<p>Having students who pull down the curve of a class and hold up the material in one’s peer group can obviously be a bit of a detriment to one’s education. But how strong is this effect in the relatively self-selected hard science / math major community?</p>
<p>This is totally anecdotal, but every math and/or physics major I’ve met has been fairly intelligent. Most of them went to fairly mediocre universities with dismal average SAT scores.</p>
<p>To those who attend schools with low SAT ranges and/or reputations for less-intelligent students: have your upper-level physics/chem/math/CS classes felt dumbed-down, or were they rigorous?</p>
<p>I think I get the question. I don’t think the courses you are talking about can be dumbed down so I think you are right, the only people in those particular upper division courses are sharp.</p>
<p>what ive found that the lower division classes tend to be “dumbed” downed. at the end of the day (ie second year…), all the students need to be prepared for the upper division classes.</p>
<p>so what ends up happening is those frosh level physics and stuff classes need to build up more to get to that level. at the same time, a lot of freshmen physics majors won’t become senior physics majors.</p>
<p>that being said, im still hesitant to say that upper division physics classes at, for example, berkeley are going to be fairly similar to those at, say, iowa state in terms how well students walk out with information. than again, at the undergraduate level, curriculum and what not have been fairly constant for the past 30-40 years… so i don’t know for sure…</p>
<p>[ie. all physics majors would take classical mech and E&M their junior year, a class on stat mech, a class on quantum, and what ever electives they want their senior year; or something like that ]</p>
<p>In my personal (but limited) experience, the more selective colleges taught the more rigorous upper-level classes. Even though the formal syllabi might be the same, there is a notable difference when it comes to expectations, homework assignments, extra topics thrown in for good measure, etc.</p>
<p>Just think about all the different ways of teaching multivariable calculus: many colleges teach a 2- and 3-dimensional plug-and-chug version, while some offer sections that prove the n-dimensional version of each theorem.</p>
<p>One of the guys I work with in my lab here at Caltech (a former grad student in my lab) is a professor at one of the Cal States. I’m pretty into education, so I like to discuss what he covers in his classes, homeworks, exams, and those sorts of things with him. A few times we’ve gone through some of my old tests from undergrad (Carnegie Mellon) and says he wouldn’t give many of the questions I had in my upper-level classes to his students since, in general, they just don’t have that sort of preparation.</p>
<p>To be fair, he also covers a lot of the “simpler” engineering topics which I’ve never learned since my education was mostly in the science of materials.</p>
Transcend them for what purpose? You can always do extra reading and problems on your own, and most professors are more than happy to meet with you to go over extra material. When it comes to graduate school admissions, this is a tougher question. Many top programs are reluctant to accept students from much less selective colleges because they don’t have a basis for comparison - how does the top student from XYZ College compare to an average student at Cornell, for example?</p>
<p>My question is mostly related to boredom. I’m not seriously considering attending a school with a terrible reputation or without a somewhat decent grad program in my major (which correlates with academic prestige). I just don’t want to be bored with easy classes.</p>