^See above.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Anyone is free to ask or answer questions in this thread. It is not the place, however, to ask for chances.
What essential life hacks you recommend every freshman should know before going to UChicago?
Who’s your fav third year at UChicago and why is it me?
- With enough e-mail aliases, you'll never have to pay for Amazon Prime in college.
- If a non-seminar class has a 9:00 lecture with space and an 11:00 lecture that's full, you don't actually need to go to the 9:00.*
- The college's tutors are good at what they do
- Boost your productivity by deleting your college confidential account.
*N/A if the TAs take attendance
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ERRATUM
A reliable source has informed me that this is actually a bad idea; students who do this will face the wrath of the higher ed gods - and possibly the administration. Don’t do this.
Ah, second-year, the iron year, the year of doubt, lethargy and dilly-dallying coming after the high-wire act of first-year. The year in which one’s allegedly brilliant future can be glimpsed only darkly through one’s present reality of sloth and indeterminacy. I remember it well. To be honest it was also the year in which I began to lose my fear and awe of the University of Chicago and begin to love the place.
What is your / the average amount of work a night?
What has been your worst course (or experience you had in a course) at UChicago?
(Feel free to add your best experience, in the interest of balance, if you are so inclined. But I’m just interested in worst.)
@ViceCube It varies widely. Last year, I took three quarters of HUM and SOSC, with another seminar in the spring for good measure. Three seminars at once meant a heavy reading load - anywhere between 40 and 100 pages of reading per night, five nights a week, and at least one writing assignment (generally a paper/short essay) each week. I generally spent about 3 hours a night on reading.
This quarter, I’ve largely been taking introductory classes for my major, which tend to be lecture- and exam-based because of the sheer number of students who take the classes (75-80 on the lower end; as high as 150, or even 175 in one case, split between different sections). Lecture classes emphasize content mastery rather than essays or discussion, so during any given week the only time you spend on a class might be time spent in lecture (Go. To. Class.) and possibly in a discussion section. This approach can, of course, backload a schedule and make for a killer finals week. I’ve spent a lot of time on an outside job this quarter, and my weekend is going to be brutal.
For me at least, budgeting time for reading has been easy. At a deliberate pace (I take my time so I won’t need to read materials again) every 20 pages a professor assigns will mean about an hour. Problem sets and lab assignments are less predictable; one coding assignment might require five hours of debugging before I figure it out, while another may run perfectly the first time I test it, half an hour in.
Your mileage will vary according to your classes, workflow, aptitude for particular subject areas, etc.
@exacademic An excerpt from my professor’s instructions for an assessment of climate change:
Lab sections range from 15 to 20 students; in mine, 4 or 5 actually contributed. I was tapped to compile the group’s analysis, and still have nightmares about this report. I know the professor knows how social experiments like this turn out.
This was part of a broader pattern; I learned a lot from this class, and did well, but mastery of the content was clearly optional. Exhibit A: a multiple-choice, take-home, open-book, open-notes, open-internet midterm exam that tested surface-level knowledge of the lectures and reading.
The class wasn’t entirely bad: I found the content interesting, and learned a great deal above and beyond what the exams required. The assessments just happened to be as intellectually stimulating as a game of Flappy Bird.
Thankfully, this class was the lone outlier among 15 classes to date that I’ve largely found challenging and enjoyable. My best experience was the second quarter of Classics, when my class read Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft. I took a course in political theory that same quarter, and comparing these thinkers with John Rawls was the most fun I’ve had in years.
Always fun to realize you’re an involuntary participant in a professor’s social experiment! But, hey, replication is important these days.
Rawls was probably the prof who had the greatest impact on me as an undergrad. I’m not a fan of his theory of justice,* but he offered a good model of what it means to do serious intellectual work. Basically, you learn from others’ work by fixing (rather than exploiting) their errors before you set out to critique. And be as self critical as you can wrt your own work. Definitely an “always make the best case you can for the other side” kind of thinker and that was emphatically NOT an approach I had encountered in HS.
