<p>
</p>
<p>Yea I want to study engineering. So am I killing my chances of going into Grad School or is Cornell’s rigor known widely enough for Grad schools to still give some respect to the lower GPA?</p>
<p>More importantly, down the road, what about employers?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Compared to other top colleges, it’s not harder at all. Average GPA is 3.4. And its student body isn’t as strong as the students at other top colleges (which probably accounts for all the whining).</p>
<p>As an engineer, you’ll find a decent challenge due to the nature of the major. Engineering is a beast at any school. Are the engineering courses harder at Cornell vs. engineering at Yale or Harvard? I doubt it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I studied hard Freshmen, Soph years, took it easy junior year, and barely studied at all senior year. Senior year - many kids are checked out. Either many have jobs lined up, have grad school acceptances, or are ready to get the hell out. Last three months of school was some intensive partying; I barely went to classes and was drunk almost all the time.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Dude, engineering is by far the hardest major at any school. It depends on what grad school you are applying to. If you are going for PhD in engineering or something, I think you will be fine. Medical school? You have some terrible 4 years of future ahead of you.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This depends on how good you are at engineering stuff, like how good you are at quantitative thinking, etc. If you are good at that, you will be fine. If you aren’t good at it, I’d recommend a different major.</p>
<p>I keep on hearing students at Cornell are not the best from the same posters over and over again, and Cornell really isn’t harder than other schools. </p>
<p>My older daughter was top 2-5% at her high school, a lot of her friends with similar or lower stats ended up at Georgetown, JHU, Haverford. M of them graduated with 3.7+ GPA with majors in Econ and international relations. D1 studied very hard at Cornell, but struggled to to get above 3.5. Did D1 just all of a sudden became stupid when she showed up at Cornell?</p>
<p>D1 is at a training program with 500+ people for 2 months. Most of those trainees graduated from HYPS, Wharton…They have an exam every Fri on what they have learned that week, D1 consistently do better than most of her colleagues on those tests, and she is the one who explains some of those concepts to other “slower” students. So either D1 lost all her smartness while she was at Cornell, or there were other students at Cornell with more brain power who kicked D1’s butt. </p>
<p>D1 had a very nice balance college life. She was in a sorority, with a lot of campus involvement and her main EC. She played hard and studied hard at Cornell, made a lot of good friends. She has nothing but good things to say about Cornell and it’s student body, she is very proud to tell people she is a Cornellian.</p>
<p>Agreed oldfort, particularly about the quality of Cornell students. For the enrolled class of 2014, 90% were in the top 10% of their HS class, and the median SAT was 1410 and median ACT 32. For Engineering and CAS, scores were higher than this.</p>
<p>
I was hoping to go to med school, although not doing an engineering major, I was thinking either Biometry and Statistics, or Math. How hard is it to do good in those majors? 24/7 studying or what?</p>
<p>Oldfort’s post also shows that the work ethic you need to succeed at Cornell will serve you well later in life.</p>
<p>I don’t think norcalguy was saying Cornellians are stupid, or that there isn’t a subset of the Cornell student population (sizable at that) that supersede most students at other comparable institutions. He also didn’t single out a single college, he was talking about them all together. That’s not to say that a 1410 on the SAT is a bad score: it’s fantastic. The point is just that the average GPA (across all colleges and all students) is 3.4, while the average entrance stats are lower than other Ivy Leagues. Therefore, it seems very unlikely in a statistical sense that Cornell is actually harder than the other Ivies, although some certain programs may be; but even then, the difficulties don’t vary too wildly, I wouldn’t think. Undergraduate courses at all top-25 universities are probably very nearly identical in difficulty.</p>
<p>Exactly. A lot of Cornellians seem to think that they’d actually have a higher GPA if they had gone to Harvard. A lot of Cornellians decry the “grade deflation” at Cornell. Neither are true by any means. There is so much more self-pitying behavior at Cornell than at other places. I don’t hear too many Harvard students whine about how tough their school is. Yet, during my 4 years at Cornell, all I heard was *****ing about the work. Easily, my least favorite aspect of being a student at Cornell. So, yes, I do think Cornell students overestimate their intelligence. Many of them don’t have the objective academic stats to sniff a shot at Harvard.</p>
<p>Ask yourself: do Harvard or Yale or Dartmouth have reputations for grade deflation? Then why is it that Cornell does? Even when its median grades are so embarrassingly high that they are no longer available online? Even when the administration was forced to put the median grades on transcripts to try to stem grade inflation? Why is it that Cornell continues to have the MYTH that its grades are deflated? Because its own students are whiny. They are the ones who keep perpetuating this. Take your 3.4 GPA and shut up about how hard Cornell is.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Depends on how smart you are and how efficient you are at studying. Some students study a ton. Some barely studied at all. I studied about 3 hours every night and really studied hard during prelim weeks and it was fine for me.</p>
<p>And seriously dude, this is like your 20,000th question about whether it’s possible to get good grades at Cornell. The answer is YES. And no, no one does 24/7 studying. 90% of the people who profess to “study all the time” are just not efficient studiers. They spend most of their “study time” on facebook and then whine about their crappy grades later on.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not for transfer students.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Stats and Math are still ‘hard’ majors. I dunno, I am not a math/science person and I suck at those. After high school, I did not take a single math or hard science course, and I would assume those courses would’ve been tough for me. This really depends on how good you are at those subjects, how smart you are, etc. Only you can answer that question. FYI, I didn’t find it that hard to get a GPA over 3.7+ because I picked the right major and courses for me. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I noticed the same.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>College is all about taking a balanced coursework - 1-2 core req courses + ‘easy’ elective courses to boot your GPA each semester. If you’re smart about your course selection, you will be just fine. Maybe those people who complain about how ‘hard’ Cornell is are either 1) Terrible at course selection, or, 2) Chose the wrong major for themselves, or 3) The ones who got into Cornell without sending in their SAT scores.</p>
