@mathprof63 " The difference is in the level of assignments, exams and classroom atmosphere. All of this is driven by the student makeup and the capabilities of the middle 50%."
Bing, bing, bing. We have a winner!
classroom atmosphere, yes…the other two, often but nowhere near always.
It’s not so much an “of course it matters” conclusion though. It’s less obvious than that… Classes will in fact vary somewhat in difficulty among colleges, but that variation is not always predictable, and more importantly, is not really all that relevant! Relevancy is what’s always lacking in these elite vs. non-elite conversations…
I think it’s important to remember that there is no “good enough” in academia. Kids attending elite schools nowadays are undoubtedly smarter than kids attending elite schools 50 years ago… all because of merit inflation. Did Medieval History get any more challenging to study over that period of time? Of course not, but competition artificially pushes the requirements up to study that major.
Bottom line, yeah, English 101 at University of Arizona may not be quite as grueling as English 101 at Dartmouth. Regardless, relatively speaking, U of A’s class is still respectable, and is more than adequate for 95% of students to get where they want to be in life.
mathprof,
"That’s not the same thing as saying everyone who attends the institution is of lower quality, or that the institution itself is of lower quality. " - yes, it was exactly my point, I agree. Any place has variety of offerings even at intro level and ample of opportunities outside of academics, it is up to a student to take classes that will serve them well in a future, take advantage of various opportunities (Research, volunteering, leadership roles), participate in activities that are of personal interest, be active in college life. Ranking has very little to do with any of these. Ranking is important only if the applicant has it as a high personal criteria for making a college choice. Many very top self-reliant kids do not think this way. Being in Midwest, I know very many highly successful stories of kids who are achieving at the highest levels after graduating from in-state public colleges of various ranking. On the other hand, the kids in NE and CA are definitely much more into chasing the Ivy / Elite colleges. I have an example of my own granddaughter. It is somewhat a difference in culture as far as I see. So, I would say, that this discussion will not change anybody’s mind. Again, from personal experience, we have tried within our family without much success.
"Actually, some highly selective schools do offer precalculus:
Princeton (100)
Cornell (1101)
or embedded precalculus in a two term calculus 1 sequence:
Harvard (Ma-Mb)
Brown (0050-0060)
Dartmouth (1-2)"
These schools have athletic teams to fill.
In my experience the elite school courses tend to either more material, or the same material in more depth. However, the differences are gradual. If you are comparing computer science classes at Penn, Northwestern, Michigan, Michigan State, Central Michigan, Ball State, and Kellogg Community College, there will be a very significant difference between Penn and Ball State. However, there may be no difference or only a slight difference between Penn and Northwestern.
Thinking of it as a gradual slope is more helpful than as the stark contrast implied in a comparison of elite v. non-elite.
@Zinhead : Wow! Gotta say I love you for that one though I don’t even know you lol. Let us not talk about elite publics like Chapel Hill.
@Much2learn : Nope, depends on departmental strengths. If Penn or NU is better/different in CS or engineering, you will see notable differences between how many instructors teach their classes. Will rigor likely be higher than Ball State, but if one is weaker or has a different departmental culture/faculty attitudes, then one elite school can have an inferior level of intensity to the other. This is like when I compared my school’s chemistry to Vanderbilt’s pretty certain Vandy would win, but they lost big…and then when I looked into and compared the caliber of each dept and what the focuses were (Emory’s talks much more about education of UG’s), I was then not that surprised, just like I wasn’t surprised that physics (intro, intermediate, and advanced) there was at least a bit better than my school. Instructors don’t often challenge at levels that they “can”, they settle for levels that are convenient depending on their research demands and departmental culture toward teaching (which would be reflected in tenure requirements).
Does this mean that courses which are not important prerequisites for other courses are more vulnerable to being taught at a lower level than they should be, because there is less likely to be backlash from the instructors of subsequent courses complaining that the students do not have the needed prerequisite knowledge?
Could another factor be whether the subject has external subject-specific accreditation (e.g. ABET for engineering, NAAB for architecture, ACS for chemistry, AACSB for business and accounting, etc.) and how high the standards of such accreditation are?
@bernie12 I completely agree that there is variability based on engineering and even the specific major within engineering and when the schools have similar status / students like Penn and NU, you will have too look at the details to see which is better.
In contrast, when the gap is larger as with Ball State, the level of student in the middle 50% is too significant, so Penn and NU will be very likely to have stronger programs.
I think the focus on the “middle 50%” is misplaced, especially at larger universities (e.g., state flagships). These schools teach to different strata of students all the time, so that what the middle 50% are getting bears almost no relation to what the top 10% are getting. If you’re a math whiz and you enroll at a Michigan, Wisconsin, or Minnesota, you’ll be placed on an accelerated math track that will have you taking graduate-level courses by your junior and senior years, in graduate departments that are among the strongest in the country. Or even earlier in some cases. The level of math instruction received by the middle 50% in math proficiency at those schools is utterly irrelevant to those top-echelon students. Yes, it may be true that the average or median level of math instruction at large public flagships with top math departments is lower than the average or median level of math instruction at Harvard or Princeton. But that’s just a meaningless fact to a top math student who enrolls at the public flagship, where the sky’s the limit in how far and how fast they can go in math as an undergrad. What the average or median student is doing in some other classroom simply doesn’t affect them.
