Bottom of the class

[siserune]

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@calmom

My daughter is a junior at Barnard. Her test scores put her below the 25th percentile for her school. Since she attends Barnard, she also takes classes at Columbia (usually 1-2 classes per semester) - where she probably is way below that 25th percent mark. She has earned A’s in all the classes she has taken at Columbia, including one class with an A+. She will probably graduate summa cum laude (However, an A- will bring her GPA down, so its possible that she is only looking at magna cum laude)</p>

<p>The real question is what this young man’s study habits are.

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<p>HYPSM are quite a bit more demanding, competitive and IQ-saturated than Barnard, which makes for a less elastic stratification of students. Someone who at entry is consistently pegged at the bottom 25 percent by a variety of measures will not find it easy to jump 70 or even 20 percentiles in class rank through diligence alone. There will be a bottom 20-30 percent (if that) of students at those colleges who underachieve for whatever reason, and one can surpass them through hard work. Beyond that, the competition gets a lot steeper, as many smart(er) people will actually be trying to maintain high grades.</p>