Harvey Mudd sounds like a wonderful place to go to school. I applaud them for all their efforts
@dogandcat - 
Wow! did you misunderstand my statement! Letting them pass without effort isn’t success…success is understanding the material and the professors are there to help the students.
Harvey Mudd is actually known for grade DEFLATION, that would hardly constitute a letting them slack and passing them just to graduate. It’s definitely not a place for a slacker – the workload there is notorious. But the workload and difficulty is not meant to “weed out” students but rather to challenge them. The professor that made that statement went on to talk about the dedication of the staff and the resources (tutoring, study groups etc) available to the students.
Think of it this way… A relatively inexperienced musician will be in the orchestra. But the orchestra is not going to play an easy program to accommodate that inexperienced musician. Nor will they be happy with a medocre performance. Instead, they will arrange for extra lessons so that he is as good as the rest of the musicians. They will make sure that he has the guidance to practice correctly and perform to their standard.
In my mind, the best schools cultivate talent this way. It’s not all about where/how you start…
Some schools do it better than others for students with less preparation. My son’s friend attended a fully funded summer bridge program that included an additional stipend to account for lost summer wages. It sounds like Harvey Mudd is trying to work through the problems.
Mudd has a 3 week “pre” program (not sure what it is called) that quite a few students are invited to. D’s roommate frosh year had attended. I think it may be focused on students for whom English is not their first language, and they take the required frosh writing class during that time.
For 2nd semester freshman year when D was there they offered a couple of day “pre” session in physics for students who felt their prep might be light. Kids came back a few days early from break. I think it was free (maybe small fee for food?). D went, and said it was very helpful to her. Must have been, since she ended up as a Physics major. 
The first semester is also Pass/Fail, which definitely helps.
Mudd’s “pre” programs sound like a start. I think some very capable students may need more than a few days (physics) or 3 weeks (writing) preparation, though, depending on the quality of high school that they attended. The quality of high schools in the US is highly variable. Not so far from us are high schools that offer AP Physics Mechanics and E&M, and others that do not offer any physics courses at all.
Another variable that factors into this: What is the prevailing ethos at Mudd about declining AP credit and repeating a course for which one would otherwise already have credit? One doesn’t have to search very far on CC to find posters advocating this, but I haven’t cross-correlated that idea with Mudd.
And another set of questions: How many levels of freshman math are available at Mudd? Are there multiple levels of introductory physics? How many?
I have a high opinion of Harvey Mudd. (I think of it as much like Caltech, but with a higher proportion of women students.) The students there in general have to work quite hard, even if their high school preparation is excellent. It bothers me when a student starts out with a disadvantage based on high school background, due to no fault of the student him/herself.
Excellent personal qualities including strong self-advocacy will not put someone on the same footing in E&M with a student who had the AP course in the topic, but declined the credit. This is especially true if one student came from a high school with a very weak physics program. In that case, the student is at a disadvantage just compared to students who had a very good, but non-AP high school physics course.
I owe a lot of my scientific success (such as it is) to a high school physics teacher who really understood physics.
Many schools have always had either a remedial program or at least remedial classes for kids who aren’t quite college ready in every subject. Public schools know that they are going to have ‘developmental admits’ (although they aren’t called that except at the Ivies). Tutors, group review sessions, extra labs, etc.
Harvey Mudd was used to only admitting the top of the top, the 99%ers from high schools they were familiar with. Now they are admitting more students in the 90% range, or maybe a student who is at 95% in all subjects but lower in one area. The professors weren’t used to that. They expected everyone to keep up at the 99% rate.
I think it makes Mudd at better school for having more academic diversity. Maybe when their students get out into business Mr. Physics will realize not everyone can get a concept on the first try, that he (super smarty pants) will have to present the material in a simplified way. Mr. Physics has to realize that not everyone can go at the 99% level and that it may be his boss who needs to understand the material.
Do you mean that they may be admitting the 99.9%er from a previously overlooked high school who turns out to be “only” a 90%er or 95%er overall?
It could be either way. According to the president, they were used to only admitting the top students from the top high schools, schools known to them. Now they are looking for a little more diversity and that may mean looking at a different high school or at home schooled kids or someone who only at a 95% (gasp) at a top tier high school.