<p>I really think Cornellians should get over their defensiveness. Yes, Cornell has a problem with grade inflation. Yes, Cornell has started to address it. Step 1 was removing the median grade reports from the internet. I don’t mind if it institutes a school-wide grading policy like Princeton did. If the school has a problem, let’s not turn a blind eye to it. Princeton didn’t. Cornell shouldn’t either. And certainly, we shouldn’t be spending our time scaring prospective freshmen about how hard the school is. Cornell is challenging in some majors, a lot less challenging in other majors. It is not unfairly difficult in any major. You do not need to study 24/7. Many students get 3.9’s and above. The average GPA is 3.4. If you look at the median grade reports (before they were removed), the vast majority of classes had medians of B+ or A-.</p>
<p>Alright so from what I understand, at the end of the day, I will be graduating with a top-notch education that is equivalent or exceeds other prestigious institutions and I won’t be feeling as if I would have been better off somewhere else - like “Harvard”? Correct?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That makes me feel much better. I could definitely live with a 3.4. :)</p>
<p>Norcalguy- with all due respect, the only reason anyone is being defensive here is because you keep on attacking, and I would like to know why? I have met many of D1’s friends over the years- parties at our place, or various events up at Cornell, and I have rarely ever heard her friends complain about amount of work or their grades. I have heard them talking about applying to graduate schools, interviewing for jobs, parents problems, various social issues(drinking, segregation, diversity, Greek life), but not about transfers, grade deflation, or difficulty of Cornell. I think my kid and her friends were fairly main stream, in speaking with them, I never got the sense it was that big of a problem. My question to you is why it is such a big issue with you? I went to a small LAC around the corner from Cornell, not as highly ranked, but guess what, we complained about our course load and how hard our classes were, that’s what college students do. We got it that you got really good grades at Cornell without doing much work, but it could have been the same whether you went to Cornell or another school.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree with norcal that there is a large ‘myth’, whether among students or non-students, that Cornell is like hellish hard. It is just not true. However, I did not run into many individuals constantly complaining of Cornell’s supposed rigor or difficulty. It may be becasue I was not math/science major. People in general seemed content with workload and their grades weren’t too far off from their expectations. However, my roomate in Soph year was an engineer, and I remember he did complain a lot about rough grading and brutal problem sets.</p>
<p>One of my ex-girlfriends went to Princeton. She seemed to have hard feelings with grade deflation policy at Princeton. In fact, she told me that many students complain constantly about their grades, like they would’ve gotten A’s at Brown or Yale instead. And, MIT is known to be a living nightmare among many students due to insanely harsh grading. At MIT, there is a largely circulated phrase among students, “IFHTP” - meaning, “I f-ing hate this place”, which reflects the school’s rough grading and coursework. So, I don’t think that Cornell is the only school with a population not happy with grading or school’s difficulty.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Replace “Harvard” with “Brown” and it might actually be true. </p>
<p>Cornell isn’t as easy as norcalguy makes it out to be (he’s just an incredibly smart/hardworking guy), but it’s no walk in the park either (unless you’re in a few select majors with 70%+ median grades of A-/A’s). </p>
<p>However, I do agree that the myth of Cornell being the hardest Ivy is bogus. It’s just that Cornell accepts the highest proportion of unqualified applicants due to who knows what reasons, and this in turn leads to the highest proportion of whiners.</p>
<p>Yes, there’s PLENTY of complaining about grade deflation at Princeton with their grading policy. My best friend who went to Bucknell said there was so much complaining about workload there that she and her friends made a pact that they weren’t allowed to talk about it at all. My god daughter went to Harvard and struggled with the social scene and the insane competitiveness for interviews and jobs in consulting and i-banking. Another friend goes to Brown where he works very hard in a wide array of subjects. Just get over it. You’re not going on vacation, you’re going to college where you SHOULD be challenged to do well. If you do your work and ask for help if you need it, you’ll be fine.
People seem to think that they’ve worked hard in high school (many, not all) and plan on intense careers (medicine, engineering) but that college should be a world of easy achievement and balance. Why? The rest of life isn’t like that, trust me.</p>
<p>Question - how hard is it to get academic help at Cornell?</p>
<p>My daughter had a very difficult math course, she ended up going to every office hour, which the professor kept by himself. She said surprisingly she was the only student there most of the time. She did the same with her art history course. When she had problem with one of her required computer course, she was able to get help at the math lab. She found one who was very good, she didn’t share his name with kids in her class.
Based on what D1 said, help is readily available, but not that many people utilize it. She said for problem sets, they have study group to work together. </p>
<p>If I had sons, the only thing I would say to them when they go off to college is “go see your professors, ask for help,” because it is not in guy’s DNA to ask for help. It will save you a lot of time and be more productive.</p>
<p>I agree with oldfort, putting pride aside for academic work is essential. I see a lot of kids at my school struggle with the first step in actually going to get help, but once they realize how helpful it is, the “embarrassment” subsides.</p>
<p>Oldfort, I agree with you. I always ask for help if something is not clear. I’m not embarrassed because when I look at my grades it’s definitively worth it. It beats the person next to me who never asks and fails their tests. I will continue to do the same at Cornell and I’m not embarrassed to get a tutor either.</p>