some cases, this may be incentivized by GPA considerations (e.g. competitive admission to get into a desired major, or to get into medical or law school), but it does seem odd that so many students reverse course on choosing rigorous options when they go from high school to college.
Academic difficulty likely correlates with a combination of selectivity, department or major, type of grading system (curves increase competitiveness and often work ethic) and quality of teaching.
Selectivity - high scores/grades, difficult HS classes - sets a new baseline for beginning of college curriculum
Department/major - For example, engineering degrees require more credit hours and advanced classes
Grading system - Bell curves ensure there are A, B, C and D grades
Quality teaching - Good foundation teaching combined with the above ensures that subject depth exceeds the textbooks and exams stretch the entire class.
After surviving an environment with all 4 characteristics, working is a cake walk!
My sis goes to Vandy and I go to UA. She, a math major told me that I would do just fine in Vandy.
While it might be literally true most professors have a curve, not all curves are the same. Depending on the professor or the department or the college, the curve might be set so that 10% of the students get As or 40%.