Admit Rates, Standardized Test Averages, Cross Admit Results

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
461

In other words, university presidents and provosts are giving a different answer from what you’re sure is the right one, so they must not know how to follow instructions and/or don’t have the expertise to compare colleges accurately and/or must be looking at various other rankings and thinking about endowments and being affected by their knowledge of all the areas in which UChicago might come up short. Ooookay…

Having demonstrated that H and Y are in fact standouts from the point of view of academic offerings, I’m feeling goalposts moving here, but in any event I don’t know how many students take calculus at UChicago vs. other schools (I think the Core only requires a quarter of math, and it doesn’t have to be calculus), and how much would be covered in three quarters vs. two semesters, and why such an analysis would be anything other than a comparison of math classes. Since your child considered Yale, how do you think a freshman Humanities sequence at UChicago compares to Directed Studies, taken by 10% of Yale first-years? I’m guessing DS is on another level, but either way it proves nothing about comparative academic rigor of the two schools.

On your other points, you haven’t provided any evidence of the purported disconnect between graduate and undergraduate academics at the Ivies other than claiming that Pinker says there’s one at Harvard. Telling @JHS that there must be one anywhere there are strong graduate programs and undergrads who have other interests in addition to academics is wishful thinking - @JHS has told you that that wasn’t the case at Yale when he was there, and I don’t see evidence of it there today. I’m glad you acknowledged that at Yale tenured faculty, even Nobel Prize winners, teach undergrads, even just to dismiss it by saying they aren’t great teachers. I think you’ll find they do so at Harvard, Princeton, etc. as well. If you have enough really bright and committed undergrads, and all these places do, professors are likely to want to work with them.

Again with the “we know this” and “we know that” with no evidence. I’m pretty sure some of your readers here know more Yale faculty than you’ll meet in your lifetime, so here’s a story about one Nobel laureate there who’s been teaching seminars as well as lecture classes for decades and is revered by his students: https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4784-william-nordhaus

That’s just a deflection. My point is that even the people on this thread can’t agree on what the median and mode are or how to measure them; some seem to have a sense that UChicago in general attracts more smart, serious kids who aren’t looking for the atmosphere of an Ivy, so therefore has more of an ”academic culture”, others believe that there are fewer and fewer of those kids at UChicago, which resembles an Ivy more every day, and that HYPSM attract enough super smart kids to ensure that any can find their culture there and will apply, notwithstanding the fact that there’s a lot going on beside pure academics. You’re not going to get any agreement on what the median or the mode are, although I suspect all these places are moving toward one bimodal distribution of Canada Goose coats and hand-me-downs.

Re: the satire, I prefer it. One has to consider the source (the Simpsons has historically had many Harvard grads on its writing staff - see here: https://tv.avclub.com/the-yale-harvard-war-bogs-down-in-an-overstuffed-simpso-1798191070) but there’s evidence of real research, it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is, and it’s pretty funny.

462

“What mature person actually thinks of grades as a ‘reward’?”

If one substitutes “average adult” or “average college-educated adult” for “mature person”, then the answer is “practically everyone”.

Thanks, John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner! Another overpowering but disheartening example of ideas having long-lasting consequences. Alfie Kohn’s book Punished by Rewards details both the prevalence of overt and covert behaviorist theory in modern culture and the harm it causes. (I recommend it to you @surelyhuman , for an alternative way of thinking to consider. Or Pink’s book Drive, which I think is more about the work place.) Kohn’s got a recent article in EdWeek subtitled “Scientists have moved on from behaviorism. Why haven’t educators?” It’s not just educators (and the legislators who blindly govern them), but that is one of the areas where the results are most stark. My younger child had a third grade teacher who put little cups in the middle of the kids’ tables. Whenever a student did something nice, a little token was put in her cup, and when she got 5, she got a material reward. The cups were labeled “Random Acts of Kindness”. When she was in fifth grade, at a different (“progressive”) school, a student asked the school had to give a limited number of students ribbons for their science projects; the teacher answered, “because otherwise, no one would work hard on their projects.” My daughter, who loved science, came home and said, “I guess [my science teacher] doesn’t think kids like science very much.” Indeed.

I like to think of Chicago as a school where most students have not had even the faint memory of intrinsic motivation for academics and intellectual thought starved out of them and don’t view education and life as a zero-sum game among tributes competing for “medals” and whatnot. Maybe because Chicago used to take students who hadn’t played the game enough in high school enough to have perfect grades. Perhaps that’s an overly romantic notion, at least by this point.

