<p>I’d be interested in starting a thread that gives you an idea of which colleges have a “cooperative” attitude among students vs those that have a “competitive” attitude in terms of work submission or classroom discussion.</p>
<p>Here’s a few which, to my belief, are valid and might help students decide which school to which they are better suited:</p>
<p>Cooperative…vs…Competitive</p>
<p>Vassar…vs…Brandeis</p>
<p>Tufts…vs…Georgetown</p>
<p>Yale…vs…Harvard</p>
<p>What’s the basis of your belief?</p>
<p>Talking to students who visited these schools prior to being admitted.</p>
<p>It might be better to talk to current students, preferably a significant sample size. Individual experiences may vary. Someone in pre-med classes may find the environment competitive, while others might find it more cooperative (for example).</p>
<p>Caltech is super cooperative. When you have so much work to do, it’s best to do it in groups. :)</p>
<p>MIT is cooperative. That’s why there’s so much irritation directed at the stereotypical premeds, particularly among non-premed life science majors - they’re violating a pretty major cultural norm in a way that affects others.</p>
<p>I think that more academically challenging schools tend to be more cooperative, because there’s just no way that you’re going to face the material alone without hashing it out with your friends on their dorm room floors. I go over my friends’ essays (and vice versa), and a lot of my friends in science classes do their problem sets as a team. You’d have to be quite foolish to withdraw from that sort of collaboration.</p>
<p>Not to mention there is enormous variety amongst schools/departments within a school…</p>
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<p>To be honest, I’d think the opposite. The schools that are more academically challenging tend to be considered “competitive” – usually because the students don’t do as well as they would like, and blame it on the “competitive atmosphere.” How many times I’ve heard people say that about Chicago, I don’t know. Same for MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, and even Stanford sometimes.</p>
<p>Can anyone even define “competitive”? What makes a school “competitive”? Ever since I first looked into the college scene, I have not found one person who can define it. Is it the students? Is it the classes? Is it the programs? Is it the grading scales? What? Some can cite supposed examples–e.g. a student sabotaging another’s work–but that isn’t really a definition, nor is it very common at all.</p>
<p>Good thread.</p>
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Good post. :)</p>
<p>Good thread AND good post. :)</p>
<p>OK, this was pointless…</p>
<p>I don’t see Chicago as competitive. Academically intense, sure, but I definitely don’t get the impression that students are out to best one another, and if they are, it’s easy to avoid, because I don’t see it at all.</p>
<p>(We’re having a discussion about grading scales on the Chicago forums right now, and what current students and I are trying to explain is that grading at Chicago is uneven and unpredictable-- there are easy A’s and hard B’s-- and that a perfect transcript is somewhat rare and not really a worthwhile goal, as it’s a mixture of hard work with lots of luck).</p>
<p>I don’t know how to define competition, but I could imagine situations that would be competitive: a group of students have the identical goal, and the means to achieve that identical goal are limited. At college, though, everybody has diverging professional goals, so you may not have the opportunity to meet your competition face-to-face en masse. If you are competing for a spot at Goldman Sachs, your friend Sally is competing for Harvard Law school, and your friend Joe is competing for Teach For America, you are all competing for something but I don’t imagine that you’d feel like you’re competing against each other.</p>
<p>This model falls apart in the classroom, I guess, where it could be argued that a group of students who are face-to-face are competing for A’s. I don’t feel competition this way at the U of C because a) I know that the A is probably unrealistic for me if I don’t feel I’m producing work of a superior quality, I’m looking for a grade that demonstrates the professor esteems my work, b) I don’t know the grades of my peers, it’s horribly impolite to discuss what grades you’re getting, so my classmates could be getting A’s or C’s, and c) with an emphasis on classroom discussion, I’m aware at just how much having bright peers is an aid to understanding and discussing the material, rather than a drawback in that my work might not be as good as theirs.</p>