<p>^^ I can’t speak to Jessie’s theory about parent pressure, because I’m not aware of any evidence that’s not anecdotal. As a parent, I don’t believe we put pressure on our daughter, but as a junior majoring in focused physics (and doing tons of other stuff), she has very little free time on the weekends this year. Let’s talk about another factor in all this: the student’s major and future plans/hopes. If you want an engineering degree only, then a phrase I’ve heard at MIT works just fine: “C’s lead to degrees”. Or something like that. But let’s say you’re a physics major hoping to go on for a Ph.D. Then you will feel some stress, because the physics courses are graded on a curve, and as a result, you are always competing with the other students in the room. Some of the stress comes from sitting for the final of Quantum 2 and realizing you are probably only answering around 70% of the questions correctly and having no idea whether this level of performance = average (C), above (B) or more than 1 st. dev. above (A). (By the way, it turns out, that 70% was an “A” in Quantum Mechanics 2). And if you want a really horrific picture of stress in physics Junior Lab, just read Lulu’s personal blog about it (her link to this blog is in the MIT blogger archives, her last post). </p>
<p>MIT students may occasionally come close to a breaking point, but they don’t seem to break. Instead, they figure out ways to work more efficiently; they adjust their schedules; they take a different path. When the students painted “Halfway to Hell” on the Harvard Bridge, I don’t think that was a reference to parent pressure.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Self inflicted pain (like I can graduate with 4 classes a semester, but end up taking 6 classes because I load up on grad classes…)</p></li>
<li><p>Periodic stress due to the unavoidable requirements: this kind of stress usually last 1-2 semesters, during which you have to complete one of those heavy classes that tend to “weed” out people. Some examples are: Thermal Fluids Engineering, Software design, Unified Engineering, Bio lab, Physics Junior lab etc… Those are unavoidable.</p></li>
<li><p>Stress due to procrastination. This has to do with your planning skills/study skills. The better you plan and study consistently, the less stressed out you will be. It sounds easy, but it really is not, especially when you are burnt out.</p></li>
<li><p>Stress because you hate your coursework… it’s time to change your major.</p></li>
<li><p>Stress because you are self-motivated to get straight A’s, are a premed, or you are a grade maniac.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>So I guess #1, 3, 4, 5 can be changed/reduced/minimized, while #3 can’t. If you want to be stress-free at MIT, the secret is to minimize the stress from other sources like #1,3,4,5</p>
<p>As a note: as a P/NR frosh, I feel a LOT less stressed out than I used to be in High school. In high school, I absolutely hated the mindless homework, and a lot of the work was boring… so the stress was mainly due to #4. Plus in high school , quantity is emphasized over quality. I took 6 AP’s at the same time,+ sports+ college apps, and I was not interested that much in the coursework so it ended up being pretty hellish sometimes. Here, I enjoy a lot more the course work, and I have only 48 units, which is pretty stress-free so far…</p>
But then it’s important to have cruft around to remind everyone that it’s not necessary to have all/mostly A’s from MIT to get into a great science PhD program.</p>
<p>I can’t say I ever felt stress at MIT because I felt I was competing with the other students in the room (and I was in bio and BCS, both premed-heavy majors). I felt stress when I wasn’t living up to my personal standards, but not because of the people around me.</p>
<p>I suppose this is true on the surface. I haven’t checked lately, but when I was a student, MIT would award degrees to people who had completed the requisite classes and unit totals with a C or better average.</p>
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<p>From what I have seen, many, perhaps most engineering courses are graded on some kind of curve, so those engineering students would feel the same pressure, theoretically.</p>
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<p>This used to stress me out. There would be times when I felt like I understood the material really well (based on my ability to answer questions on sample exams), but I could not be sure that I would perform as well as other students on the exams I was actually graded on.</p>
<p>After reading A LOT of the back and forth argumentation of some of the earlier posters, I’ve come to a consideration: so being a debater will help me get into MIT???</p>
<p>Just kidding. But I am a debater.</p>
<p>A lot of diverse opinions on this thread. Great input.</p>
<p>This is a really good point. Premed and prelaw students, for example, are likely to be more stressed about grades than someone who wants to get a rigorous bachelor’s degree in CS and become a software engineer for a good company and never take classes again.</p>
<p>And yes, there are certain classes that hurt for most people. I never took Junior Lab, but I took the old 6.170 (“the old” because the class no longer exists - it got split in two). Unified (for aero/astro majors) tends to hurt, and goes on for a long time. 6.111 (“Digital Death”), 6.101 (“The analog version of Digital Death”), and 2.009 (the final lab class for MechE students), and some of the architecture studio classes, also come up a lot when people talk about painful classes.</p>
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<p>Most classes at MIT are graded on a curve, and most people that I knew preferred it that way. If you’re on an absolute grading scale, a single exam that is somewhat more difficult than the professor intended it to be can really screw you over (I heard that this happened with 8.01 this term)! You can end up with most of the class failing that test badly! When the grades are curved, adjustment for the difficulty of a given test or project is built in.</p>
<p>Though, to counter my own point, I liked the absolute grading scale in 7.05. I’m not sure why 7.05 was special. It could have been that the professors have been teaching that class forever and know how to design a test so that the score distribution ends up like they want it to. It could have also been that the ranges for different grades were, well, pretty wide - if I remember correctly, something like a 45/100 got you a C. This was because the tests were pretty tough, but the benefit was that if you knew the material well you had some wiggle room in case you choked on a particular test.</p>
<p>Jessiehl and Yagottabelieve, you’re absolutely right that most courses at MIT are graded on a curve, and most science and engineering courses at other institutions are too. If I could go back and edit my previous post, I would slightly change the wording, but not the intent. I don’t believe that MIT students feel that they are “competing with the other students in the room” in the sense that there’s a competitive, rather than a collaborative atmosphere. From everything I’ve heard, the students are very collaborative. But there is definitely going to be stress when you enroll in the top physics program in the country and are graded on a curve. CalTech’s graduate physics program has only enrolled 1-2 students from MIT per year, for instance. The process of moving on to a top grad program in physics is more selective than the process of getting into med school.</p>
<p>Apparently in Quantum Mechanics 2, the professor distributed the exam and told the class it “shouldn’t take too long”: a couple of hours at the most. Two hours later, not one person in the lecture hall was finished. I gather the mean score on the exam was something around 60%. These are mostly junior physics majors, so QM2 comes too late in the major to be a “cut class.” So yes, there’s stress when you know you’re graded on a curve with some of the top physics students in the country…it comes with the territory.</p>
<p>My impression is that PhD selectivity can depend a lot on department size, rather than necessarily on caliber. Caltech is a great school, but there are probably others that are just as high caliber (even prestige-wise), with more faculty choices to fit the applicant’s research interests in many cases, but are not as selective, since they simply are bigger and have more spots to feasibly offer.</p>
<p>There are also probably several ways to make it into a top program, one of which may de-emphasize grades and emphasize research experience. Granted that in theoretical fields, it is not as common for research experience to adequately reflect preparation for graduate school as in more practical ones, which can be a cause for some stress.</p>