<p>So, lucky me, I got accepted to Cornell through ED.
But I heard so much about Cornell being easiest ivy to get into and hardest to graduate from.</p>
<p>Not to mention the grade deflation.</p>
<p>I am sure this has been discussed for a long time, but I want to hear from recent graduates or current students who know of current trend. </p>
<p>Thanks in advance.</p>
<p>To address your question, you will have to find recent graduates or current students who attended Cornell and also another “top school”, preferably taking the same courses at the same time, while not benefitting from the knowledge gained from one while taking the other.</p>
<p>Alternatively, you will have to find recent graduates or current students who have conducted statistical studies of graduation rates and GPAs of students at Cornell vs. other selected “top schools” who had identical high school GPAs and SATs, etc. to start with.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I fear mostly you will get here impressions from current students or recent grads who have attended only Cornell, hence are not qualified to authoritavely comment on what the experience is there vs. the other schools, since they have limited or no knowledge of the reality of these other schools.</p>
<p>While few people have attended multiple top schools, you can draw comparisons via average GPA and such. Considering the fact Cornell’s average GPA (3.4) is in line with other top schools and its student body is slightly worse than other top schools, I would say that it’s even slightly easier than the other top schools.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Where did you find this information? Is it something you can cite?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Cornell as a whole is very, very different from other top schools and I don’t think this statement can be categorically made. There are programs here in which obtaining a good grade is quite easy (think: AEM, ILR, Hotel Administration, economics, etc.). These majors tend to have very high median grades and the difficulty of these programs when compared to other top schools is a joke. Also, students in such majors tend to be of lower quality than those of other majors, so getting a good grade in a curved class in one of these majors is not that hard.</p>
<p>Then there are ridiculously difficult majors such as Electrical Engineering, Architecture, Physics, Chemical Engineering, etc. If you are in such a hard science major, chances are, very little grade inflation exists and students you compete with are academically very strong. Therefore, in a curved class, it is difficult to beat the mean and get an above average grade. It’s much more difficult to do well in a hard science major at Cornell, and Cornell derives its reputation as an academically intense university due to its hard science programs.</p>
<p>^seconded …</p>
<p>damn my major is theoretical physics
the replies are evenn more discouraging.
well i will study at my own pace</p>
<p>Cornellian2011, I can’t speak for the other majors you mentioned, but as a parent of a student in the Hotel School I take offense to your statement. My daughter is not a “student …of lower quality than those of other majors”. In fact, she graduated in the top 1% of her high school class of almost 500 students. She attends the Hotel School with many equally accomplished students.</p>
<p>Have you looked at the median grade report?? The majority of Hotel Administration class grades are a B. If you look through that report, you will see many, many A’s. Not in HAdm classes. She’s taken classes across the University, earning many better grades than those she received in her Hotel School Classes.</p>
<p>Don’t want to get in to a long debate here, but I needed to get this off my chest.</p>
<p>c’mon, im gonna be a freshman next fall but its hard to believe that hotelies have it hard in any form whatsoever</p>
<p>You said students in AEM tend to be “of lower quality”… yet it’s the most competitive major for admissions at Cornell. Students in the CAS econ program had to be admitted to CAS through the same process as the math/science majors. ILR is extremely competitive (the SAT ranges are similar to that of CAS) and has a great reputation with people in HR/law for laying a good foundation for law school, grad school, or the work force. It seems like a bit of math/science elitism is coming out and it doesn’t look good.</p>
<p>Yeah, when I first read post #4 and 5, I was annoyed and amused. I thought–how immature and inexperienced these young kids are. I read #4 to my senior Cornell daughter. She apparently could care less.</p>
<p>I guess, as a 3.9 gpa ILR student, being that she is lower quality, she doesn’t quite comprehend #4 and 5’s post.</p>
<p>Then again, maybe she is too busy grading because she is a TA for computer science classes because that is her minor. Or maybe it’s because she is too busy communicating w/ her future employers. You see, she already has a job lined up at a BB investment bank, earning close to 6 figures w/ a 5 figure signing bonus, when she graduates in May.</p>
<p>[Median</a> Grades on the Rise | The Cornell Daily Sun](<a href=“http://cornelldailysun.com/node/23297]Median”>http://cornelldailysun.com/node/23297)</p>
<p>[Grade</a> Inflation at Cornell](<a href=“http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/grade_inflation_at_cornell/]Grade”>Grade Inflation at Cornell – Outside the Beltway)</p>
<p>Note that engineering, premed, etc. is going to be harder than humanities majors at every college. Simply saying that bio or physics at Cornell is hard doesn’t mean anything. They’re hard at Yale and Harvard too. I’m not saying Cornell is easy but it’s not harder than any other top schools. It just has whinier students.</p>
<p>I guess having the second highest starting salary for graduates of any of the colleges at Cornell (behind only ENG) makes being “lower quality” a bit easier.</p>
<p>“There are programs here in which obtaining a good grade is quite easy (think: AEM, ILR, Hotel Administration, economics, etc.). These majors tend to have very high median grades and the difficulty of these programs when compared to other top schools is a joke. Also, students in such majors tend to be of lower quality than those of other majors, so getting a good grade in a curved class in one of these majors is not that hard”</p>
