<p>I like reading different points of views too.</p>
<p>I really like reading yours. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t ask you so many questions. :)</p>
<p>In our house we value education, but we could really care less about cars.
To each his own…</p>
<p>Quote from Marite: “How different can organic chemistry be at Rhodes vs. Yale?”</p>
<p>I’ll take a big risk of getting slammed by answering a similar comparitive question: “how different is organic chem at Brown vs Harvard”.</p>
<p>Both my kids took that course at their respective schools.
My daughter, having attended the former, thought her version was quite advanced. Then, she compared the content with her brother at about the mid-point in his semester at Harvard, and said, quite honestly, he was already tackling things she had never covered. Both my kids gave the course their all. My daughter, a strong science student but frankly not quite like her brother, got an “A with Distinction”. Her brother got a B+.</p>
<p>The problem is with the “values” argument is that I see no evidence that the education at Rhodes deficient in any way. Cur’s daughter clearly is one of the “smartest” students there (at least they think so, given the scholarship selection)-- yet there has not been a single post this year about how easy her coursework is or how bored she is… or how much smarter she is than all her classmates. In fact, I seem to remember last fall that Cur’s daughter was being put through the paces somewhat with the required writing class. </p>
<p>I can understand the skepticism that one may have about the full tuition scholarship for NM’s at UT Houston – and I admit that the only attractive thing my son saw about the full-tuition offer at Long Beach State was the free parking… but that’s not what we are talking about here. </p>
<p>Rhodes is considered a top 50 LAC by US News; the Princeton Review gives it a significantly higher rating for academics than it assigns to Cornell or Brown; and Loren Pope is lavish in his praise. I don’t place much stock in any of those evaluations, but it tells me that Rhodes may very well be one of those hidden gem colleges that provides its students with an excellent education. </p>
<p>So what is “valued”? “Education?” or prestige? When the conversation turns to the question as to how many doors are opened by the name on their degree…well that sounds to me like prestige. </p>
<p>Especially given the fact that Cur’s daughter’s Rhodes’ scholarship has given her the opportunity to work closely with profs doing research as a freshman that it is unlikely she would have at any Ivy. So while the <em>average</em> quality of education may be “better” at the prestige college, it may well be that on an individual level, educational opportunities at a scholarship-awarding college may be much better.</p>
<p>Quote: “Rhodes’ scholarship has given her the the opportunity to work closely with profs doing research as a freshman that it is unlikely she would have at any Ivy.”</p>
<p>Completely untrue.</p>
<p>I don’t in any way dispute that Cur’s daughter is getting a wonderful education and marvelous research opportunities as a freshman. However, it should be stated that at Yale, Harvard, and the like, freshmen are likewise able to do complete hands on research at top notch facilities all the time. My son has spent the past year at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute doing his own projects under fantastic mentorship. And he knows many just like himself with very similar opportunites.</p>
<p>Donemom, isn’t it possible that Brown is doing a better job of <em>educating</em> your daughter? She is not moving as fast as your son, but maybe she is getting a better grounding and deeper understanding of what she is learning. Maybe that “A with Distinction” is NOT a sign of easy grading, but rather that a spark was planted in your daughter that led her to produce really excellent work. Whereas maybe your son is working hard but missing things here and there, in part because the pace is a little to fast for him too fully integrate the concepts in a way that would allow him to produce A+ work just yet. </p>
<p>I dropped organic chem after the first quarter and abandoned plans for bio-oriented science major because I only managed a B- by the skin of my teeth. I felt I had lucked out on the final exam and honestly didn’t think I could keep up the pace for a second semester. I think I was in a class of 400 students. My son took chemistry at an LAC in a class of 8; his prof extended the lab hours to accommodate a scheduling conflict that my son had, and my son was often alone in the lab with the prof with plenty of time for one-on-one contact. Of course my son ended up with an A. I think my son’s chem course was objectively much easier – but I bet he understands chem much better than I ever did. I don’t think I had a clue what I was doing… and as noted, that was the reason I dropped out. </p>
<p>I don’t know your kids and I don’t mean to imply that your son’s knowledge and abilities are deficient in any way – I’m just trying to point out that from an educational standpoint, “covering more material” is not always better-- especially at a foundational level, like organic chem.</p>
<p>Donemom - I think that the difference in the two courses may be related more to the particular philosophy of the professor teaching it rather than to Brown versus Harvard in general. The organic chemistry course I took in college was very unusual - the professor taught primarily mechanisms of reaction, and did not emphasize the memorization which this course is normally famous for. It was more of a thinking course than a memorizing course, which is presumably preferable educationally. However, I remember that my friend, who went on to become a top bio-medical researcher, found that she was not well prepared for the more mundane questions (names of compounds one would learn only by memorization) on the Chemistry GRE and I found the same to be true when I needed to use those chemical names in my eventual job after graduate school. (Of course, in my case, I could look them up and learn them at work, so it wasn’t as big a problem as for my friend trying to get a good score on her GRE.) I really don’t think the difference in the two courses is because Harvard is more rigorous than Brown.</p>
<p>Calmom, I appreciate your hypothesis, and believe me, I am not in any way belittling my daughter. I also was not saying that Brown had “easy grading”…from what I understand, A’s in that course were not easy to come by. It’s simply that the breadth and depth of the courses were not equal as determined by my own kids who discussed this at length. </p>
