The biology major / pre-med versions of these courses are not necessarily the most difficult versions of the courses, although there may be grade-grubbing pressure in them. For example, physics for biology majors and pre-meds is typically less rigorous in content than physics for physics and engineering majors.
Whats awful about small, academically rigorous schools like Reed expecting its students to be able to have the chops to handle the coursework? Small schools often don’t have the demand or the resources to offer less demanding classes for non-majors. Students selecting a school like Reed will have the ability to handle the coursework they choose. Its a far cry from , for example, a Div I school who may have some students whose academic abilities range and may not be able to handle the same coursework.
Some selective schools that do not offer separate Calculus I classes for English majors versus Physics majors also allow students to take those classes on a pass/fail or non-graded basis. That wasn’t true at our son’s school, which has been on lists for producing one of the highest percentages of students who go on to earn PhDs. He was an English major with As in everything but Calculus, in which he received a C. Are we upset that his GPA is only a 3.8 and that he was forced to take a Math class? No. We are glad he took a rigorous class that expanded his horizons and exposed him to the thinking of others not like him.
@albclemom, it also works in the other direction. DS is thinking about his courses for next semester, and is considering taking a difficult Philosophy course Credit/D/Fail. There are restrictions on which/how many courses you can do this way. We are appreciative that the opportunity exists.
This most definitely works in all directions, and a student who takes a “most rigorous” college schedule is usually at a disadvantage wrt GPA if most peers are not doing this as well.
Here is “math wars”, or how much math does a life science student really need:
I always felt the concept of elite college admission as we know it is formulated to protect the children of privilege, however defined, from the striving middle class- grade inflation, test optional, a buffet of hard and soft majors on offer etc.
Some employers seem to fight back by asking for SAT scores (even for those who are out of school for a while), having recent graduates (recruiters) going over transcripts to verify rigour and so on, so forth…
Fascinating epic of one-upmanship, isn’t it?
Any company that asked for SAT scores (short of it being an SAT tutoring/prep job) my kids wouldn’t want to work for.
161. Reed is the school to which I was referring. I assumed that is part of the appeal. Rigor you know.
Pre-med isnt a major anyway, you can enter med school with any major, as long as you have the prerequisites.
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always felt the concept of elite college admission as we know it is formulated to protect the children of privilege, however defined, from the striving middle class- grade inflation, test optional, a buffet of hard and soft majors on offer etc."
You’re kind of one-track mind obsessed with this concept.
You might have had a remote point 60 years ago when admissions to elite schools rested on your headmaster shaking hands. If the elites are trying to keep out the middle and lower classes, remind me again why they participate in Questbridge and offer tons of need-based financial aid? If they “wanted to protect the children of privilege” remind me again why the majority of legacies are rejected?
If they wanted to draw their classes for elite boarding schools and weLthy suburbs no one is stopping them. But they aren’t.
“Some employers seem to fight back by asking for SAT scores”
“Fight back” how? No employer is obligated to go to any school to look for employees.
Honestly, you are just so off.
Yes, I knew that, EK. Hence the reason I mentioned it as the example in the first sentence in post 161. But it also holds true for other small, academically challenging schools. If the student selects it and gets in, they know what they are in for, and why they chose this type of academic environment.
I’ve never understood the common forum perception about pre-med classes being extremely rigorous/challenging. It’s been my experience that these intro math/science classes are often taken at the least rigorous level offered by the college, which can be the same classes taken by humanities majors (if they choose to take such classes). For example, at Stanford both humanities majors and pre-meds typically take the least rigorous level of physics, which does not use calculus, while engineering/chem/physics/math types generally take one of the more rigorous levels of the class that uses calculus. Similarly both humanities majors and pre-meds typically take the slowest version of calculus, while persons planning more math intensive majors (I realize some pre-meds do choose such majors) or persons using AP credits typically take one of the more accelerated tracks.
Totally agree, data10. Unless they are majoring in a science (chem, physics, whatever) most of the premeds are taking the lowest level required classes in the sciences, if/when they are offered.
Questbridge places a few hundred high-achieving, economically disadvantaged students annually. It’s great for the few who are placed and great PR for the schools that participate, but in the big picture it’s little more than window dressing. Need-based FA is generous at elite colleges and universities, but they still manage to do a pretty good job of educating the sons and daughters of privilege. At Duke, for example, 55.3% of undergrads are full-pays, meaning they come from families in, what, the top 3% or so of the income scale? As for legacies, it’s true that most are rejected, but non-legacies are rejected at far higher rates. I’m not aware of any school where it’s disadvantageous to be a legacy; at some schools legacies are accepted at many times the rate of non-legacies. Harvard admits about 30% of legacies v. 6% overall. Legacies tend to be overwhelmingly white and wealthy. Remind me again what social good is served by this leg up for the already privileged?