*though I do like to imagine it reincarnated as a Disneyland ride
I had a professor in law school who did the same thing, but it was for the final exam. People had to take the exam in teams of four (the same teams that had previously engaged in a negotiation exercise together). People taking the class pass/fail could not be on the same team with people taking the class for a grade. It was a take-home exam, it was required to be typed and there was a strict page limit (8 pages, double-spaced). Instead of having to grade 60 scrawled, incoherent exams, the teacher got it down to 15 short papers, only 9-10 of which he had to read past the first page. (The exams were, of course, anonymous, but I’m sure he could tell the difference between a graded team and a P/F team in the first paragraph.)
Very very interesting approach by your prof JHS.
@JHS gosh, this brings back really bad memories of some arbitrariness of grades.
It was brilliant in converting a task that probably would have taken him at least a couple days to do well into a task he could probably do perfectly well in 3 hours at most, while pretending to teach us real-world collaboration skills. No one really cared, anyway, law school grades being pretty much meaningless for most students after the first semester of second year. And, in any event, the students (all of whom were second- or third-years) could figure out how it worked, and so basically sorted themselves into the groups based on how much they cared about the grades. There may have been only two or three groups that actually tried to get As.
Basically, the game he set up let him give the students the grades they wanted with a minimum of effort from him. It really was brilliant.
I should add that this was NOT at the University of Chicago. It seems like a totally non-Chicago thing to do, so it’s amusing that the climate change course has something similar going on. (But actually not so similar, since the people grouped into each lab didn’t choose one another to work on an exam with.)
Thanks for doing this. A few questions from a newly accepted student:
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How common is it for students to take the L into downtown Chicago for nightlife? Or do most students stay on campus?
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Grading on a curve - is it true? For all classes or just the STEM classes?
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I’m not that great of a writer. Is there some sort of writing center or tutors for geeks like me who need help?
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Can undergrads take classes at Booth?
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I’m looking for as high of a GPA as possible. Should I place out of Calc, language and econ classes, or just take the intro level classes for an easy A? I’ve heard differing opinions that upper level classes are easier than intro classes.
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Depends more on the student than anything else. Most people go downtown at least once. A few people barely leave. A few people go downtown a lot. If you want to explore Chicago you can; the CTA is right there.
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It happens. Often in science, somewhat in math (usually there’s no real curve but grades are comparative), rarely in other subjects.
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[url=<a href=“https://core-tutors.uchicago.edu/%5DYes%5B/url”>https://core-tutors.uchicago.edu/]Yes[/url]. You will have a writing TA in most essay classes, writing seminars in hum, and you can, of course, go to office hours if necessary.
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[url=<a href=“https://www.chicagobooth.edu/programs/full-time/admissions/early-career-candidates/dougan-scholars-program%5DYes%5B/url”>https://www.chicagobooth.edu/programs/full-time/admissions/early-career-candidates/dougan-scholars-program]Yes[/url]
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There are very few easy As here. This attitude is going to cause you a lot of pain, I strongly suggest you take classes that you think will benefit you and try to do your best in them. In general, I don’t think people should skip the intro classes, often they aren’t as prepared as they think they are. Just realize it isn’t going to be an easy A.
Thanks for the honest feedback @hydesnark. Definitely agree to not skip the intro classes. Even though I took a lot of advanced high school classes, I’d rather retake the intro classes again.
Can you expand a bit more about the curving of grades? I go to a difficult boarding school now, and had to struggle to get As, so I understand what you mean.
But my underlying concern with a curved grading system is that it leads to competitive behavior. If only half of the class can get A or B, then does this result in a cut-throat environment? I’d really rather know the now, since I still have the chance of applying to other colleges.
Secondly, if on average, UChicago students have lower GPA vs their peers, then does this lead to more difficulty in getting internships, or into grad/med/law/business school later? Most grad admissions people generally don’t provide a GPA adjustment for kids who went to ‘harder’ schools like UC.
