I don’t think gator was implying that by default every flagship class is weaker than say an ivy and every CC class is weaker than a flagship. It’s more a response to people who say “the kids at X school are learning the same [insert STEM topic here] as the kids at Y school.” Technically yes, but the way that material is tested can be quite different from school to school. I don’t see “woefully underprepared” anywhere in his post, but I have seen numerous 4.0 CC students whose GPA drops when they get to their state flagship.
^When I transferred from CC to University we were told at orientation “this will be harder than what you were doing before”. It wasn’t for me, but then I was at the top of the class - and continued to be so ;).
I’m curious about this now, because my D said something interesting when she was home over break.
She took the equivalent of AP Chem her junior year, and so did her friend (which at their HS is a second year of Chem). They both took Intro Chem (for science majors) as college frosh, first semester.
My D (at an SLAC) found that the college course covered the AP stuff in the first two weeks then went beyond into material she wasn’t familiar with, and the problems were new to her, at least in the way they tested the material. It was by far her hardest class (and she’s a likely Chem major). Her college very rarely permits students to skip that class, no matter their AP score. The exceptions are kids with significant college (in HS) Chem experience.
Her friend (at a flagship) said his Chem course was basically a repeat of the HS AP Chem class and it was one of his easier classes for that reason. The U would have allowed him to skip it with AP credit but he chose to take it.
Clearly there are differences, but short of getting syllabi and actual exams, I think it must be hard to tell what you’ll get,save the clues form the U saying “you can skip this” or “don’t skip this even if you got a 5 on the AP exam”.
“Starting”? California has had the transfer pathway in place for decades; the intention for decades has been that about a third of UC and CSU graduates started at community colleges. Of course, the transfer pathway works better for some majors than others. It is doable for engineering majors, but is less optimal due to the UC and CSU campuses’ varying lower division engineering courses which are often not available at many community colleges.
Back when UC Statfinder existed, one could look up first year GPA of transfer students based on prior college GPA. At the top end of prior college GPA (3.8-4.0), first year GPA at UC tended to be about 0.2 to 0.5 lower (depending on campus). But the difference disappeared at around the 3.0 range (though the most selective UC campuses had few students with prior college GPAs in that range).
@OHmomof2 It isn’t easy to project whether the difference was in that particular AP class, AP classes in general, or the students. I am my kids’ teacher and I have taught them since they were little. I know how they learn and how they think. I have kids who can make an A but really don’t have a deep grasp of what they are doing and anything outside of what they have been explicitly taught appears to be completely foreign material, but in reality it is not. Then I have kids who make an A and can expand it to new material that has not yet even been covered. They intuitively see the bigger picture of concepts and can interject pieces not yet seen.
As a student…I was the kid who made an A in calculus but was completely clueless as to what I was doing. I did it in high school and in college. Same with chemistry. I learned more about math teaching my kids than I managed to grasp when I was in school.
Anyway, it is why it is difficult to make blanket statements. All individuals learn differently. It is hard to quantify what may or may not be occurring.
True, though in this case the first variable can be taken out since they took the class together in HS. It could be the students or it could be the college Chem class. D wondered if it were the class since she and this friend had very similar grades, etc in HS, but of course it’s possible the friend was able to expand on the concepts taught in HS more efficiently than she was. He did say nothing new was presented to him, though, and she said they left the AP curriculum after the beginning of the semester.
My foreign husband finds US high school grading too easy. When he did Advanced Level courses in his high school, getting 70% was considered a major achievement and it rarely happened. My kid does a lot of AP classes at school and always gets grades in the 90s. Her scores so far have been 5s, but I do worry that she will be under-prepared when she goes to college next fall. By all accounts, college seems to be much tougher than it was back in my day.
Re #45
Perhaps the two students can compare their college chemistry course materials and exams to see what difference there is in the courses?
@Ohmomof2 If you asked my ds if the material was new, he would probably say no. It doesn’t seem new to him b/c that is where he grasped the concepts, even if that isn’t where they were taught. He projects things in his head that were never articulated.
When he was in 6th grade, his 9th grade sister was doing a geometry problem. I started explaining something to her and he interjected that he want to demonstrate something. What he ended up explaining was something he had never been taught and something I had never considered. If you asked him where he learned it, his answer would have been in his geometry textbook.
Maybe the college class really was that much less advanced than your dd’s. But unless the same student is sitting in both classrooms, I don’t know that a student evaluation is without bias. That is my only point. Looking at a syllabus and a final exam would probably paint a much clearer picture than personal opinion.
@ucbalumnus Aw shucks! I had left her post up to reply and didn’t refresh the page. You posted between that and when I was typing!
Cannot speak of what happens at other universities, but I agree with what was stated above in my undergraduate engineering program. I cannot remember any engineering professor grading on a curve. Typically, with a class of about 40 engineering students, an average of 4 people (10%) would get As, 30% would get Bs, 40% would get Cs and 20% would get Ds or fail the class (this after some students dropped the class early on - very few). It is the same group of students consistently who gets A in these engineering classes. So, it is definitely not the norm for all engineering programs.
