<p>huh? I was being serious. Anyhow, I agree with l3yranger except for the part about McGill being easy. I have never, ever heard anybody say that McGill is easy.</p>
<p>I actually found McGill's admission requirements, which are based on the European model, quite refreshing. Either you can meet the requirements or you cannot; no admission because of legacy, donations, hooks, URM status, polished but paid-for essays or any other trickery. McGill has limitations because of the sheer numbers of students it admits, it can't interview all those applicants and each one cannot be of Ivy League caliber. But many are.</p>
<p>
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and each one cannot be of Ivy League caliber. But many are.
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Many of McGill's applicants are ivy league caliber? Which ivy league school do you contend is comparable to McGill in strength of applicants?</p>
<p>I think McGill's applicants are more like University of Michigan or University of Virginia caliber.</p>
<p>Atomicfusion: false dichotomy. Being accepted at McGill doesn't exclude one from being Ivy League caliber. And to prove BOYSOFWINTER's statement, many of my classmates went on to grad school in Ivy League schools (make that mostly Harvard, because no one cares about Cornell or Dartmouth, in fact a number of them turned down Harvard despite being accepted).</p>
<p>Can you give a list of all the graduate schools attended? I highly doubt that many went to Harvard and just didn't care about other schools. </p>
<p>You provided absolutely no evidence for anything.</p>
<p>Im definitely gonna disagree with you atomic fusion.</p>
<p>Do you even know McGills rep with grade deflation?
Cause you can figure many students do go off to top grad schools if they get over a 3.2ish and actually want to go to good grad schools.</p>
<p>People have posted stats on here before about grad school placement stuff.</p>
<p>As for percentages, it is definitely not as high as ivy league schools, but thats because a decent amount of HYPS students go on to grad school</p>
<p>University anywhere is what you make of it. Case in point: one of our best, smartest fellows at one of the most prestigous medical fellowships in the US (in its field) went to U Western Ont, followed by a state NY med school, residency in an OK residency (and chief resident)- and shone. And even compared to those who graduated from fancy, Ivy undergrad and med schools- he shines. He has no sense of entitlement either. Cream rises to the top!</p>
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Can you give a list of all the graduate schools attended? I highly doubt that many went to Harvard and just didn't care about other schools.</p>
<p>You provided absolutely no evidence for anything.
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</p>
<p>Well, aside from taking my word for it because I'm not going to give names, I'll repeat the list of grad schools my classmates attended that I can recall from memory.Of those who went to Ivy League, I can only recall Harvard (at least 3 got in and turned it down in favor of University of Chicago or Johns Hopkins) and Yale (possibly Princeton as well, can't be sure). But others went to Stanford, MIT and Berkeley, etc. I'll skip the list of "lesser" schools, but no one I know went to Cornell or Dartmouth, for whatever reasons (if you've been to Montreal and enjoyed it, Boston beats Ithaca and Hanover, and when it comes to grad school, who you work with becomes more important than school name...)</p>
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Im definitely gonna disagree with you atomic fusion.</p>
<p>Do you even know McGills rep with grade deflation?