@ucbalumnus: I don’t want to talk about ACS…too much about content and not about depth of knowledge is what I am finding out about them. ABET…I think is typically more respected which is why you can have places like NC State for engineering and science be similar in intensity to places much more selective than they are such as Georgia Tech. Same could be said for the UT Austins and UCLA’s of the world (though these places have high 75% levels and this is likely the group in STEM at said schools).
As for the course level: Department dependent. Effects will likely be greater in physical sciences (including chemistry)…but my observation is that, in said departments, unless pre-med heavy, the advanced course is not watered down…Interestingly enough, you see that more in natural sciences (neuro and biology) where many courses are not exactly connected. For example, classically watered down (and ironically classes with extremely high enrollment levels) intermediate or advanced biology courses at Emory include: Developmental biology (both instructors) and human physiology. These can both easily taught and tested without respect to previous knowledge from the introductory sequence. So what happens is: the instructors make them mostly about memorization instead of maybe incorporating more modern approaches or experimental approaches to the fields (ironically what happens is the introductory sequence has much more problem solving, especially the second semester, than these two upperlevels).
And note that physiology need not be memorization based (maybe anatomy, but not physiology where things such as physics, genetics, and biochemistry are all important to understanding it). One year, one instructor tried research based case studies and it was not well received by students because the 3 other sections stuck to lecture, textbook/slide memorization, and multiple choice exams (of course when there aren’t options, students complain less). And yes, part of this is likely because there is no risk that said knowledge is a) relevant for future courses and b) will show up on an MCAT a lot. Interesting, even most evolutionary biology instructors back there are much more effective and technically rigorous in their teaching and assessment methods than the instructors for those 2 courses. Most employ problem-based learning and data analysis as the mode of teaching and their exams, while not technically hard (evolutionary biology from a more qualitative approach is almost common sense), ask students to understand genetics and other biological phenomenon to a solid degree as prompts are based from data (as in several panels of it…not “what does this graph mean”) in actual primary literature that range from how changes in genetics may effect a metabolic pathway or development of the immune system…things like that. Questions often ask about experimental design (and often ask students to design their own for a situation). If only the two more MCAT relevant classes (phys and developmental) were taught and assessed at that level (one is “circle the right answer of HS level MC prompt” and the other is “remember the exact scenario we reviewed in class and be able to draw a picture of it…”), I would imagine less biol majors at my school would struggle on the MCAT. At the same time, they know what they are doing when they take those courses and it rarely has much to do with MCAT relevance.
This isn’t really a problem with neuro, chemistry, and physics majors pursuing pre-health which have more consistency throughout (though I would argue that neuro at Emory for UG’s is fortunate to have a good departmental culture toward teaching which is why…at many other schools, I hear it is merely a more specialized version of the biology major with teaching and testing methods being very similar). Only weakness is the GPA penalty of the other majors (upperlevel biology classes can grade fairly soft…the other 3 are not that generous and when they are, you pay with a higher workload and harder examinations…biology, it’s a) easier than it’s supposed to be or b) unnecessarily big curves for a few instructors).
Would it make sense to offer one section with a more problem solving emphasis as an honors course or some such, if the department is not brave enough to have all sections move to the less memorization and more problem solving?
@ucbalumnus This is the issue at private and selective schools, especially with intermediate courses. Emory actually used to have honors intermediate biology courses (including a physiology course), but I talked to one professor in chemistry about potentially making his and another section of organic that were ultra challenging (I’ve showed their materials before) honors or as having a special designation on the transcript, but he said: “That would step on toes of those teaching other sections”. Basically, other instructors will wonder why theirs doesn’t get it. Many instructors badly like to pretend or may even think they are teaching at a high level and with provocative techniques so one way to keep the illusion going is to prevent that sort of thing from happening. The fact is: these instructors (especially younger ones still in the tenure process) are not necessarily popular because of their quality which is often mediocre, but are instead taking advantage of students desire for ease. If you give a special designation to the other courses, the incentive to run to the easier one diminishes some because many students do it with the idea of “no one will ever know and I’ll just make an A this semester”. This is especially for sequenced courses. It would look awfully strange if you took an honors instructor and got B-/B and then suddenly switched to a non-honors section because you didn’t want to do the work to improve the second semester…but instead just wanted a guaranteed chance at a higher grade (this is really the case for students with near 4.0’s going into the sequence-for whom it would also look strange if they never opted into honors courses during their career and were yet shooting for top schools or MDPhD programs). It would be almost too obvious. Though I do feel in the case of biology majors for example, it could be more elective in nature since the classes I speak of are not sequenced. It could also serve as a nice filter for honors students (being added on top of needing to take a grad. class or two and defend a thesis which is the current requirement). Basically, you can’t just simply dance your way to cum laude.