<p>-Way to through your fellow Cornellians under the bus</p>
<p>the person starting the thread shouldn’t have figured that any path through Cornell would be easy. it’s worth it though.</p>
<p>Other than my writing seminar, all my classes are curved to a B median. it is not very easy</p>
<p>Well, what do you define as difficulty? Although this may sound like i’m plunging into the murky depths of philosophy only to convolute the situation to no end, i’m not. Do you define difficulty in terms of the results attained, i.e, GPA? Or perhaps in terms of the conceptual struggle for the average student at the university? I will go with the latter only because i feel the former is useless when curving is introduced.</p>
<p>A personal anecdote that may or may not reveal defining characteristics of the top universities: my best friend is at princeton, and we often compare tests from our common classes in order to get at all angles of the material. That is, we realize that some material may be emphasized more than others given the professor. Therefore, the areas which are given more emphasis will be tested more harshly than others, and knowing this we can become “beasts” in the subject. From what i’ve seen there is no real difference in difficulty between our classes. I know that this is freshman year and so on, but freshman year provides the foundation for harder courses, so it makes sense that the difficulty of the way one is challenged will remain roughly the same for higher up courses-- adjusted of course for the difficulty in the material which is bound to rise.</p>
<p>norcalguy—in regard to “whiner students”…after the time you have spent at Cornell you have not found people who don’t whine.</p>
<p>Agree with norcalguy; I don’t think Cornell is really that much harder than any other Top 10 school you’re going to attend. Granted, I feel a lot of this is going to depend on the nature of your subject; I would assume that Engineering at Cornell would be more intensive than Engineering at Yale or Columbia, but based on my own personal anecdotes (good friend of mine goes to Yale, we both were very good at history/government, both got similar grades in History classes and both got 800’s and 5’s on History SAT’s/AP’s), after looking at his coursework and assessing how each of us did first semester, I would say that Political Science classes at Yale are more intensive than Government classes at Cornell. In short, I think it really depends on the major, field, and even sometimes specific professors (whose teaching what class when). </p>
<p>I also, however, disagree with what Cornellian2011 said. I cannot speak much of the other majors you listed since I have little experience with them, but it’s simply false to say that ILRies are less intellectual than other students. Unless by intellectual, you mean ability to do math and science; then obviously, Engineers/Hard Science majors will be better off. However, to quote my Senior Engineering friend from a conversation we had a few days ago: “Why are you asking me, I don’t know how to read. I’m an engineer: I just do math.” Although he was joking around, it’s a valid point: Engineers are better at what they do, and ILRies are better at what they do. I would like you to put the average Engineering student in Cletus Daniel’s Intro to Labor History class (mind you, a required intro class for the ILR major), and have him tell me that ILR classes are “easier”. </p>
<p>Finally, to your remark that student’s are of “lower quality”: it’s been well documented that, despite the caveat of being lower quality students, ILRies hold a large portion of leadership positions all over campus, even though they only makeup 6% of the student body. Although some of these are expected due to self selection (cabinet members of on-campus Labor Parties, the Pre-Law Fraternity, and the Pre-Law Society), unlike other disciples ILRies are involved in a much broader scope of activities than just those related to what they study. Examples of this can be found anywhere from the fact that 2/5 E-board spots on the SA (arguably one of the most prestigious EC’s on campus), including 6/23 members of the entire SA are ILRies, to the fact that the leader of the Pro-Life Advocacy Club on campus is an ILRie.</p>
<p>I am in no way saying ILR is superior to any other major or program, but to say that ILR students are lower quality students or that ILR is a joke major is a joke itself.</p>
<p>I went to BC last year and although Cornell does have slightly more work (I am taking harder classes so that may be the reason), it isn’t much more difficult than BC was last year. I think rumors about how Cornell has grade deflation/an insane amount of work is deceiving (and I’m a pre-med bio major). I was somewhat hesitant to transfer initially because I thought my high GPA at BC would be ruined if I went to Cornell given all the rumors I heard. My 3.9 GPA at BC last year (a school that is known to have grade inflation) is turning out to be nearly the same at Cornell with a relatively similar amount of effort put in. Ultimately, Cornell’s workload is very manageable in my opinion - you’re going to work hard while getting a great education but I don’t think a Cornell student ever has SO much work that he/she NEEDS to pull an all-nighter or anything of that sort if he/she manages his/her time well.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>haha I’m in med school so I’m around people who whine all the time. The only difference is that the whining is more justified in med school vs. Cornell. For example, last week, one of my lecturers went through a 180-slide powerpoint presentation on renal cell carcinoma in 50 minutes. And did it quite poorly as you can imagine since that comes out to approx 20 seconds per slide. Whining about what a bad lecture it was is justified.</p>
<p>In general, I found the grading at Cornell to be very fair so there should be no whining nor any apprehension about the grading.</p>