<p>
</p>
<p>And, exactly where did I claim that my anecdotes were better than yours in my original post? Isn’t this my exact quotation:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Did I not use the term “anecdotes?”</p>
<p>The bottom line is pretty clear. I offered some anecdotes about things I know --from my nck of the woods. And you felt that it was justified to attack my rather benign post and question my “knowledge.” </p>
<p>Pretty clear to me who believes his opinions are better than others.</p>
<p>“the middle of the pack of the HS accumulates the A’s at the purported tough engineering colleges”<br>
Do you have the engineering graduation info for these schools? (UT and TAMU, engineering schools you obviously think are not tough even though they are “purported” to be.) How many graduate with honors? What percentage are really getting these easy A’s in engineering that according to you are so common at these schools?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Fwiw, I talked about students accumulating As in the engineering programs. I did not intimate that getting ALL As would be easy and would not require work. Getting a balance of As and Bs yield a GPA of 3.5. I do not think that my “accomplished” peers have had to many difficulties in maintaining a GPA in that vicinity. </p>
<p>There are extensive reports on average GPA. Here’s TAMU for Engineering. What one needs to look at is that the percentage of grades below a B is between 10 and 15 percent. The disttribution of As is usually around 40 percent. </p>
<p><a href=“http://registrar.tamu.edu/FacultyStaff/Report/PDFReports/20131/grd20131EN.pdf[/url]”>http://registrar.tamu.edu/FacultyStaff/Report/PDFReports/20131/grd20131EN.pdf</a></p>
<p>As an additional fwiw, there are a pretty good number of students who qualified for UT and TAMU but decided to stay closer to El Paso and attend UTEP. Despite being anecdotal, the students I know quite well all graduated with GPA well above 3.5, including several with 4.0 averages. A number also use their 4.0 averages to transfer to schools such as Georgia Tech.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Crystal clear. Especially with quotes like this -</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>See condescending.</p>
<p>TAMU’s cumulative median engineering GPA is more like 3.005. As I said, your peers seem to have done better than the average engineering student in Texas. That is great for them.</p>
<p>Yeah, Bovertine, keep digging yourself in a deeper hole. It was already clear; you just are making it worse.</p>
<p>xiggi, Your friends that were qualified for UT and TAMU but stayed closer to home and went to UTEP instead probably made a shrewd move. They may have well been at the top of their group at UTEP but may not have been at UT or TAMU. Of course, they’ll never know for sure since they did not attend those other schools. But good for them that they did so well at UTEP and were able to go on to other schools, including Georgia Tech. Good things can come from many places for a motivated student.</p>
<p>
Thanks for your assessment. Somehow, it doesn’t bother me. I guess you’re an expert on holes now. But this is a tiresome waste of time as usual, so I’ll bow out.</p>
<p>Great, and if there is a lesson to be learned here regarding not to waste your time, it is to avoid the type of uncalled for comment such as your opening salvo in post 249. </p>
<p>You started it, but I am happy to read you find an ounce of better judgment by ending it.</p>
<p>To add another anecdote, D’s friend who attends Cal chose to take some of her required math classes at our state flagship during the summer because they are much easier there. Obviously, state schools are not created equal, and often those who are adamant that state schools offer an equivalent education to elite privates are thinking of schools like Cal.</p>
<p>Elite schools are great and I don’t see anybody here saying that they are not. The reality though is that they are not a viable option for most kids and some kids just don’t mind going to a non elite school. They definitely have a more concentrated number of high SAT kids in one place because they do not have any state mandate to their citizens. They pull the best students from all over the world. Being educated with such students is great and is a priority for lots of people, but not all.Obviously, places like Stanford and Harvard are going to have more high SAT kids. State schools are going to have a broader range of students. That can actually be appealing to some people.</p>
<p>Since xiggi brought up UT, I looked it up out of curiosity. The numbers for their engineering school are not going to approach the average numbers for a place like MIT or Stanford but they are pretty good. The average SAT is 1374 with “most” in the top 10% of their high school class and 8% were val or sal. [Facts</a> & Figures - Cockrell School of Engineering](<a href=“http://www.engr.utexas.edu/about/facts]Facts”>http://www.engr.utexas.edu/about/facts)</p>
