<p>We expect a good teacher is able to adjust her teaching relative to the ability of the students. This is what’s happening at some of the “hard” classes. These are not your normal honor level classes. Some of the students there demand more, and it is not just “once in a blue moon” to have super-bright kids in these classes. They are a few or more in each and every class. It would be nice if the school offers different classes tuned to different caliber of students, but many schools may not have the resources to do this. I don’t think Caltech hides the fact that they are difficult; in fact, I know many perspective students and even accepted students turned away from Caltech because they did not want to subject themselves to this type of rigor, and this is perfectly fine. You can look at some of the threads in the Caltech forum to see examples of this. (Yes, I’m aware of other reasons students avoid Caltech.) That’s why we often refer to such schools as self-selective. These students there want to be in the same classroom with the best. </p>
<p>Here is how I feel about the rigor at Caltech: it’s a bit too much. I think the students can get the same education results with reduced quantity of work while maintaining the same level of quality. Just my opinion, can’t offer any evidence or proof. S1 and all his friends really need some sleep while they are still developing both mentally and physically. Believe me, they all want more sleep.</p>
<p>“A professor who taught at two Ivy League schools and has the humility to admit his own failings”</p>
<p>It’s admirable to admit your own failings. It isn’t admirable to project them onto other people. Heaven knows I have my faults, but I have no problem talking to plumbers, even after spending formative years at Harvard. (The odds are pretty good, given what plumbers make, that we’d find common ground discussing our favorite Hawaiian islands.)</p>
<p>The skill I didn’t learn at HYPS is a sort of diplomacy. Those places reward people with thick skins who don’t hesitate to wade into the fray and tell a classmate the seven reasons why their position is wrong. I thought that was paradise, but it can become a bad habit in the outside world, especially beyond the Northeast. The people I have trouble talking to are those who, regardless of their social class, seem to me thin-skinned, and to whom I probably seem overly blunt and confrontational, if not abrasive. I’ve never been good at sugarcoating, and my education made me better at winning arguments, not avoiding them. Give me a straight-shooting janitor, and I have zero problems communicating. But at the end of the day, this is my problem, and I’d never presume to tar all my classmates with the same fault.</p>
<p>But this is the cart before the horse. The goal of the overall class isn’t to provide information about the class members to the professor - nor is it to score X points on a test or series of tests. The goal of the overall class is to teach students to master (to the best of their ability) the concepts / topics of the class. So if most students master these topics quite well - then isn’t that a good thing?</p>
<p>There’s a huge disconnect between this and the real world, IMO. When I train my junior employees to do certain things, or more broadly teach them about conceptual ways of thinking about such-and-such topics that occur in my work, my goal isn’t to divide them into the got-it’s and the not-got-it’s. My goal is to make all of them got-it’s, as much as is reasonably possible. My goal is that they all master, or at least develop strong proficiency. </p>
<p>I guess I’m looking for them to succeed, whereas the approach you’re talking about is looking to see who fails.</p>
<p>How is Caltech in terms of preparing you to hold conversations with your plumber?</p>
<p>It is true that elite schools–and this includes Yale, Caltech, Juilliard, and many others–do promote an idea that they have recruited the “best and the brightest,” and students as a result develop high expectations for post-college success. This can make those who achieve great success smug about it, and it can be very disillusioning for those who don’t achieve such great success. But I don’t really read Deresiewizc as complaining about that so much–indeed, he seems to be saying that Ivy students should be more intellectual than they are–that they are all pre-professional, gut-seeking slackers. Hey, if he’d been a slacker, maybe he could have talked to the plumber about beer pong! (I think his points lack consistency.) There’s a grain of truth in some of his complaints–I think maybe students are more careerist than they used to be–but that may partly be because academia doesn’t seem very practical these days for many students. I think students are, on the whole, more driven and hard-working now than 30 years ago, because you pretty much have to be in order to get admitted.</p>
<p>Speaking as a midwesterner, I don’t believe people here have a problem with someone challenging an argument, particularly in an academic setting. I think, especially on touchy issues, it helps to be somewhat detached rather than in-your-face and emotional. And there’s no point to prefacing a counter-argument by announcing, “No, that’s completely wrong…”</p>
<p>^One interesting aside: a friend of mine told me that the prof asked people in a social science class to raise their hand if they thought a certain behavior was rude. Then he asked them to raise their hand if they were from the East Coast. It was the same people. </p>
<p>I got the feeling like the East Coast was kind of carnivorous compared to the midwest. Walking across the street in Boston, you get the feeling like drivers would enjoy running you down…</p>
<p>In the overwhelming majority part of the “real-world”, you are exercising what you learned to do a well defined job that does not involve pushing the envelope of human knowledge or solving global problems. You are treading on a more or less defined path. Success depends on execution, not on breaking new grounds. These students, otoh, are trained to be future researchers and scientists that need to know how to think at the highest and deepest level in order to break new grounds and rigorously defend their findings. </p>
