<p>When certain people post they make it sound like Cornell is a walk in the park. It is just the way they come across. I have a son in Biology and another in Chemical engineering. There is a difference between Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton. My sons do not complain or whine they work very hard as they should. One has made deans list every semester and both are very involved with research. The point is it is not easy to get an A or a B+ in many classes and to say so sonds pompous.</p>
<p>Momma-three - I couldn’t agree with you more. Nothing about being a Bio major at Cornell is a walk in the park, and often it appears that some posters would like to pretend that it is. Maintaining a B average as a Bio major is an accomplishment here.</p>
<p>I never said the classes were easy. I gave the stats: which is that the average Cornellian has a B+ average. It’s as simple as that. The median grades for most of the courses are in the B+ range. To you, it’s as if I insulted the integrity of the Cornell degree by saying that. If that’s how you feel, then it is YOU that’s denigrating Cornell. I personally think a 3.4 GPA is just right for a top school. Most of the other top schools have similar averages so clearly they feel that sort of grading is appropriate too. You keep saying that Cornell is harder than Columbia or Princeton. Where is your evidence? I’m guessing you did not major anything that requires logical reasoning. If they have smarter students with similar grading, then they are HARDER than Cornell. You don’t need to have gone to the Ivy Leagues to reason that out.</p>
<p>Your son might have a couple of friends that went to top universities. I have 130 classmates in grad school that went to top colleges. Trust me, the kids at Princeton or Harvard or Yale are not twiddling their thumbs and earning A’s. They work as hard as your son, if not harder. What is pompous to me is suggesting that someone at Princeton doesn’t have to work as hard as someone at Cornell when there is zero zip nada evidence that shows that’s the case. Pompous is thinking your son represents the pinnacle of hard working college students. </p>
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<p>I’m glad you and momma-three are such understanding parents. When I told my dad about Cornell’s “grade deflation” after my GPA dropped for 3 consecutive semesters, my dad just laughed and said it was probably my studying habits. He was right.</p>
<p>If you’ve gone to Cornell recently, you have some insight on this. If you’re just the parent of a Cornell student, here’s a hint: Cornell students like to whine.</p>
<p>I don’t feel that saying the average GPA at Cornell is a 3.4 makes my degree worth less. It’s an accurate reflection of what I, as a bio major, had to go through. Most of my classes were curved to B+'s and I earned whatever grade that I received.</p>
<p>Wow, I guess that really doesn’t say much then for the level of academics? Maintaining a B isn’t considered an accomplishment? It should be. So why isn’t it?</p>
<p>Myfewcents:No, maintaining a B is not an accomplishment.</p>
<p>The median grade reports show that there are many Cornell students who work hard & get good grades. It doesn’t suggest that Cornell is easy/hard, just that enough people get those grades.</p>
<p>I have two sons at Cornell, One in a Chem E and the other a bio major. One has made the deans list evry semester but one and the other has not. They are very smart by the standards of society and they are far from whiners. The statement I made was made by two of their friends attending Princeton and Columbia in a few specific classes that they were each taking. I would take this to mean that in those particular classes Cornell expected something more. I am in no way saying that either Princeton or Columbia are easier…just those particular classes.</p>
<p>Norgalguy
I am curious as to why you discuss Cornell in a way that makes others believe that Cornell students are not on par with the likes of Harvard, Princeton or others. That is where I disagree with you. It has little to do with what you say, and everything to do with how you say it.</p>
<p>The academics are on par and the majority of students are on par with Harvard or Princeton students. But it doesn’t take an MIT degree to look at the distribution of talent at a school like Cornell and realize that some students might be challenged a little bit more than their peers. At the same time, there are more 1500+ SAT students at Cornell than Princeton has students.</p>
<p>Frankly, that is one of the things I love about Cornell – that it admits a wider variety of students and offers more opportunity to more students. </p>
<p>But coming on here and committing heresy about the difficulty of Cornell vis-a-vis other top programs, discouraging students from applying, etc., is not beneficial to anyone.</p>
<p>A lot of arguing back and forth in this thread, but no one has really gotten to the root of Cornell’s fierce reputation. The root of Cornell’s reputation as the “easiest Ivy to get into, but the hardest to graduate from” can be traced to the over representation of engineering and hard science majors on campus relative to other the other Ivy League colleges. A peripheral cause is (as CayugaRed2005 and norcalguy have already pointed out) the fact that the Cornell student body is, on the margins, less intelligent than those of its peer schools. </p>
<p>Major for major, Cornell’s grading scale is nearly identical to those of Princeton, Penn, and Columbia. At the 100 and 200 course level, each of the four schools curve to a B+ in humanities and the liberal arts, to a B in the hard sciences, and to a B- in engineering. At the 300 and 400 level, nearly all course are curved to an A- regardless of major. Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth generally set there 100 and 200 level curves half a letter grade higher than Cornell, Princeton, Penn, and Columbia. </p>