<p>UVa’s engineering school has an average SAT of 1407 with 95% in the top 10% of their high school class. [U.Va</a>. Engineering Facts At A Glance](<a href=“http://www.seas.virginia.edu/about/facts/]U.Va”>http://www.seas.virginia.edu/about/facts/)</p>
<p>So what entering SAT and level of “difficulty” in an engineering program are adequate to produce engineers who can build buildings that don’t collapse or water treatment facilities that produce safe water? Should we be worried that our municipality employs engineers who “only” went to Iowa State instead of Stanford?</p>
<p>(Are we really having this discussion?!)</p>
<p>sally, I personally would have no fear that a kid who was able to get through engineering at Iowa State would not be competent. Most working engineers , in fact, are not products of the elite universities. Many of the engineers in Virginia have ties to Virginia Tech. Engineering is such that the ones who have problems with the coursework or just realize they don’t like engineering will probably just drop out of engineering and pursue something else.</p>
<p>I hope you know I was being sort of facetious. I think this entire discussion is crazy.</p>
<p>I know you were. I think I’ve seen enough of your posts to know where you stand. Just thought I’d give my perspective in case anybody else cares!</p>
<p>Our local public school had 5 classmates with perfect scores (4 ACT, 1 SAT and to be clear, all in single sitting) couple of years ago.</p>
<p>The SAT perfect scorer and one ACT perfect scorer are attending UT. I think both may be doing engineering honors.</p>
<p>Here’s an anecdote that relates, I think, to the “dispiriting” point. It’s a pretty extreme case, but it happened to me. When I was in junior high school, because of a scheduling fluke, I didn’t take World History in 9th grade as was normal for good students, and the next year, because of another scheduling problem, I couldn’t take it at all, and had to take the alternative requirement, World Geography. Because this was a year late, and at the high school (10-12), except for me and one other student, every other person in the class had previously failed World Geography–which was an easy class in the first place. The teacher (who wasn’t great anyway) was not really able to teach much geography to this class, because it was filled with kids who didn’t do any homework, didn’t pay attention, and had numerous behavioral problems. Usually he let me and the other student in the same situation go to the school library. It was an eye-opener for me. Obviously, this is an example of really big differences in the classroom–but even more modest differences will affect what the teacher is able to do during class time. In college, it seems to me that this problem might be greater in subjects in which there is less of a “weeding out” effect in prereqs.</p>
<p>^ My son had roughly the same experience in Middle School and it was one of his principal reasons for choosing the IB diplomas track when he went to High School. He wanted to leave behind the kids that talked during class, threw paper airplanes, and generally did not care if they learned anything about a subject and were generally a distraction. For the same reasons, he looked for the most rigorous colleges when it came time to apply. He wanted to be among students who wanted to learn and he wanted that group to be, by far, the largest percentage of the school. To him, that was the difference between the Honors college at BSU and any other top 25 school in the country.</p>
<p>I’m biased, but I knew quite a few super smart kids who were quite dispirited at Mizzou when they were surrounded by kids who weren’t academically inclined, just wanted to party, and had little ambition. I know myself well enough to know that I would have been quite dispirited.</p>
<p>Well,my older son had an opposite experience so everyone will be different. 10 AP’s in HS at a very diverse public high school, not a magnet. Great SAT’s and GPA.Played 2 varsity sports. He would be doing BC calculus and AP Physics whereas most of his basketball teammates were just trying to get through school. He had a broad range of friends and not everybody was as academically gifted. I think this has actually served him well in his career so far as he can relate to lots of different types of people. Being around less academically inclined people did not make him “dispirited” at all. If you focus on your own goals, what is there really to be dispirited about ? I am impressed by anyone trying to reach their goals, whether that is at a community college or MIT. The kids at Mizzou aren’t academically inclined, like to party and have little ambition. Who knew?</p>