<p>no, u guys are sending the wrong messages to prospective college students. of course college classes are gonna be harder. But, remember this is a class, people teach you the subject. a lot of people study a lot and not do well, because they have an issue with their studying methods, flipping pages and cramming before an exam, are not effective studying methods. I know this because I was there, the way you studied for your high school classes(most likely cramming the night before) will not work in college. some people find excuses for themselves and say that its because they are not smart enough. you are admitted to the college because u are capable intellectually. in regular high schools, exams are mostly regurgitation. college exams require you to understand every concept and analyze new problems using those concepts. If you don’t understand every concept thoroughly u won’t be able to do much on exams. plan out your study time and stick to it and u’ll do well.</p>
<p>working hard doesn’t always pay off afterall… that’s the sad reality.</p>
<p>if it did, then many people would be so happy in the world</p>
<p>Well, hoberto, I guess you are having a good experience. Believe me, there are PLENTY of college students who don’t have the luxury of scheduling their classes whenever they want, because a particular class they want in their major, and that is a prereq to all the other classes in the major, is only taught once a year (hence, when it is taught, you have no choice but to take it at the time it is taught and no other time). Either that or the classes are so impacted that they are forced to take a class at a particular time that they don’t really want to take it. Or whatever. The point is, not everybody gets to arrange their schedule in an optimal manner. </p>
<p>I would also point out that there are many college students stuck with PLENTY of busy work that don’t add any value whatsoever. I remember in physical-chemistry how just one question on one homework assignment basically asked you to derive out the vector form of some field. Basically, it wasn’t hard to do (just apply div and curl over and over again on a bunch of flux fields), the problem is that to do the entire derivation, you had to do it over and over and over again. The final proof literally turned out to be 4 pages of single-space, with every single line of the page filled with derivations. Even if you knew exactly what you were doing and made no mistakes, you would take probably 4-5 hours doing it. And that was just one problem on that homework, there were 6 or 7 other problems to do. Or if you REALLY want to see some busy work, take a gander at some of the projects that the computer science students have to do. Computer science projects are not only legendarily time-consuming, but most of that time is spent doing the tedious and boring busy work of debugging. You’ve already extracted the educational value of actually thinking about and constructing the program, but now you have to waste days and weeks trying to find your bugs. </p>
<p>Hey, if you are having a good experience at college, then good for you. I would point out that not everybody is having a good experience.</p>
<p>The point is not who’s going to be successful or who’s going to be weeded out, it’s how these pre-frosh kids view premed going in. Yes, premed will be tough. We already know that. I don’t want these kids to feel like they have to steal other people’s notes or be cutthroat in order to succeed. </p>
<p>Heck, at 3 AM in the morning on the day of our orgo final last semester, I was helping a friend with orgo (b/c I was fortunate enough to have the entire week to study for the final while she had two other finals that same week to study for). There are somethings that are more important than achieving an A in a premed course and certainly your margin of error in premed is not so small that you must attempt to gain every advantage (through unscrupulous means).</p>
<p>What’s the point of being overly pessimistic and predicting doom and gloom before you even take a single course in college?</p>
<p>Look, I don’t want people to have to feel like they have to engage in unethical behavior either. I never said that.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I think people should know that this sort of thing happens, and it’s better to know now than find out later the hard way. People should know that they may encounter those who will try to screw them over in order to get an edge. Maybe not at Cornell, but at other schools, it does happen. People should know that so that, if nothing else, they can defend themselves properly. </p>
<p>The point is, I think that people should know the whole story about the premed process, including the bad side, so that they can make their own decisions about whether to proceed or not. We should not censor the bad points.</p>
<p>Wow. These facts are quite scary for me, considering that I plan on being a pre-med once I get into college.</p>
<p>Can someone tell me what the point of grading on a curve is? If you know all of the concepts really well, yet just scoring a few points below the average (89% compared to 95%) will yield you a D, wouldn’t that be unfair?</p>
<p>That would be a scary curve indeed but it really doesn’t happen. At my school, the mean is curved to a certain grade and 1 std. dev higher is a full grade higher than the mean grade.</p>
