<p>^ 
It’s probably becaue you have never been challenged like this:</p>
<p><a href=“Cornell parents: Did your "superachiever" fail their first test? - Cornell University - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cornell-university/1562337-cornell-parents-did-your-superachiever-fail-their-first-test.html</a> </p>
<p>(At least read carefully through the first page)</p>
<p>Smart gets being really challenged for the first time and not knowing how to study or take advantage of the resources available. As a tutor/TA, I’ve seen that and wanted to drag students to my office hours. :p</p>
<p>Honestly, I attended a tech school where nearly everyone is a STEM major, and there is little more annoying than STEM kids telling you how all of their classes are surely so much more difficult than all of yours. Per my school’s requirements, I took plenty of STEM classes, went on to complete a STEM minor, and I hardly did more difficult work in those classes than I did in my humanities coursework.
The STEM majors I knew who called the humanities easy were often doing poorly in their core classes, so they took non-serious humanities classes to lift their GPA. They have little concept of what it would actually take to complete a humanities major. (I hugely blame my school’s administration for not having stricter humanities requirements.) I imagine this may be the case for many STEM majors. No doubt, students taking serious humanities classes with a side of “Physics for Poets” might treat their STEM requirements as jokes as well.</p>
<p>^ Please read the link before you comment. I don’t believe you have anyone in humanities who had
‘2300 plus SAT, perfect GPA, 800 Math Level 2 SAT’ and getting 52 in a test.</p>
<p>“Smart gets being really challenged for the first time and not knowing how to study.”
That is probably not in a top school. Almost all who are top school undergrades performed well in their high schools and they know how to study. It is the competition among high caliber students that they didn’t experience.</p>
<p>You’re right, it’s not being challenged for the first time. But it iss a different type of challenge that they probably didn’t have to face in high school, surrounded by that level of students. The expectations jump and you have to adapt.</p>
<p>^ My argument is that they shouldn’t have to adapt by suffering the lower GPA’s; the anticipated low GPA is the reason why many were afraid of going to tougher top schools when they were admitted. </p>
<p>And I am trying to state that even if the grades are lower than what they could get from a state flagship they don’t need to worry, because the grad/med/law schools have the knowledge of top school competitions. (the incorrect information on CC is that no matter what level of schools you went to for undergraduate, you need high GPA’s to get in to post-graduate programs; and my findings on med school admissions refuted that.)</p>
<p>And you now seem to have shifted from ‘they don’t know how to study’ to “they didn’t know the expectations are higer” because you can’t prove they don’t know how to study. 
… given your posts evolved from:
“not knowing how to study or take advantage of the resources available” to
"surrounded by that level of students. The expectations jump and you have to adapt. " </p>
<p>My thought hasn’t changed - just how I have expressed it. (And of course I can’t “prove” any of it. None of us can. These arguments are almost entirely based on anecdotal evidence.)
My thought is that these students, though they are smart and took challenging courses, are experiencing a new level of challenge in their new environment that they don’t know how to handle yet.</p>
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</p>
<p>In my personal experience with Ivy League students, this is false. Many of them think they know how to study, but they know how to regurgitate information high-school style. Many students at all KINDS of schools - top schools, bottom schools, every school - struggle in their first year or semester or whatnot because they don’t know how to study and/or they don’t know how to balance their studying with all of the new commitments they have. They have to learn how to adjust their studying habits to fit the level of work they now do.</p>
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<p>In my experience, this is also false. A lot of students think that they are good writers/thinkers because they were at or near the top of their high school class, and got praise from their teachers. Then they come here and they find out that their writing is not really at a college level (or not that good at all). I have had many a student come to me telling me that they’ve never gotten anything less than an A in humanities/social science classes and are really shocked because they got a C or a D or an F on their first paper because it’s poorly written.</p>
