<p>So the best way to evaluate a college is by looking at its flunk-out rate? Flunk-out rates are evidence of rigor? Wait til USNews gets a hold of that one. That’ll really shake up the old ratings!</p>
<p>Curves designed to cull the herd, even if the entire herd is capable, are obnoxious. Especially in light of the shortage of STEM students, doctors, etc. that seems to be the case. I was married to a doctor, my stepfather was a doctor, and my father-in-law was a doctor and none of them retained a detailed knowledge of chemistry well into their practices because it was not relevant to their careers. The kept up in their fields but the background was unnecessary unless one was going to be a medical researcher. </p>
<p>Good hands and the ability to communicate clearly with the patient may be more important than college chemistry for an E.R. doc or a orthopedic surgeon. Certainly, you don’t need to be the best chemist at HYP etc. to be an excellent doctor.</p>
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<p>I thought everyone considering going to top schools had all of these courses in their pockets with As and 5s. Aren’t they a minimum requirement for schools like Caltech?</p>
<p>Many smart students attend high schools that don’t even offer AP. AP is still more of a well to do school district phenomenon than a universal thing. Listen to how Annasdad described the local hs. I bet many small, rural schools are like that.</p>
<p>There you go again. Who said the best way to evaluate colleges is by flunkout rates? Sheesh.</p>
<p>Yes, our small (about 450 kids K-12) rural district has no AP courses, or even honors courses, or even any academic electives. But then again, we’ve never (at least not in the 14 years I’ve lived here) had a kid accepted at a hyperselective college. A kid getting into UIUC is a Big Deal Indeed. I would imagine that very few students at the most selective colleges come from districts like ours.</p>
<p>What’s funny to me about this is that when my son was considering colleges, his big decision was whether to apply to music conservatories where he would have received a B.M., or to universities (like Yale) where he’d get a B.A. We strongly urged him to look at universities because we thought he’d get a better rounded education. And we continue to struggle with his desire to take more music courses, and fewer courses in other disciplines. Personally, I think Yale strikes a pretty good balance, with distributional requirements that force all students to take about a quarter of their classes outside their major, including at least a couple of science, a couple of humanities, a couple of social sciences, foreign language, writing, and quantitative reasoning. My observation is that most of the students look for classes that will be really interesting or useful in meeting these requirements. Probably most of them do occasionally pick one easier class, especially if it’s in a semester when they are taking particularly demanding major classes. But “guts” are boring. Driven kids don’t want to take many of them. Indeed, one of the common problems of advisors at Yale is convincing kids that they shouldn’t take five (or six) credits the first semester.</p>
<p>Obviously, you can choose to believe Deresiewicz over me. But why would you believe a guy who can’t even carry on a conversation with a plumber?</p>
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<p>A professor who taught at two Ivy League schools and has the humility to admit his own failings vs. an anonymous poster on the Internet?</p>
<p>No contest.</p>
<p>I agree with the point Bogney makes in #402 about culling the herd. I thought it odd that neither of my older kids considered themselves good enough in math or science to pursue a career in engineering or the like. Yet, both of them were at the top of their high school classes, were accepted at Ivies, scored very high on the SAT, and succeeded in AP math and science courses. For example, my son took Calc BC and Physics BC as a junior, and the teacher bragged that his physics class was harder than any class at MIT, as former students came back to tell him just that. Ironically, a good group of students in the levels below my S and D did decided to enter engineering fields, despite supposedly not being as good based on outward measures like having been on the advanced math track in school, standardized test scores, etc.</p>
<p>This thread, combined with the pushing ahead in math thread, have got me thinking that the way our district and perhaps some elite colleges teach math and science to the brightest kids is different than the way it would be taught to the less stellar. For example, our district has this idea that honors math means the student can learn a lot of the material on his own, can pick up what is taught in class, and then–here’s the kicker–can be tested on material 2 steps above the level taught in class. This philosophy was explained to me twice–once for each kid–when I questioned how it was that my children could do all the homework correctly, could solve all the extra practice problems in the text and on online sites, and were certified as knowing the material in the book by an experienced tutor, yet were getting stumped by the exams. They were supposed to be able to go 2 levels beyond what they had been taught because that’s what smart kids should be able to do. D at college reports a similar problem in math there. She can do all the problem sets, can do the problems in the tutoring session, but the exams are killers. Meanwhile, less academically gifted friends are studying engineering and are acing math tests at our state flagship. Makes me wonder.</p>
<p>Here’s an interesting response to Deresiewizc from a (non-anonymous) Yale grad and current prof at another college: [Rachel</a> Toor Articles <meta name=“GENERATOR” content=“Dreamweaverl 3.0 Mac”> <meta name=“description”" content=“Rachel Toor Articles”> <META NAME=“keywords” CONTENT="Rachel Toor, writing, books, non-fiction, The Pig and I, Admissions Confidential, artic](<a href=“http://www.racheltoor.com/Godandjerk.html]Rachel”>Rachel Toor Articles <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Dreamweaverl 3.0 Mac"> <META NAME=description" CONTENT="Rachel Toor Articles"> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Rachel Toor, writing, books, non-fiction, The Pig and I, Admissions Confidential, articles, running, marathons, ultra marathons, ultrarunning, ride and tie, college counseling, Kaplan SAT, college applications, Chronicle of Higher Education, Running Times, Yale">)</p>
<p>PS Regarding the concept of rigor: I don’t understand the need to give tests where no one ever scores above a 70/100, and the mean is 50 or less. If this is an elite school or advanced class, full of very smart and very motivated students, why discourage them that way? Either teach them such that earning a 100 is possible, or adjust the test to match what you do teach and what they can be expected to learn. And if that test is made to accommodate some genius kid who shows up once in a blue moon who will score a 98 (the rationale given for this practice) then I’d guess I’d have to say the genius kid should have skipped this level.</p>