<p>Because Cornell has a higher proportion of students in engineering and the hard sciences, its students encounter a stricter grading curve during their first two years, on average, then those at Princeton/Penn/Columbia. If Cornell’s graduation rate was as high as Princeton’s or Penn’s the average GPA at Cornell would be about 0.1 - 0.2 points lower (again, this is only because there are more engineers and hard science majors, not because the grading is more difficult). However, because Cornell’s graduation rate is ~5-9% lower than those of Princeton/Penn/Columbia (here is where the marginally less intelligent student body comes into play), those with the lowest GPA’s at Cornell are less likely to graduate . After you remove the bottom 5% or so of GPA’s, those who don’t graduate, the average GPA at graduation becomes identical to that of Princeton/Penn/Columbia.</p>
<p>This (undeserved) reputation of being unfairly hard doesn’t benefit Cornell. It discourages good applicants from applying. It lowers Cornell’s yield. It makes prospective freshmen apprehensive. It gives struggling Cornell students an excuse. Most of all, it’s not even true. </p>
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<p>This was my original post on this thread. No judgment on whether Cornell was easy or hard. Just the facts so prospective applicants can get an accurate reflection of Cornell’s grading.</p>
<p>B-Schooler has a good post, but I disagree with this assessment:</p>
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<p>Cornell’s six-year graduation rate has been 92% in recent years, as opposed to Penn’s 95%. And the difference is even smaller when you look at the 4-year graduation rate. Cornell is at 87, along with Columbia and Harvard, and ahead of places like Dartmouth and Brown:</p>
<p>What explains the six-year graduation rate differential? I don’t think it is just student intelligence. </p>
<p>You can also attribute it to a) Cornell is a larger school, so it’s relatively easier to get ‘lost’, b) Cornell is much more socioeconomically diverse than a lot of its peers, meaning students are more likely to have to drop out to move back home to support family, etc., and c) Cornell has relatively more hard science majors than schools like Columbia or Penn.</p>
<p>Are you sure that, proportionally, Cornell has more engineering/science students? I haven’t crunched the numbers or anything but with the # of specialized schools Cornell has, I’d expect the proportion of engineering/science majors to be lower.</p>
<p>I think the bigger issue is really the second issue that you mention. Specifically, I think Cornell needs to tighten its transfer requirements. Maybe it makes me sound elitist, but I don’t think Cornell should be taking so many community college transfers. gomestar I think confirmed that transfers tend to do substantially worse after transferring to Cornell. I’d happy for someone who got a 3.9 at a community college but I’m not so sure that they’d be an average student at Cornell. I actually think the increased number of transfers, not the proportion of science students, is why it takes some Cornellians so long to graduate. It’s not unusual for a transfer to have to take an extra year or two in order to fulfill all of Cornell’s graduation requirements.</p>
<p>Yes norcalguy, engineering majors and hard science majors are a disproportionally large fraction of the student body at Cornell. 19% of Cornell’s student body are engineers, highest in the Ivy League ahead of Columbia (18%) and Princeton (17%). After Princeton, no other Ivy is more than 9% engineers. At Cornell the next three largest majors, each representing about 10-12% of the student body, are the biological sciences (most pre-meds), business, and the agriculture sciences (some pre-meds, some chemistry majors). In contrast to Cornell (where almost 40% of the class is in the hard sciences or engineering), each of the other Ivy’s has 30%-45% of its class in the social sciences and/or humanities. League wide the three most popular majors are economics, political science, and psychology. The most popular majors at Cornell are the engineering majors.</p>
<p>Edit: These numbers are likely somewhat out dated as the are all taken from the 2002-2005 period. Also, its worth noting that since Cornell has so many majors, and so many specialty majors not offered at other Ivys, there is no one major with a huge percentage of students. This likely distorts the analysis somewhat.</p>
<p>“What explains the six-year graduation rate differential?” </p>
<p>US News computes a “predicted graduation rate” statistic, I imagine they derive this via multiple regression analysis across the institutions.
The variables they say they use for this are related to incoming students stats and insitutional finances. I have to assume those are the categories of explanatory variables that they’ve found produce the highest R-squared.</p>
<p>"…engineering majors and hard science majors are a disproportionally large fraction of the student body at Cornell. "</p>
<p>True, that. And these areas have more objective, less “squishy” grading. Though the others are buried within CAS mostly, the cutoffs for engineering Dean’s List are visible and lower, suggesting more stringent grading policies. This was certainly the case in the past, I’m sure of that.</p>
<p>“Columbia (18%)” Probably lower, because you probably omitted Columbia’s College of General Studies which has a liberal arts curriculum with no engineering majors.</p>
<p>Well, according to him Cornell follows a “strict bell curve” unlike the other Ivys, and therefore you’ll only see 1 or 2 A students in a certain major.</p>
<p>that’s really tough; that means most people can’t get the A’s in Cornell! are there any good schools in which you can achieve good grades (without being a super genius, just working hard)</p>