<p>I agree with you Sakky on the issue with doctors and med-school admittance, but is there really any other way of assessing pre-med students and their potential success in the field? And just because someone took easy classes to get in doesn’t mean that they won’t be a successful doctor. People ultimately know if it’s right for them or not, but this is going too far out of the subject.</p>
<p>For engineers at least, generally, the higher your GPA, the more work you put into your classes. If someone who is potentially a great engineer but slacks off in class and gets C’s and can’t get a job because of it, then there is a problem. However, we don’t know how often this happens. I think the article you posted just focuses on the very small percentage of people who are actually like this and not the big picture. The big picture says that potentially great engineers will work harder in their coursework, even if some of it doesn’t apply to their future job. If they can’t demonstrate themselves in college, how can they demonstrate themselves on the job? I know there are exceptions, but if we focused on exceptions all of the time it might everything up for all of us.</p>
<p>Also, our grades are ALREADY inflated. It’s now easier to get an A in STEM class than ever before. They want to make it easier now?</p>
<p>I don’t think grades is really the big motivator to opt out of a STEM major. I think it’s the difficulty of the classes. These are two different things. A class may be difficult, not always because the professor is evil, but because that’s just how the material naturally is for people.</p>
<p>Explain to me how a potentially successful STEM major can be successful if they opted out of their program because the material was too hard for them. It’s all about the natural difficulty, not the grading.</p>
<p>Surely one of the most demoralizing aspects of majoring in engineering is looking at your shoulder at the less talented HASS students who putting in far less work than you are while enjoying the times of their lives in college…while nevetheless receiving higher grades than you are. Comforting yourself by telling yourself that you’ll enjoy a better career than they will may salve the pain for a while…until you then watch them being admitted to top law/med schools or garnering job offers from top consulting/banking firms that you could never hope to match because of your poorer grades.</p>
<p>The upshot is that engineering students would be far more incentivized to complete engineering degrees - or to even try to major in engineering in the first place - if they didn’t feel that they were not damaging their prospects in alternative careers by doing so via lowered grading schemes relative to the other majors. For example, as it stands now, the optimal strategy towards admission to med-school unfortunately is to take the easiest possible coursework you can get away with while still filling the minimal premed requirements. Easy humanities majors are therefore sadly a far more viable pathway than is a difficult engineering major towards a medical career. Sad but true. One could argue that the onus is then on the med-school adcoms to modify their admissions schemes. I would agree, except they have demonstrated time and time again that they don’t care and they’re not going to stop. The only other alternative is to then equalize the grading schemes amongst the various majors.</p>
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<p>Then let me give you another example. I can think of several people who entered college with full-ride merit scholarships that required that they maintain a minimum cumulative GPA (usually 3.0) to keep their scholarships active. As a result, none of them dared to major in engineering, because - entirely rationally - wouldn’t dare to risk their funding in the engineering grading meat grinder. After all, if one of them ended up after one semester with a 2.9 GPA, they wouldn’t then be able to argue that they should be allowed to maintain their scholarship because they just happened to be in a difficult major such as engineering. All that would matter is that they missed the cutoff, and it wouldn’t matter why. Heck, one of them even told me that without that scholarship, he would have to drop out of the university entirely because his family can’t afford to pay full-freight. Maybe they would have been terrific engineers, but we’ll never know because they never dared to try. The lower engineering grading schemes is therefore discouraging promising students from even trying engineering at all.</p>
<p>And why? What’s so terrible about trying something, even if you perform poorly? I believe that that’s still better than never even trying at all. For example, Jennifer Granholm moved to Hollywood immediately after high school to try to become an actress, where she basically ‘failed’, earning only bit roles. So she then went to college where she did well and then went to Harvard Law, and eventually became the Governor of Michigan. HLS didn’t hold her ‘failed’ acting career against her. But if she had tried engineering and failed, she wouldn’t have been admitted to any top law school, let alone HLS. {For this reason, I have always advocated that engineering programs should cancel the grades of former engineering students who leave the major for poor performance. If a guy isn’t going to earn an engineering degree anyway, who cares what his engineering grades were? But engineering programs refuse to do even that.}</p>
