<p>Its not that upper level science classes are easier- I just think its because all the average students have left the class. Like when I started as a chemistry major, my class has 40-50 students, which went down to 20 of that after orgo. When we got to upper level classes- which were even harder than Orgo, like Pchem no one left the class.</p>
<p>That’s true. Actually I took the freshmen section of organic chemistry here, and it was actually harder than most of the non-freshmen sections mainly because he consistently changed the testing style/format so that not only the material became more difficult, but the extent to which it was applied became much more involved (abstract in many cases) as we went along. Many of the concepts are more often stressed amongst grad. level students than undergrads. In fact, other profs. would actually claim that the tests were too difficult. And then the final would be 5 times harder than the previous exam, which was unpleasant to say the least. This would essentially weed out (make them take orgo. II the following year or switch into upperclassmen orgo.) upwards to 10 students of 60-70. Often the final (he has since changed his teaching/mentoring methods to obtain better performance on these in classes after mines without having to water them down. The man is dedicated) alone was enough to weed out those who were actually going (and got) to get a good grade in the class. Often such students would switch into the non-freshmen sections (the hardest one at that) and do better. Another 10-20 students would be weeded out by the 1st 2 of 3 exams of orgo. II. However, I notice in the upperlevel courses, like inorganic (Emory only has advanced level inorganic, not intermediate, they got rid of intermediate after my freshman year) and Pchem, students are much less likely to drop the course even if they are doing poorly (most/nearly all of the students do poorly in Pchem here if it was graded on a regular scale. I believe last year, A-grades started in the low-mid 70s). I believe the methods used to teach and grade in math and physics here are to blame. They are too easy, too much inflation in many cases when the section is amongst the more difficult ones. Gives folks false security and hope I guess, because the pchem. profs. will not water down material. If you manage to fall behind the already large curve in there, you simply will not score well in the course.</p>
<p>At the very least, Harvard’s summer stats course so many Harvard undergrads in my class were panicking about failing was quite manageable while balancing full-time work. Though the course was challenging, I was mainly worried about receiving a B+ rather than an A/-A…not failing the course. </p>
<p>When I found i aced the course, I was stunned considering I was a D-level math student in high school, graduated in the bottom quarter of my graduating high school class, and my SAT scores were well below the 25th percentile of all students admitted to Oberlin in my graduating class. </p>
<p>Then again, if that stats course were offered at my high school, it would certainly be considered an easy course by its standards. A pity as I would have done far better in high school if the math and other courses were paced like that Harvard summer stats course.</p>
<p>cobrat, you know what? I actually here the same about our intro. stats for both summer and the school year. I hear the calc.-based version (which unfortunately requires intro.) is much more challenging though. However, honestly, in high school, I normally only got B+/A- in my calc. classes, but had a harder prof. for honors stats, and got a high A. At least Harvard probably teaches calc. better than Emory does. I can tell you with confidence that my high school “honors” calc. course covered more material and went faster. Exams were tougher too. Needless to say, it was even less comparable to AP Calc. A/B. I am really hoping that only my section was like that. However, I hear otherwise. Most of my friends in most other sections need not even attend class. However, chem, bio, and psyche here counteract that well. Also, the lifesciences calc. series is a bit more rigorous and perhaps covers the stats. material (integrated into half of part 2 of the series, some diffeq, lin. alg., multivariable being the other half) in greater dept than the intro stats. course itself (embarrassing considering that lifesci. calc. 2 only takes half a semester to do it).</p>
<p>I go to Wake Forest. A lot of students who transfer here are shocked when they find out how much work we get on a daily basis. I have friends at comparable schools who have significantly less work.</p>
<p>Yeah, some schools have a high out of class workload. Here, until you get past entry level courses, this is not the case (okay, except the labs which can often be overkill except in biology). At Emory, they tend to murder people by simply making exams harder and the few assignments given really involved My friend who is now at Georgia Tech (doing 3/2 dual degree, so finished with Emory coursework) admits this to be the case. He says the workload is annoyingly higher and perhaps more useless (doesn’t understand why he’s forced to do it when he understands the material), but the exams are noticeably more predictable and manageable. He is ChemEngineering by the way, but is embarrassing the Tech students by destroying the curves on both HW and exams in almost all the classes.