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<p>Amen to Bogney and GFG. I think it’s what passes for cool among geeks with no social skills. Really. When I think of the kind of person who likes to give tests to clearly very smart and hard-working kids that are deliberately structured to be so mind-blowingly difficult that the best score is a 30, I think of someone with tape on his glasses who really needs to get lai… well, this is a family board, so I’ll stop right there. Hee-hee, look how cool and tough I am in the classroom, since I’m not cool anywhere else. Or a sadist. There’s no need. There’s no need to treat smart, hard-working, motivated students that way.</p>
<p>These tests are sort of like the game at a fair where you try to ring the bell by hitting the target with a mallet. Only a few people can ring the bell. </p>
<p>It also occurs to me that this kind of testing might benefit people who work faster, but don’t necessarily have a better grasp of the material than somebody else. I guess that’s an element in all testing, but it seems exaggerated in this scenario.</p>
<p>Well, think of it this way: On any one exam, one can only sample the topics that have been covered in the course. A difficult exam, with an appropriate curve, can make it easier for students to get a good grade because they don’t have to know everything on the exam. It does require that students must get over their high school attitude that they should get 100 on everything. </p>
<p>And as a prof, I definitely do want to spread out the distribution at the top. I usually have one or two who stand out in each course. These are the students that I will invite to join my research group.</p>
<p>Here’s a question, though: if there is a student who can do all of those super-hard problems, while even very smart students are getting 50 out 100 or less, what is the likelihood that you are really testing what that top student learned in the class? Isn’t it more likely that you have a situation similar to a native speaker taking a foreign language class with a bunch of non-native speakers?</p>
<p>Tests can only tell you something about a student’s mastery of the material, not where, when, or how the student learned it. But I teach advanced courses, so it is extremely unlikely that a student would come in knowing everything beforehand.</p>
<p>But to explore the foreign language analogy a little further–if the foreign langauge course is taught and graded so that non-native speakers can learn something and get a good grade, who cares if there is a native speaker in the class who gets a higher score on the exams? And if employer/prof/whoever needs someone with good skills in the language to do something real as opposed to take courses, they want to know who has the best skills and probably don’t care how the skills were obtained.</p>
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<p>I’ve never heard that before - that it’s a “high school attitude.” I did well on (most) tests in college. My D just called me yesterday, excited that she had gotten a 97 on a given midterm. What on earth is the problem here? Why would it have to be arbitrarily pushed down? What’s wrong with having students master a given area? This is some weird ego-trip I can’t fully figure out. </p>
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<p>Can’t you tell who you would want to invite based on other factors taken in combination with their test performance – participation in class, novel solutions to issues, enthusiasm, how well they work with others, how much you sense that they would take opportunities and run? I don’t know why it would need to be done based off the test scores alone.</p>
<p>Well, we could also put it another way–why should exam scores be arbitrarily pushed up? There is nothing sacred about A= 94-100, etc. Creating a test where almost all of the students get close to the maximum possible numerical score reduces the amount of information provided by the test. Why in the world would you think that the professor’s ego has anything to do with it? </p>
<p>Sometimes a student will stand out for asking especially interesting questions in class, but many are shy or don’t feel comfortable enough with English to speak up. In my experience, exams are usually the best way I have of recognizing the top students. </p>
<p>In any case, especially at elite schools, I don’t see any reason for students not to know where they really stand. It can be very valuable for the top student to know that they really are the top student, and it can be valuable for the good, but not absolutely top students to know that, too. A 60 on say, a chemistry exam that is still an A is fine for med school and many other things, but if you want to be a chemistry prof, you should probably be one of those who are getting the 95s at least some of the time.</p>
<p>I generally give exams where 80-85 is an A. I don’t want the occasional stupid mistakes or lack of insight into a specific problem on a time-limited in-class exam to make the difference in students’ grades. Instead, I want the grades to reflect more closely the level of understanding that a student has developed. I think the exams where the average is a 30 are a little weird (in the US), but they do have a place. As I understand it, in the final undergraduate exams in mathematics in Cambridge, the Senior Wrangler has typically gained 10 times the marks of the lowest-scoring student who still qualifies for first-class honors (to say nothing of the 2.1s, 2.2s, and 3s).</p>
<p>In my experience, the kids do not care what the mean is, just what their letter grade will be. Certainly, I don’t think a low mean discourages people from pursuing a specific degree.</p>
<p>If a bunch of people get in the 90’s and the “A” is set at 90%-93%, that can be nervewracking too. It means you have no margin of error. </p>
<p>I think there is a place for a big spread in scores. Given the same lecture, some people will understand the core principles and be able to solve problems not explicitly presented in class, and some will not. I think a good exam would allow people to show what they do know. Having some challenge problems to allow the more talented and more interested students demonstrate their mastery can be a good thing. </p>
<p>Sometimes a prof will just make a class impossible. If you’re going to give hard exams, you had better make sure the lectures were done well. I’ve seen hard classes where there basically was no teaching, and the students were responsible for learning everything themselves by doing problem sets in groups. Other times, the lectures were done really well but were subtle and deep, and you had to really stay on the ball in order to be able to perform on tests.</p>