<p>how come i always see the word prelim in the cornell thread but not anywhere else?</p>
<p>prelim = preliminary exam</p>
<p>i felt the same about the phrase “problem set” when i came to cornell…we always just called everything homework back home…</p>
<p>Everywhere else they call them “midterms”. We don’t because there’s usually more than one, so it can’t be at the middle of the term. </p>
<p>Other schools are like this too, MIT calls them quizzes or exams since they have probably 3 per class.</p>
<p>oh thanks for clarifying that up
and are the tests fair (it tests you only on stuff you learned in class)?
and ive heard the means of some tests were very low. is it cuz of time or hard material</p>
<p>“Prelim” is just another term that makes Cornell special. :)</p>
<p>…Tests are usually fair, as they are in most places as well.</p>
<p>Low mean just means a bunch of premeds.</p>
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<p>They are fair, as in you should be able to figure everything out based on what you’ve learned in class or whatever is covered in the textbook/any other material used for the class. You should still expect to see at least one question every exam that makes you apply what you’ve learned in a new way; otherwise it wouldn’t be fair for the people who really know what they’re doing. And exam scores usually do end up fitting the normal distribution pretty well.</p>
<p>MIT calls problem sets “psets”</p>
<p>I surely hope that post was in jest. Pset is obscenely common.</p>
<p>Cornellians say pset.</p>
<p>Tests are 100% fair. Everyone has access to the exact same resources as you do. If the mean is low enough, it’ll be curved anyways. Therefore, there’s no way to make the test unfair unless one person is given a significant advantage over the others.</p>
<p>What I enjoyed about the exams at Cornell was that, for the most part, they forced you to critically think your way through a problem. At my old college (and I school were I recently did some post-bacc work), my exams were multiple choice and basically tested how well you could memorize the professor’s notes and spit back the information.</p>
<p>
I’ve had classes at Penn that have “three midterms” and none are at the exact middle of the semester. It’s just terminology. I guess you develop your own language when you’re isolated from the rest of the world :)</p>
<p>Wow…my grammar sucked on that last post. I guess that happens when you have your head in an anatomy book all day :)</p>
<p>I’m surprised people here are so willing to generalize about Cornell’s prelims’ fairness. Some are fair, others aren’t. It varies significantly by professor, and even by department. In my limited experience, however, I would say that the majority of exams are fair.</p>
<p>Yeah at my old College, we dont call it prelims, we call it Midterms or exams. Besides, Prelims sounds so much cooler and more awesome :).</p>