Mudd doesn’t accept AP credits. They do give placement tests, but it is pretty hard to place out. That makes sure every student is solidly grounded coming out of the core (mostly completed in the 1st three semesters). It also (CS is an exception) puts students with higher and lower levels of prep together in the same classes. It is definitely true that students with less prep work even harder in those core semesters. But it is a fairly collaborative environment, so everyone helps everyone else (within the rules of the honor code, which they take quite seriously). By the end of the core semesters, I think things have leveled pretty well between the students.
I’m not sure my student would have been keen on spending the whole summer before frosh year there. I also think it might break down some of the Mudd comeraderie that they build going through core together if some students spent a long time on campus before the rest of the class.
Presumably because its courses are more advanced than typical frosh level college courses. For example, Mudd is one of the few colleges in the US that require entering frosh to have had calculus.
Note that some percentage of college-bound high school students will find Mudd not an option because calculus is not available to them. It is not clear what that percentage is (the widely reported “50% of public high schools do not offer calculus” includes reform/continuation schools and juvenile hall schools which have small populations of low performing students). In addition, some college-bound high school students will not reach calculus in high school due to middle school math placement decisions.
Some of those students may take Calc at a community college. Almost all frosh at Mudd do take Calc and Probability & Statistics as part of core. Both are just half semester courses, I think. Just to make sure everyone has those basics. But you do need at least high school Calc to be admitted.
Are you referencing test score percentiles? The percentile ACT scores for different years at Mudd are below. They seem fairly consistent. Mudd still admits stellar students, as they have in the past
2017-2018: 33-35 (99th) / Math 750-800
2016-2017: 32-35 (98-99th) / Math 740-800
2015-2016: 33-35 (99th) / Math 730-800
2014-2015: 33-35 (99th) / Math 740-800
2013-2014: 32-35 (98-99th) / Math 720-800
2012-2013: 33-35 (99th) / Math 740-800
Agree. I think they’ve just started taking less from feeder schools, and looking for students with the potential based on grades and test scores, and not just taking the students who had the better opportunities for stronger prep.
The quality of local high schools or individuals in some of those other schools can also shift. You can’t always count on Naviance to predict.
But “top” is more than stats.
The difference in math ability between the 99th and 90th percentile can be enormous. Some of those testing at the 99th percentile are really at the 99.999 percentile but the tests are too easy to judge that. I have kids at both levels, and it is a world apart between them. Very different approach to teaching between those 2 levels, educators told me. They were never in the same types of math classes.
I do not think the kids at the 99.999 percentile as referred to by @roycroftmom benefit much from having classes with those at the 90-95 percentile, nor should they need to learn how to explain so that others can understand as @twoinanddone mentions. This is similar to elementary school having the kids good in math teach the kids that are struggling. It is fine to do occasionally but not regularly.
Ideally, these top kids could be challenged so that they can advance which in turn should benefit everyone.
Given Mudd’s ACT and SAT M ranges, plus the requirement for calculus in high school, plus the self-selection to apply there in the first place, it is not too surprising that most of the students could wind up in a comparable position after a while, at least in math.
I will see if I can determine whether the high schools in our general geographic region that do not offer physics at all do offer calculus. Presumably Mudd also requires high-school physics, even if the high school does not teach it?
An increasing number of students are taking multi-variable calculus in high school. In my view, E&M after multi-variable calculus is a quite different experience than E&M while trying to learn multi-variable calculus at the same time.
So far, I have learned that the area schools in question list “Principal, Assistant Principal, Athletic Director” on the front pages of their documents, and some of the curricula are actually pretty hard to locate.
HMC does offer various levels of entry math courses:
https://www.hmc.edu/mathematics/program/mathematics-course-descriptions/
https://www.hmc.edu/mathematics/program/placement-core-classes/
- 30G = standard HMC calculus, which is proof based and expects the student to have had calculus before (70% of students)
- 30B = HMC calculus course for students who do well enough on a placement exam; includes "deeper study of selected topics" (25% of students)
- exempt from 30G/30B by placement test (5% of students)
This is not too different conceptually compared to other colleges in terms of offering different levels of entry math courses. The main difference is that the lowest level entry math course at HMC is like a high honors calculus course at many other colleges (if such a course is even offered at many other colleges).