<p>For example, on my last orgo midterm, the mean was 63% with a (rather high) std. dev of 20%. The mean was curved to a B. So if you had gotten a 43% (1 std. dev below the mean), you would’ve had a high C and if you had received 83% (1 std. dev above the mean), you would’ve had a low A. I scored a 91 which is basically a solid A. The way most of these premed curves work is to make it difficult to get A’s. I had to score 28% above the mean in order to go from a B to a A whereas in an uncurved class, the difference between a B and an A is only 10% (85% vs. 95%).</p>
<p>I doubt there is a single school where getting 6% below the mean would yield a D, esp. since grade-inflated schools like Stanford or Harvard curve their means to A’s and A-'s.</p>
<p>Crichton brings up an interesting point when he says, </p>
<p>“I thought that a humane profession like medicine ought to encourage other values in its candidates. But nobody was asking my opinion. I got through it as best I could.”</p>
<p>What are your thoughts on this? One can’t help but relate to the logic!</p>
<p>medicine can also be used to poison/kill someone if overdosed</p>
<p>Norcalguy is correct in that it is all about the mean and the standard deviation.</p>
<p>In the case of the guy who got a ‘D’ for getting an 89, the mean was a 95, and I believe the standard deviation was something like a 3 or something. So basically, he scored 2 standard deviations below the mean - hence, the ‘D’. </p>
<p>What basically happened was that all the scores were basically bunched up. The 89 was one of the lowest scores in the class. So although he knew quite a lot of what was going on in the test, almost everybody else knew more. Whether you think that is fair or not fair is, unfortunately, beside the point. </p>
<p>I’ll give you another example from Moochworld about UCLA. It isn’t related specifically to premed, but it’s still relevant because it talks about weeders and curves.</p>
<p>"Is There REALLY A Curve?
You might have heard about this. I remember in my high school, curves were a myth. No such thing there. However, in college, yes, they are reality. Don’t rely on them to save you. They are NOT THERE TO GIVE OUT A’s. They are there to give out C’s. Most classes are curved so that the average grade is a C+. This means if the average grade was a 50% (F), the professor may curve it to make the average grade 75% (C). I stress MAY. Impacted courses (high demand) such as chemistry and computer science will fail kids left and right and rarely have generous curves. Also, professors will curve some classes only to a C- or sometimes all the way up to a A-. It really depends on the professor and subject, and whether or not the course is a weeder.</p>
<p>Weeder?? What’s That?
At UCLA there is something called a “weeder” class. “Impacted” courses (courses that have strict guidlines about adding or dropping them due to their high demand) are often “weeders.” Most majors have at least one weeder course. Many have more than one (called “weeder series”). A weeder is a course that is designed to flunk out kids who aren’t good enough for the major, thus “weeding” them out. FEAR THEM. You’re at a school with the best and the brightest… and these courses are designed to flunk a big chunk of them out, of course not on an official level. Most of the time you won’t know your class is a weeder until you go to UCLA for a while and you hear the rumor. I will do my best to inform you of what classes you may take as an incoming freshman that may be weeders. UCLA is a pre-med school… remember that. Anything here that is pre-med is *<strong><em>ING HARD. All of the chem courses are considered weeders. Computer science and engineering in general is considered one giant weeder. No, they do not get easier as you move up; in fact, they get really *</em></strong>ing hard. To illustrate, I have a friend who is a graduating senior, Electrical Engineer, I quote him saying, “A’s? What is an A? I thought it went from F to C-.” It’s his last quarter here and yet at least once a week he won’t come back from studying until four or five in the morning… and yet it’s not midterm or finals season.</p>
<p>…Back to Weeders…
I once took a weeder course in North campus (largely considered the “easier” side of campus). It is the weeder for the communications major (Comm 10). However, because this is an introductory weeder (anybody can take it), it is considered by many as North campus’ hardest class. I didn’t know this and I took it as an incoming frosh. I was quite scared. The material is ****ing common sense; you get a ton of it. I had 13 pages of single space, font 10 notes covering only HALF of the course (this is back when I was a good student and took notes). I was supposed to memorize the entire list including all the categories and how the list was arranged by them. And I did. Fearing it yet? My friend told me about his chem midterm… the average grade was a 16%… No, they didn’t fail the whole class; I’m sure they curved it so only half the kids failed. My freshman year, I met this friend of mine who was crying because she got an 76% on her math midterm. I told her that she should be glad she passed, she told me, “the average grade was 93%, the curve fails me.” Weeders can have curves, as these three examples show… but only to make sure some people pass… and some fail. Famous weeders are courses like: Communications 10, Life Scienes 1 (and 2 & 3), Chemistry 14a (and all the subsequent ones get only harder), English 10a (OMG that class was hard), CS33, etc. Oh, and if you’re wondering, my friend ended up getting a C- in her math class after studying her butt off. Lucky her!!!"</p>