If you go to Chicago, @surelyhuman, you may still have to choose at times between learning and getting “rewarded” for your work. Last quarter my own daughter took two classes in which the professor said there had never yet been an A grade, and A- grades were scarce. Daughter knew these were hard graders when she picked the classes, and so wasn’t one of (few) kids who switched out. In many other classes and sections, students can count on at least some students getting A’s.

And you might want to be prepared for the fact that in college, professors are much less likely to reward effort per se than teachers in K-12. Professors are human, of course, and I’m not saying that showing that you’re trying hard makes no difference in the grade you’ll get, particularly if you might be about to fail a class.

463

You all need to give it a rest. You aren’t going to convince each other and you are repeating your arguments. UChicago, Harvard, and Yale are all the top schools in the country (along with Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, Columbia, Northwestern, Duke, etc…). There are some things that one is better at than the rest. We all have our own criteria and will tell you who’s best based on that criteria.

Now, I think that Ted Williams was the best baseball player of all time…

464

Echoing @BrianBoiler in a different way, '85 Bears is still the best football team of all time :wink:

465

I never suggested that mature adults don’t respond to money as a reward. Money is a reward. Grades aren’t. (Unless someone is paying you for grades. Which is gross. Of course, there are some common situations where people are rewarded monetarily for grade levels: scholarship minimum GPA requirements, dorm or fraternity minimum GPA requirements, automobile insurance discount GPA hurdles. In my mind, those situations powerfully encourage grade inflation.)

466

@DeepBlue86 - I actually agree with the presidents and provosts! UChicago’s Peer Ranking is influenced by more than possible admissions puffery (in the eyes of those “other” deans . . . ). One thing not mentioned before is the narrow range of major options compared to those ahead of it. It might be the highest Peer-Ranked college w/o a developed engineering program, for instance. It may never climb out of the 4.6 on USNWR and always be suspended midway between Y and NU. It may not pass JHU until more of its undergrads get into top med schools. It is what it is. That’s not where we differ.

My original point before all these comparisons and rankings discussions was that UChicago has a "niche reputation in the “plain ole’ tough academics” department. As long as we are talking rankings, you see that on every two-bit ranking of “hardest working students” or “Most challenging colleges.” That is merely one aspect of what makes a college attractive to a candidate. @BrianBoiler is correct - everyone will have their preferences and criteria.

My kids would have enthusiastically embraced the place back in the “bad old days” due to the reputation for intellectual inquiry and the rigorous academic pace. But the College currently offers a much stronger career support system now than it did back then. Despite some of the conversations on CC, students arriving on campus are explicitly encouraged to pursue their intellectual interests - not just the majors leading to power-jobs or easy grades - because the College can support these interests with fulfilling “next steps” at the end of their undergrad. years. If that makes UChicago more like an Ivy now - count me in as an “Ivy wannabe” :blush: But I think both Ivy fans and UChicago diehards can agree on one thing w/o question: the liberal arts are alive and well at these top uni’s, and that program of study leads to great opportunities down the road.

467

@Lea111 I think you are missing my point. I don’t care if professors are harsh in their grading. In fact I think more should be. At least they shouldn’t be giving out A’s like candy. It’s also not all about how much effort a person puts in although putting in more effort may result in better outcomes. It’s fundamentally a question of fairness. When you give everybody in the class the same grade, you are insulting the productive kid and yelling the lazy kid that effort and outcomes don’t matter. Everybody gets a medal for showing up or worse just for registering for the class. It also means that the professor doesn’t have to do his or her job of paying attention to which kids are really involved in class. Just give everybody A’s, off load most of the teaching burden to TA’s and focus on research. It’s a terrible disservice to the studious and intellectually serious kids

It takes more work on the professors part to grade accurately and divvy up the class by grade. One of the reasons I am interested in Chicago is because I am hoping that the professors will let me know when my work is “meh” through accurate feedback, even if it means I get a B or C or D. My parents will be paying a lot of money to the school for that. I want to to know that my 3.5 was earned thru diligent work, not because I took easy classes with lazy professors.

468

@JBStillFlying How much time does your daughter spend on academics each week, on average. Including classes, labs, and out-of-class studying or work?

469

@surelyhuman Rewards and feedback aren’t the same thing. Grades aren’t a very good form of feedback (and are a much “lazier” form of feedback for a teacher than giving more detailed feedback). Some of DD’s profs are better than others about offering detailed feedback. It doesn’t seem to correlate with the grades they give, though. If you want to learn more, I’d recommend looking for profs who are generally excellent but who also have a reputation for offering detailed and preferably timely feedback (whether on papers, or if you’re willing to go to office hours, in that forum). Don’t look for profs who are “harsh graders” per se (any more than you’d look for profs who are “easy graders”), because you may be frustrated with lack of feedback.