<p>Sure. I believe that adcoms shouldn’t use GPA at all - or at least should greatly reduce its weight - and instead rely upon the MCAT. After all, if nothing else, at least the MCAT is fair, as every aspiring premed has to take it. Furthermore, every MCAT score is statistically equalized with every other (within a certain tightly bounded confidence interval), and is certainly displays far less systematic bias than the grade differentials amongst various majors and various schools that already exist now. If the problem is that the MCAT is deficient in covering certain material, then the answer is to design a more comprehensive MCAT. </p>
<p>The rationale behind using grades in the premed process (as opposed to relying solely upon the MCAT) is that it is supposed to serve as a mechanism of judging one’s work ethic. Unfortunately, that rationale has been obviated by the existence of creampuff courses where students obtain top grades for very little work. Hence, the premed process has been irreparably corrupted by no longer rewarding hard work but rather rewarding those who scheme and game their way through the system by exploiting easy courses and avoiding difficult ones. </p>
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<p>However easier it may be to obtain an A in STEM now, it is surely even easier to obtain an A in HASS. Or, put another way, why have the HASS grades inflated faster than the engineering grades? Shouldn’t they both have inflated at the same rate? </p>
<p>And like I said, as long as certain majors refuse to inflate their grades at the same rate as others, and as long as post-undergrad career gatekeepers such as med-school adcoms refuse to care about those grading differentials, then promising students will rationally continue to migrate away from the more difficult majors.</p>
<p>And that’s where we would disagree, for I suspect that even if such a concept of a ‘natural difficulty level’ of engineering exists, engineering programs are far from realizing that concept. After all, you alluded yourself and most practicing engineers will surely tell you that the great bulk of what you learn in an engineering major are never used in the actual engineering job. Let’s face it: practically no real-world engineer actually spends a typical work-day racing against the clock in deriving reams and reams of calculus-based equations by hand, on pain of losing their jobs if they are unable to beat the clock. But that is precisely what engineering students learn for that is what they are forced to endure. The engineering exams that determine whether you will pass or fail basically devolve into all-out mathematical sprints where you desperately attempt to solve as many questions as you can within the allotted time. Heck, I remember one guy handing in a stack of more than the blue books entirely filled with equations for a 2-hour engineering final exam. (I believe he got an A). Who actually routinely does that on the actual engineering job? The difficulty of an engineering major is therefore arbitrary in nature. Heck, most engineers, at least of the ones that I know, happily report that their engineering jobs are far easier than the actual engineering majors. {Heck, some of them still have chills about their painful undergraduate days.} </p>
<p>And the truth is, probably no natural level of difficulty exists for any discipline. For example, while humanities undergrad majors may not be particularly difficult, the corresponding humanities PhD programs certainly are. Indeed, most humanities PhD students will not complete the program. Humanities faculty have made the arbitrary determination that they will demand relatively little work or evidence of talent before granting a bachelor’s degree but will be far more exacting before granting a PhD.</p>
<p>Really? Then consider this thought exercise. You have 2 courses. On the first day of Course A, the professor announces that while the course will require much work, everybody who does that work is basically assured of receiving an A. On the first day of Course B, the professor announces that while the course involves little work, most of the students will nevertheless receive a failing grade. Which course are students more likely to drop? Be honest with yourself.</p>
There is a difference between incompetence and malfeasance, but this whole line of discussion is probably served in a different thread.</p>
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Actually, I know a few. And only one was a former engineering student desperately trying to avoid the reality that they were simply not prepared for college. Still, I can think of a couple of reasons why engineers would fail out more often:</p>
<p>1) There is often only one right answer. Setting aside for the moment your prior complaints about the lack of creativity in engineering classes, the laws of physics and rules of mathematics are what they are, and no amount of arguing will change the fact that saying 2 x -4 = 8 is wrong. In many other fields, there are no scientifically demonstrable standards against which to judge, and therefore it is much harder to call someone wholly and completely wrong.</p>
<p>2) There are more incentives to enroll in engineering, even when you should not. There are significant advantages (especially financial) to graduating with an engineering degree, and (as has been noted repeatedly on this forum) many enter engineering simply because it will pay well. Conversely, how many people major in Classical and Medierranean Studies without already knowing that they have a significant level of interest and talent? In many schools, you also have to decide earlier as well - at Penn State, if you have not selected your engineering major by your 3rd semester, you will likely not ever be an engineering student, so many people enter engineering before they are really equipped to make that decision.</p>
