<p>I have just been accepted EA, and I am extremely scared of attending. I am not the smartest kid in my school, but I am pretty smart, and I plan on either double majoring in economics and management, or econ and math, or single majoring in chemical engineering. If I choose any of these options, can you give me a rough estimate of how much time I would have to put into work each week? Can you tell me the grade distribution (Curved? Everybody gets B's?)? </p>
<p>At the end of the day I am pretty smart and willing to work, but I feel like I am not MIT material and I don't want to go to a school and get destroyed by everyone else grades-wise while putting in 110%.</p>
<p>And when you think it’s hard, it’s harder than that.</p>
<p>If you come here, you shouldn’t expect to be the smartest kid anymore. Every single one of us was pretty brilliant in some way in high school, so if you’re lucky, you’ll be mid-pack. That’s… an emotional load to handle if you’re not used to it, and many MIT students find themselves redefining themselves based on something more than intelligence. (Though stepping out into the real world… you’ll feel smart again :D)</p>
<p>That said, do not doubt your abilities to do well here. You got in. Admissions can take several classes over out of their extremely competent pool of applicants and you got in. They know what they’re doing, and you have the capability to be here.</p>
<p>That said, being capable of something does not mean you should do it. You’ll have to figure out what sort of college experience you want. (If you haven’t read the Admissions blogs, you really should.) 'cause I can tell you that MIT is exhilarating and fascinating - but yeah, it will be very hard.</p>
<p>So, moral of the story: you can definitely do it. But it’s up to you to decide if MIT is the type of place you want to be at (so feel free to ask more questions!).</p>
<p>Piper covered the big stuff, so I’ll just fill in around the edges.</p>
<p>
Nobody can really tell you how much time you will put into school. In theory, most classes are 12 units, and most people take four classes per term, and one unit is supposed to equal one hour of work per week. So the average courseload is supposed to require 48 hours of class/homework/lab per week. For some classes, that’s a good estimate, for some it’s too high, and for some it’s too low. But on average, it’s probably about right. </p>
<p>
Each class has its own methods of grading. There’s a set of MIT-wide rules governing classes and grading, and one rule is (roughly) that classes can’t be curved to hurt people, only to help. So professors won’t set the highest grade achieved as 100% (which is what most people mean when they say “curve”), they’ll generally set the class average as a B. Even if the class average is very low. </p>
<p>The only MIT-wide statistics I’ve ever seen, which are several years old, indicates that the average GPA among seniors is a 4.2(/5.0), slightly higher than a B average. Some majors give higher grades than others; conventional wisdom would be that management would be on the higher end of that scale and chem E would be on the lower end. </p>
<p>But the real difficulty of MIT, as Piper is implying, is bigger than grades. You will most likely not be destroyed by everyone else grades-wise. But you will probably work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life.</p>
<p>^And so, in terms of time spent working, how “hard” is it? I know there are bound to be people there who work their butts off pretty much 24/7. And I know there are bound to be people there who can somehow pull off the kind of grades they want for themselves while still managing ample free time. But, if it’s possible to say, how much free time does the AVERAGE MIT student have during the average week? Are we talking some free time almost every day or night? Or are we talking only on weekends? Or is it even worse than that? (Free time = doing whatever it is you want to do = listening to music, watching movies, playing pickup basketball, exercising, just hanging out … that sort of thing … total and complete downtime.)</p>
<p>This is from a blog entry I wrote my senior year:
</p>
<p>This is a hard question to answer for several reasons, not least because “free time” and “social time” and “homework time” often meld into each other at MIT. I mean, the times when I was sitting in the entry lounge with my friends with a textbook and problem set on my lap watching TV, is that free time? Or homework time? What about the 12-15 hours a week I chose to spend at my UROP, or the 6-8 hours a week I spent at cheerleading practice?</p>
<p>Each weekday, most students will have 4-6 hours of class. They will probably do a few (say, 3-5?) hours of psetting, writing papers, or studying. There’s certainly time to sit and stare at the wall for many hours per day, but most people choose to fill those hours by UROPing, or by having a campus job, or by participating in an extracurricular, or all of the above.</p>
<p>A B/B+ would be about the average grade at many of the top universities these days. As for the latter (“you will work harder than ever before”), it would be true as long as you end up attending a similarly selective school as MIT, so think of it this way: you’ll be working way harder at MIT than you ever had in high school, but only slightly harder than if you’re attending one of your other options, if that’s any more comforting…</p>
<p>v sorry I sort of posted before yours… now you have to make that two ^s.</p>
<p>This is not true at MIT, which is known for grade deflation. My experience with science classes (and I took quite a bit of advanced classes) is that they are curved aruond a B/B-. Electrical engineering/computer science classes are curved around B-/C+, meaning half the class got C’s or below. I graduated before Mollie, so I don’t know if university-wide rules were instituted after I graduated and that’s the reason for the disparity in our posts. However, I do remember that the pure sciences seemed to be curved easier than the core classes in the pure sciences (I took a ton in chemistry and physics). Most humanities classes are curved easier, and the grade spread tends to be split between A’s and B’s; for most people, I think it helps there overall GPA a bit. </p>