The Out of class work here is normally supplemental and not graded (tons of work like that admittedly), but you’ll probably do poorly or not as well as you’d like if you don’t do them in moderate/harder sections for certain classes. To me, it seems as if most humanities and social sciences put the mandatory work and reading on thick. And when they have exams (I have only had one social science/humanities w/exams), they count worth a lot more b/c there is normally only 1 or 2. Again, for sciences I guess the labs make up for the lack of work given by lecturers. But I’m actually noticing an increase in the workload for lecture components in science classes. Lecturers in bio for example are now holding students responsible for the reading of various research papers and sometimes even workbook exercises. One class is experimental and requires groups of students to prepare case studies each class. This section has no lecturing. The prof. simply tells students to read text book on their own so they understand the cases. This is perhaps the hardest section, and the only one not to have multiple choice only exams (hybrid, with even multiple choice requiring solid command of material). None of this happened my freshmen year. Physics is getting harder too. Things are also not being graded as easy as they were before this year. Emory seems to go through cycles w/its science and math courses. The freshmen this year have their work cut out for them. At least they’ll be used to it though, seems like those from my year and last are now having a lot more trouble with orgo., than normal. Many were complacent due to their performance last year, when in reality many of the traditionally difficult courses and sections were watered down.</p>
<p>I would propose 3 major models of difficult courses:<br>
- workload high and moderate-difficult exams, perhaps some quizzes b/c the workload makes less time to prep. for exams in some cases, as eventually you only aim to complete work w/o understanding it. This can be gen. chem here, and bio lab.
- Low/non-existent graded workload, only moderate-difficult exams and quizzes. This is a high-stakes model I guess because if you screw up on 1-2 exams, kiss your desired score goodbye. This is biology lecture, and any of the orgo. lectures, and many of the psychology classes (which are much less social science based than natural science based, yet you get no practice problems). There is no homework grade buffer.
- Bad Professor with moderate/difficult exams/quizzes lol! I need not explain this one.</p>
<p>Yes, the more prestigious schools typically have harder coursework, given other variables are held constant (such as major).</p>
<p>The main difference is that your peers are all going to be bright at the upper-tier schools. The material itself may be the same, but you’ll need to understand it better/learn it faster/learn more of it if you want to keep afloat at the harder schools. The standards are simply higher, much like the standards are higher for getting admitted in the first place.</p>
<p>Many of my friends at Wharton, Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, etc, were all valedictorians or were at least top-5 of their class in high school. Many of your peers at upper-tier schools are going to be naturally driven, well-off/well-supported, intelligent, and hardworking. It’s just a much tougher crowd to compete against.</p>
<p>There’s a key nuance between harder coursework and harder grading of the coursework. It is almost certainly true that more prestigious universities tend to provide harder coursework, strictly speaking, as the students tend to be more talented and have better work ethics, which allows for the course to dive deeper into more difficult material. Yes, the actual course materials are may be the same from school to school, but how deeply the students are actually expected to know the course material differs greatly. </p>
<p>However, whether the grading is commensurate with the prestige of the school is an entirely different story, particularly the grading at the lower end of the scale. Let’s face it: at many of the top universities in the country, it’s practically impossible to actually flunk out. You might not get top grades, but you won’t flunk out either. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry have freely admitted that they were irresponsible and immature students who cared little for their studies, but they both nevertheless passed their classes and therefore successfully graduated from Yale. With mediocre grades, mind you. But they still passed. I suspect that many schools of lower prestige would have flunked out students as unmotivated as Bush and Kerry. </p>
<p>*“I always told my dad that D stood for distinction,” Kerry said in a written response to reporters’ questions. He said he has previously acknowledged focusing more on learning to fly than studying.