No, I haven’t. First of all, because GPA is not the problem - I went to high school with a future Rhodes scholar, and her GPA was within the range of a couple of dozen engineering graduates that same year (some of whom were higher), so if the engineers were rejected it was not because of GPA. Second of all, because I know of only a couple of top engineering students who ever even mentioned the Rhodes or Marshall scholarships, simply because engineers at that level don’t usually want to go to Britain to study engineering - those 3.95+ GPA engineering graduates (and yes, they exist at every school) with grad school aspirations are headed to MIT, CalTech, Stanford, etc.</p>
<p>1) Interviews are not hires. My employer has a database where new hires post their internal resumes, and I was able to peruse it for a while. Those we hired from"lower-ranked regional schools" had better GPA’s than those we hired from traditional engineering powerhouses. We had 3.0 grads from great schools, but it seemed that you needed a 3.3-3.5 to get in from a lesser school. So this seems like a problem for only that 1% or so who would have gotten an interview without the hard 3.0 limit and still would have gotten hired.</p>
<p>2) There are lots of employers without this cutoff, and ultimately, that is THEIR choice, not the schools’ - if you change the average GPA of engineering students, why would you think the employers would not adapt and start requiring (for example) a 3.2?</p>
<p>3) Engineering students who get a 3.0 GPA from any school may demonstrate particular characteristics that are desirable regardless of the school. While you may think that a 2.9 from MIT is equivalent to a 3.5 from Cow College, we have no data on anyone doing both programs so that we can really compare. If employers have that requirement, there is a reason, even if it is just so that they can tell their customers that they only hire 3.0+ graduates.</p>
And surely one of the more demoralizing aspects of NOT majoring in engineering is looking over your shoulder at lower-GPA engineering graduates who are making twice what you are (unless you are a 3.6 GPA philosophy grad, in which case the 3.0 engineering grad is probably at least tripling your minimum-wage dishwashing job) and enjoying their lives outside of college. Its called karma.</p>
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And yet many people in those kinds of programs do so on a regular basis! At PSU, the honors college has a 3.33 minimum GPA, and the Engineering Science major will drop you FROM THE MAJOR for going below 3.00 GPA. You seem to be focusing on the relatively small number of students who are selected for honors but expect or fear to skate on the ragged edge of honors criteria. I know a number of people who entered honors/scholarship programs with GPA requirements, majored in engineering… and succeeded! Conversely, I personally know none who failed.</p>
This is an interesting point because it raises interesting questions. If the content of engineering programs is unrelated to engineering work, why do engineering employers demand employees who have completed such programs? If your characterization of engineering programs is correct, then why are STEM graduates important to the US economy? Perhaps the process of achieving an X.xx GPA in an engineering program develops something important or useful.</p>
<p>But you chose not to list the number who never even dared to try at all. You assert that the number is ‘relatively small’, but even if that is true, such a relatively small number is still too large. The number probably should be zero, or at least equalized with the number who fear any other major for their grading schemes. </p>
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<p>I would argue that such demoralization is entirely appropriate. After all, we are now living in straitened economic times when society and (especially) most parents can no longer afford to provide the nation’s youths what essentially amounts to a 4-year vacation/drinking-party fest. It is entirely appropriate for college students to be incentivized to develop marketable skills, and to feel demoralized when they don’t. </p>
<p>But to take your example head-on, that 3.6 philosophy grad you cited ends up going to a top law school where upon graduation he pulls an annual higher higher than the highest salary the 3.0 engineering grad will ever make during his entire engineering career. Where exactly is the karma in that? Reminds me of the story of ariesathena, a former poster on this forum and former engineer who went to law school who expects to make more money immediately upon graduation than her fellow coworker engineers with decades of experience at her former plant. </p>
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<p>If any pervasively popular notion now ought to be cast to the ashbin of history in the face of overwhelmingly decisive evidence, it is the notion that firms always behave in an economically rational manner. The last few years have been nothing but a parade of horribles of economically irrational behavior by firms that have wreaked damage not only to themselves, but also to society at large (as witnessed by the massive crash). Why did Netflix try to separate its streaming and physical delivery businesses, with a new website name that nobody could spell? Why did RIM launch a tablet that couldn’t natively check email (which had always been RIM’s signature killer app)? Why did Transocean pay its executives bonuses for its ‘exemplary’ safety record, - notwithstanding a certain little safety mistake in the Gulf of Mexico? Why did HP publicly announce that they would sell off their PC division - hence generating considerable anxiety amongst their corporate clients - only to later decide not to, all the while employing 3 different CEO’s in just 14 months? Why did NBC hire and then fire Conan? And certainly, I don’t need to enumerate the litany of ludicrous decisions made by the finance industry (how’s MF Global doing?). </p>
