<p>Are there any easy courses at Columbia? I hear that it is the toughest of the Ivies. What courses are a bit easier?</p>
<p>A) It’s not the hardest of ivies. I don’t think there’s one ivy considered the “hardest”; you’re asking for the whitest snowflake there. It is the one with the most graduation requirements with the core curriculum and those are almost all humanities classes.</p>
<p>B) There are “easy” courses everywhere. Loose-grading teachers and creative writing workshops and the likes. No one can answer that question for you. It depends on your skills and department.</p>
<p>C) CULPA is a website where classes and professors are reviewed by other students. Use it as a reference.</p>
<p>D) If you’re heading to college looking for the “easy classes” before even applying than I don’t think you belong at a top tier school. Or college in the first place. No one is forcing you to be there so a minimum of effort is required; otherwise you’re wasting time, money and a spot.</p>
<p>E) Is this new background making anyone else more impatient?</p>
<p>Volleyball.</p>
<p>well, you can always change it at the bottom left corner of the page from “---- Fresh” back to the original “-- CC” colors</p>
<p>^thanks slowpoke, I needed that ;)</p>
<p>Columbia is definitely one of the tougher ivies, Columbia’s grades are not nearly as inflated as brown’s or H’s or Y’s. I’d say princeton is the toughest ivy, they focus on academics when admitting people and they have grade deflation. Below princeton I would put Columbia, Harvard, Cornell. Columbia because the courses are generally tough with several requirements, and many people taking 5-6 courses and the grades not so generous. Harvard because the students would be slightly more competitive, while the grading is easier. Cornell because the grade deflation is crazy. Below them I’d put Yale and Penn, Yale grades well and my friends there tell me the courses aren’t actually all that difficult to score in. Penn is a party hard but also work hard school and they again don’t have crazy grade inflation. I don’t know anything about Dartmouth difficulty wise. Brown is definitely the easiest (though still no cake walk), easy grading, take whatever you like, less competitive students, it’s no wonder they are happiest (ignorance is bliss :p)</p>
<p>There definitely are easy courses at Columbia, but beware! grade whores much like yourself will scout out these courses and rock the curve (profs at Columbia can never give more than a certain percentage As and A-s, unless the class is tiny). There isn’t too much arbitrage at Columbia, many people will say course X is really easy, but it was easy for them, because reading 200 pages a week is pleasure not work for them. You could despise the same course. And if you are close to bottom of any course you’re not getting more than a B, irrespective of grader.</p>
<p>Thanks for the input. I’m not looking to coast… but I do want to go to law school and I’ve been told that lots of smart kids at Columbia get more than a smattering of Cs over the course of their four years… in part because of needing to take more than four classes, the demands of the Core, etc. If there are some courses that are easier and can help with a GPA I’m hoping that they are at least interesting, rather than silly courses, since I would not want to take anything just for a good grade. That’s why I was wondering what some of them might be… so I can judge if taking them is a waste of time and intellect.</p>
<p>bump …</p>
<p>I think a lot of what is considered “easy” will vary depending on who you are. An applied math major would find partial differential equations a cakewalk; a literature major would likely not. Figure out what you find easy, and use CULPA as a resource to gauge what teacher you should get.</p>
<p>How much say do we have in choosing our Core classes’s teachers? We do that during orientation right? How does registering for classes work anyway?</p>
<p>^You don’t. Instructor info isn’t posted for Core classes until a couple of days before classes begin. You can still switch out at that point, but it’s harder because most of the other sections will be full.</p>
<p>if anything, the difficulty is finding the hard classes. most majors are setup for people of middling intelligence to be able to complete.</p>
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<p>know a fair number of them, can tell you this is positively not true. There such a thing as easier and tougher courses which is true for almost everyone.</p>
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<p>ivilleslacker is also an outlier on campus, don’t listen to a word he says about difficulty, he finds almost any courseload at columbia easily manageable. He does not represent the average student whatever anyone might say, nor is he speaking on behalf of the average student. It is easy to find hard classes (esp in seas or in the math/phy/chem dept) but it is easy to graduate (with an average gpa) from CC from a bunch of majors.</p>
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actually, few get even a smattering of C’s. C’s are uncommon. Not rare, but certainly uncommon. Probably fewer students get C+ or lower in most classes than get a straight-up A. It’s a rare student indeed who gets more than a few over their four years here.