At the graduate level, I did not experience any type of curve, since the students were some of the best engineering students from across the globe and the class average on tests were probably in the 80s. Most of the 500-level courses and some of the harder 400-level courses (a couple or no undergraduate students), the classes were composed of 98% foreign students (mostly from India, China, South Korea, a few from the Middle East, Africa, etc.).
^^My son in engineering school also says that class grades are not curved and generally he’ll report to me that he’s above the class average or at the class average or at the top as a “guesstimate” of where he is mid-term. But really it’s no secret that alot of kids drop out of engineering freshman and early sophomore years and I’m guessing it’s those kids that are below the GPA required to continue on in engineering. My son’s a junior in engineering now and I think he told me a few weeks ago that there are less than 40 kids in his concentration now (I think there were at least a hundred if not a couple hundred when he was a freshman).
It doesn’t necessarily stop at the undergraduate level. My D is in an engineering masters program at a top rated university. In one of the required classes, she was elated to earn a B as her exam scores were typically 40%.
I think one major component many overlook when choosing a school is its grading policies. When I was in grad school, the program I was in operated on a C-curve, while other universities generally utilized a B-curve. Lower GPA’s definitely made our graduates look less competitive to employers than our counterparts at other schools. When my daughter was looking at schools, we did hear some wild stories of grade deflation and crazy grading curves from students we talked to. With my grad school experience in mind, we chose a school that had a less renowned math program, but a better atmosphere for collaboration.
I’m using Florida as my reference point (it’s what I know), which does have a strong CC system (model in many ways on California’s excellent system).
PHY 2048, Physics w/ Calc 1 is taught at our local CC and at UF. The state has set standards for both class naming format and subject matter, to ease progression from the CCs to one of the 12 public state universities. Both classes should teach the same material.
The CC is not selective, students attend the CC to save money, or because they lack the GPA/Test scores for the selective state universities. UF is the most selective in-state public university in the Florida system, 72% are in the top 10% of the class, the rest are in the top 25%.
Two points.
First, since the UF students are academically stronger (on average), the professor will be able to (and may have too) write much more challenging test, using the same basic material.
Next, when it comes to engineering, a CC students will have much higher GPA requirements for admissions into the College of Engineering, than a freshman admit. For example, I’m hearing that this year, Mechanical Engineering, which is one of the more selective engineering programs, will require a 3.8+ GPA from transfer students. On the other hand, a “B” student, who was a freshman admit, would be allowed to continue on to take upper division ME program, and will not have to meet the much higher level GPA metrics required for transfer students.
Sometimes, the stories about low grading curves are exaggerated by students looking for excuses for their low grades.
When actual grade distributions are published, these can be more reliable than student anecdotes. For example:
https://schedulebuilder.berkeley.edu/explore/ (select a course, then see grade distribution; B averages are quite common, including lower and upper division engineering courses)
https://registrar.wisc.edu/course_grade_distributions.htm (engineering departments seem to have 2.9-3.4 average undergraduate grades)
Yes, students who drop the courses are not included in the grade distributions. But the drop rate is probably nowhere near as high as some of the stories, since dropping delays progress toward graduation, and most students are not able to pay for a very large number of semesters, and have restrictions on minimum progress, full time status for financial aid, etc…
@ucbalumnus good idea, though I doubt they’ll do it 
The course descriptions are:
Of course, that’s a given. I just found it interesting since they felt so differently about the college course but so “the same” about the high school course.
Interesting discussion. I keep seeing posts that engineering students, for example, frequently end up with 2.5 - 3.0 averages due to the difficulty of their exams. Anecdotes in this post would seem to bear this out. What happens to those students who want to major is this or another difficult field but are on a scholarship that requires them to maintain a 3.0 or 3.25 GPA? Schools that offer those scholarships but use frosh and sophomore classes to “winnow out” prospects from the major are sending mixed messages, at best, and seem to be setting up their students for failure.
I think you make some points here, but if you look at a school like Stevens Institute of Technology where the vast majority of students are majoring in engineering/Computer Science, their 4-year graduation rate is only 40%, where their 6-year graduation rate is approaching 78%. This is at a school with a $64.4K per year COA. With a dropout rate of about 17%, what would explain their low 4-year graduation rate (despite their high COA)? Is it that students are taking less than the required number of courses per semester in order to graduate in 4-years (17/18/19)? Large number of students dropping courses?
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING CURRICULUM: http://www.stevens.edu/ses/me/undergrad/curriculum
COA: https://www.stevens.edu/sit/financial-aid/student-info/cost-of-attendance
@Jamrock411 it’s rather hard to complete an engineering BS degree in 4 years (at most schools). If you drop one core class, it can put you behind by a semester, as it’s likely a prerequisite for the next class. Also, engineers tend to work internships or co-ops, which will also delay graduation.
The ASEE college profiles will list nominal program length (usually 4 years) and average program length (4 to 5 years).
You’ll find it under “Program Comparisons” in each schools profile.
Edit: Not all schools will provide “average program length”.