Cause you can figure many students do go off to top grad schools if they get over a 3.2ish and actually want to go to good grad schools.</p>
<p>People have posted stats on here before about grad school placement stuff.</p>
<p>As for percentages, it is definitely not as high as ivy league schools, but thats because a decent amount of HYPS students go on to grad school
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</p>
<p>First off, what does grade deflation have to do with student quality? Boysofwinter said that many McGill applicants are ivy league quality. This is what I was going with.</p>
<p>Then Blobof made an amazingly compelling argument in which he somehow equated some prestigious grad school placement (which there is destined to be at ANY massive school) with applicant quality. I don't see how anyone proved that McGill applicants are ivy league quality by saying that some people went to ivy league graduate schools. </p>
<p>Isn't the average SAT score at McGill for American students like 1300? Isn't the overall acceptance rate to McGill around 50%? You honestly think the applicants are the same as people applying to places like Harvard? The ivy league schools have a low teen percentage of acceptances usually. Even though acceptance rate isn't everything there is obviously a discrepancy between 11% and 50%, 1300 and 1500.</p>
<p>The average McGill undergraduate applicant is not anywhere near the average Harvard applicant. I would put them on the same level as applicants to places like Tufts, Case, Notre Dame, etc.</p>
<p>And I highly doubt you could call what McGill has "deflation." Maybe "lack of inflation" as compared to the ivy league that McGill students like to imagine they are in. Schools like Chicago and Caltech have grade deflation.</p>
<p>Canadians also get an edge when applying to places like Harvard compared to American students. You guys do know this, right? That might be a good explanation for why there are lots of Harvard acceptances.</p>
<p>After perusing some of the comments on here: <a href="http://overheardatmcgill.com/%5B/url%5D">http://overheardatmcgill.com/</a>
I can't really see some of these people as "ivy league caliber"</p>
<p>Heck, there are smart people in the community colleges and spoiled underqualifying legacy kids at Harvard. But I thought we aren't talking about few individuals who shone in a drowning environment, but McGill University. </p>
<p>Yes it is very easy to make up fancy essays and seemingly stellar extracurricular activities, but grades are also not challenging to fake. A lot of high school work is just plain mindless drills that any monkey can master with enough practice (only the magnitute of practice vary among different people). Teachers even give credit for superficial efforts such as "prettiest poster". Even the SAT scores can be raised just be studying. Mechanical memorization does not reflect intelligence.</p>
<p>The McGill student pool vary a lot, from award winning geniuses to average students. There are students who can finish undergrad and masters in 3 years, but people who fail a first year introductory linear algebra course multiple times. Professors just stopped having high expectations of undergrads, making classes simpler and simpler. Oh, another example, in PSYC 311, last Thursday's lecture, the professor had to stop in the middle of lecture to answer a student's question regarding the difference between neurons and axons. </p>
<p>In most "good schools", the variation should be smaller because everyone has been through a highly selective admission process.</p>
<p>Oh regarding Harvard admission rates for Canadians. There is a noticeable difference between the ratio of admitted/applied international students from Canada compared to a country like China. You all know the obvious reason why.</p>
<p>atomicfusion: BOYSOFWINTER's original claim was that many McGill applicants are Ivy League quality. Not all of them, not even most of them. Many, as in "a number greater than one". That statement is true. Not to mention that Ivy League quality applicants accepted at McGill may choose to go elsewhere (like an Ivy League school if they bothered to applied...), we just have no data on that... I provided evidence for the stronger statement that many McGill students are also Ivy League quality. That doesn't mean most of them are, especially given any large population of student. As for the "average" applicant, in both case it's a rejectee, so I'm not entirely sure why you'd want to compare those...</p>
<p>And, if you look at the stats provided on the McGill webpage (someone linked to it in one of the threads somewhere), McGill's acceptance rate is is much lower than 50% (I can't recall the exact number, but was surprised as I didn't expect it to be as low as it is). </p>
<p>/not bothering to mention that sampling from "overheard at McGill" ain't really random...</p>
<p>Wait, so you're saying that most McGill students are not Ivy League caliber afterall?</p>
<p>Honestly, Canadian college admissions is nowhere near as intense as US college admissions. So the acceptance rates are not comparable in any way. </p>
<p>Overhead at McGill is pretty random, considering people from all faculties contribute to the collection of quotes. </p>
<p>Guy: So you have Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars as the terrestrial planets.
Girl 1 (who just claimed she’ll ace the exam): Wait, Mars isn’t a planet, it’s a moon!
Guy: (Frozen with shock) Umm.. No, you’re wrong.
Girl 2: (with certainty to girl 1) No, Mercury is the moon.
Guy: (walks away in disgust)</p>
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Wait, so you're saying that most McGill students are not Ivy League caliber afterall?
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</p>
<p>I never claimed that most McGill students were Ivy League caliber. Given that a B average in cegep was enough back in my day to get in, I would certainly not make such a claim. Consider that McGill has 4 times as many undergrad as Harvard, if both take the top potential students amongst their applicants, then obviously Harvard weeds out a lot more people at that level (for one thing, they can afford it, McGill, on the other hand, needs the tuition and government money that comes per student enrolled; if keeping only its top 25% students were financially sound, then the entire student body of McGill would be closer to Ivy caliber than it is now, and you'd be happier with the resulting smaller classes). </p>
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Overhead at McGill is pretty random, considering people from all faculties contribute to the collection of quotes.