Interestingly enough, medical schools seem not to care which is most annoying and disincentive for any non-prehealth life science major to challenge themselves. Medical schools wouldn’t recognize the braveness or uniqueness of taking a computational modelling or physical biology courses vs. evolutionary biology or physiology (at many schools, they are standard science GPA padders). Seems they simply want A’s in anything which is why pre-meds drop the former 2 classes like they are hot. This would be the case with an honors designation or not. It also explains why freshmen with AP credit opt out of honors or accelerated offerings if offered. Talk about perverse incentives. And more interestingly, a freshman (especially pre-health) who does elect the honors (even when offered at elite schools…I’ve heard such stories from Duke for example) offering of say, a general chemistry course, often ends up surprised or complaining about how it is actually more challenging than regular general chemistry. As in, they literally expected it to be made easier than expected and for an “honors” designation to pop up on the transcript alongside an A. The grade incentives make for weird expectations and course selection schemes. Elite students, depending on the track, are basically not allowed to achieve higher abilities without risking their future which kind of sucks. Yet you still have people clamor and say: “I like that med schools have high standards because it ensures that my doctor knows what they’re doing”…no, it often ensures that most know how to pick the most convenient path (and sometimes, in healthcare, that could be the wrong path). The “high” standards are much more easily gameable than a student trying to land at a top doctoral program in their field of STEM. That student absolutely must pay dues in terms of actual scholarship even if their GPA doesn’t come out perfect (or near it for that matter…not to say 3.6-3.7 is perfect, but it is still quite high and means for little risktaking). Let us not talk about pre-laws trying to get into a “relevant” school…though luckily they now have declining applications and interest on their side.
That is higher abilities via classroom instruction…I am fairly convinced that many rigorous high schools may lead to more learning gains from the classroom if only because of the different incentives though many have rampant cheating unfortunately. Once at a reasonably selective college, the in-class learning experience pretty much levels off. Often students write about how they lose their joy for learning in college. The reality is, they may be hardly allowed to learn without thinking of what happens if their “learning” is imperfect.
Couldn’t they offer honors sections, but not fixed to particular instructors, so that any instructor willing to teach at an honors level could teach them?
Do they reveal anywhere what the 9 colleges and universities were?
I don’t doubt that there are superb teachers at all levels of institutions (including two-year colleges). When maybe 10% of new PhDs get full-time positions at all, I’d expect pretty much everybody hired to be terrific. The quality of discussion in seminar classes, not the level of “instruction” from the professor, is where the rubber meets the road in my experience. That’s a lot harder to study, I would guess.
Even at flagships, there is also large attrition and/or weeding out of lower students, say the bottom 25% and even of the middle 50% in difficult majors. So while admit and freshman stats may be very different, as you progress towards your degree, the students will be more similar. There are other theories about how middle tier students do better in lower ranked colleges, etc …
By senior year, in say engineering, most if not all students will either be bright or hardworking/efficient or both for probably any top 100 school, probably any top 200 school, and probably most if not all ABET accreditted school.
I am not sure how liberal arts majors compare, do all schools produce graduates who can think critically, read high level scholarship, and write and speak persuasively and at a high quality level?
The level of discussion I had in high school with my future Ivy and Ivy equivalent peers was likely not met in junior year English classes at a flagship, but that was in the 80s before the middle and upper middle classes flocked to flagships to avoid paying exorbitant tuitions.
Personally, I think having peers of similar skills, interest, and goals should result in higher academic work. If you are a grade-grubber, you won’t get much out of any school, as a matter of fact, you might be more stimulated at a lower school where you can take a more challenging class and still get an A.
Med school admissions has always been a bit odd, with the GPA craziness, I am not sure why this system keeps going on. Other than proving you will do anything to get an A and/or learn 90% or higher of any material, why punish people who are challenging themselves and getting say a B in quantum physics?
Probably because medical school admissions committees do not want to have to evaluate all of the possible courses at all of the possible undergraduate schools in terms of rigor and grading difficulty.
Even if they did try to do that, there could be political issues (accusations of political favoritism or disfavoritism toward some undergraduate schools).
Unfortunately, the focus on GPA over course selection (beyond the specified pre-med courses and science versus non-science courses) creates the kind of grade-grubbing incentives that @bernie12 has been writing about.
I don’t know if I would classify the classes as “better” in an elite school, but I would say that they are more demanding and teach at a higher level because the students there think at a more advanced level than the average kid. If you put one of those kids into a 2nd tier school or below, they will be absolutely bored because they won’t be challenged enough. They’ll be able to get A’s without the effort that it would take in a 1st tier school. The basic education and the foundational principles will be the same between the schools, but the level of thinking and the depth to which the subject can be taught will be very diverse.
I would say that half or more of the students at 1st tier schools, no matter their scores and grades, should have just went to the second tier school. Many students I see are perfectly content with being academically bored and may have been indeed happier elsewhere (many will often reference in disdain about how easy it would be at other schools…and it isn’t a spur of the moment or joking mention). There had to be times where I may have enjoyed academic boredom…but I snapped out of it eventually.