<p>And of course those are just some examples of the most spectacular of economically foolish decisions that firms have made. Firms commit plenty of other economically foolish decisions every day that simply don’t rise to the litany of the examples provided above. Anybody who is working right now, just look around, and you’ll surely discover plenty of economically silly practices that your firm is enacting right now. </p>
<p>The fact is, firms routinely behave in ways that may not be economically rationally but are socially legitimate. To cite Heath Ledger’s Joker: “Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying.” For example, one former axiom noted by corporate IT staffs was that “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, meaning that IT staff would often procure IBM gear that was far more expensive and technically inferior simply because the IBM brand provided political cover against upper managemers who are not technically savvy but could nevertheless fire the IT staff. {Nowadays, corporate IT networking staff have a similar saying that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco’.} Buying IBM/Cisco is therefore “part of the plan”. Managers see that other firms are doing so, so they decide that they should too. Similarly, screening out all job candidates with <3.0 GPA’s may also be ‘part of the plan’, probably instituted by some upper managers who are simply looking to cover their rears. {Hence, such hiring practices may be rational for those managers, but not rational for the firm at large.} </p>
<p>So in response to engineering grade inflation, would firms then respond by raising their GPA threshold as an economically rational decision-maker might expect? Ultimately, that’s an empirical question. But the notion that firms always behave in an economically rational manner is clearly discredited. </p>
<p>But even if firms did respond by raising their GPA thresholds, so what? Engineering students at the low-end would still benefit by at least being given degrees. After all, a 1.9 GPA engineer is surely more competent than somebody with a 2.1 in American Studies, yet the latter is still granted a college degree. So why not grant the former a degree as well? Sure, maybe he won’t be able to garner an engineering job. But at least he can compete for a generic job that requires a degree of some sort. As it stands now, he can’t even do that because he doesn’t have a degree at all.</p>
<p>Even if everything you are saying is true (which I frankly doubt), that’s still a 1% improvement over the status quo. I’ll take that. That’s better than nothing. </p>
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<p>Well, you should have. </p>
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<p>If GPA truly isn’t the problem, then there is no reason not to equalize grading schemes between engineers and non-engineers, right? </p>
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<p>Oh really? Last time I checked, Cambridge - which is open to Marshall Scholars - was considered an elite worldwide engineering school - frankly, stronger than even Caltech. </p>
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<p>Then that would seem to only strengthen the case that businessmen and lawyers can wreak tremendous physical harm upon society. Why are we so concerned about engineers building cars that explode, when we seem to be unconcerned about bankers and lawyers synthesizing financial securities that explode, thereby sundering entire national economies and currencies, generating worldwide declines in standards of living and accompanying social unrest? Rioting resulting from frustration and immiseration is tremendously perilous to public health. </p>
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<p>So what? It seems to me that the lack of a single (or at least a countable number of) right answer in the humanities could just as easily be utilized as a reason for the humanities to be extraordinarily difficult. After all - you said it yourself - humanities grading is based on judgment, and a professor could always ‘judge’ your humanities work as a failure, no matter how strong it may actually be. </p>
<p>As a historical case in point, Moby Dick received scathing reviews when first published and indeed was a key reason for Melville’s descent into obscurity; he died nearly completely forgotten. Anna Karenina was dismissed by the critics as nothing more than a “trifling romance”. The Picture of Dorian Gray was lambasted as being "mawking and nauseous’. John Keats’ poetry received only mediocre reviews at best during his lifetime. Emily Dickinson’s poems continued to be dismissed as unskillfully crafted for 30 years after her death. Impressionist painters such as Manet, Renoir and Monet were widely ridiculed during their time, and indeed numerous people arrived at the dedicated Impressionists’ exhibition (the Salon des Refuses) largely to publicly mock and humiliate them. The musical adaptation of Les Mis nearly died at launch, being infamously dismissed by the critics as “Les Glums”. </p>