<p>As for the difference in their grades, it also had to do with the curves. At Brown, the level of competition just wasn’t quite the same, making it just a little easier to be at the top.</p>
<p>And re your experience, Mother of Two, from what I gather, memorization is not the key to how Organic is taught nowadays. The demand is completely a “thinking and reasoning” one, which means that on a timed test, you have to be able to figure out complex stuff by applying concepts to things you’ve never exactly seen before. And the timing issue, it turns out, is a bit of a challenge for my son…which is something that never really showed itself during high school.</p>
<p>I am sure that this was true of the organic chemistry courses they each took, but my point is that if the H. professor was at B. and vice-versa, the situation would probably have been reversed as far as the rigor of the courses. Different professors have their own ways of teaching and their own ideas of how in depth students should learn a topic. Have they both taken the same general courses on any other topics? Is this a consistent pattern?</p>
<p>P.S. I guess my professor was a trend-setter because our course was a “thinking and reasoning” one too!</p>
<p>Well, I can’t really comment on any other comparison’s between my kids’ experience, but I’ll take another risk and tell something that my cousin, a prof at UPenn told me several years ago:</p>
<p>He is an internationally reknown linguistics prof. who does guest lecturing and guest courses at top schools all over the place. In his opinion (NOT MINE), from his perceptions as an instructor, there are discernable differences in the overall academic capabilities of the student bodies among the elite schools. He names 5 that, (again in his opinion), stand above the rest (and he does not count his own university as one of them). THis point of view will strike most as off-putting. Make of it what you will…</p>
<p>Donemom, I’ll play. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Dartmouth, Chicago.</p>
<p>Are those 5 schools listed above?</p>
<p>You’ve listed more than 5. And you’ve left out one.</p>
<p>Despite the honorable intentions of the OP. </p>
<p>How many threads have we had on this issue, year after year?</p>
<p>But this go-around, I’d propose that if you take the exact same student (let’s clone her and give her exactly the same environment from the first breath) - highly intelligent, motivated, passionate about learning and ECs, with the scores, grades, challenging courses, and awards which demonstrate those qualities - and change just one factor (to be proposed in the next paragraph ), the optimal choice would flip from A to B (or B to A, contrariwise).</p>
<p>And the distinguishing factor I’m proposing is: whatever term one may choose as a label - I’d say it is the desire to be challenged on all levels and to ‘feel at home’ in a peer group of similar students. Some students need/desire to be pushed across the board - i.e., academically (individual attention, small classes, great faculty, excellent resources, etc.), in company (most peers at the institution are very likely to also be shiny pennies) and even in ECs (peers are very likely to be driven individuals who put gobs of energy and passion into ECs as they do with academics). If this type of environment is a priority, the student will be likely to choose the top-notch institution. </p>
<p>Example - my son first attended the program for accepted students at one of the full-tuition-offer schools, and last at the free-ride-offer school. He turned to me at the end of the day and said “This would be a very enjoyable playground, but I think I do much better when I’m really challenged.” He was acknowledging that he needed the spur of uniformly high academic standards/expectations to do his best. I had to agree with that (he does have a bit of a lazy streak), and on the merits of the merit-offer schools versus the full price schools, his first choice happened to be the very place I would have wanted to go if I were applying to college again - difficult to argue against your own fantasy school, right? </p>
<p>The clone of the hypothetical student, taking the scholarship, may have very sound priorites that matter more to her. Say she wants to develop new gene therapies. She may conclude that what matters most is being in the right place, which probably means an institution that has a large, research funded, happening department with the right courses, a very good graduate placement record, and an attractive scholarship offer. Since she will need a PhD, a consideration might be the money she would save taking the scholarship. It may also be a very good idea to be a star student in an institution that has a broader range of applicant qualifications. Better chance at the big scholarships, better chance to be the very best grad that year applying to the top genetics graduate programs. She may be completely self-motivated, therefore may care less about the percentage of her peers happen to be her intellectual equals. She has a clear goal, she’s choosing the best path to it.</p>
<p>Once again, it’s all about personal priorities and preferences. </p>
<p>The mantra of CC: Fit is God.</p>
<p>
Really you might. It’s not that you want to be coy, but it’s inevitably followed by “You must be sooooo smart”. If you say “No not really,” you end up sounding falsely modest, but “Yes I am pretty smart,” is almost worse. I’d much rather people get to know me and THEN find out where I went to college.</p>
<p>Just curious, was dstark’s guess of Columbia warm or cold?</p>
<p>Anyone know where I can trade in my set of 50 yearold eyes for at least one eye that can read this 14.1" screen on this laptop I bought today (because my cpu crashed)? This was truly a bad purchase. Truly. Bad. </p>
<p>BTW vig180 did a great job .</p>
<p>As to the science classes at Rhodes D has reported that the class average last semester in both bio and chem classes was a seventy five. And calmom is correct. That writing class was a bear. Zero A’s. One A-. Tough. They may not be learning much but they ain’t giving out A’s. LOL. Carry on. I need some aleve.</p>
<p>Donemom, OK. I got 4. I know I listed 7. I’m allowed to miss a few.
I’m going to drop Dartmouth and Chicago and add Stanford.</p>
<p>Calmom, that question I have about Barnard, can you answer it over here?</p>
<p>Bingo…that’s his list.</p>
<p>I’m wondering if they are all American colleges.</p>