<p>Also, here’s the site I mentioned, that is intended to compare the course requirements at various universities: [Rating</a> Criteria - What Will They Learn?](<a href=“http://whatwilltheylearn.com/criteria]Rating”>What Will They Learn? - Rating Criteria)</p>
<p>My apologies, annasdad, Deresiewicz appears to have nothing to do with this site. I leapt to the conclusion that you were writing about the comparisons at “What Will They Learn?”</p>
<p>Distribution requirements are so “high school”. (But at some schools, they keep some departments alive.)</p>
<p>@SlitheyTove, I’m talking about the rigor with which a course is taught and on which the students are assessed, not about the difficulty of the advertised subject matter. If two profs give the same exam and one curves the scores up and the other doesn’t, I would call the course taught by the second more rigorous.</p>
<p>Wow, that “What Will They Learn” site is profoundly stupid. I give it an “F minus.” I guess it would be too hard to find out what students at various colleges actually take, how well they learn how to write, etc. The idea that students at Yale don’t learn how to write well because they can take any of a range of writing-intensive classes is moronic.</p>
<p>They could also, I suppose, look into how many matriculants at various colleges already have AP credits (and high test scores) in a lot of the topics they think are important. But that would also require a little more critical thinking.</p>
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What if a majority of the students in the class demonstrate mastery of the course material at a high level? Do you think the grades should be curved down in order to make sure too many As aren’t being given?</p>
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<p>Yes. Yale almost never tenures junior faculty. They seem to expect them to teach a while at Yale, and then go elsewhere - perhaps with tenure at the new institution- and then frequently Yale hires them back as Full Professors.</p>
<p>I did not mean my post to suggest that the fact he wasn’t tenured meant anything about his credentials.</p>
<p>My two cents FWIW - I understand that if someone wants to meet a requirement in Math and really do hate Math, Yale provides choices with some courses that make it more of an exercise in English than Math (this is something the adcoms say from their own experience). This kind of equates it to Brown in terms of being more of an open curriculum. OTOH, there are students who work extremely hard in their own majors but may find short cuts like above to get around fulfilling the requirements. </p>
<p>On our tour last year, we went on pretty much every tour except the liberal arts one (I don’t know if there is one but I was not looking for it). We took the regular one, engineering one, sciences one. I was equally impressed with the engineering kid who just completed his freshman year but was doing research in a lab during summer who could explain what was going on in their engineering labs as well as the girl who gave us a tour in her very last week at Yale (true commitment) and it was her absolute last tour. Here was a Boston girl who started out in mechanical engineering (had two brothers who went to MIT and Harvard), decided it was not for her after her first year, switched to sciences into this complex combination of sciences offered at Yale, was not satisfied with just getting her degree but finished a masters in three years while doing research. She was very proud of her accomplishments. She was gushing about a recommendation from a chemistry professor last year who gave her a LOR to support her MD/Ph.D. application at Columbia where she was headed, and the fact that she got the letter and just before it was turned in, he won the Nobel prize. I did not believe either of those kids was skating through.</p>
<p>This post is a bit late, but to alh, #325, the comment that it is very hard to gain tenure at Yale was not directed at your post, nor other posters, but really to lurkers on the thread, because it would be possible to over-interpret the fact that Deresiewicz did not get tenure there.</p>
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<p>texaspg…D and I had this same young lady when we toured the school a few years ago. At that time, she was a freshman. It must be the same one – how many girls at Yale are from New England and have two brothers at MIT and one at Harvard? We had a nice chat with her, and she told us in addition to scoring a perfect score on the SAT, she was editor her senior year in high school for her suburb’s newspaper! Impressive young lady to say the least. :)</p>
<p>I don’t see science-for-non-science majors (etc) as a shortcut. If they are legit courses offered by the university, what’s the problem?</p>
<p>And we have truly gone through the looking glass if we are regarding Yale’s high graduation rate with scorn. Give me a break. How agenda driven is that? Yes, it’s awful to be at a school where basically everyone graduates @@.</p>
<p>No, it’s great to be at a school where everybody graduates! Whether all those degrees are actually earned may be another matter.</p>
<p>That dumbed-down courses are legit at Yale or other top colleges IS the issue. They have the best young minds in the country. Why not make students use them?</p>
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<p>Are you arguing here that what defines rigor of a course is how it is graded? Do you think a course is better when there is the sort of curve where some have to fail? IMHO this is a terrible academic environment if you really want to encourage learning. It will definitely encourage some very nasty cut-throat behavior on the part of the students. I want a doctor or lawyer, who while an undergraduate, was encouraged to share notes with a sick classmate and discuss various difficult concepts over lunch or dinner or drinks off campus… not one who “misplaced” the current assignment in the reserve book room or “moved” someone’s book bag where they couldn’t find it. I especially want my doctors to be comfortable consulting with a colleague if they have questions or concerns about a diagnosis or treatment.</p>
<p>motherbear wrote:
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<p>^^^YES. The ordeal we put our ambitious students through seems to me very damaging. We hold up a model they need to duplicate to get into a certain college with no thought as to whether the formula makes sense in an individual case. And then we have all these super-achieving 17 and 18 yr olds who don’t get into their first choice college, that they have been aiming for since they were 10 or 11, and they feel like failures. I know, I know this is not how it is done in the mid-west and particularly in the suburbs of Chicago 
but it does work that way often enough to be a problem imho ymmv And with children and teens having internet access it seems to me a growing problem. Regardless what parents do, young kids are going to be reading those chance threads on cc. Talk about peer pressure!</p>
<p>When I first began reading this board most parents seemed to be in agreement that whatever it cost, we’ll send our kids to the best school they are able to get into. For 99% of us this may no longer be an option. It is really frustrating to not be able to provide what we see as the best educational opportunities for students who really could take advantage of them because of financial realities. It is my impression this doesn’t happen in many other countries.</p>
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I don’t believe there are dumbed-down courses at Yale. You would have to actually sit in class, hear the lecture and subsequent discussion and read the student writing to make the determination imho. </p>
<p>Not all students need a well-rounded education (sadly the way the system is set up, not all even have time for a well rounded education which should be happening before HS imho) and by the time they get to" Yale" shouldn’t be required to take math and science - IMHO. They can’t necessarily study everything and those courses may not best serve their needs and interests. Ditto English for math & science majors. There is not time at any school to learn everything. </p>
<p>It seems to me if the goal is a well rounded education, a school with a core is a good choice. I think that students who don’t need graduate level courses (or some sort of IB networking opportunities :)) will be much better served by small liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>Quantmech: I think it was really good to clarify and had already begun to be concerned about lurkers who might be adjuncts or former assistant/associate profs at Yale. The system there is often criticized as abusive.</p>
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<p>Is this not a dumed-down course? I heard the similar course “modification” to satisfy science requirements when we took a tour with my kid. Basic math and sciences are taught all over the world. They are not that hard that we have to water it down. </p>
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<p>This sounds more like Ivy worship to me. Of course, there are dumbed-down courses at Yale and other top Uni’s as there are not so bright people at those institutions. Fewer compared to others but not non-existent. I have a mis/fortune to spend my Thanksgivings with Stanford graduates for the last 20 years and not infrequent dinner parties with Harvard graduates. Sometimes , you gasp hearing what comes out their mouth.</p>
<p>Iglooo: I am really about the furthest thing possible from an Ivy worshiper. If anyone wants to discuss actual problems and issues with ivies - I am so there! 
But maybe it should be another thread since I’m pretty sure … Caltech isn’t even an ivy :)</p>
<p>Sure, there are some (relatively) easy courses at Yale. But all the “Quantitative Reasoning” courses have some math in them, just as all the writing courses have writing in them. What’s silly about this, to me, is that virtually all the Yale students of today will have already taken calculus in high school (usually BC Calculus). How much more math does an English major really need?</p>
<p>And to this:
It could be, but it isn’t. While it may be possible to satisfy your distributional requirements with gut courses, there really aren’t gut majors, and the majors have significant requirements. Students generally can’t use AP credits to get out of a lot of requirements, either. It’s not like a lot of other colleges, where people come to play sports and come out with a degree in a cheesy major–if they graduate at all. The big athlete major at Yale is Political Science.</p>
<p>You know, igloo – are H or S graduates supposed to always be thinking and saying Deep Things? Can’t they just enjoy the turkey and the football game and have a laugh with friends and talk about the latest movie or wrestle their brothers after dinner?</p>
<p>It’s getting thick in here. Really, really thick. Pretentious city.</p>
<p>There are all kinds of stupidity, and Ivy grads have their share of many of the kinds. But there are some kinds that they are less likely to have.</p>
<p>Yk Annasdad, it’s more than a little ironic and dare I say hypocritical that you are sending your kid to a place which explicitly focuses on heavy duty math and science with comparatively short shrift given to humanities and then dissing a college for enabling a student to focus on humanities with comparatively short shrift given to math and science.
I agree with Hunt. How much math does the lit major need?</p>
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I was an English major, and I wish I had taken a stats course. But because I didn’t have calculus in high school, and everybody said you “should” take calculus, I took calculus in college. In my opinion, it was the biggest waste of time of any course I took in college. It had no application in any subject I ever studied later. Stats would have been of some use, though.</p>
<p>So let’s sum up the thread so far - when Caltech offers heavy duty math and science and “light” humanities, that’s really important because it’s important to ensure that these brilliant young minds stay up to 3 am focusing on math and science because anything else is just a tedious distraction to the important goal of cramming as much math and science into one’s brains as possible. Go Caltech and go “angular” students!</p>
<p>But switch that to a Yale lit or French major, and all of a sudden angular’s not good, and by golly, why aren’t those kids taking advanced calculus and chemistry labs, they need to be well rounded, what will they ever learn, get offa my lawn. Screw you, slacker Yale!</p>
<p>STEM triumphalism, indeed. Utter hypocrisy.</p>