<p>The upshot is that each and every one of those works basically received failing grades, at least as judged by ‘the critics’. Nor can anybody prove that the critics were ‘wrong’ in their judgment, because, like you said, there is no right or wrong answer. If you want to argue that the classic Disney film Bambi is “entirely unpleasant” and “tossing away [Walt Disney’s] whole world of cartoon fantasy” (which actually happened - the initial reviews of Bambi were negative), nobody can really argue with you because that’s just your opinion and opinions can never be proven to be wrong. On the other hand, if somebody says that 2x-4 = -8, and you as the critic declare that to be wrong, then it is quite provably clear that you (as the critic) are the one who is wrong. </p>
<p>And like I said, the lack of a provably right/wrong answer hardly makes the humanities easy…when it comes to PhD programs. After all, you can’t just slap together some random dissertation on literary criticism and demand that Harvard grant you a PhD in English simply because they can’t “prove” that whatever you wrote is “wrong”. The standards for obtaining a humanities PhD may be arbitrary but they are also highly exacting, which is why most humanities PhD students are unable to complete the degree. If Harvard doesn’t like your dissertation, then they’re going to demand that you keep rewriting it over and over again until they decide that they do like it (which may never happen). </p>
<p>So, whatever the reasons may be for the grade inflation within humanities undergrad programs, it has nothing to do with the lack of clear right/wrong answers.</p>
<p>Conversely, there are also plenty of reasons to enroll in an easy major for which you have no interest…namely the fact that it is easy and therefore grants you a college degree for relatively little work, thereby allowing you ample free time to enjoy what is effectively a 4-year vacation. Let’s be perfectly honest: many HASS majors aren’t really interested in HASS subjects at all, but in reality are actually ‘majoring’ in partying and drinking. After all, that’s what they spend most of their time actually doing. </p>
<p>It’s interesting and ironic that you would invoke the example of Classical and Mediterranean Studies major (actually we just called it the Classical Civilizations major), for I can think of a number of students who chose that major precisely because it was easy, not for any inherent interest in the subject matter. Heck, one of them specifically said that he chose the major specifically because it was an easy pathway for him to obtain a top GPA and so be competitive for law school without much work. {He then later went to a top law school; it’s hard to argue with success.} </p>
<p>So why is it a problem for engineering programs to attract students who are not inherently interested in the major and are just using it as a vehicle to advance their careers, if it’s not a problem for humanities programs to attract students who are also inherently uninterested in the major but are likewise using it as a vehicle to advance their career (i.e. by amassing the necessary GPA for law/med school)?</p>
<p>But why does failure need to be penalized? What’s wrong with trying new things, even if you fail? If I try out for the Boston Celtics and completely embarrass myself, so what? Nobody is going to hold that against me. No permanent stigma will mar my academic record in any way. Future employers wouldn’t even know that I tried out, and even if they did, they wouldn’t care. </p>
<p>But they will know if you tried out engineering and failed, and they will hold that against you. If you fail an engineering weeder, that grade stays on your academic record for life, even if you leave the engineering major. Why? If you’re not going to be an engineer anyway, why should your failed engineering grades matter? </p>
<p>All that the engineering programs are accomplishing is simply discouraging people from even trying. What’s so wrong with 18-19 year olds trying a number of different topics, finding out which are unsuited for them, and then moving on with a clean slate?</p>
<p>Then let’s not use a low-ranked school as the counterexample to MIT. Instead, let’s use Stanford. I believe there to be widespread consensus that Stanford is an easier (that is, more grade inflated) school than is MIT - indeed even many Stanford students would seem to agree. Indeed, Stanford is a well-noted outlier in invoking relatively relaxed grading standards, certainly compared to MIT or Caltech. {For example, for many decades Stanford didn’t even assign the F grade at all, and during the 1970’s Stanford didn’t even assign D grades.} Furthermore, there is basically no important difference in the selectivity between Stanford and MIT. </p>
<p>Hence, I think it is entirely reasonable to expect that engineering students at MIT would have obtained higher grades if they had instead majored in engineering at Stanford. One implication is that those who (barely) flunked out at MIT might have actually graduated if they had gone to Stanford; this certainly seems true during the time when Stanford didn’t even assign D or F grades at all. Another implication is that somebody with a 2.9 GPA from MIT and hence is ineligible to apply for jobs with employers that enforce a 3.0 cutoff would have been eligible had they gone to Stanford and obtained a 3.1. </p>
<p>Yet not once have I ever heard anybody dispute Stanford’s status as one of the world’s elite engineering schools. {Heck, some have emphatically argued that it is even better than MIT, and is certainly higher ranked than Caltech.} Indeed, Stanford serves as living proof that you can provide a world-class engineering education without harsh grading standards. Why can’t other schools do the same?</p>
You think that engineering is the only major where people fear they cannot maintain a 3.XX GPA? </p>