<p>ChemE is one of those courses that can chew people up and spit people out. Econ and applied math are not that taxing, especially if you are fairly adept mathematically (maybe like AIME qualifier level.) </p>
<p>Oh, and don’t plan on double majoring until you have significant coursework under your belt and you’re sure you can handle it.</p>
<p>I don’t know what kind of high school you went to. If your school sends people to places like MIT regularly, you don’t necessarily need to be the smartest person in your high school, obviously, to do well at MIT. And humility can be a good thing–you’ll be focused from the beginning.</p>
<p>If you WANT to go, and it sounds like you do, you should go ahead and attend MIT. What is the worst that could happen? The first term is pass/no record. It’s not hard to pass first semester classes because a lot of the people who know everything already aren’t really studying. The second term you can wait to drop a class until a few weeks before the final. If you aren’t up to MIT level you can always transfer. There are enough people that don’t like it for other reasons that other peer schools won’t think twice about it. </p>
<p>Frankly, I think most any admit can survive the first year and do a major in management, which had a reputation for being easy. I don’t know if that’s what you would want though.</p>
<p>So, you are actually asking two different questions- how hard is it, and how much free time will I have?</p>
<p>You can have lots of free time if you like, but if you got into MIT you’re probably not the kind of person who doesn’t like free time. =) We tend to fill our free time with anything and everything. So yeah, people spend tons of time on homework, but they could definitely have time to veg out and watch TV after that. They just tend NOT to, and join sports, theater, student government, etc instead.</p>
<p>At the same time, it will be hard in the sense that you will NOT be able to do your homework alone. You will need to collaborate with your classmates to figure out the solutions to the problems. You will take tests that challenge your ability to problem-solve beyond how far that ability has already been stretched by the homeworks, and then get a 35%. Then you’ll find out the class average was a 30%, and you’ll think you’re a genius. You will learn to recalibrate what “hard” means.</p>
<p>All that said, you will not “get killed” by everyone else. At MIT there is very much a sense of “we are all in this together.” Yeah, it’s hard, but it’s hard for everyone. It’s not like you are going to be the only person struggling as everyone else is breezing through!</p>
<p>In general, what Piper said is very true. If you got in, you can do it. That doesn’t mean you should. MIT is a very intense experience, on both the good and bad sides. You have to decide if that’s what you want.</p>
<p>I’m seconding a lot that has already been said:</p>
<ol>
<li> If you are admitted, then MIT thinks you can do the work.</li>
<li> You will not be the smartest kid in your class and that can be a real blow to your ego (it was for me)</li>
<li> I played varsity sports and did the best, gradewise, when I was playing. I had to budget my time when playing. When I did take some time off, I’d waste my free time and end up in a tighter time crunch (because I thought I had so much free time).</li>
<li> Very few (no one?) gets thru MIT by themselves. You need to form/join study groups. You actually can learn more in a group than by yourself (not like high school) and some professors encourage study groups quite a bit.</li>
<li> I found that most weekday evenings, after practice, were spent studying. I would try and have some fun (PE classes can be fun, etc.) between classes during the day.</li>
<li> Most weekends I would study pretty much all one day and do something besides study the other. That wasn’t true towards the end of the semester.</li>
</ol>
<p>Since you applied and were admitted, I assume that you wanted to go. So, just go for it.</p>
No, no institute-wide rules about where to locate the average. I’ll try to find the wording for the specific faculty rule to which I’m vaguely referring (“curves must be helpful, not harmful”). </p>
<p>I mostly took biology and brain and cog sci upper-level electives, though I did take several chem classes, and all were B-centered (and I know this because I was always right smack in the middle of the bell curve! :)). I don’t know how much that reflects a departmental bias and how much it reflects any sort of institute-wide grading change – and of course, I’m as much older than the current students as you are older than me!</p>
<p>But I don’t know that I would refer to MIT as grade-deflated so much as grade-not-inflated. (I TAed an undergrad class at Harvard this semester. The other TA and I wrote the final exam and were quite happy about it; the professor changed many question segments to extra credit, and the class average was something like a 97%. Made me want to barf.)</p>
<p>@Mollie and college alum, I think it might depend on what one means by deflation. I am pretty sure if EECS were centered at a 2.7 GPA in a 4.0 scale, then it is probably extremely hard to do well in certain classes, even for someone who puts in the work and has a pretty good understanding. Given it is MIT, I bet they could set the GPA avg to be higher without seeming lax or anything. </p>
<p>I call it somewhat deflated because outside MIT, a C+ or B- for that caliber work is likely scary. But in the purest sense, one could always say there is no deflation, just high standards. I think it depends how one views the “I would like everyone to get A’s, but that is not realistic so I gave half of them C’s and D’s since they earned exactly that” type thing.</p>
<p>One thing that helps is that a class that’s B-minus-centered would still give out an average grade of 3.0(/4.0) at the end of the semester – plus/minus modifiers are internal-only at MIT, so B+=B=B-=3.0. So even if a class is B-minus-centered, it’s still B-centered, if that makes any sense.</p>
<p>Management and econ are known for being significantly easier than chem e at MIT, but how would those majors compare to other colleges? From what I’ve heard, is seems that MIT’s grade deflation mostly applies to hardcore engineering majors.</p>
<p>For example, is econ at MIT easier than, or the same as, econ at, say U Penn Wharton (known for grade deflation)? How would management science at MIT compare to Princeton’s ORFE?</p>