Regarding grade deflation, I found a dataset online from the Law School Admission Council. It shows median GPA of law school applicants by each college in the country. Now I know this is only for law school applicants, and not all students. But it could help provide context. The median GPA is indeed a bit lower at UChicago, but not by a huge amount.
https://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/top-240-feeder-schools
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Yale 3.68 3.70 3.70 3.72 3.76
Brown 3.73 3.71 3.74 3.74 3.76
Stanford 3.64 3.64 3.66 3.65 3.74
Columbia 3.63 3.70 3.62 3.68 3.70
Harvard 3.63 3.65 3.68 3.69 3.68
Penn 3.55 3.53 3.61 3.58 3.63
Duke 3.55 3.57 3.58 3.57 3.61
UChicago 3.50 3.53 3.58 3.57 3.59
Princeton 3.43 3.51 3.42 3.39 3.53
Question is whether or not a lower GPA with a degree from UChicago makes it more difficult for internships/grad school applications? Versus say someone with a Brown degree with a 3.8??
No one knows the answer to your question. The distribution of UChicago student’s grades are not public, and you aren’t going to be able to hold everything equal between a Brown student and a UChicago student except for grades.
Classes are generally not graded on a curve - as in your grade is normalized wrt the mean and you’ll do well if you’re more than the std dev above and do badly if you’re more than the std dev below. There is almost always some standard you will be graded against and the potential of the entire class doing well is always there. Write good essays, prove the theorems satisfactorily, successfully program the project, etc. and you will get an A.
The question is: can you do that? Maybe your final tells you to prove something and you honestly have no idea because that problem didn’t happen to be on your p-sets or you didn’t study that exact part of the quarter as well as you should have or you just couldn’t figure out the trick you need. Or maybe you’ll write a paper with subpar analysis because you were busy studying for some other final so you didn’t work as hard as you could have or you just genuinely couldn’t come up with insightful analysis (it’s not easy!) and you weren’t able to make the connection that would have made your paper excellent. Then you get a B or C. Oh well - happens to basically all of us at some point.
That’s what we mean when we say that doing well at UChicago is hard. The system is definitely not set up to screw you. You will know what you did wrong. But nevertheless getting mostly As is not easy.
So look - don’t worry about it. It’s possible to do well at UChicago. Tying your self worth to grades is a terrible idea here. If you think you need straight As to be happy, you might want to go somewhere else.
But cutthroat behavior generally doesn’t happen. Again - we aren’t fighting over each other for grades. Even in gen chem - if everyone did the problems on the midterms perfectly they would all get the As. That doesn’t happen because they’re absurdly difficult, but it could. So in practice they end up using the class mean to figure out the standard but the grades are not preset at all and depend on the distribution of scores. People are nearly always willing to help a housemate or friend or even just a random person that desperately messages them at 3 am asking for help to look over their paper or explain a concept they don’t get or help them with a problem. That’s just the way the culture of the school is - we’re here to learn and learning is hard so we better look out for each other. And lord knows we all know how hard it is. No one wants to be alone under the amount of stress and work UChicago can give us.
Wow that got long. Sorry for being so wordy. Hope this is helpful.
Hold on - what @f77a9b82 posted is fairly persuasive proof that some consequential grade inflation is going on at Chicago. Chicago may be on the lower end of the pack - behind such notorious grade inflating schools like Brown and Yale, but it’s undeniably in the pack.
I imagine this is a shift from even a decade ago, where, per data from gradeinflation.com, the avg. Chicago GPA was 3.35, and the average Brown GPA was 3.59.
Of course, the current data is only for law school applicants, but it looks like the gap has closed. The current data even bears out that, for almost every year in the past ~5 years, the median UChicago GPA for law applicants has been increasing. Yes, as @HydeSnark said, you will “feel” a Chicago education, but the grading schema doesn’t look as punishing as it once was.
Footnote: per the LSAC data, Chicago’s median LSAT for law applicants in 2016 was 166.36. That’s absurdly high - notably higher than peers like Brown and Cornell, and a hair’s breadth away from Stanford’s mean. Combined stats of 3.59 GPA/166.36 LSAT make Chicago law applicants just about the best in the country - behind only the very tippy top (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford). Taking standardized test wunderkids is obviously paying dividends at Chicago.