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</p>
<p>It's not a representative sample of the population, merely, at most, a random sample of population of the stupid quotes (you haven't done any statistics yet have you?). </p>
<p>Look, you took a program with huge classes, and, from my own, not necessarily representative, experience, there's two types of people who ask questions in class: really smart ones or really stupid ones. In intro classes, chances are it's the latter who'll ask questions because the smarter students will know or understand the material already. It's unfortunate because it often slows things down, while having a really smart student ask a (smart, advanced) question usually (again, from my own, non-representative experience) intimidates the rest of the class into not asking anything at all.
I was in math and jumped right into advanced calculus and "basic" algebra, so I saw really smart kids asking questions. It made me feel like I was stupid and the rest of the class was really smart, but it turns out that wasn't quite the case, and the number of students in each class dropped dramatically after the midterms (in basic algebra much more than in "advanced" calculus). But there were still easily at least a dozen incredibly talented students. My brother went into philosophy and got to notice the dumb students in his large intro classes. So, instead of taking the same path as most his classmates, he took tough courses with smaller enrollment and intimidating profs (the kind that'll say "you need to speak ancient Greek to enroll"), because he knew these would be challenge and he'd be surrounded by the smartest among his peers, and would get in touch with the more active and renown profs (who are less likely to teach big intro courses...). Hopefully, after your first semester, you'll get to take such classes, so you might gain a better opinion of your peers (and the faculty).</p>
<p>representation of stupid quotes...if you notice, most quotes there represent the lack of basic common sense. Those quotes should NOT be coming from students from a school with good quality and high selectivity. </p>
<p>Again, my point is that the distribution of abilities among McGill students is not anywhere near normal (I took MATH 203 3 years ago). Any logically selective school would seek a well rounded student body with people who are all equally qualified, even if there would be variations, those should be smaller than McGill students' variation in academic strength. If you pick a school, say MIT, no one would ask if Mars is a moon or a planet, or if godmother is called Mosesmother for jewish people, not even the dumbest kid at MIT.</p>
<p>First, smart people can lack common sense, and say really stupid things.
I'm sure if someone bothered to make an "overheard at MIT" you'd get tons of funny quotes too (I should ask my friends who went there). But at this point, I really think you should have gone elsewhere and realized that even the best schools don't match your idealized notion of what university should be like.
Personally, I've been disappointed in Harvard's students ever since I saw the video of Colbert's visit...</p>
<p>blobof, can you link to the colbert visit?</p>
<p>Whether or not Mercury is a moon isn't really some mistake that even normal people would make. It's not a trick question or a bizarre trivia but basic astronomical fact. Everyone probably have learned it in elementary school and then again in junior high science class. "overheard at MIT" or "overheard at (insert any top 10 US university/LAC)" wouldn't have quotes about that, since most students there have been severely selected based on intelligence, integrity and individuality.</p>
<p>I never said the faculty is anything less than excellent, I just said that professors and advisers just assume every student is stupid enough to intimidate them when they simply ask how they can excel. Yes there are smart people at mcgill, I never denied that. However, the majority is rather average. Like someone else said, McGill is equilavent to a US state school. During high school I was active and outgoing. But here I'm having the hardest time finding people with whom I can share a decent conversation.</p>
<p>drmambo assumed that I like to assume. So lets say:
a biology major at McGill, 4th year anticipating graduation, cumulative GPA 3.0
a biology major at Caltech, 4th year anticipating graduation, cumulative GPA 3.0</p>
<p>now which 3.0 is more impressive?</p>
<p>And yes, many students from ivy league undergrad or top10 lac or even a mediocre state school go on to superb grad schools. Heck, I've even read an article about a kid from community college making his way to Yale grad. That statistic doesn't say much about the differences between these schools, does it?</p>
<p>Caltech, obviously. In the scheme of things, who cares...you can go to grad school at caltech if you really want. Save up some money and do it right. But Caltech is like the hardest school on earth-of course a large Canadian school is going to be as good. The Canadian system is based around egalitarianism not elitism. </p>
<p>Also, wait till you get your grades.</p>