<p>what are the best and worst things about carolina?</p>
<ol>
<li>Decent academics, especially in the higher-division courses.</li>
<li>Cheap.</li>
<li>Nice ‘college town’ experience.</li>
<li>Nice architecture.</li>
<li>Friendly.</li>
<li><p>Sports rivalry.</p></li>
<li><p>Smug/complacent/self-satisfied… not as good as it thinks it is.</p></li>
<li><p>College town (same old bars) is a bit boring after a few years.</p></li>
<li><p>Geographically isolated (3 hours to beach, 4 hours to mountains, 4 hours to major city).</p></li>
<li><p>Homogeneous student population.</p></li>
<li><p>Tedious obsession with Duke, often expressed in terms of ethnicity and social class.</p></li>
<li><p>Bad food on campus.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>^^^regarding point number one, I partially agree. I think UNC is happy being a big fish in a medium sized state–without a doubt, UNC is king of the hill in North Carolina. Because of that, I don’t see the university making a concerted effort to reach further, go harder: conservative endowment growth strategy, lack of ethnic/geographic diversity, unwilling to compromise big sports for academic integrity and, there seems to be no concerted effort to, make the university “better”–Holden Thorp’s Innovate@Carolina is a modest attempt at this.</p>
<p>With that being said, there are a number of things I do like about UNC:</p>
<p>Quality of teaching–most of the professor’s I’ve had are leaders in their respective fields. In fact, some classes have been earth-shattering and taught me to look at the world in a different way.</p>
<p>aesthetics–the neoclassical and beaux-arts structures dotted throughout the green lawns are a sight to be seen, along with the wonderful landscaping.</p>
<p>cost: I do not think there is a comparable school in the country, in regards to quality and cost</p>
<p>students: I read somewhere that at UNC there are a ‘potpourri’ of students. Yeah, sure, you may run into the occasional dumba’ss every now and then and ask yourself how they made it into UNC. But for every person like that, there is another person who’s a classical violinist or Morehead Scholar or someone who turned down an Ivy to come to UNC or someone fluent in five languages. There are a lot of students here and with that comes a lot of talent and intellectual peers.</p>
<p>Pros:
- Cheap (I get to graduate debt free!)
- Close to home (which is something I actually wasn’t looking for, but it’s actually pretty nice)
- 20 minutes to Raleigh (which I’d classify as a “major city,” keepittoyourself)
- Prestige (which is debatable, but it was certainly the most prestigious on my college list)
- Easy classes (Seriously, super easy classes)</p>
<p>Cons:
-HUGE, GIANT SCHOOL
-Hard to find your niche
-Poor fit for me
-Not very challenging academically</p>
<p>ArtemisDea, what’s your major? Just wondering which classes you think are super easy. I’m a potential IR/History major, and I’ve heard that the social sciences/humanities classes are super easy to get As in.</p>
<p>ArtemisDea, I wouldn’t necessarily characterize the school as “GIANT.” Giant, is a school like IU, with 38,000 undergraduates or Michigan or Wisconsin or Berkley, each with a little over 26,000 undergraduates. </p>
<p>UNC has an undergraduate student body of 16,000 students, roughly about the size of Virginia and a little larger than Cornell–I would hardly call that huge.</p>
<p>^^ Undecided, but I’m leaning towards Econ/Business. All of the humanities/english classes have been much less challenging than my high school, but I was fortunate enough to go to a very rigorous high school. If I’d stayed with History as my major, I’m pretty sure I could’ve graduated with a 4.0. My math classes are killing me right now, but I’ve had an easy time with all my social sciences. </p>
<p>^ Personally, I think it’s giant because my middle school had 50 kids in it, my high school had about 700, and my first choice school had about 1500 (Reed). So comparatively, 20k is huge for me. Compared to other schools, however, I realize that it’s not that big at all.</p>
<p>Classes at UNC can be easy, but that’s going to change with the new transcript style.</p>
<p>^ What new transcript style?</p>
<p>Soon, UNCCH transcripts will show the average grade of a class next to the grade you got, plus some extra information. They’ll also show (I think) a ‘schedule point average’: what the average student with your schedule has for a GPA.</p>
<p>This will mean that easy classes won’t be so helpful anymore, since everyone will be able to see how easy they are.</p>
