This is my big concern: preparation. What happens when the dog catches the car? My D25 goes to a rural, under resourced HS, but has the stats that, on the face of it, would likely make her a competitive candidate at many colleges. If she is admitted to a highly rigorous program, will she have a sufficient foundation to excel?
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How under resourced?
Minimum rigor across colleges does not vary as much as admission selectivity, although there are some outliers like Caltech. Also, many of the most selective private schools have substantial resources for student academic assistance, and most of them have various levels of some entry level courses for students coming in with different levels of preparation. Few fail to graduate from such schools, and college GPAs tend to be high at those schools.
But will social fit of a student from a rural middle or lower income area in a student cohort mostly from the very upper levels of the SES range work out? It can, but some of the commentary on the subject suggests that it is a factor that students outside the typical SES levels at those colleges need to work on when they enter college at those colleges.
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I may be naĂŻve, but I think just about any student with a strong recordâmeaning not only GPA but also external checks like SAT/ACT and if possible, AP scoresâcan do well just about anywhere. At least academically, as long as their personality and drive are suitable for the environment where they land.
Yes, a student without extensive math training will likely not leap to the top in the most demanding math courses. And a student without deep experience reading and writing about difficult older material will not immediately be composing the best essays about Plato and Cervantes in, say, a curriculum like Columbiaâs core.
But these things can be learned. Thatâs the point of college. As a smart student I know (family friend now in college), from a not terribly well-resourced public high school says, âI keep expecting the math to get to a point where I canât do it. But hey, you learn it, and at every advance in level, I just keep doing well.â
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Due to differences in rigour? Thatâs a huge difference in GPA. Is that even likely? Despite the reported grade inflation at some of the elite colleges, is there actually that much variability between the level of difficulty in the same major at different colleges excluding the MIT/Caltech types?
Yes, there is, IME. One of my kids got a 3.7 college gpa. She would have been lucky to manage a 2.0 at her sisterâs school in that major. Such is life. Good thing she didnât attend there.
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I agree.
My husband left the south to attend a T10 college in the NE while most of his classmates attended southern state schools. They didnât understand what the big deal was when they had the same text book.
At some point, they compared problem sets and tests, and those were vastly different. His friends were pretty much sticking to the âcheck your knowledgeâ problems on each chapter while he was usually assigned the challenge problems from the back of the book or professor written problem sets.
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The equity grading policies have destroyed K12 education in some states as this article states.
So Standardized tests act as an objective measure, without them the students will need grade inflation so all the undergrads grads pass diluting the undergrad education as well.
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While different professors/colleges can have different levels of rigor for similar courses, itâs not a simple relationship where the higher the SAT score of the college, the more rigorous the professor will make the course. Instead a particular highly selective college may have several different possible levels of rigor to choose from, for the same course. Some professors at the same college may choose wildly varying different levels for rigor, when teaching the same course in different years.
Grading also is only loosely correlated with level of rigor. Some classes may have a high level of rigor, yet still give >90% of the class A grades and no grades less than B. Other classes may have a low level of rigor, yet still have a median grade of C. Some exams may be curved such as that a grade of 30% is an A. Other exams may require answering nearly every question correctly to get an A. Some exams may primarily be based on memorization/regurgitation of textbook. Other exams may primarily be based on applying textbook concepts in new and original ways that arenât directly discussed in homework or problem sets.
This makes it difficult to make generalizations. For example, I would not assume itâs harder to get an A at HYPS than your flagship, even if HYPS have far higher average SAT scores than your flagship. Instead it depends on many other factors.
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I have not seen specific data, no. I do know there are companies that make the software the universities use, and that software is rules based. I just canât image in this age that algos arenât being used in admissions, despite the protestations from AOs.
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I expect most professors teach the course material at a level appropriate for the class median, whatever that might be.
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I expect most professors teach the course material at a level appropriate for the class median, whatever that might be.
I expect few professors pay any attention to the SAT score of students participating in the class. How much the professor varies rigor based on student performance varies depending on the particular class and particular professor. In general, the more selective a colleges college is and the larger the portion of high achieving students, the higher the average grade distribution. This suggests that many professors allow students to be unsuccessful in the class, rather than watering down the material to make the class easy enough for everyone to be successful.
Iâve taken classes at a wide variety of colleges with varying degrees of selectivity â Stanford (3 degrees), RPI, SUNY, Syracuse, UCSD, and Wyoming. My experience was at Stanford is there are wide variety of different levels of rigor in different courses. Freshmen math/science classes usually have several different levels of rigor to choose from. For example, when I was attending, freshmen math options included the following among others, rather than saying every student must choose the same level of rigor, regardless of HS math background. In general students tended to choose the lowest level of rigor that was appropriate for the major or grad/professional school plans, so the more rigorous options like Math 61* tended to have small classes.
- Math 19-21 â 3 quarter version of single variable calculus
- Math 41-42 â 2 quarter version of single variable calculus
- Math 51-53 â differential and integral calculus in several variables, linear algebra, and ordinary differential equations
- Math 61-63M â covers the material of the Math 50 series at a much more advanced level with an emphasis on rigorous proofs and conceptual arguments
- Math 61-63DM â covers the same linear algebra material as the Math 60CM series and otherwise focuses on topics in discrete mathematics, algebra, and probability theory at an advanced level with an emphasis on rigorous proofs
There was also wide variability depending on which professor taught the course. For example, when I had freshmen chem with Barry Trost, the median exam grade was ~30%. Some exams had medians closer to 20%, with nobody in a lecture class of hundreds scoring more than ~80%. The exams were challenging because the professor asked questions that required applying the textbook content in original and more complex ways than discussed in the text, and had inadequate time to finish all the questions. A/B/C Grade distribution was high due to a generous curve, yet exams were still very challenging, and the course was rigorous. With the challenging exams, some pre-med students I knew studied ridiculous amounts of time for the course and presumably learned the material very well. The next year, a different professor taught the class who had far more straightforward exams that essentially regurgitated the textbook content, with median exam grades of >90%. At the same college and same course, the level of rigor was very different in different years.