470

It was once the case that the tough graders mapped almost perfectly on to the great teachers. Those were the ones you wanted - if you could get them: their classes were always filled to capacity with us masochistic eager-beavers.

471

@Lea111 - she’s definitely working at a more relaxed pace compared to last year, and she doesn’t have a STEM course for the first time this quarter so I believe she’s doing something like 15 contact hours plus another 30 of outside study. That latter amount really can swing depending on the week. This quarter is primarily reading and discussion and more of her papers are due during finals week, not crammed into 10th like they were her fist year. That makes a huge impact because not only do you get a bit more sleep, but there are no classes after Wed. of 10th.

How about your D?

472

“It was once the case that the tough graders mapped almost perfectly on to the great teachers. Those were the ones you wanted - if you could get them: their classes were always filled to capacity with us masochistic eager-beavers.”

  • Agree. I had a prof. ask me if I'd care to reconsider taking two of her courses one semester because she was known for being tough. She WAS tough. But she was also fair (although she really didn't like my Keynes paper - ouch. I still disagree with my grade on that one). My D has a tough old bird whom she absolutely adores but it's a super hard class for the subject matter. Said she's never had to work so hard for a lower grade in her life. I'd say both my D and I are masochistic eager-beavers, always willing to test the common wisdom floating through campus and usually regretting our fearless jump into the adventure by sometime around mid-terms. Fortunately, the perspective of time in my case has helped to sharpen the rough edges that gouged my pride . . .
473

“How about your D?”

This is her last quarter with a lab, and so I think that’s 14 hours a week of classes.

When I ask her, she guesses less than for your D. Like maybe even as low as 15 hours a week for outside work, most of the quarter. And this hasn’t varied throughout her 5 1/2 quarters (except first quarter first year, when she took 3 courses, and wasn’t bored, but felt weird about how much less she was working than everyone else). But she may not be a good judge of how long she spends. She’s not very good with time. :wink:

She does all of her reading by the discussion date, so that doesn’t build up, but she generally procrastinates papers and writes them very fast. There is some correlation between how long she spends on papers and her grade, but not a tight correlation.

When all of the papers fall at the same time (last quarter, 2 short papers, 4 long papers, and a big project, all due within 10 days, and this was before reading period), she is surely working a lot more during that period. But that’s usually just once a quarter.

474

I agree!

One result of all this back-and-forth has been that I’ve now made enough posts to join @JBStillFlying as a Senior Member, which I find worrisome (my level of activity, not being grouped with @JBStillFlying, which is surely a positive distinction). The pay isn’t any better at this level…

Careful, or you’ll make me get started on Babe Ruth…

475

Thank heavens it’s no longer the case (if it ever was) that tough graders map almost perfectly on to the great teachers. That really sounds like a masochistic fantasy of the University of Chicago of yore: if it isn’t painful, it can’t be valuable, because if we were learning without pain we would be just like everyone else. For what it’s worth, my experience at other institutions was that the two qualities were completely uncorrelated.

As a practical matter, if you want extensive feedback on your work from a full professor, go to a small liberal arts college, where that’s what they are paid to do. Otherwise, at a university like Chicago, you are going to get detailed feedback from graduate-student TAs, or in Core classes in some cases from recent PhDs hired as non-tenure-track Core professors. That’s really not a bad deal. Chicago (like its peers) has fabulous graduate students in most departments, and they can do a great job of mediating between the undergraduates they still remember being themselves and the faculty with whom they work 24-7 as indentured servants. The Core faculty positions are great jobs for people who are often great scholars but for one reason or another do not yet have a tenure track offer (or do not have one they can accept and keep their marriage together).

For both of my kids, some of their most productive learning relationships at Chicago were with graduate student TAs, including their first-year writing instructors and in one case a BA thesis preceptor. My wife and I both had similar experiences four decades ago at Yale. A number of our grad-student TAs grew up to be pretty distinguished people, by the way. I had future English Department chairs at Harvard and Yale, a federal appellate judge on the short list for the first Trump Supreme Court appointment, and a future chair of German Literature at Michigan. My wife had a respected historian and a seminal feminist legal scholar who was then in the process of writing the book that made her famous.