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Then so is the other type - from a financial standpoint, an engineering degree is just another kind of capital investment. Paying more now (in time and effort) results in increased benefits later, and if others prefer to squander their futures in favor of instant gratification then that is their choice.</p>
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They took a huge gamble and won, and I’m okay with that. Assuming (since this is otherwise pointless) that a given individual could have taken either path, the 3.6 philosophy grad risked the far, far more likely outcomes of trying to find a job with just a philosophy degree (i.e. dishwashing), failing to get into a T14 law school, or failing to get the right job that would pay the fortune you think people are just dropping in his or her lap. Note that BLS does not show that all lawyers make massively more than engineers, it shows that the median lawyer is making about $18k more than the median engineer, after 3 years of law school and working hours rivaled only by new doctors. If that 3.6 philosophy grad nets one of those pretty-dang-uncommon $400k spots at a top law firm, good for them cuz they gamble a whole lot on making that happen.</p>
Management, no, but most people in a company, yes. Executives often make strange decisions, but you are implying that firms almost never act in an economically rational manner, even in small areas like hiring entry level engineers. If it makes you happy to think that you are smarter than hundreds of thousands of HR professionals in the US… go ahead.</p>
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Probably a more competent engineer, surely, but not as competent in the study of America. But hey, let’s fail no engineers at all then, right? After all, if 2.0 is an unacceptable line in the sand, then so is 1.8, or 1.6, or 1.0, or 0.0! I WAS a 1.9 GPA engineer at one point, and I sure as hell was not competent in my field by ANY standard, but with a degree in hand I theoretically could have been… what exactly? Jobs that would hire a 2.0 GPA college graduate are usually just as happy with a non-grad.</p>
There is also no reason TO equalize grading schemes, either.</p>
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Sure… for very select fields, and only for the Marshall and Gates scholarship. For non-UK engineers, Cambridge is a good option only for a few, unlike many students in the humanities or sciences. Plus, the Rhodes is applicable only to Oxford, which draws few top-level engineers. And again, you are talking about revamping the entire grading system to benefit a few engineers each year who wanted such a scholarship but were denied it because they had too low a GPA (and again, not sure who they are since 3.98 GPA is the top 2% of PSU engineering grads, so there are more than enough at PSU alone to fill up most of these scholarships!).</p>
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Businessmen and lawyers wreck harm by being greedy, unscrupulous, and unethical. Bad engineers kill people by incompentence. Big difference, and very different discussion.</p>
Sure it does, and I don’t think you actually made an argument in that response.</p>
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And they pay for that later. Haven’t we gone over this?</p>
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I’m sorry, are you saying that humanities programs are inflating their grades to attract prospective law and medical school applicants? Do you have any evidence of this? </p>
<p>Again, though, the current options still seem equitable: Path 1 (humanities) has a lower mean income range with a slightly better shot at big big money, while path 2 (engineering) has a higher mean income range with a slightly lower shot at big big money. Pick one, and accept the consequences.</p>
Try new things, failure won’t hurt you… unless (1) you keep trying the same thing over and over without success and (2) try to transfer to an area which values and investigates the same things you were previously attempting. You reasons for failing in the NBA are probably not related to your chances for success in other non-athletic ventures, but if you tried out for the NFL you can bet they would talk to the Celtics. Likewise, your reasons for failing in engineering are not isolated from your other academic efforts, and they have valid reasons to consider and deny you for spending two years failing course after course and then trying to use them as a lifeboat.</p>
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I am not an English major, why should my Freshman English course count against me? I don’t work in control systems, why should my required Control Systems Theory class count against me?</p>
<p>It is not “one weeder” that kills an engineering student. It is the repeated failure of multiple classes, and that is a valid concern for other academic departments or schools.</p>
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Quite the opposite, they are desperately trying to attract new students, they are just not willing to compromise their standards in doing so.</p>
Comparing Stanford to MIT I can see (assuming that they truly do look for comparable students), comparing it to arbitrary “other schools” is unreasonable. I also doubt that 2.9 GPA MIT or Stanford students are really having that hard a time getting by, and dispute that the people CHOOSING the different schools are equivalent in any case - I think MIT and Stanford draw people with different interests and methods.</p>
<p>Still, if you think MIT should be more like Stanford, pitch it to them. If you think every school should be like them, I think you first need to ensure that all engineering students are just like Stanford engineering students.</p>