<p>What is your field? EricLG, you are the patron saint of high-IQ, low-GPA persons. Please go to Prothero’s thread and give him advice.</p>
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I may, but the reason for the discrepancy matters. I never learned to be disciplined when I was not interested, but I assure you I work(ed) VERY hard otherwise. This is different than laziness, an all too common affliction.</p>
<p>EricLG, that is an important distinction to make, I think most high-IQ, low-GPA individuals are in the same boat as you. It makes sense that someone with high aptitude would enjoy being productive, at least as long as it interests him.</p>
<p>Aptitude is a relative matter. My extended family has a crop of geniuses, so I am well aware just how much smarter some people are than me. A LOT. I have never doubted the necessity to work hard to succeed in things I want to do or understand.</p>
<p>I peeked at Prothero’s thread. His problem seems to be lack of direction or interest; and to be frank, more than a bit of mental masturbation seems to be going on. Someone posted that college is an extra-ordinary pot of opportunity and discovery for those inclined, and I agree with this sentiment completely. The inclination, however, is not assured by any particular IQ threshold, it is only facilitated.</p>
<p>EricLG,</p>
<p>Regarding nursing being “waterered down vocational”, I certainly beg to differ. Whan I was in school for nursing just a few years ago, there were many that flunked out. Aside from the plain rigor of the curriculum, the state board of nursing requirements are such that an A = 93-100%, B = 87-92% and C = 80-86% and anything below 80% was FAILING! Show me that in another major! Not to mention the competition to even get in the program is fierce. So talk about something you know something about.</p>
<p>I think that if an incoming freshman is really academically ready for college (strong research, reading and writing skills) then how well they will do will weigh heavily on if they attend classes all of the time and actually pay attention. Surfing the Internet or being on Facebook during class can be tempting with laptops and needs to be a personal taboo for a successful student. Next, a successful college student understands that a typical college class will cover more material in a semester than a typical high school class does and to be successful you need to keep up with the material and not wait until the last minute to prepare for a test. Another important choice is to introduce yourself to your professor. I think most professors enjoy helping students whom they view as wanting to learn the material. Introduce yourself within a few weeks and don’t hesitate to ask for help as soon as you need it. If you wait until the last part of the semester and you go visit your professor and confess that you haven’t understood anything all semester they probably won’t be as helpful. It is unrealistic to think a professor can teach you an entire semester in a one-hour office session.</p>
<p>Basically, a successful student will put their academics first, use good time-management skills and utilize any resource available to understand the material (professors, study groups, tutors, etc…)</p>
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<p>Any “homework level problem” or a “textbook level problem” is a function of homework or textbook difficulty. The text, the homework, and the tests are usually determined by professors. A student who gets a 50% on a test with many advanced questions that most/all students don’t get full credit for might be understanding the fundamentals perfectly, while a student getting 90% in another class may understand nothing. </p>
<p>All of these factors depend on the professor, and a curve adjusts for it. Student variance is a much smaller issue–history students shouldn’t be much better/worse at history than engineering students are at engineering. Even if you think the average engineering student is smarter–grades don’t measure IQ, they measure mastery of material. Or they would if grades weren’t so grossly inflated. ALL these students should have their classes curved, with the average GPA being a 2.0. </p>
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<p>I get what you’re saying–you SAW the test and you’re telling us that a 60% was very bad for the simple questions that were on it. Thus, they didn’t deserve to have their grades inflated. </p>
<p>My point is that raw scores are meaningless without context. For instance, if the USAMO was a math test, a student scoring 25/42 (~60%) on the USAMO did well. Like I said, test difficulty varies too much among classes, so it’s easiest to adjust for this with a standard curve. </p>
<p>You’re assuming a curve is somehow inflating grades. A curve does no such thing. When 5% of students get an A, 5% get an A. Whether this forces the A range to start at a raw percentage of 98% or 60% simply depends on test difficulty.</p>