<p>A lot of students assume that STEM majors/classes are harder than humanities majors/classes. They are not objectively harder. They are simply different, and different types of students find different tasks harder than others. The other thing is that a lot of STEM majors think they are doing the heavy-duty lifting work in humanities classes when what they are doing actually isn’t anything like what humanities is. It’s humanities-lite. What I mean is, taking freshman English composition is not the same thing as writing a lit crit paper on Shakespeare or putting together a coherent theory on Kant.</p>
<p>My own field requires a lot of statistical and mathematical courses and I find those to be the easiest ones. Math is easy. It’s the theory-based ones in anthropology and sociology that are difficult for me. Calculating and interpreting statistics is not difficult; what IS difficult is writing a coherent argument that presents the material in the best light. And memorizing the muscles in the body or the quadratic formula isn’t particularly difficult, either; the hard parts of science and math come when you’re expected to do independent reasoning (like proofs), which honestly, isn’t all that different from the hard parts of the humanities and the social sciences.</p>
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<p>Well…you didn’t present any findings. You presented the handbook from one elite university and your strongly-held beliefs that lower GPAs are acceptable from elite universities. I don’t even totally disagree with you, but you’re not actually presenting any evidence to support your assumptions.</p>
<p>“You presented the handbook from one elite university and your strongly-held beliefs that lower GPAs are acceptable from elite universities.”</p>
<p>Prove otherwise!!!</p>
<p>Also I am giving you Cornell’s in addition to WUSTL’s, you can compare with the general ones (the first link below). Now it is not ‘one elite university’ but two.</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/2013factstable24.pdf”>https://www.aamc.org/download/321508/data/2013factstable24.pdf</a>
<a href=“Career Services | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University”>Career Services | Student & Campus Life | Cornell University;
<p>“I have had many a student come to me telling me that they’ve never gotten anything less than an A in humanities/social science classes and are really shocked because they got a C or a D or an F”</p>
<p>Are they ‘2300 plus SAT, perfect GPA, 800 Math Level 2 SAT’ students? Give me proof, please.</p>
<p>"My own field requires a lot of statistical and mathematical courses and I find those to be the easiest ones. Math is easy. "</p>
<p>You can claim however you want, your posts didn’t show that but I won’t ask you for proof on this one. LOL. </p>
<p>@juillet, I assume by your statement that you have never taken an advanced course in the physical sciences or in pure math since you state math is easy. I’m sorry but that is completely ridiculous. Math and science get very hard very fast, with many ideas that are very conceptually involved. I’m not saying the humanities are not difficult, the material and readings are very intense, but having a few papers a semester and weekly readings is not the same as having problem sets due every week (many which take over 10 hours and all graded thoroughly) on top of midterms and finals. And due to the numerous required courses in the sciences, it is much harder to slip by with an easy course load than for an English major (not to say that many English majors don’t take a very difficult schedule and go above and beyond the minimum requirements).</p>
<p>If you counter that I have only taken “lite” humanities, you are mistaken. I have taken several history courses taught by award winning authors (a Pulitzer Prize winner) as well as special seminars (called BFS seminars at Penn) filled with people majoring in history, English, Russian, etc, one in which we did an intense reading of war and peace, one in which we read a book like More’s Utopia every week.</p>
<p>Just piping in here…I am a STEM major as well (chem!) and I try to avoid the “STEM classes are sooo much harder” mentality. However, at my particular school (a decent state school), humanities majors are allowed to take A SINGLE easier ‘non-major’ science course, whereas STEM students are required to take 6-8 (depending on credits you come in with) pure humanities courses, which are not ‘dumbed down’ for us or ‘major only’. That tends to be the reason why there is a stigma at my school against humanities majors, although I disagree strongly. Yes, some humanities majors can get away with doing a lot less work for the same degree. BUT:</p>
<p>a. What good will this do them in the long run?
b. Why are you so jealous? Do you not love the path you’re taking? (I love my path, and I wish everyone did!)
