On the academic-political spectrum of this board, I am clearly one of the people most likely to think that there’s nothing wrong with Chicago being more like Princeton, having a great deal of respect both for Chicago and for Princeton (et al.), and taking exaggerated claims of Chicago exceptionalism with more than a few grains of salt.
That said, the notion that Chicago should abandon its historic academic calendar and course arrangement because it results in a practical impediment to its undergraduates getting one of a tiny percentage of summer internships leaves me colder than cold. It’s beyond trivial. And any student who is not applying to Chicago because he or she is afraid of being excluded from the market for one of those internships? Good riddance.
All of you got me on that one. Thought for sure he had been undergrad at Princeton. Was no doubt led astray by the feared “Princetonization” that was always thought to be a concealed stalking horse of the administration back in pre-Boyer days. Boyer’s vision and actions as Dean of the College (and now this initiative to eliminate the quarter system on grounds that it is too relentless) just seemed very Princetonian. Well, I assert that Princetonism can be a fighting faith detachable from actual Princetonians. Dean Boyer may have a little of that 'ism in his soul if not in his actual history.
We don’t have much information on why Boyer has called this committee. Who, exactly, is suffering from the “relentless pace” or experiencing curricular or social pressures as a result of the quarter system? They are being quite vague. Internships and the college curriculum are easy points of discussion, but it’s going to take more than a couple of issues impacting some of the undergrad. program to move this. There have to be serious realizable benefits across the board. A coherent statement is required at this point. Hopefully the Maroon will stay on the story.
The students! My daughter. Her friends and classmates. I talk to them every week and they are stressed and anxious. The pace is relentless. You know that kid that was shot by the cops in Hyde Park. He is my daughter’s friend and he was stressed!
As I stated from the beginning. Dean Boyer (like everyone posting here) needs to talk to the students. We are all armchair quarterbacking this issue.
@paxfobiscum - with all due compassion to the poor kid who was clearly having a mental health crisis, surely you are not suggesting that those incidents don’t happen at other schools on the semester system? Some local friends of ours lost their son to suicide at an Ivy not too long ago, as merely one example of how college stress can impact a young person anytime, anywhere. Do we have data showing that Stanford, Dartmouth, UChicago and other schools on the quarter system have a higher incidence of stress-related crises than schools on the semester system?
You seem to be advocating a slower pace for the coursework. That might work for your daughter and her friends. It won’t work for others who are able to keep up, deliver good grades without stressing out more than is typical for any kid at a rigorous elite school. This is no knock on any one student - a lot depends on major, course load, and whether the student needs to work or is committed to other non-academic activities. But the question is still there: should the pace be slowed down in order to accomodate a certain percentage of students? What if by doing that they make the workload too easy for others?
Also, “relentless pace” might also be referring to administrative functions, including advising and counseling. We shouldn’t assume that Boyer is referring merely to undergraduates. And even if he is, they are only about a third of the student population at UChicago.
My s is an undergrad there and after doing 2 quarters, he says he does like the quarter system’s pace, and also the ability to change to new classes that much faster. He said there are ‘waves’ of busy time, but that could probably apply to the semester system as well. Also, until now, we’ve never heard of people using the quarter system as a criteria to apply to a school or not.
Maybe the new problem is this: Back in the day, when Chicago was a secret intellectual club for kids who were something less than shiny, the students actually liked the feeling that they were working harder than students at Stanford or Harvard. And they didn’t flip out if their grades weren’t perfect because that’s how they and their high test scores got to Chicago in the first place: Their grades weren’t perfect. They were used to that.
Now Chicago has convinced everyone that it’s the same as Harvard or Stanford, except with a core, and now it doesn’t have to accept imperfect students anymore. So, maybe it has a critical mass of kids who don’t feel good about working under pressure, and who do flip out if they think they might get a B+.
You put your finger very acutely on the “new” problem for the shiny new U of C, @JHS . I am optimistic to think that the old wine can still be found in the new bottles, but I too have my doubts.
It was certainly true in my era that we took for granted that an A was a very rare ocurrence, and in general we were not very fussed about grades. That seemed like a high school triviality to me and my friends. But then none of us worried much about the life after college. We seemed to think that we were meant to figure out the meaning of life itself first. There were downsides to that culture, of course - one of them being that we didn’t get on track to conquer the world financially and pay some of it back to the institution from which we came. Yet that sort of achievement isn’t the whole of life: the experience of wrestling with the big questions and the great writers acted in my own life to give me immunity to such things as worldly setbacks and tribulations. In a dark time there was always Plato, there was always Shakespeare. Did it matter that Maclean could only cough up a B plus for me in his Shakespeare course? Not at all. That was a good grade, firstly, but more importantly grades were the perfunctory thing that you got at the end of the wild ride of reading the greats, thinking about them and getting the guidance of the best Profs you could possibly wangle. And, incidentally, the best Profs were always the toughest graders.
As I say, I am optimistic that that spirit lingers, with all necessary modifications, or at least a leavening of these unreconstructed types with a newer breed. But you are dead right in seeing a clash of cultures at work here.