<p>Since neither the school nor the students can anticipate what new things they will uncover in the future, they need to be trained to think and get used to think deep in general and in multiple disciplines. Do most people need or want to be researchers and inventors? No.</p>
Let me be perfectly clear and disassociate myself slightly from this comment. I didn’t say she was rude, and don’t think she is rude. Generally, those who find her rude tend to be those who disagree with her point of view. I just think she’s just a bit more tenacious and direct than many. At any rate, I don’t want to get in trouble here. :)</p>
<p>"These students, otoh, are trained to be future researchers and scientists that need to know how to think at the highest and deepest level in order to break new grounds and rigorously defend their findings. "</p>
<p>Well said. The “real world” that scientists experience is a whole different kettle of fish than the one most people encounter. Different skills are needed to solve scientific problems that may arise at some point in the future.</p>
<p>No, I’m just want to be able to differentiate the students who have mastered the material well from those who have mastered the material exceptionally well. Why in the world would you say that is “looking to see who fails”?</p>
<p>In all but very small classes, students mastery of the material will fall on a distribution. Assessment tools (and that is all exams are) that reveal the distribution instead of topping out provide useful information to both the students and the profs. </p>
<p>Can you not imagine that if a class were going to be graded pass/fail, it might still be useful for the prof and students to have more information about the distribution of the pass grades, especially if everyone in the class passed. How would that be looking for failure? I want similar information about the A grades, which means harder exams–especially in cases where most of the students have learned the material reasonably well.</p>
<p>You are putting an awful lot of importance on a particular grading scale, which is commonly used in the US, but is actually completely arbitrary. Using another one doesn’t mean the prof is “on a wierd ego trip”, or “looking to see who fails” or anything else. You are just making stuff up.</p>
<p>I think what may be confusing some of us (including me) is that typically when we think of a curve, we’re imagining that only a certain number of people can get an A, and that there will be more or less set numbers at other grade levels as well. But maybe that’s not what these super-hard tests do. So if, for example, 60-100 is an A, 50-60 is a B, and so on, I guess it doesn’t matter to me that much. I can’t help feeling that part of the purpose is to throw some fear into the kids who get 60, but maybe it really is about smoking out that kid who can get 100. What I don’t like is giving a lower grade to a kid who has mastered the material just because there happens to be a super-brain in the class this semester. If that’s not what’s happening, OK by me.</p>
<p>Most of us would agree that a broad distribution of grades is desirable if that truly means that more accurate information can be gleaned about the students’ capabilities. So the scenario Hunt proposes works for me, but only if there really are kids out there who can get a 95-100. If it hasn’t happened yet in 15 years, then the test needs tweaking IMO.</p>
<p>However, the test should also be accurate on the bottom end as well. If the professor is allowing for the genius who might come along some year and score a hundred, then the exam should also be revelatory to the unqualified or terribly unprepared student. For that, there’d have to be some easier questions on there too. On a math midterm D took freshman year, there was a kid who got a 6. Did that really mean he did no work and learned next to nothing? It’s possible, I suppose, but hard to imagine at a school with a 7% admissions rate. Presumably if he just attended class he’d have learned enough to fail with at least a 15 or 20!</p>
<p>In my “real world,” I’m training the people who work for me to push the envelope to solve the particular problems that we are faced with, not just tread on a defined path, and the success we have in our particular area of expertise is predicated on breaking new ground, not just on flawless execution. And I have to “rigorously defend my findings,” too. (In fact, I’m procrastinating on doing so for a particular client, LOL.) I certainly don’t think that the idea of training people how to think at the highest and deepest level has value only in research and science; do you? I know you didn’t mean this to come across this way, but it came across as saying that researchers and scientists needed to have these skills, but the rest of the world were just plodding executors along well-trod paths, which is inadvertently insulting IMO.</p>
<p>I used to work for a midwestern-based company that subsequently took over an east coast competitor. It was fun to watch the culture clash. In the midwest, people would tiptoe around telling their boss that their project (etc) wasn’t working - which led to several “will anybody tell the emperor about his new clothes” situations that weren’t good for the business. On the east coast, otoh, people would get into very heated arguments about a particular project and what should be done … and then, oh, it’s noon, wanna head to lunch together? The midwesterners just couldn’t get it, and the east coasters said, “What’s the problem? I like the guy, even though I don’t think we should launch his new product the way he wants.”</p>
<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.”</p>
<p>My students at Chicago used to “flunk out” because they were bored, or mentally ill. My students at the Community College (often equally bright, though rarely as well-prepared) used to “flunk out” because they ran out of money, or their brother got murdered.</p>