Hong Kong vs. US, help me on this decision please!

Sam_Lee
Sat, 21 Apr 2012 02:00:17 +0000

^The point is they have quality professors and the caliber of students is probably much higher than you thought.

To show what I meant about those grades, check this out:
http://www.hkeaa.edu.hk/DocLibrary/HKALE/Release_of_Results/Exam_Report/Examination_Statistics/alexamstat09_5.pdf
We can probably translate those grades to the scoring in SAT; in doing so, we should consider the following:

1. The students sitting at HKAL already survived through HKCEE and represent roughly top-30% of their age group.

2. HKAL is more advanced than AP. The effect of self-selection is enhanced further.

3. The majority in most subjects get E or below.

My guess is those Cs and Ds probably represent mid/upper 700s if it were translated to our SAT scale.

HKUST has only science, engineering and business for undergrads. Since business is more competitive, engineering admission doesn’t look competitive in comparison. But the social sciences, humanities, and others in other universities actually have lower medians. As mentioned, the caliber of the students is high and the engineering school has exchange programs with schools like Penn, Northwestern, Cornell, UC Berkeley, and GATech.

It doesn’t really matter whether the engineering majors are bottom half or whatever at HKUST. It’s like the people in the school of fine arts at CMU don’t worry about how bad their test scores are when compared to their roomates and hallmates majoring in engineering.

Job shouldn’t really be a concern here. If it doesn’t work out, there’s always a grad school in the US after only 3 years of quality education at HKUST. The OP could do one of the 1-yr MS programs at schools like Stanford or GA Tech. So for just a quarter of the cost (if he were to do undergrad in the US), he would get a BS at HKUST and MS from schools like GA Tech.

https://career.ust.hk/upload/survey/f284-StatisticalSummary_UG_2010.pdf
shows the employment survey. Note how the stats is very much comparable between school of engineering and school of business, despite the seemingly large gap in those median grades for admission. But considering what I said about how people getting those Cs & Ds are actually very capable, this is not all that surprising after all.