<p>^ Really? I’ve heard about that, but I wasn’t sure when they’d be implementing it. When does “Soon” mean exactly? Would they then retroactively apply class averages to past semesters? </p>
<p>IMO- It seems like that’s treating the symptom without actually addressing the problem (grade inflation). I don’t think it’ll matter so much for me personally then.</p>
<p>Starts next year I think.</p>
<p>I think it’s a great solution to grade inflation: it simply stops grade inflation being a problem.With the new system you will always know how you are doing compared to your peers, and so will employers/grad schools.</p>
<p>I read the DTH article and it said it applies to students incoming in 2012, so I’m not sure how it’ll effect current students. I doubt they’d redo everyone’s transcripts (they seem to have enough trouble compiling everyone’s transcripts as it is), but that’s certainly an interesting possibility. </p>
<p>It would certainly benefit math/science majors who have deflated GPAs, but I’m not sure how it’d effect social sciences majors, aside from noting that the average grade in everyone course is generally going to be a B or an A. It’d be ridiculous to have to plan courses based on which classes would have the lower percentage of As, so I guess ss majors would just have to consistently do better than a 3.5 GPA instead of the average 3.1 GPA. </p>
<p>I wish they’d then just make the classes more challenging and give out fewer As.</p>
<p>I seriously doubt they’ll redo everyone’s transcripts. There’d be howls of outrage from current students whose easy and well-chosen schedules were shown up.</p>
<p>Hopefully it will mean that people won’t need to take ‘difficulty’ into account at all when choosing classes, since it’ll all come out in the wash. It’ll help smart humanities/social science people who get A’s and hurt dumber or lazier ones who get B’s. It will show who is an above average major and who is a below average one.</p>
<p>Unfortunately it’s very hard to reduce the number of A’s when hiring and promotion is so dependent on student evaluations. It’s commonly said that there’s a tacit ‘non-aggression pact’ between college teachers and students: go easy on us and don’t assign too much reading, and we won’t ding you on your evaluations.</p>
<p>One thing to consider, though, it that Honors courses almost always have higher averages than non-honors courses, so I guess this new system would discourage honors students and regular students from taking the honors-version section of a course in favor of the regular. If Byrn’s Econ 101 has a C average and his 101H has an A average, a smart student would then take the regular section for the “context” boost. Wow, that really sucks then. </p>
<p>As for the difficulty, it should be more helpful, but at the same time, what are History majors supposed to do? If all of the courses for their major average A or B, there isn’t any meaningful way to then show purely academic accomplishment.</p>
<p>Pros
- Great academics
- Excellent location (Chapel Hill is a great college town, just 20 minutes to a major city in Raleigh, only 2 1/2 hours from some of the best beaches in the East Coast)
- Sports (UNC is good at everything
- Amazing social scene
- Special opportunities available only to Carolina students</p>
<p>Cons
- A bit too liberal</p>
<p>That about does it for cons…</p>
<p>■■■? just read the article and its right–this is undermining the students. now i want to transfer schools…</p>
<p>How exactly is including information about average grades undermining the students?</p>
<p>ok. people can generally agree that grade inflation is rampant in most colleges. also, most of these colleges DON’T have average grade info.
now imagine a student having a 3.6 gpa while the average is a 3.7. </p>
<p>if he were to graduate from one of the colleges without average grade info with a 3.6, then that would look pretty good on his transcript and he wouldn’t have much trouble finding a job. NOW, if he were to graduate from UNC-CH with a 3.6, employers would see that he was below average. what implications do you think that would have on him finding a job? HALF of the graduating students will be below the median by definition. i’m not saying the average gpa is a 3.7, but replace it with whatever the average is and the argument still stands.</p>
<p>also, now it is beneficial to a student if the rest of their class does terribly in the course. what implications will this have on students cooperating and working together? an overly competitive environment will undoubtedly develop, where students will not learn to work together in a team.</p>