Difficulty of College

[sakky]

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Your support for this statement is that Stanford does not like to fail students while lower-ranked engineering schools will fail students. I don’t think the failure rate is applicable to difficulty.

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<p>You don’t think that failure rate is applicable to difficulty? Really? I would say that if anything, they are completely intertwined. After all, can a school really be difficult if it never fails anybody? </p>

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Engineering is a very un-subjective major and so there is a basic level of difficulty in the coursework and exams. If a #5 and a #50 school gave exams of the same level of difficulty, the bell curve of scores will have a much lower median at the #50 due to the disparity in student quality. However, most courses are curved so I think it’s reasonable for the #5 to give fewer F’s than the $50.

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<p>Then consider the next example. MIT is just as good, and probably a (slightly) better engineering school than Stanford is. Yet MIT is also a very difficult school; one where you are more likely to flunk out than you are at Stanford, and also harder to get A’s. </p>

<p>So you have 3 data points consisting of 3 engineering schools - MIT, Stanford, and Caltech, ranked in that order from best to worst. Yet the 2 endpoints are difficult schools. The middle school is the easier one (relatively speaking). What’s up with that? Shouldn’t only a one-way trend exist? Instead, you end up with some sort of strange parabola. How’s that? </p>

<p>Which gets to precisely my point - that school ranking is a weak indicator of difficulty. What is a far stronger indicator is the culture of the school. MIT, Caltech (heck, any school that has the words “Institute of Technology” in its name) is probably quite difficult. Yet a school like Stanford, not so much, even when we’re talking about engineering.</p>