@dowzerw Sorry your child has not had a good experience at VT. Retention rate in COE has been around 87-90% from 1at to 2nd year but obviously not everyone is finding the support they want or need.
“Realistically, here on College Confidential, the suggestion to attend Community College is usually code for “you’re not smart enough for ‘real college’.””
Most references/recommendations I’ve seen on CC for CCs is for affordability reasons.
“Third, students may take “hard” classes (e.g. organic chemistry) in the summer, at a less-competitive school. Stanford has advised some of its pre-med students to do this, in writing, in the past.”
So, if selective colleges are willing to do this, this must mean these elite institutions feel these summer courses elsewhere are adequate prep for further study. That begs the question, why make them more onerous at the home institution vs. supposedly easier summer courses taken elsewhere?
^^ I wonder if the Stanford thing is related to their large Athletic program. A lot of athletes take summer classes so they can take lighter loads during their competition season due to the heavy demands of their sport. Of course any academic policy an athlete can do has to be available to the general student populace otherwise it’d be a NCAA violation.
“I don’t know why schools would want to admit students and then weed them out.”
These decisions aren’t made by the same people, and in fact the people who make them often have competing goals.
The admissions office’s job is to enroll the strongest possible class at a certain budget. That’s it. Whether students graduate with the intended major or not has no bearing on whether the admissions officers keep their jobs. Meanwhile, the faculty who run the pre-med or engineering programs are interested in teaching the students they want in the way they want. That might or might not be congruent with the goal of keeping interested students in the program. I’d rather teach 50 kids than 100 kids; wouldn’t you?
Some universities have strong central leadership to keep all the moving parts in harmony. Most do not.
The other alternative is that many students at the Ivies are very smart and deserve good grades. Why would you put those students on a curve??
“The other alternative is that many students at the Ivies are very smart and deserve good grades. Why would you put those students on a curve??”
@collegedad13 1000% agree.
@sevmom One of the interesting occurrences at VT, which may or may not be echoed at other schools, is that statistical measures of completion of a course are skewed. They don’t include withdrawals in the end figures so the number of students successfully completing a course is deceiving. Our experience has been just as many engineering students dropping out after second and third years. I can’t even imagine dropping out after junior year but it’s real. We’ve seen a lot of disconnect between reality and what is thought to be the case. I would be curious to see how comprehensive that COE number between first and second year actually is.
@dowzerw , you might want to start a different thread in the VT forum to voice your concerns about the College of Engineering . Best of luck to your child!
@sevmom I can’t even remember how we got on this path on a thread about Ivies…
@dowzerw Me neither but everything from community college, to Ivy League and everything in between has come up, as well as majors from international relations, to classics, to enginering! Also, women in engineering, the role of admissions, and all kinds of other things. It’s actually been a pretty interesting thread!
Does anyone have a reference for this? I did the pre-med track at Stanford, with an EE major. I am not aware of any Stanford students who took their post-HS pre-med classes elsewhere, nor have I heard about any students being advised to do so. Stanford students have a low pre-med attrition rate compared to less selective colleges and pre-med classes all give few C or lower grades. Stanford also allows students to repeat classes and replace lower grades. I knew one pre-med student who repeated classes if she got an A- because she thought the A- was too low.
In surveys of Stanford students that do drop out of pre-med, the classes that the say discouraged them are most likely to be chem classes, particularly organic chem. This may relate to organic chem depending more on natural ability and less on memorization or plug and chug than other fields. It can also depend on how the professor teaches the class. For example, one of my chem classes with professor Trost often had exams with median grades in the 30-40% range. Many of the exam questions were at a far higher level than the textbook (which the professor wrote), and the exams were structured so that few could finish all the questions in time. My strategy was to emphasize intuition, instead of spending a lot of time working everything out and confirming. I enjoyed this environment where I was truly challenged instead of just having easy, rote memorization examinations where you are expected to get near 100% correct if you memorize basic concepts and can plug into the formula, like occurred in HS. This inspired me to continue with the pre-med track instead of just doing engineering, as I had originally planned. However, some students have the reverse response. In other years, a different professor taught the class and gave exams with 80-90% average grades. I imagine you’d be less likely to have the former style of classes at less selective colleges.
I cannot imagine Stanford is telling premeds to take Ochem at another school. There are forums which advise premeds to take Ochem not at an easier school but at a summer school where they are more likely to earn an A grade.
I was shocked when I saw the MCAT now required biochemistry. Biochemistry was the most difficult course I ever took. The only biochemistry course offer required two semesters of Ochem and three semesters of biology. I see many schools now offer a biochemistry course with no prerequisites.
Back to engineering. I saw a recent study where female engineers felt they faced the same challenges I did 30+ years ago. So disheartening. Most of my children’s female peers who earn engineering degrees go directly to management consulting. I don’t know what the GPA cutoff is, but I think it would likely be 3.5.
“There are forums which advise premeds to take Ochem not at an easier school but at a summer school where they are more likely to earn an A grade.”
Yes…and med schools can see that you did that. It is probably still better to have an A in the summer than a B in the fall, but don’t assume that the summer course will be viewed the same as the regular course, even at the same university.
I think that is still true in math and CS to a large degree. So sad.