@MiamiDAP : Just coming back (I thought this thread stopped) interesting ideas about honors. Weirdly enough, what you say is more applicable to “less selective” public schools based on what friends have told me (who were in honors programs. However, at more selective schools, often the honors instructor will run their class in a completely different way. I’ll give an example that I kind of see recurring. Often the science courses that do honors, take biology for example, do it differently than the regular one. Is it possible that at a selective school the regular is solidly challenging already? Yes, but an honors may make it challenging in a different way. For example, when Emory offered an honors general biology, instead of traditional lecture, textbook, and powerpoint slide learning, they had the freshmen learning the material from primary research articles. They were focusing much more on the experimental basis of the material as opposed to either " just facts" or general concepts. The thing you said about the workload is true, but this may be an artifact of the smaller size of the class as you kind of suggested I think. However, there was one instructor (who used to teach the honors section) who, when he switched to general biology, did intensive case studies and writing assignments for a class section of nearly 100 students, so I guess if an instructor is dedicated to teaching, anything is possible, and in fact, more than 1/2 of the general biology instructors now use the case method (though I have no way to confirm if it is as intensive as his-where the case studies were not only done in class, but extended to out of class homework assignments that were a bit messier).
As for biochemistry (I think you got the other classes correct in your statement), sadly most schools I looked at (public or private) make a combined section to host both biology and chemistry majors. And this course is usually hosted by the biology department which means it usually because a “molec cell lite” course or memorization fest of sorts. My alma mater was one of the few schools I saw that separated the two departments and this is actually only a matter of politics and evolved recently. There are places that sometimes offer a second semester or higher of biochemistry, and weird enough, it is usually the chemistry department that hosts these higher levels. Generally, when I chemistry department hosts the biochemistry course, it tends to be focused more on mechanistic and mathematical principles that ultimately make the course more geared toward problem solving than say, memorization of pathways. Chemistry dept offerings make it more balanced in my opinion.
Also, when I make comparisons, I ensure(by looking at a syllabi and course description) that I am comparing courses that are more or less equal in content and target audience.
As for the commenter that keeps saying “most instructors teach to the norm”…trust me, it is much more complicated than that. Instructors do whatever they want. Those who teach to the “norm” are what I would consider “medium” difficulty instructors (these are the ones who may yield the 75-85 averages in science courses). However, many instructors seem to choose to teach below the norm (consistently above 80). In essence, they teach at a level that keeps the students out of their face. Other instructors want to push students toward gaining new skills or increasing their abilities, and these of course are considered difficult (these would consistently have about 75 averages or significantly lower for a science course). And again, one has to ask, what is used to determine the “norm”. Is it something measurable like SAT scores? Or is it student/institutional culture culture/whatever students are used to doing. In my opinion, it is more of the former in combination to the fact that most instructors just teach the same content at the same level EVERY time no matter what. My prime example is how, at selective privates, places with similar incoming stats to Harvard, still may not be able to claim too many classes that teach at or near the same level (as in, if I were to put their basic ochem, gen. chem, or equal level physics and math instructors side by side, it wouldn’t compare well). If instructors were simply, in general, “teaching to the norm”, the level of those courses and the instruction by the professors who have been teaching them for quite a while, would change. In some cases, they would have changed dramatically as some of the schools have risen in SAT scores by A LOT. However, if I go to their course website and look at the instructor’s material from 10 years ago and now, you would see no difference. What is even more interesting, is that (if available) the averages may be the same regardless of the score changes.
What I found for these “suddenly rising schools” was that at a school where the courses and instructors were traditionally challenging before the rise in scores, the courses and instructors remained at that level, and at the school that was less challenging but “alright”, it remained that way after the rise. To me, it seems that beyond a certain threshold, the credentials of the students don’t matter at all. In fact, for some instructors, they just don’t matter at all. Again, an instructor at a selective school may choose to give an easy course just because they want the high evaluations. Teaching to the norm suggests that instructors change their teaching based upon the abilities of the students which I do not think is true. Instructors are more likely to respond to changes in departmental and institutional culture than that. For example, a science department’s instructors may change their methods or level of teaching if more and more instructors (domino effect) decide to adapt based upon what the science education literature is saying about education.
And in general the concept of “rigor”, especially in science, is interesting to me. I mainly use Bloom’s Taxonomy or various methods of ranking the “level” of cognitive tasks to determine how rigorous it is. Like, I could consider a high workload rigorous, but if that work doesn’t demand much more than recall or a basic understanding of content (as in, if a couple of reviews of the assigned reading can get me through them very easily), then it is primarily busy work priming the student to be able to recall things on an exam. What is more interesting is that some instructors have the nerve to have assignments at such a level and then call them “problem sets”. If I can open a book and copy the answer onto the paper, there is no problem to be solved other than how I will motivate myself to open the book.