*</p>
<p>[Kerry</a>, Bush GPAs At Yale Similar - CBS News](<a href=“http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/07/politics/main700170.shtml]Kerry”>http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/07/politics/main700170.shtml)</p>
<p>“I suspect that many schools of lower prestige would have flunked out students as unmotivated as Bush and Kerry.”</p>
<p>Such schools would be a lot easier, though. Many people at upper-tier schools get burnt out and lose motivation. It’s hard work. Those same students would have dominated at the easier schools without necessarily losing motivation.</p>
<p>Sakky’s point is VERY VERY true. The work assigned gets rescaled a lot when you get to the grading point. Its like a chemical process:</p>
<p>Work in (difficult material) —> Easy Grading ----> Work out (Everyone gets As or B+ for effort)</p>
<p>Yayy for grade inflation</p>
<p>I’m sure they could find people who would flunk out, pretty easily, they just tend not to want to admit those people. So instead those students are more highly represented at “many schools of lower prestige”.</p>
<p>Bush & Kerry may have been unmotivated students, however they are probably innately more intelligent than at least 96% of the population, and that provides them with better ability to “wing it” than many other people possess. “Many schools of lower prestige” would enroll more students who were equally unmotivated and/or less innately intelligent, and many of these students would scrape the bottom of that pile before Kerry & Bush did. Ignoring the other factor, as you acknowledged the work would be easier in the first place. Kerry & Bush would have been fine.</p>
<p>Well, it’s a common misconception that courses are the same at different universities and then, somehow, are ratcheted up or down to suit the abilities of the class. One of the things I noticed when I went from a second-tier to a top 5 school: no textbooks.</p>
<p>I have yet to buy a textbook for any of my courses at this school. Instead, we’re using source material (ten or more books per course plus articles, journal, etc.) to form our understanding of a subject. Even for the sciences, you’re walking around with a distended backpack full of the texts that the men and women who wrote your chemistry book probably had to read to put it together.</p>
<p>bernie12 - yes, my experience (again, decades ago) at GT was that higher level courses were not where the weeding out was done. It was in the first two years that the ranks were culled. But I was comparing my freshman experience to my daughter’s at Harvard and her classes were clearly more difficult than my equivalent ones even with mine being weed out classes.</p>
<p>It’s true that it’s pretty hard to flunk out at a top school. The only way you could ever actually fail a class is if you flat-out never showed up to it, or if you bombed every quiz and exam to an extreme degree. Typically, I find that kids who fall into the latter category are <em>usually</em> not putting much effort into things. I know of one student who failed a math class at Penn because she feared math so much that she could only bring herself to study/make a study sheet the day before the exam. She wasn’t strong in math to begin with, and so naturally the test obliterated her.</p>
<p>That being said, it’s still pretty hard to fail. But it’s also hard to get a good grade, too. Even if a class curve is being adjusted to give some upper portion of the class A’s, you have to realize that it’s still going to be hard for the average person to perform well enough to make it into that category in the first place, which is why I’ve always found the “Ivies hand out A’s too easily” argument to be misguided.</p>
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<p>Somehow I doubt that George W. Bush lost motivation and performed poorly because he was burnt out. To be burnt out means that you first have to ‘burn’, which means that you have to have been striving hard. I don’t think anybody, including Bush himself, has ever claimed that Bush was a hard-striving student at any time during any of his youth. Bush himself has freely admitted that he was basically a ne’er-do-well through his whole life until around age 40 when he got religion and quit alcohol. But he still graduated from Yale, (and then Harvard Business School).</p>
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<p>The difference is that the bottom of the pile is rather big at the lower-prestige schools. Practically everybody at schools like Yale actually graduates; practically nobody fails. In contrast, at many schools, less than half of the students actually graduate, and a significant portion do fail. Hence, that bottom of the pile could well have claimed Bush and Kerry along with the other students who were even worse.</p>
