<p>how cut-throat is this university?</p>
<p>I go to JHU and I don't find it cutthroat. My friends and I always study together for tests. Everyone is in the same boat and out to help each other succeed.</p>
<p>This is a difficult question to ask. The common response that current students will say is that the school isn't cut-throat at all and that students work together all the time, yada yada yada. I too supported this claim for quite sometime but am now beginning to question it. For one, most (if not all ) students who claim that it is not cut-throat have nothing to set as a reference point because Hopkins is the only thing that they have ever experienced and they probably want to believe positive things about the school. I realize this is impossible, but I would love to place all of the students into another school, say your local state school, to see if their perception changes. I wouldn't be shocked at all if it did.</p>
<p>I'd like to give an example as to why I think this. In one of my classes we had a weekly problem that we would get and the Prof repeatedly told us do not spend more than 3 hours on it. Anything more than that is a waste of time and not needed. After we turned the first one in he asked the class how long we spent on it and not a single student said they spent under 3 hours. The average student actually spent just over 6 working on it. The reason? When polled the students said that it was because they thought other students were spending more time on it and wanted to do well. The average time spent on the problems decreased to about 5 hours throughout the course of the semester, which really isn't that much better. The studnets in the deparment always work together and help each other out, which supports peoples claims that the school is not cut-throat, yet things like that still happen. I constantly see students, or groups of students, trying to out do each other in their classes, while still working together and helping one another at times. So I guess Hopkins being cut-throat really depends on how you view cut-throat, in my eyes it is much more cut-throat than your average school. But I love it.</p>
<p>wow thanks</p>
<p>Competitive is not cut-throat. Working hard for your grades and making sure that you are the best student is competitive. Making sure that you're the best student by undermining the efforts of others is cut-throat, we call that unfair competition. Students at Hopkins are very motivated and very competitive. On occasion some students will turn to unfair competition to get an edge. The university makes a point of the fact that they are very much against this and that they will suspend and expel and bring up people in front of the ethics board for such behavior, especially cheating.
I'm going to start my second year at JHU and so far I have taken Physics, Calc, and Chemistry -- these are all "premed" heavy courses. I have yet to see any form of cut-throat behavior but I have seen a lot of intelligent students go above and beyond "average" to do extremely well on their exams and demonstrate their knowledge.
Does this make JHU cut-throat? No.</p>
<p>Does it make it a hard school? Yeah. But so is MIT, CalTech, and a whole slew of other schools where grades are based on actual demonstration of knowledge relative to the remainder of the class. (We call this the curve.)</p>
<p>To me, there is no difference between an extremely competitive environment and a cut-throat environment. If you define cut-throat as people trying to undermine one another through cheating, etc. then I don't think you could call a single school in the country cut-throat. To me, it all comes down to how hard you have to work as to how "cut-throat" a school is.</p>
<p>So, how hard do you have to work if you don't plan on going to med/law school? Does being satisfied with getting B's in pretty much all your classes mean you can ease up just a little or that you can ease up a lot, as compared to the pre-meds and pre-law students?</p>
<p>Depends on your major. </p>
<p>A quote from a friend who was a political science major:</p>
<p>"You can sit around with your thumb up your butt all semester and easily get B's, but you really have to work your tail off to get an A in my classes"</p>
<p>Thanks for the info. That's what I was hoping to hear.</p>
<p>I applaud those of you commenting on this thread. I must say in my close to one year on College Confidential, this is one of the only threads about a "Hopkins myth" that led to a coherent and informative discussion. Rather than dispensing hyperbole, absurd opinions, or just citing statements from those awful guide books you all get to, in what "spe07" and "scrop" wrote, the heart of the discussion about "cut-throat" and "competitive. This is not just for Hopkins, it relates to a lot of other schools that get lumped into the same negative connotation of being an academically challenging school.</p>
<p>Traditionally, the Admissions answer to is Hopkins cut-throat is absolutely no. But, it all comes down to how you want to define the terms cut-throat, competitive, challenging, etc - these words can be defined differently and the connotations they bring up in each individuals mind is also something to consider. One persons cut-throat is another persons competitive. </p>
<p>There is clear disagreement about the definition of cut-throat when you read spe07s comments and when you read scrops response. However, I think you will see that there is agreement to the fact that yes Hopkins is academically challenging, but that does not lead to all the traditional negative connotations that must people assume. Students work together a lot here, and most of the competition you will find is internal. It all comes down to what kind of an individual you want to be. </p>
<p>I have my opinions about the academic climate/culture here at Hopkins but in the end my thoughts really dont matter. Just as in the end the comments of spe07, or scorp, or any other Hopkins student, or alum dont matter if ultimately comes down to what you think. So come visit, sit in on a class, hear all sides to the discussion and then in the end formulate your own opinions and your own definition.</p>
<p>Hopkins is an outstanding place. It was my experience that students here were MORE collaborative than at other schools. Perhaps this is because of the small size of the undergraduate body (~4,800) where students get to know eachother and hang out together. Students are then more comfortable going to eachother for answers because most times they are friends. :)</p>
<p>As a current student, I can also vouch that the cut-throat nature of Hopkins is nothing other than a rumor. It's very common to find groups of students working together through collaboration. Students here are overall very motivated and competitive, but that does not make them cut-throat. As any student attending a top university, they all know they must work hard to stay on top of things.</p>