@Data10 : Sounds right, and even science (especially life science) majors manage to find the easiest electives and requirements. The admissions to med. school is too grade sensitive IMHO. I honestly think many of the science students who go on to get PhD’s but had a GPA that could not get them into medical school to save their life are perhaps better trained or at least have more rigorous training in science than the average pre-health. And then there are of course those who DID have great GPA’s good enough, but preferred research and went for PhD. My experience (with several friends) tells me that these students in particular managed to graduate with similar GPA’s to pre-healths getting top 10/20 medical school invites but a WAY harder courseload and instructor selection, sometimes spanning beyond their major/concentration. I’ve seen such students take graduate courses in other disciplines just because…for example. I imagine more of the top (from what I see, these are at least better at selecting better and more challenging instructors for their core pre-med requirements ) pre-meds would do this if it wasn’t as risky to do so. The average ones, not so much.
@bclintonk, please knock off the racial divisiveness. Your statements about whites are not true. Legacy admittees are not overwhelmingly white. The Harvard (and other Ivy) student body by the early '90s, when the parents of today’s applicants were there, was far from overwhelmingly white, FYI, and the legacy applicant pool, and the admitted legacy pool, today is certainly not overwhelmingly white.
Legacies who are admitted to elite universities are not materially dissimilar from the rest of the admitted applicant pool, and much higher quality (numbers-wise) than the general applicant pool. (Of course parents who graduated from Harvard will have sharp kids.) So a 30% admission rate for legacies is not far off from that the same applicants would have if they were non-legacies.
Just because you and your children couldn’t get into an elite university doesn’t mean that you are entitled to make up your own falsehoods about those who could.
Never assume that they and their child even applied or were attempting to get in an elite (especially those elites) school. As for legacies…as far as I’ve read, usually the legacies are “on par” with the student body, not above. Keep in mind that legacy includes siblings at most schools. While they are certainly solid stats wise, that doesn’t mitigate the fact that, like URMs (admittedly, these categories may overlap), and I guess athletes, they clearly get special consideration beyond someone else near, equal to, or even beyond their statistical qualifications. From an administrative and political point of view, this is probably justified. I recently read an article that discussed Stanford legacy admissions. It seemed to reveal that the alums’ attachments to the school were very much at stake, especially in the case where they seemed to be a “match” for the school. The fact is, you don’t want to alienate the alumni base (especially the part that donates and serves on various boards), so naturally special consideration for the children occur. However, the almost randomness of admissions these days is ever lessening the advantage of being a legacy with a well connected parent.
@bernie12, yes, you’re correct.
My point wasn’t that legacies are above the caliber of the student body; they aren’t. My point was that legacies are above the caliber of the overall applicant pool; they are.
Also, in my experience, elite universities (at least the Ivies) really don’t care about typical alumni enough to bend over backwards to do special favors for them, such as letting in unqualified children. Maybe someone who gives tens of millions could get some strings pulled, but not peons like me (despite giving in the 6 figures).
I don’t think they do “as much”, unless the alumni is some socialite or government figure. As for the applicant pool…probably depends on the Ivy (remember Ivies, for the most part, are not much different from other elites. There are maybe 3, or 4 if you want to include Columbia, that differ much from other elites. Even among those, they are independent entities that behave differently despite competing directly with each other. Don’t lump them together like a monolith like aspiring undergrads do). Some Ivy applicant pools are so strong that it is very hard to be significantly better to the point where you are just easily preferred over another because of stats. This may be more likely to happen at Cornell or Brown (maybe Dartmouth) than anywhere else. In other words, the applicant pool at many of the Ivies with even higher stats than those and their non-Ivy peers in the same statistical group are not as far off from the admits or those who enroll (usually enrolled student stats fall in between the applicant pool and the admits but the range between those two is a bit smaller or at least less important at somewhere like Harvard). Given that Stanford is probably not different from top Ivies in how it reviews applicants (other than it maybe weighting scores a tad less as indicated that they are a little lower than HYP, or even UC, Vandy, WashU, and Columbia), I’m willing to bet that most legacies’ applications get more reviews (the article suggested that this is what typically happens). This of course won’t be enough for most (as indicated by the fact that legacies maybe still only have 1/5-1/3 of a chance of getting in at best). I guess what would be interesting ton look at is to see the percentage of those admitted (overall) who were comfortably in the inter-quartile range or higher of the previous year’s admits and then compare it to the legacy admits (basically we assume that they are among those in that range and are indeed). It is really hard to break down elite admissions today because there are way too many applicants, including at least some who truly are not statistically qualified (as in WELL below the IQR at a school with over say, 60% yield).
“Just because you and your children couldn’t get into an elite university doesn’t mean that you are entitled to make up your own falsehoods about those who could.”
Both of bclintonk’s children have attended very elite top 10 LACs.