I argued with my wife over this back when she was teaching as an adjunct. The fairest grading system is one where the grade distribution is a normal curve with a decent level of dispersion. A test where students are all clustered in the 90% range (like hers) is an inherently unfair test. It does not distinguish a top 1% kid from the 40th percentile in any meaningful way. The purpose is to measure the depth of their knowledge and rank them against the curriculum and each other as accurately as possible. Mean test grade becomes unimportant as long as it is neither very high nor very low.
Giving the median student an A (so at least 50% A grades as in many high schools and the Stanford example) is a huge disservice to the top few students and to someone hoping to use grades to identify the top rankings. One could ostensibly graduate with a 4.0 and never be better than an average student in any class.
When I was an undergraduate in EE, courses were on a 2.7 normal curve for most classes. The median student was borderline B/C. Four year graduation rate was around 50%. To survive was enough to get job offers.
Maybe more on topic, the quality of HS educations was wildly variable both in my experience and those of my kids (the first two were both tutors). To use my current state as an example, a 3.5 gpa from Bellevue (wealthy Seattle suburb) is worth way more than a 4.0 from a poor rural HS over in Eastern Washington. In Bellevue, writing skills, lab notebooks, interactions with teachers, and work expectations would all have been done on a college track level preparing for the best colleges.
For the most part, those from poor rural high schools lack some of the critical pieces needed for performing right out of the gate at a rigorous college. Some of those kids were touched by magic and perform well anyway. More likely they spend their first year bailing water and patching holes. Some are frighteningly incapable but had college qualifying grades. Those Bellevue kids have issues, too, but more likely due to behavior than preparation.
No reference, but U-Santa Clara’s summer O-Chem program has plenty of Stanford undergrads taking it. A full year of Organic over the summer. I know a couple of Stanford premeds that did this so they could study abroad.
I graduated in engineering in 1984 and didn’t feel that I faced any challenges at all related to my gender. I had an amazing education and made many close friends, men and women.
@ChoatieMom , “problem solving” is the word D used when she realized that she was not successful in her first two chem (premed weed out) exams, she realized that she needs to concentrate on problem solving. She was able to get all A+ grades on Chem after that.
@MaterS “Most of my children’s female peers who earn engineering degrees go directly to management consulting. I don’t know what the GPA cutoff is, but I think it would likely be 3.5.”
D was a finalist for a scholarship sponsored by a top consulting company. She knew her chance was not great as she was only a freshman. But the company had nice breakfast reception for them and presented them with networking opportunities and encouraged them to look into consulting for their future career. They even have a summer cohort!! Pretty smart recruiting techniques!
@collegedad13 “1 Don’t take classes from professors who are difficult to follow or who are totally unorganized
2. Don’t take classes from professors who have a history of being a harsh grader”
It might not be possible. Vandy has several math professors this year and they are all teaching cal 3. There is not RMP information for them and most of them never had any teaching experiences. You might be dealing with professors who just finish their PhD, and have no idea how to teach and give exams, but at the same time the requirement is to adhere to a dept policy on GPA(2.6). You might have a professor who is not testing new concepts learned, but time-consuming algebra which is busy work!
There are 2 different schools of though on grades. One is like you described in the quote – grades should distinguish the best students in the class from the typical students in the class, and a class where the majority of grades are A generally does not do this. The other school of thought is an A should indicate students who have excellent performance in the class, and if the majority of the class has excellent performance in the class, then the majority of the class should get an A. It’s been my experience that highly selective, private colleges usually fall somewhere between the two, including Stanford.
A’s are usually the most common grade at highly selective colleges, including Stanford among many others. For example, Yale provides cum laude honors for students with a top 30% ranking. Last year, the cutoff for top 30% was a GPA of 3.81. Yale grads needed a GPA of at least 3.95 to get the highest honors. Most highly selective, private colleges that publish GPA averages have an average GPA of the student body in the A- range, above 3.5. At less selective colleges where a smaller portion of the students to excellent work, the average GPA tends to be lower, in some cases as low as C/C+. You also see this effect in specific course sequences within the same college. I linked the a grade distribution of the advanced freshman physics series at Stanford earlier in the thread. Most received A’s, and there were almost no C’s. There are notably more C’s in the less rigorous freshman physics series, as the more advanced classes tend to attract a large portion of stellar students who do excellent work. A similar effect occurs with the grade distribution increasing for more advanced upperclassmen classes, that are rarely taken by non-major students.
However, this does not mean such colleges have no way to distinguish the the best “excellent students” from more typical “excellent students”. Earlier in the thread, I mentioned that it was my experience that Stanford professors reserve the A+ grade for something really unique/special that goes beyond just getting top grades on exams. Highly selective colleges usually offer some kind of “honors” designation for specific majors that often requires both getting A grades and taking more advanced versions of class than standard. Such colleges often give a wide variety of other distinctions for best in major/department/college, sometimes academic and sometimes other reasons. For example, the poster Mr. Tubbs on this forum received what is sometimes considered Stanford’s highest honor – the Dinkelspiel award, which is given to only 2 seniors each year. More detail about why he received the award is at https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/june/cuthbertson-dinkelspiel-gores-061112.html .
Those just finishing their PhDs presumably had teaching experience as TAs while doing their PhD study, right?