<p>Hopefully, if curves are standardized across colleges, then professors will have an incentive to teach more advanced material and make tests harder so they can easily weed out top students without arbitrary cutoffs. Likewise, students will take the classes they most enjoy and most prepare them, because there will no longer be “GPA boosting” classes.</p>
<p>I completely agree that C should be for competency and A’s should be for truly advanced understanding. I don’t think this is possible without a curve. You can’t just say that those who get the fundamental questions right get a C, etc., What do you do with the students that answered advanced questions partially correct? Or that ONLY got the advanced questions correct? You’d have to use a percentage scale, and this arbitrarily favors students who choose classes with easier textbooks, easier homework, and easier tests.</p>
<p>Land64Shark,
I find I anger nurses a lot on this board. Welcome to the club!</p>
<p>I’m afraid that your arguments are just fuel for my position, because frankly your reasoning is very poor. You think a “90” says something about difficulty, that people flunking out implies rigor, that demand for a student spot exceeding supply implies general selectivity.</p>
<p>While each statement <em>could</em> be true in the appropriate context, you have not said one thing that substantiates the context you like to think is true.</p>
<p>Try this: 1) what were your SAT scores, and what is the 25 - 75 percentiles of SAT scores for your matriculating nursing class ?</p>
<p>2)What fraction of your class scored above a 3 in the AP AB or BC calculus, chemistry, or physics tests in HS? Heck, since you have probably talked to dozens or hundreds of nurses, just tell me the absolute number of people who can answer the question yes.</p>
<p>3)What is the usual applicant GRE and accepted GRE scores as percentiles of the test taking populace for ‘post-graduate’ nursing programs ? I found it and posted the results a couple of months ago, but I’ll leave the exercise to you for your enjoyment.</p>
<p>4) What frequency do nurses with BSN degrees pursue grad programs outside of nursing ?</p>
<p>5) What are the HS courses and rigor required to enter a BSN program. I’ll start you off with math: it is usually algebra I, at most algebra II.
5a) How many BSN programs require at least one semester of calculus to finish the degree ? I want to be helpful, so I’ll answer this question: ZERO.</p>
<p>6) Find me programs in the US that require the nursing students to take biology, chemistry, physics, or math in the native departments along with students from those departments, rather than a ‘nursing’ course. I have never seen one, but surprise me.</p>
<p>In short, try to compare a nursing cohort to a cohort of any semi or quantitative college degree along any cross sectional reasonable metrics you care to.</p>
<p>Nurses believe their own propaganda regarding “academics.” I welcome you to try and back it up with facts.</p>
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Nothing to do with the student class ?</p>
<p>I have looked at a sampling of Calculus I and II books used by a swath of colleges from MIT to my local flagship. The variation in depth and breadth is minor compared to admitted class profiles. So you tell me: what is the curve doing again ?</p>
<p>^The GPA is showing you how well students learned the material relative to their classmates. A curve makes sure that GPA’s are meaningful WITHIN the college you attend, and it also encourages a higher level of learning because students have no incentive to take easy courses. Thus, a 3.0 history major “understood” history as well as a 3.0 engineering major “understood” engineering. This is how it should be.</p>
<p>If you want to compare GPA’s ACROSS colleges, then feel free to curve prestigious colleges at a higher GPA. Lower ranked schools could be curved to ~1.5 while MIT could be curved to 2.5-3.0. Whatever, it’s not even necessary because people know there’s a difference between MIT and the University of Kansas. The problem is that students at both schools are averaging a 3.0-3.5 (depending on major), so there’s no way to know which students are learning the material thoroughly.</p>
<p>As it stands now, both the 2.0 GPA Kansas student AND the 2.0 GPA MIT student could know practically nothing relative to what they should. These types of students should be failing, but you’re potentially letting them pick and choose their way to a passing grade.</p>
<p>BTW elite college problem sets rarely come from textbooks.</p>
<p>LS,
I offer VCU (Virginia CommonWealth U) as an example
[VCU</a> UC - Pre-Nursing](<a href=“http://www.vcu.edu/uc/prehealth/VCUUC-Pre-Nursing.htm]VCU”>http://www.vcu.edu/uc/prehealth/VCUUC-Pre-Nursing.htm)</p>
<p>They write that only 1 of 4 applicants lands a spot. Sounds selective at first blush. But check out the standardized testing paragraph: 900/1600 is enough to apply, and 1100/1600 is a solid applicant who can expect to land a spot.</p>
<p>With all respect due, an SAT of 1100/1600 is not enough to give any confidence to a student trying to get into one of the top 100 USNWR colleges across the country. In fact, the reality is closer to almost certainly not without a hook.</p>