I understand your point, but you picked a bad example. PDEs was the second-hardest class I took at columbia, and I’m no slouch. It’s manageable if you’ve really learned to think like a mathematician and you put the time into it, but it’s a big step up from any math course you’ve ever taken prior to that.</p>
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I think “middling intelligence” is going a bit far. You have to be smart, competent and organized to get a good grade in a Columbia course. Most Columbia students clear that bar easily; a fair fraction are brilliant and may have an easier time.</p>
<p>That said, I would divide the campus about 50-50 between students who have to work really hard and put in a lot of hours to stay afloat (get by on hard work), and the students who are so amazingly good at absorbing, analyzing and reasoning with new information that they can cruise through most classes without ever appearing to work hard (get by on brilliance). Maybe some peer schools have a different distribution, but in my experience it really is about 50-50 at Columbia.</p>
<p>I think C02 and I had a mini-debate one time about the various classifications of smarts we could put people into at Columbia, and the percentages thereof.</p>
<p><a href=“profs%20at%20Columbia%20can%20never%20give%20more%20than%20a%20certain%20percentage%20As%20and%20A-s,%20unless%20the%20class%20is%20tiny”>quote</a>.
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<p>Can anyone verify this? I’m calling BS.</p>
<p>to tack on to concoll. and partially because of my curiosity.</p>
<p>i went through the schools requirements. columbia is the only uni at which taking ~5 courses is necessary of all students to be on track to graduate (with cornell being hard to track down any info). number of courses is a general indicator and not an absolute indicator of rigor. if you are asked to learn more over the course of 4 years, it can generally be considered that your school is more demanding. it doesn’t speak to grade deflation/inflation, quality of instruction.</p>
<p>Harvard - 16 Full courses, 32 courses total, 8 half courses a year, 4 per semester.
Yale - requires the slightly more rigorous 36 courses total, 4.5 a year
Princeton - at its least, requires 31 courses total, but remember there is a mandatory thesis. so i could see it fluctuating from joke to non-joke.
Brown - at least 30 courses total, the lightest course requirement. Under 4 per semester.
Dartmouth - D-plan f’s everything up. and the single worse website known to man. Can’t figure it out beyond that they get to be off campus for a quarter of the time.
Penn - we will use CAS as the model. at the least you take 32 c.u. or 4 per semester, with some going as high as 36 c.u. (for the record, SEAS is ~40 c.u., Wharton is 37 c.u.)</p>
<p>And so Columbia…which is tricky because it can be done a million ways
124 pts for the college which works out to 4 required 4 pt classes, an average of 6 or so other 4pt classes (a guess here thinking about for lang), and then approximately 28 courses of 3 credits and you have 124 credits (+ 2 PE). This would be an average of 4.75 classes a semester, or 38 classes total. this is a pretty standard courseload. because columbia has a pt requirement and not a class requirement, it is hard to say that it is easier to finish at CU because to do so in fewer courses would require taking more intensive classes (4pt and above).</p>
<p>i don’t think this means columbia is better, worse, harder, softer. it just requires on average more courses to graduate. it is certainly going to push you, that’s one of my favorite parts of CU. def think you end up doing a lot, but the grade inflation is nice and noticeable.</p>
<p>*AP or other credit not included.</p>
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And thank Christ for those.</p>
<p>Yeah, um, the easiest courses are the ones you never had to take in order to get credit for.</p>
<p><a href=“profs%20at%20Columbia%20can%20never%20give%20more%20than%20a%20certain%20percentage%20As%20and%20A-s,%20unless%20the%20class%20is%20tiny”>quote</a>.
Can anyone verify this? I’m calling BS.
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<p>well don’t know if it is completely true, but departments definitely have requirements on the maximum percentages of As and A- (sometimes this constraint can be pretty high). But teachers in core classes, econ, seas, math, psych classes have said so. It’s probably that Columbia has a procedure to require departments to maintain a standard. But I don’t think we’re going to find any info to prove or disprove this, columbia wouldn’t publish any such thing, and reverse engineering what people got is also difficult.</p>
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<p>In other words, what you said is a complete crock of dog doo-doo. </p>
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<p>Yeah, it’s incredibly difficult to figure out what percentage of people get A-range grades given that CC students have such data printed on their transcripts.</p>
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<p>If every department maintains a constraint, then you are not going to find a class with an extremely high % of As and A-s, the profs in the best curiving classes I’ve been in all said that they have departmental constraints on the grading, the ones that didn’t mention anything, curved much worse.</p>
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<p>sorry, forgot about this, anyone have this sort of info?</p>
<p>how is gpa weighted? Is an A- the same as an A+?</p>