<p>But that’s not my real point, for I don’t think we need to concentrate so much upon the truly lower-end schools. I don’t think many people here on CC are really interested in such schools anyway. The CC population is skewed towards the higher prestige schools, and what the most elite schools seem to offer is a strong discontinuity. I suspect there really is a strong grading difference at the low-end between just barely getting in (but still getting in) to HYPS or other top private schools and just barely missing getting into those schools and being forced to attend your safety school. HYPS practically never give out truly terrible grades, but other schools just below them in prestige will do so.</p>
<p>It’s very well possible, but burning out isn’t the only possible source. Based on what I’ve seen from some of my peers back in college, some of the really affluent students slack off simply because they can. They sometimes have jobs already lined up after they graduate, plentiful connections, etc, whereas many people work hard during college because it’s their primary strength for getting a good head start in their desired fields. Bush and Kerry didn’t really need their schools to get where they are today.</p>
<p>My main point, though, is that getting something like a B (or even a high C) at an Ivy as a result of “winging it” is still somewhat impressive when you consider that the same amount of winged-brainpower would probably clock a higher B or even an A-/A at a lesser-ranked school. If a student is getting a ton of low C’s, though, it’s harder to tell because, as you said, the lower-end gets buffered quite a bit at upper-tier schools.</p>
<p>I know a kid who got a C in an upper-level math course, but his skill would have easily netted him an A at the state-level school in the same course (same book, too).</p>
<p>Seems today that the B- is the favorite grade to give to average students in private school. However, as a result, if a class is curved to a B- average (most of the more difficult science courses here), you find that significantly less people get A-grades, and maybe 35-45% get C+ and lower. Seems like non-Ivy peers grade slightly different. I believe the average in gen. chem (no one curves or scales here) here is about 2.85 (B-) while Bio is about 2.5 (not many curve or scale here either, but there are exceptions each year). This, however, can somewhat be explained away by the structure though. Remember the “3 ways” I mentioned. Bio has only tests and quizzes and the heavy workload in lab. Chem. has tests, clicker quizzes, and a Homework component (where nearly all do well) along with a somewhat tough lab. Often the exam averages in chem. sit between 70-80 (this is about the case for all the sections, all which are reasonably difficult) which is close to biology, which can range from 70-77 (one prof. yos-yos the exam difficulty so that averages jump from 75-85 to 60-65 between two exams. This is how she achieves her C+) exam average by semester’s end. Point is, performance is similar, but biology lacks the HW buffer. However, it seems as if the bio. dept. literally aims for a C+ average in intro. bio, so you’ll have profs. that crash the average (if above this) on the last non-cumulative exam. Once to achieve this, not only did some profs. do that, but the dept. stepped in and curved borderline grades in one section down one level (87.3 becomes B for example as opposed to B+). Most other tough sciences classes are normally curved to B- area (2.6-2.7), like orgo. and intro. to neurobiology. I hear however, that many of our peers would curve to a B, and that it is now surprising when the average is B- or lower for a class. I thought it was normal. If you look at grade distributions at Tech for example, they still have many courses/sections with averages in the low 2.0 and high 1.0 ranges, and it’s not because the students are dumb. It’s because they don’t believe that weeding out or fair grading is simply giving the average folks a B- (this can also compress grades if people making the 69 get a B-, but the person w/a 77-79 still only gets a B. Compresses by 2 levels!). You give them a C. Big difference! I guess this is how gen. bio here approaches it.<br>
In the case I mention, it would make more sense to curve those students to a minimal C (73) or C+(77) and add the same amount of points to those above and below, thus everyone gets either 4 or 8 points depending on the choice. This makes more sense then favoring those who performed poorly and probably were only counting on the curve to save them, and thus put forth a mediocre performance. </p>
<p>When you actually consider this, you would think the elite private schools had some consortium on grading practices.</p>
<p>As freshmen, my friend at Harvard insisted on Thanksgiving Break that his workload was probably equal to mine at UMiami. Both of us earned some AP credits going in and were taking all general ed classes which we compared.</p>
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When you actually consider this, you would think the elite private schools had some consortium on grading practices.
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<p>I have a feeling professors know how grading is done at peer institutions. Further a lot of professors have taught at several universities</p>