c. I find it appalling that, at my school, humanities students are held to lower standards than STEM majors, as evidenced by the inequality in competition in the ‘dumbed down’ science classes for them…but isn’t that a flaw in the design of the system and not their fault? I am appalled mainly because I think science and social science (also a big anthro fan :D) are important courses for personal development and well-roundedness. I can’t say I enjoyed all of my required humanities courses (AND NOWHERE NEAR AS MUCH AS I LOVE CHEMISTRY :D), but I did learn alot from a few of them…I’m thankful for that.</p>
<p>Anyways, good day all, and no offense taken or implied from this post please!</p>
<p><em>Returns to silent stalking of this forum</em></p>
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<p>You assume wrong, but you’re missing the point anyway. I was talking about for me. My point is that for some people higher-level math is hard and for others the theoretical thinking associated with the higher-level social sciences and humanities is difficult.</p>
<p>I also wasn’t referring to the enterprise of math in general - I was referring to the general computational math necessary to do most applied math tasks.</p>
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</p>
<p>I disagree. But again, this has to do with what’s considered easy, which is going to vary from person to person.</p>
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<p>Given that this would be a violation of FERPA, I cannot. That is, however, irrelevant to the point. Some strong students struggle with math, and others don’t. And some strong students struggle with writing, and others don’t.</p>
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<p>The onus is on the person making claims of fact to provide evidence. You were the one who claimed that people could get into med school with a lower GPA from a top school; therefore, the onus is on you to provide evidence to that end. For reference, a few data points is not proof; statistical testing and evaluation would be evidence.</p>
<p>I’d also like to remind you that I never disagreed with you, and in fact stated several times that I actually do agree with you there. The only thing I said is that you are not actually providing any strong evidence to support your assertions.</p>
<p>I’m bowing out of this thread.</p>
<p>"Given that this would be a violation of FERPA, I cannot. "
LOL, if it is statistics and not giving out names/ID’s/races… it is not violating FERPA! Don’t use FERPA as an excuse when data didn’t agree with your claim.</p>
<p>“You were the one who claimed that people could get into med school with a lower GPA from a top school” “a few data points is not proof”</p>
<p>I already proved it with WUSTL and Cornell’s GPA charts to be compared with AAMC’s data. (these are not one or two data points, these are tens of thousands.) It is pretty obvious. If you can’t accept it, it is because of you need to work on your Math.</p>
<p>"I’m bowing out of this thread. "
That’s fine. We all know it’s because you have no evidence to provide.</p>
<p>That’s just… vicious. No one is going to win this debate. It’s impossible to PROVE anything. Even if all of the data were available (which they’re not - there are just bits and pieces and anecdotal evidence), no one would be able to completely prove anything. The whole process is fuzzy and messy and grades are only one factor.</p>
<p>@juillet, then why is the average GPA in humanities majors so much higher than for science majors even at schools like Chicago? Why are English and communications so much more likely to be in Greek life.</p>
<p>I still stand by my statement that saying math is easy is ridiculous. Even the top math students I know, including a guy who started taking grad courses sophomore year and chose between Princeton and MIT for grad school would never say something like that. Sure things at easy at the beginning, but that is true for everything.</p>
<p>I am not saying that the humanities are easy. At the grad level it takes of hard work and talent, as much as it does to succeed in the sciences. But from what I have seen, undergrads can get away with much less.</p>
<p>Statistics is much easier than most other areas of math. The hard part of math and physics is developing intuition. For example, in physics you may find something interesting, but it doesn’t mean anything until you interpret it physically.</p>
<p>nanotechnology, you can believe whatever you want to believe (can’t prove, etc.) while data is already presented.</p>
<p>"The whole process is fuzzy and messy and grades are only one factor. "
That’s right, and this counter someone’s claim that one has to have high GPA to get into med school - sounded as if GPA is the only thing (or at least the most important). Thank you, you just help proved my point. :-)</p>
<p>I need to be really firm on this issue because I saw too many top school admits afraid of attending just because they are anticipating that lower GPA’s will hurt them in the future. I thought so too when I just got on CC and reading much wrong informtion before I started to look into data myself. To those new admits: there is nothing to be afraid of, just go and explore and prepare to meet all your high caliber peers!</p>
<p>I give up on this argument. I don’t even know who’s arguing what anymore. But you’re just coming off as pointlessly aggressive at this point…</p>
<p>It is not aggression but firmness. Anyone looked at the data should see that it is not necessary to get high GPA from a top school to be admitted to a medical school. Any other conclusion would be misleading. (Not because these top school students don’t try but it is harder to get high GPA’s. Not because they don’t know how to study but because there are high competitions. Not because they can’t adapt to the competitions but they can’t remove the competitions.) </p>