<p>Shall we compare this SAT threshold to Medical School, which is also called ‘selective’ and non URM matriculants have SATs of 1450+ ? The difference is 1.75 standard deviations.</p>
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How?</p>
<p>I say I was in the top 5 of my class, but you do not know squat about my class. Do you think you are informed about me in any useful way ? Can you predict the likelihood I can complete a task ?</p>
<p>How about the reverse: students are put in ordinal order based on statistically insignificant differences. The top student gets an ‘A’, and the bottom student an ‘F’. Not only does the curve imply differences not real, but the range of aptitudes is unknown.</p>
<p>Curves will inflate the grades of weak classes, and deflate the grades of strong ones all else being equal.</p>
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<p>What do you mean by classes here–a college graduating class, like the “senior class,” or a course? Either way,</p>
<p>If you refer to individual courses:
What is a “strong class” versus a “weak class”? You expect students learning quantum mechanics to proficiently understand quantum mechanics. Likewise, you expect freshmen history students to understand freshmen history when they exit the class. The freshman history student who got an A is equally strong in freshman history as the senior quantum mechanics student who got an A is in quantum mechanics. The fact that one course is arguably harder is irrelevant. We judge students based on their understanding of the material; whether the material is difficult is a different discussion. </p>
<p>If you refer to entire graduating classes:
This is truly nonsense. Graduating classes in most colleges range from 500 to 10,000 students. The samples are WAY too large to have significant fluctuations in the distribution of student body abilities/comprehension skills. The ONLY way these could change is if there is a consistent trend–i.e. the school is attracting consistently better or worse students than it used to. In this case, we would adjust the average GPA because the school is getting better/worse relative to its peers. </p>
<p>For e.g. I will always know the caliber of top students that graduate from UW Madison. There is no way the top 5% in the class of 2009 were different from the top 5% in the class of 2010. If they are changing, then that means UW Madison is changing (in which case their rankings will rise and we will change the average GPA) or else the ENTIRE population of college students is changing (which we don’t need GPA to measure–students should be keeping up with peers. There are no absolutes in education. A student today who has the knowledge/undestanding of a student in the 1600s is ignorant.). </p>
<p>The problem today is that we can’t identify the top 5% of students in any given college. Not at MIT, not at UW Madison, not anywhere. Is the 4.0 history major in there? Is the 3.6 chemE major in there? Who knows? There’s a cluster **** of students in the 3.0-4.0 range, and this needs to change. We have 4 grade points, and we only use two.</p>
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<p>No one said the curves shouldn’t break the A’s from the B’s and C’s and D’s and F’s where there are statistically significant gaps in raw percentage grades. You can deviate from a normal distribution if necessary–we’re just trying to maintain an average GPA that’s not inflated. Over enough courses, even a distribution with a left skew will eventually weed out top students when the average is a 2.0.</p>
<p>BTW, The harder the tests, the easier these gaps will be to find (up to a certain point–but I’ve never had a test where the average is TOO low to separate students). This is another incentive for professors to give meaningful exams.</p>
<p>This thread certainly has crossed the lower threshold of Boredom.</p>
<p>Shouldn’t you be studying for one of your proper noun summer classes? Or is your IQ too high to study effectively?</p>
<p>No and yes, respectively.</p>
<p>Michdish, this thread got a tad highjacked in a way, so I missed your response.</p>
<p>I feel that your ACT score supports reasonable aptitude (95th percentile and up) and your GPA, while maybe a teensy bit bloated by the weight, correlates. I cannot fathom any reason – aside from financial capability – why you shouldn’t pursue premed at the university of your choice. Just know that it will be competitive in the final analysis, but that a lot can happen in 4 years.</p>
<p>The deal maker or breaker will be your ability to be self-disciplined to prioritize your time and work. Maybe your parents don’t see this yet. If that’s the case, ask them to allow you to demonstrate your maturity first hand by supporting your freshmen year, and then let your track record there speak for itself. </p>
<p>Good luck to you!</p>
<p>I was just wondering…where did your sister originally choose to attend college?</p>
<p>She went to Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.</p>