At the other extreme, I had one course in which the professor said he didnât like giving any grades below A because he felt that non-A grades discouraged students. Instead he wanted to do everything possible to encourage students to pursue his field of engineering. The class was not rigorous and was an extremely easy A. Students may not have learned the material as well as Trost chemistry, but I expect the persistence in major rate was very high, which is what the professor had hoped for. There wasnât any consistent pattern between different courses.
The UCSD courses I took were mostly upper level EE classes, which in my opinion had a similar or higher average level of rigor than comparable upper level EE courses at Stanford, even though the median SAT score of students was substantially lower at UCSD than Stanford. The typical grade distribution in engineering classes was also substantially lower at USCD, which is consistent with UCSD being less academically selective, as noted above. UCSD didnât appear to be watering down their EE course rigor because of the relatively lower SAT scores compared to Stanford. Instead I noted influence from local area company expectations, particularly Qualcomm.
I took intro courses at Stanford, RPI, SUNY, and Syracuse. For intro courses, the average level of rigor was higher at Stanford, which probably relates to intentionally choosing the most rigorous level offered at Stanford, which was often higher than possible at others. However, as noted above most Stanford students do not choose the most rigorous option for intro courses, like I did. I wouldnât assume Stanford is most rigorous for students who chose less rigorous courses at Stanford.
In short, there is a wide variability rather than a consistent pattern based on SAT scores of students.
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Agree that it is difficult to make generalization. This is why UCsâ studies on the impact of going test optional/blind may have to be taken with a grain of salt. It is not clear how each professor varied their level of rigor and their grading curve when teaching the same course in different years, especially years before and after going test optional/blind (which partially coincided with covid). It is possible that some professors, upon seeing how their students performed after the first midterm, adjusted the material covered, the exam difficulty, and the cutoff for each letter grade. The rest of them may adjust only a subset of the three, or stick to the same âscriptâ and same letter grade distribution each year. Due to these hidden factors, it appears to be risky to use average GPAs across different years to draw conclusions about the impact of TO/blind.
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They absolutely must be using some sort of rules-based filtering, the volume of applications has mushroomed because of the common app
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That sounds miserable. To me, thatâs the sign of someone who shouldnât be teaching, especially for an undergraduate class.
I donât think anyone is making that claim. They are saying that on average professors teach the course material at a level appropriate for the class. That may correlate to SAT scores, but no one is saying that professors are looking at scores and designing curriculum accordingly.
Some of the anecdotes presented imply there is a pattern and some (like yours) imply there may not be.
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One of my sons proudest moments was in scoring a 38% on a Stanford CS class that was taught by a highly respected prof.
And that score was above the average.
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Professors usually have a sense of whether students are following the material and adjust accordingly.
MIT offers wonderful courses online for free, but I know many profs at other schools who say their students would not understand those lectures at all. Presumably, they teach at a different level.
When one of the physics courses at Princeton didnt cover all the expected material in the semester, before the course ended, additional lectures were put on line to be reviewed over Christmas. In any event, students had to know it before the second semester began
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Someone on these boards posted a story about her husband that was a professor at a state school and a son at a top school so they could compare the curriculums. The professor indicated that while there were a few kids in his class that could handle the speed of the curriculum, most could not, and thus he could never do the same curriculum unless he failed most students.
I also know a kid that recently took Calc I and Calc II at a college while in high school (and received As). He went to Princeton, and even though his professor from the Calc II class suggested that he consider taking Calc II or even Calc I again to get used to Princeton, he took Calc III. He said he was completely lost three weeks into the course. His classmate went to a T20 school and took the advice of the math professor. But even he was in shock on the first test. He soon figured out that he had to do a lot more prep to get an A in the T20 school. (And he did wind up with that A, but said he had to work a lot harder to get it.)
All anecdotal, but pretty consistent and pretty logical. When you have a mass of students who on average understand things faster and can get more problems done on a test more quickly, professors have a lot more flexibility to adjust the curriculum and tests accordingly than professors who are teaching a class where a smaller subset has that ability.
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Letâs be honest. No matter which university or college, or how âbrilliantâ the professor is, many struggle to communicate as âteachersâ and many are in their role because of the âacademicâ and âpublicationâ prowess. So, it benefits these professors to have a student body that can figure things out on their own. All this to say, I take with a grain of salt what âprofessorsâ say about the SAT.
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Here is where LACs and other majority undergraduate colleges differ drastically. AT one of these colleges, unless you are an excellent teacher, you will not be hired, and if you managed to get hired, you will not get tenure. Senior faculty hires are also required to demonstrate teaching excellence.
For Community Colleges, only teaching is expected, and, if you cannot teach students of a wide range of abilities, you will not get tenure.
On the other hand, at research universities, only 20%-25% of their position is usually undergraduate teaching. So to be hired at basically any research university, especially the high-powered ones, you need to demonstrate research excellence, excellence obtaining grants, excellence in establishing professional networks, the ability to perform service, solid abilities in advising graduate students, and minimum competence in teaching undergraduates.
At high powered research university, âminimum competenceâ is often pretty minimum.
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