<p>
</p>
<p>Still kinda sounds like cheatin’ to me… But it’s ultimately your call, I s’pose.</p>
<p>Solution manuals can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you use it. Obviously if you just copy everything, it’s not good for you. If you copy it, and try to understand it, that’s a bit better, but you’re still not doing any thinking for yourself. Ideally, you’d try to figure everything out yourself, and only resort to the solutions when you’re ready to give up and would’ve skipped the problem otherwise. It’s better than not ever knowing the answer.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Care to elaborate?</p>
<p>wow… 8-10 hours? I guess they’re not doing engineering then!
I think working in groups helps if everyone works sincerely. Usually, to save time, my friends and I first work on all problems individually, and individually beat our heads against walls before coming together and discussing the harder problems. And I think we’re all probably around middle-tier students, mostly for reason of being lazy I think.
The smart students here are incredibly good and also fairly anti-social from what I’ve experienced so I’m guessing they all just do their work on their own.</p>
<p>Well, I’ve been getting around 9 hours of sleep the last couple nights and I feel a bit refreshed. Anything less doesn’t work.</p>
<p>To answer OP’s original question, yes it is possible. Maybe only the top 5-10% get there. One thing I found in engineering school was that some portion of one’s GPA is dependent on which professors you get for which courses. Some professors will give an A for the same level of effort and knowledge that will only earn a B or C from another professor.</p>
<p>It definitely is possible, but it takes a significant effort and good study skills. My GPA was 3.2 for the first 2 years in my undergraduate program. My last 2 years, I averaged a 3.7 mostly because I had developed the skills (though a little too late) necessary to pull off high grades. I still had the high school mentality my freshman and sophomore years. The foolish confidence that studying 3-4 hours for a test would be enough, that reviewing my notes was unnecessary…etc. Towards the end of my sophomore year, I began to study harder, improve my focus, and develop a system for studying that took me to the top of my class in nearly every course. My last semester I pulled off a 3.95 GPA. I only lament at the fact that I was so slow to develop these essential skills. Otherwise, my overall GPA would be around a 3.7-3.8 (factoring in these few difficult courses I could never completely grasp).</p>
<p>Regarding the teamwork issue…by all means get some friends and study together. You’re an engineer and you’ll constantly be working in teams throughout your career. The ability to work in a team and communicate with other people is an essential skill that will allow you to be an efficient engineer and reduce the liability that exists in every project. It’s good to develop these skills early on, because I see some engineers who simply hole themselves up and shut everyone else out. This attitude won’t be tolerated at whatever company you work for and it’s very hard to “switch on” that extroverted personality when you’re teaching yourself to be strictly self-reliant for 4 years.</p>
<p>But a word of caution…understand what you’re doing. Work on problems for a few hours before you see your friends and read the material. Being in a team doesn’t mean that one person dictates while the others follow. All members should be competent, and try their hardest to understand why something is before passing in an assignment.</p>
<p>(edit: I also wanted to say that anything above a 3.0 GPA is very good. Don’t think you’re stupid if you’re not hitting a 3.7. It’s not an easy field of study)</p>
<p>Aibarr: Rice is more than a little unusual. For starters the 75th percentile SAT 1 for math is 780, which means that virtually all engineering students were 780 or above. In that deep of a gene pool you either collaborate or risk drowning.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And what of places like MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins? Similar stats, but not nearly the collaboration that Rice students show… </p>
<p>I guess Texans are just nicer. ;)</p>
<p>I’m at Caltech and there’s plenty of collaboration going on.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s good to hear… One of my friends went to Tech and she always seemed to be overly-concerned about the competition there. It was a little unnerving.</p>
<p>Well, I think there is competition in the absolute highest rungs, as they have a stupid A+ grade here, so in some classes you get students that just have to get a 99% because an A isn’t good enough. It kinda sucks for the rest of us, since they like to try and ruin curves. :p</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ugh… Yeah, none of that at Rice, in my experience. If you asked the best folks in the class for help on things, they’d typically be more than willing to help out. Once we got to know each other, we’d all just schedule a time and location when we’d be doing a particular problem set and whoever wanted in on it would show up. That typically included people from the top of the class as well as people from the bottom.</p>
<p>Yeah, I had the same experience at CMU. I found the lack of +/- grades made people a lot more cooperative on assignments, as there weren’t nearly as many cutoffs to be concerned about making. Maybe the people on the A/B range weren’t as forthcoming with their info, but they still generally needed enough help such that they’d come and work with everyone.</p>