What I am really suggesting is that if you accept mainly applicants with perfect grades, you are likely going to wind up with a higher number of grade grubbers than you used to have. And they are going to start doing what grade grubbers do, which includes whining about conditions that make it harder for them to get perfect grades (as well as caring more about grades than about knowledge or growth). That never used to be a problem at Chicago, but it never used to have that many kids with perfect grades.
What they need to do - and will never be able to do perfectly - is separate out in the admissions process the kids who are smart (as evidenced by grades and test scores) but are too focussed on these externalities from those who are just as smart but have the true right perspective on these things. In the old days that level of discrimination wasn’t necessary. But, to be perfectly frank, there were and always will be kids who were overwhelmed in coming face to face for the first time with the reality of their own limitations. I certainly had that experience. Being a student at the U of C is a test of character as much as of intelligence.
@marlowe1 - there seemed to be a lot of kids with amazing GPA’s who didn’t get in this year. Several posted rejections from ED2. So I wonder if what you are suggesting is going on already.
I graduated back in the 1980s and no one I knew finished all four years with a 4.0. I had a roommate who graduated with an almost unbelievably high 3.8 GPA but that was it. Rumor had it that former US Senator Chuck Percy graduated with a 4.0 but that may have been apocryphal.
Percy’s exploits were already verging on the legendary in the sixties, when he was said to not only have achieved that gpa but to have set up a laundry business at BJ by which he made a cool profit after paying all his college costs. He later served on the board of governors and when his daughter was married (to a Rockefeller) it was in Rockefeller Chapel. The party afterwards was in Ida Noyes. I watched from the Midway as all that went down. No wonder the legends circulated. We all thought he would be the first U.S. President with a Chicago B.A. Bernie Sanders might also have been watching, with a very different flight path in mind.
I think dismissing grade inflation as simply an increase in “grade grubbing” is ignoring the reality that the economic and cultural meaning of grades has shifted significantly over the years. There are many more college graduates (and thus more competition for jobs that require a BA) than a few decades ago, and the shift towards a predominantly skill based economy means that good grades really are worth more than they used to be. Conversely, there’s not really anything stopping universities from giving out better grades except for institutional tradition (well, except for at Princeton - and look at how that turned out! Princeton students said grade deflation put them at a disadvantage while applying for jobs and the grade limits were scrapped), and plenty of incentive to give out better grades, since better grades can lead to better jobs which leads to successful alumni - and hopefully I don’t have to explain why schools want their alumni to be successful.
UChicago has not been any more immune to this than any other school in America. It’s no surprise at all that grades have been rising at every single university.
I take your point, @HydeSnark , especially as it reflects the experience of someone on the front lines.
It’s a reasonable practical consideration to want good grades if they’re a necessity in taking the next step in life. My old apartment mate years ago was very much concerned with that very thing. His less than brilliant grades kept him from realizing his dream of getting in to Harvard Law. However, he got into another very distinguished law school, largely, he thought, merely because he was a U of C graduate whose mediocre grades were in effect upgraded to reflect that fact. He had a good career in the law, the capstone of which was that he taught at Harvard Law for many years as an adjunct Prof.
The moral to the story is that while it’s reasonable to be concerned about grades there are many ways of overcoming poor ones if you inherently have the right stuff. A year or so after graduation nobody knows or cares in a practical way about your college marks. Poor marks will bother only those who have let metaphysical significance become attached to them. By the way, if you will pardon my saying so, I would be astounded if your grades were not really good. After all, grades generally do reflect effort at a school like Chicago where everyone has the necessary smarts. It’s not crass or petty-minded to want one’s efforts to be acknowledged.
My experience with grades on the interviewing front lines for corporations is more nuanced. Provided grades were above a certain minimum, say 3.2-3.4, the interviews were based on assessing behavioral attributes and experiences to suss out the “intangibles”. A 4.0 GPA in of itself never made the cut if the :intangibles"weren’t there. This is from fields ranging from engineering to management consulting.
Not sure how slowing down the pace of the term is going to solve the stress problem or relieve the pressure to achieve high grades. If the prof. grades on a curve, then nothing really changes. If the prof grades easy based on some minimum standard of competency, that standard could well shift up to account for the slower pace. We are not likely to see a kinder gentler UChicago by switching to semesters. A better ability to process and absorb the subject matter won’t necessarily result in a higher grade.
Of course not. But the kind of person who is super-stressed about getting high grades is also the kind of person who is likely to say, “OMG! OMG! The quarter system is so stressful! It’s only a couple weeks, and then you start having midterms!”
If you have decided that it’s important to keep that person happy, or to get that person to apply, then you may have to consider ditching the quarter system.
Personally, I’m more or less neutral on the quarter system. I can see benefits and drawbacks. I effectively had it in high school, and it was fine, but I never got bored or felt that things were moving too slowly in my semester classes in college and law school. However, I think it would be an awful idea to abandon a curriculum design that has worked at Chicago for over a century, and that definitely contributes to its culture, merely because some students think semesters are nicer for them.