<p>It’s hard to believe there is a test with a std. dev that low though. That would essentially mean that just about everyone got within 4% of each other (more likely if it was a small class).</p>
<p>For tougher classes, grades seem to be more spread out anyways (meaning a higher std. dev). Numerous students scored between 3-20% on the 100 pt. test which not only lowered the mean but also upped the std. dev.</p>
<p>Well, think about it. With the mean being a 95%, there has to be a lot of bunching up simply because the highest score you can get is a 100%. </p>
<p>And quite frankly, it was an easy test, in the sense that if you knew the material, you were bound to get most of it right. But that was precisely the problem. Because it was an easy test, almost everybody did very well, which means that if you didn’t also do very well, you ended up with a very poor grade indeed.</p>
<p>And that leads to a corollary. If you are in a harshly curved class, you should absolutely fear easy tests. Why? Because if the test is easy, then the mean is going to be very high, which means that the difference between a top grade and a bad grade usually is just due to a stupid mistake. In the case of that guy who got the 89, he just made some stupid mistakes. He just misread some questions. It’s not like he didn’t know the material - he knew it. But it didn’t matter. He made stupid mistakes and so he got a D. That’s the harsh reality of the weeder curve.</p>
<p>I took THE accelerated chem course at U of I and one time our average grade was a 35%. I received a 27 and basically got a very high (cut-off was 28) D!! But one more multiple choice question right and that would hve put me at a solid C. Does that seem fair? Not really and I have since come to hate multiple choice (especially for chem where I always make the DUMBEST mistakes). Professors have target averages and one of ours was a 50% b/c he “liked to see the whole spectrum of grades” and the other was hoping for a 65%. The result of underestimation & overestimation: a 70% average for the first test and a 35% average for the second.</p>
<p>Also this class was a blatant WEEDER course (designed for ChemEs & chem majors). This was only made more obvious by the fact that our class size went down from 351 (almost full-capacity) students to 146 in ONE semester. The biggest casualty: pre-med students (mainly bio & some chem majors) that wanted out! In fact when one of my friends went to her bio advisor and before she even said anything her advisor said, “You want to drop acc. chem, don’t you?” Now many that dropped are doing fine in normal chemistry and biology courses but it was most likely a big blow to many freshman GPAs.</p>
<p>"working hard doesn’t always pay off afterall… that’s the sad reality.</p>
<p>if it did, then many people would be so happy in the world"</p>
<p>I would hope you are not considering a career in medicine. And if so, God help your patients.</p>
<p>norcalguy… just wondering where you got the idea that grade-inflated schools like harvard and stanford curve their means to A’s and A-'s. I’m currently taking organic chem at Stanford, and the mean on our last test was curved to a C+/B-. There is no grade inflation in pre-med classes.</p>
<p>Yeah, but there is ‘overall’ grade inflation at those schools.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/stanford.html[/url]”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/stanford.html</a>
<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/harvard.html[/url]”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/harvard.html</a></p>
<p>I think that when HYPS students say that there is no grade inflation at their schools, they doth protest too much. I agree that the curving up to an A- or an A is an overstatement, but I think we can agree that there is grade inflation of some sort going on at those places. After all, think of it this way. What do you think your grades would be if instead of HYPS, you were going to Caltech? </p>
<p>Come on, be honest, let’s just all admit that HYPS students have a good thing going, and we’ll just leave it at that. HYPS students tend to get higher grades for less work than students at places whose names contain the words “Institute of Technology”.</p>
<p>"working hard doesn’t always pay off afterall… that’s the sad reality.</p>
<p>if it did, then many people would be so happy in the world"</p>
<p>I would hope you are not considering a career in medicine. And if so, God help your patients.</p>
<p>i’m refering to the situation about how this one guy studies all day/tries really hard but no matter what he doesn’t get the material/mess up on the test.</p>
<p>I would also add in the situation where the guy works extremely hard and understands the material quite well - but just not as well as the other people in the class. So when the class gets curved, he winds up with a bad grade. He still scored well, but he didn’t score as well as the rest of the class, and so he ends up with a terrible grade. Again, I would point to the guy who scored an 89%, which got curved to a ‘D’ grade, because the mean on the exam was a 95%, and the standard deviation was about a 3.</p>
<p>and why not a career in medicine?</p>
<p>Well… </p>
<p>As hard as my school is, they never curve down, only up to a C+ if needed. </p>
<p>All curving is done at the end of the year as well, not on individual grades.</p>
<p>Lucky?</p>