<p>whats witherspooning and whats VD?</p>
<p>Well, you can read the article in the link provided. The story is kind of long. So I suggest you read it. VD - well thats venereal disease. unpleasant business. kills millions of people each year. especially AIDS.</p>
<p>8.012 /8.022 are nowhere close to being like any AP Class. I had taken AP Physics C and 8.012 makes you feel like you didnt learn a thing in AP Physics that isn't trivial. Classes are hard, I expected rigor by going to MIT but I couldnt conceive the difficulty of classes ,hard to compare to AP classes,but nobody forces a person to take a challenge</p>
<p>Does that mean that it's not a good idea to place out of classes with AP credits? Since you will miss alot of information on the subject?</p>
<p>I cant give you a straight it depends on the person what you plan to major in and such, i mean if you were planning to be a physics major and are not USAMO or US physics olympiad i would recommended taking 8.012/8.022 to give you killer physics background for your major</p>
<p>what 2bad4u said</p>
<p>Are problem sets the main reason classes are hard, or are tests extremely difficult, too? Wondering because a few of you said passing out of a bunch of the lower-level classes (like multivariable, the required physics) wasn't too difficult. Or are these classes just a lot easier than ones you take later on?</p>
<p>Nah, the real reason why MIT is hard is that classes are graded on a curve and pretty much everybody in the class is top-notch. It's not like high school classes where all you have to do is demonstrate a set level of knowledge of the material in order to get a good grade. What the other students do doesn't matter - it's all about you and how much you've learned. Not so at MIT (or most other schools for that matter). At MIT, you get a good grade not by knowing a set amount of material, but by knowing more than the other people in the class. You are competing against each other. It's no longer about you vs. the material. Now, it's about you vs. the other people in the class. If you know a lot about a subject, but everybody else in the class knows more, then you will get a bad grade. Furthermore, MIT profs set the grading policies rather harshly such that not many good grades are given out.</p>
<p>i think i was fooled by the fact that they give lip service to encouraging teamwork- that's one of the reasons they gave for the pass-no record first semester. that doesn't sound like it encourages students to work together :-/</p>
<p>well - homework isn't graded on a curve, and you can't really work together on tests anyways, xlittleonex</p>
<p>true, but i wouldn't expect someone to help me on hw if they knew that my understanding the topic better would help me score higher on tests</p>
<p>You wouldn't? Well, I'm sorry then :(</p>
<p>
[quote]
You wouldn't? Well, I'm sorry then :(
[/quote]
I was thinking the exact same thing.</p>
<p>Unfortunately such 'mean' competition exists at my present high school.
I wanna go to MIT :D</p>
<p>Out of curiousity, how hard would 6.001 and 6.821 be for someone who already has years of experience with Scheme and Semantics under their belt before hand?</p>
<p>I thought the problem sets for physics were alot harder than the test . The curve really is something that takes getting use to where even in hard p-sets the class average is around 90, but working in groups helps , test scores are lower but the curve still usually doesnt deviate much unlike high school.</p>
<p>im not sure if i understand, r u saying that since test scores are lower than p-sets but since they dont deviate much the average test is maybe a bit below 90? that doesnt seem too bad?</p>
<p>test are weighted a decent amount</p>
<p>Homeworks are indeed curved, because your entire total score is curved. Homeworks are one component of your total score. If you do extremely poorly on one homework, and everybody else does well, then while you might not get the graded homework back with an 'F' grade, for the purposes of calculating your final course grade, you effectively did get an 'F' on that homework.</p>
<p>The hardest thing to learn (at least for me) is that a 67 can also be seen as a good score. The class average for tests tend to be in the 60s - 70s range. It's a big shocker.</p>
<p>As time goes on, problem sets directly impact your grade less and less. In one class I had homework was only 5% of the grade. In another, homework didn't directly effect the grade at all. The incentive to do the problem sets usually comes from the fact that you need to do them in order to pass the class :P</p>