Yes. That high honors course may not work for some students. It isn’t a question of preparation necessarily; sone of those scoring at the 90th percentile are doing so not because of inadequate preparation but because of comparatively less aptitude. That issue will follow them in each succeeding math class.
Few students (pretty much no students) get into Mudd with low math scores. They don’t admit people without aptitude, because they won’t make it through. They require a Math Ii subject test, too. And no one is bored there (I’ve literally never heard that complaint). As a Physics major, my kid took 8 math courses there – after the first couple, I think she was pretty even with her fellow students.
Mudd and colleges like it still end up with a range of student preparation in math and physics, despite only taking students who’ve had calculus and did really well as far as math grades and scores. The SAT I and II math tests and AP Calc tests don’t distinguish well in the 95-99.9% range.
There aren’t any standardized math tests to gauge ability at proofs, which becomes important at colleges like HMC. Even the AMC/AIME doesn’t do that. So, colleges like HMC and Caltech find out where to place students via placement tests over the summer.
Caltech does have a support track for some math and physics students that is below the regular track based on placement tests. The other freshman supports at Caltech seem similar to those at Mudd.
Note that for undergrads in recent years, HMC is about 46-47% female and Caltech is about 45-46% female.
Note that Harvey Mud has a Biology Major. You don’t need an extremely high aptitude for math to be a biology major. Once they get through the required courses for the core, they are not likely to use calculus much again (unless they go in to one of the more computational type fields).
It looks like for the most recent common data set the gender statistics for both schools were:
Caltech - freshman class 56% male/44% female, other than frosh - 60% male/40% female
Mudd - freshman class 48% male/52% female, other than frosh - 54% male/46% female
So Caltech is certainly approaching Mudd in terms of gender split. My kid chose not to apply to Caltech because she had interests beyond STEM that she still wanted to pursue, and thought the Claremont consortium would give her more ability to do that. It did work out that way for the most part, too.
Well, sometimes calculus is used (or rederived)…
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscovery-of-calculus-in-1994-what-should-have-happened-to-that-paper
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152
@VickiSoCal True, but the HMC core requirements (including for biology) include Calc, Multivariable Calc, calc-based Probability and Statistics, Linear Alg, and Differential Equations. And, that is all taken within 3 semesters.
And, as UCB mentioned, some parts of biology are very quantitative.
Biology is a small major at Mudd. This is at least partly due to the grade deflation. Many (probably most) college bio majors want to go on to med school, and getting the needed GPA is difficult at Mudd. That said, D’s sophomore year roommate is in med school now. And as @Ynotgo, said, the core still requires significant math at a fast pace.
Wanting students to succeed does not mean failing to teach, push, or challenge the students. As a professor, I work hard to prepare meaningful classes to help develop my students’ critical thinking, writing and communication skills as well as knowledge of the content. I grade tough, but fairly, with extensive comments to explain where they fell short and what can be improved. My office door is open to answer questions. No one is getting passed along or just getting entertained. A professor can be supportive, and invested in their students’ success, without encouraging mediocrity.
@intparent Yes, it looks like HMC started aiming for a better male:female ratio before Caltech.
Incoming freshman by year at Caltech:
Class of '16: 37% female
Class of '17: 35% female
Class of '18: 40% female
Class of '19: 46% female
Class of '20: 44% female
Class of '21: 46% female (from web page; CDS not yet released)
Where are these 90th percentile score posts coming from? The CDS indicates fewer than 1% scored below 95th percentile on ACT math. You aren’t going to find many (any?) 90th and 99.999th percentile math scores at Mudd.
Not sure what you mean by a 99.999th percent score, but a lot of students at Mudd have 800 SAT I math and 800 Math II subject test scores. I agree that you will find few below the 95th percentile. And some of them might have had high Math II scores, you can’t really know from the CDS.
I was quoting a post that mentioned 99.999th percentile. Nobody lists that level of precision in SAT/ACT/… because the tests don’t distinguish that level of precision. If you had some way of distinguishing the best per 100,000 students, such as USAMO, then I’d expect you’d find few of this group at Mudd because they are so rare. The point was talking about the difference between 90th and 99.999th percentile is irrelevant since hardly any of either group are at Mudd.
they aren’t that rare, Data10. Perhaps the top 1500 or 5000 scorers on the AMC 12? Add in the international IMO students, and you have several thousand more. Now it could be those people decide to attend elsewhere, like MIT or Caltech or Princeton, or whatever, but I would have guessed that Mudd was, or wanted to be, competitive with that crowd. Something like 30,000 kids in the US score over 750 on the math section of the SAT, so that really isn’t unusual at all
By definition 99.999th percentile is 1 in 100,000. There are maybe 4 million HS seniors in the US, so that works out to only ~40 kids. Considering the number of colleges in the US and Harvey Mudd’s entering class size, on average Mudd isn’t expected to get any of those ~40 kids.
At least a decade ago, there were aprox. 500 single- sitting 1600 scorers on the SAT per year (I don’t know if the number has changed in the last ten years). Admittedly, a bigger pool than Data and Roycroft are describing. But not in the thousands.
prepscholar seems to disagree with your math, particularly on the revised sat, but I’m bowing out now.
I’m not sure how much it matters for the sake of this discussion anyway… I don’t think anyone thinks that the students getting into Mudd are generally lacking in math talent.
I agree that the percentiles don’t really matter at the upper levels, because a 800 SAT I math and 800 Math II doesn’t say anything about ability in proof-based math. It just says the student is good at math through AlgII/Trig.
There is no test HMC can use prior to admission to determine which kids will be good at proof-based math. So, if they want to diversify beyond admitting students from TJ in NoVa, some publics in Silicon Valley, some select magnets/privates and a few students who reached proof-based university courses in HS, they will have incoming students with a wider range of math abilities. And, they seem to be doing fine with that.