At Chicago, one of my kids (in a relatively small department) had extensive formal and informal relationships with full professors and tenure-track junior faculty, including real feedback from them, but the other (in a larger department) really didn’t. Some of that was just bad luck. The person she wanted as a BA thesis supervisor had a sabbatical planned for her 4th year, the next choice took sudden leave when she had a chance to adopt a baby, someone else got seriously ill, and she wound up with an administrator who hadn’t done scholarship in 20 years and came into the picture months late. Some was department style. My son’s department did a ton to integrate undergraduates into the life of the department. Its senior faculty really enjoyed teaching undergraduates in small groups. I have related many times how one of the best-known professors in the department, having taught a 10-person seminar for fourth-year majors fall quarter, kept the seminar going through winter quarter on a voluntary, no-credit basis. (Something that not only deepened my son’s understanding of his field, but also deepened his friendship with one of the other students in the class, with whom he is now married.) Anyone who wanted could get involved in faculty research. My daughter’s department – one of the highest ranked in the university – just wasn’t like that.

476

It’s not so much that hard marking is meant to punish unworthiness, induce pain, reduce to cringing servility and such Dickensian horrors as to create the terms in which real excellence can be rewarded - if that’s the acceptable word for it. Great teachers may have other qualities, but most of mine were strong wielders of the red pencil. There seemed to me to be a very essential connection between the high expectation that drove the pencil and the high standard that prevailed in the conduct of the course. It must be awfully boring to make A’s all the time - if not terrifying when the odd B has to be faced.

I suppose I need to clarify that “masochistic” as used above to describe “eager beavers” was self-deprecatory. I couldn’t find the smiley-face and figured it was unnecessary anyway in a place where fun expires so often.

477

@Marlowe CC has hidden the smiley faces! You need to type a colon to activate them and the choices are few now . . .

478

“I have related many times how one of the best-known professors in the department, having taught a 10-person seminar for fourth-year majors fall quarter, kept the seminar going through winter quarter on a voluntary, no-credit basis. (Something that not only deepened my son’s understanding of his field, but also deepened his friendship with one of the other students in the class, with whom he is now married.) Anyone who wanted could get involved in faculty research. My daughter’s department – one of the highest ranked in the university – just wasn’t like that.”

A year or two ago I spoke to an academic and asked why some departments were very “undergrad” friendly and others “not so much” (keeping in mind that this is a comparison among other elite private uni’s that all tend to be more friendly to undergrads than State U). This individual thought that it had to do with popularity of major relative to number of faculty in the department.

I posted before that my daughter gets far more attention from full-time faculty in the history department than she would in the Econ. department. While this isn’t always true, Econ. departments tend to have fewer, higher-paid faculty than history departments (last time I counted, UChicago’s History department had 50% more full-time faculty than it’s Economics department). They also have WAY more majors! (UChicago at over 1,100 last spring vs. History with under 200).

Faculty at research universities have responsibilities for research (of course), grad courses, and graduate student advising. These responsibilities will vary among members of the same department, and also among departments (as some humanities and even a social science or two might have markedly fewer grad students than other departments). So one major might either see lots of full-time faculty available to divide up these other responsibilities, or it might have some full time faculty willing to cut back on research or a thriving grad program, in order to focus more on the undergraduates via teaching and mentoring, etc.

The situation is very different at an LAC, where full-time faculty are particularly devoted to teaching, mentoring and advising grad students. There are no PhD students on campus to mess that up. This is probably why LAC’s can be great PhD feeder schools.

Some full-time faculty members at the research uni’s clearly enjoy teaching and interacting with undergraduates. Furthermore, you don’t need a Nobel Laureate or even a tenured member to inspire you in a particular discipline - all you need is a great teacher, and that can be a lecturer or grad student as much as a tenured faculty member.

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@Lea111 at #472 I don’t think my kid is very good at keeping track of hours spent studying either. She told me that “Time disappears.” So who knows. I don’t really recall how many hours I would spend. I know I spent a lot. Perhaps when you enjoy your work it’s not “work.“ These kids can also study pretty much anywhere. For instance, my daughter commutes to Downtown twice a week and probably studies on the train.

480

It’s not just that, although the numbers certainly matter. After their first couple of years, and often even earlier, grad students are essentially indentured to a specific faculty member. That becomes an intense relationship that continues day-to-day, week-to-week for 4-5 years, and really is expected to last the remainder of their professional careers. It’s critical to getting the professor’s work done, and critical to the professor’s reputation in the field. It is generally analogized to a parent-child relationship, with good reason. Undergraduates take one course out of 3-5 from the professor for one quarter. Maybe they take another a few quarters later. They graduate and leave shortly after they learn enough to start being interesting. It’s not remotely a relationship that can compete with the professor’s grad student relationships.

That doesn’t mean the undergraduates can’t get a lot out of their relationships with the professor and the graduate students, but they have to find a slot to fit themselves in.

The History/Economics comparison at Chicago is a little misleading, though. There are Economics professors stashed at Booth and even some at NORC, I believe.