I don’t know what it was like in 1984 but today lots of women in college and in the workforce still face challenges related to their gender. There are even cases at the Ivies where women in some of the tech fields are graded more harshly than men.
@collegedad13 what are examples you have at Ivy league schools where women in “tech fields are graded more harshly than men” ? A University of Akron male professor has just run into trouble for automatically raising the grades for women in his class in an effort to address the issue of women in STEM (which seemed to be his rationale).
@ucbalumnus , my DH got his PHD in ME from UIUC and never did TA, RA only. Some of the new professors are from other counties too, I am not sure if European PhD candidates usually have TA experience, for example.
The higher caliber of thought expected at elite universities is something to take into consideration before deciding to attend. On these boards it is often taken as a given that high achieving students want to end up surrounded by the most accomplished and challenging peers, but this is not necessarily the case. Moreover, kids may feel pressure to express this desire even when its not really what they want. How many kids have the courage to say, “No, I would rather not push myself to the fullest extent and be surrounded by the best and the brightest?”
But there is a downside. Those kids who get pushed to the fullest and drop out of STEM classes might have made fine scientists had they not been knocked out in the early rounds by the extra rigor expected at the elite schools. I recently had a long conversation with a chemistry professor at one of the CUNY Schools. He occasionally tutors kids taking chemistry at Columbia and has confirmed that the difficulty is tremendously greater for the Columbia Pre-meds. However, the kids from his CUNY classes go on to med school and do very well there – even with the “lesser” preparation they got in their foundation classes. How many of the Columbia pre-meds that are weeded out might have gone on to become successful physicians had they chosen a less elite path?
Honestly, this is a major consideration for our family at the moment since my D2 has her heart set on medicine. Those “lesser” schools will not only be orders of magnitude more affordable but might actually be better at getting her where she wants to go. I know there is a lot of controversy on this point and many here will disagree with me. We have a lot of research left to do, but it is certainly something we are weighing.
While I get that there are times you may want to do this, I see nothing wrong with having say a Calculus 1 course where you say, this is what you should know by the end of the semester, and if everyone knows the material at the end of the semester perfectly - then they all get A’s. What’s the harm in that? Who cares that at some higher level some will become mathematicians and some will just know enough calculus to become architects? (That would be me - and I whizzed through the final exam before the half way mark.)
I always thought it was a shame that my younger kid who liked math and science felt intimidated from taking more advanced courses, because he needed to not tank his GPA any more than Arabic already had.
Funny about students being told to take summer classes at Santa Clara as back in the day my alma mater was pretty notorious for grade deflation. I’m not sure what they are doing these days but I’m pretty sure SCU’s average GPA is way lower than most Ivies/Stanford.
Some of the kids that say they are pre med or engineering will change their minds or not do as well as they expected going in, regardless of school.
sry, my bad on the earlier post. It’s not a full year of Organic Chem in the summer, but physics:
@bluebayou this article is from 2008. Has anything changed since then?
“sry, my bad on the earlier post. It’s not a full year of Organic Chem in the summer, but physics”
That’s still a little surprising, though not as surprising as ochem, which med schools would closely look at in terms of grade (letter, p/f etc) and where and when it was taken. I can’t believe med schools would be ok with a Stanford student taking the weed out class at another place. But Physics is still part of the math/science gpa (or whatever they call it) so the grade is not going to be counted by the med school. I’m also assuming Stanford will transfer the credits and not going to count any grades in the GPA that’s not taken at Stanford.
This is a little odd, but you’re at Stanford in stem, why would you take a stem class somewhere else? I can see maybe taking a humanities or social science class in the summer to fill a H&SS elective for stem students so you can take more classes in your major or travel abroad as someone mentioned.
Some schools will restrict their students from taking science and math classes from certain schools.
WashU (the kid’s school) forbids Chemistry majors from taking Organic Chemistry from other schools. Biology/BME majors are not under the same restrictions and a lot of students take Organic Chemistry during the summer. They end up going to Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford to take their classes, since they are required to secure permission from the school before they are allowed to register.
I would definitely think that the quality of Stanford STEM would be higher than Santa Clara STEM.
As the article implied, some students have the perception that a lower level class means an easier A. When I was a student, it was common for pre-med students to choose the lowest possible level of intro math/science classes offered at Stanford – the least rigorous/slowest version of calculus, the lowest level of freshman physics that does not use calculus, etc. Apparently a minority go so far as to take classes at Santa Clara, or at least did so in 2008.
With Stanford’s holistic admission process and emphasis on things intellectual vitality out of classroom activities, they attempt to find students who are truly passionate about learning and their desired field, rather than those who are passionate about whatever increases their chance of getting an ‘A’ for pre-med. I think they are largely successful in this goal, and most pre-med students would prefer hearings Sapolsky’s incredible pre-med lectures about darting wild baboons in East Africa and measuring how hormonal state corresponded to baboon group dynamics over a “high school teacher” doing a summer class at Santa Clara, but there are exceptions.
But med schools may request transcripts from all institutions attended so the grade will not necessarily disappear.
Princeton and I’m sure other top schools invite/require some students to attend a Summer Institute to help get them up to speed. At Princeton the Freshman Scholars Institute includes 2 full credit classes - one in HUM and 1 in STEM w/ lab to help get them up to speed in those areas. The 2 classes also allow them to take a lighter load in Fall/Spring as they continue to adjust to the rigors of Princeton.
“I know the OP isn’t trying to convey snobbery, but the original post conveys a sense that ony students at Ivy colleges are in for a bumpy ride in terms of course rigor, etc…, but that just isn’t the case.”
I actually took it the other way, since ivy league colleges are known for handing out mainly A’s and B’s in their classes, as long as the students do some amount of work, encountering a rigorous class or professor where maybe Cs and Ds are possible was a surprise.
This is not surprising among GPA-chasing pre-med students at any school who take the minimum rigor needed to fulfill pre-med course requirements while earning as high a GPA as possible (A = acceptable, B = bad, C = catastrophic, D = disastrous, F = [use your imagination]).
Even at Stanford, the grade distributions for pre-med courses listed at https://edusalsa.com/ indicate that fewer than half of the students earn A grades in most of them, suggesting that they tend to grade lower than most courses at Stanford. (Stanford pre-med course recommendations are listed at https://stanford.app.box.com/s/oglgzh7ad0mm8e3bnhycn6gbwnqghtlg ).
“While I get that there are times you may want to do this, I see nothing wrong with having say a Calculus 1 course where you say, this is what you should know by the end of the semester, and if everyone knows the material at the end of the semester perfectly - then they all get A’s.”
Calc 1 has too many tough concepts for a general university class to have everyone know the material, especially if it’s their first time being exposed to the material. There are going to be kids that understand the concepts and kids that don’t know, and that will show up on the test. Now if you’re saying calc 1 at Cal Tech where all the kids have a 5 on the BC exam and have taken diff eq or m/v, sure I could see everyone knowing the concepts.
Calculus 1 (Ma 1a) at Caltech assumes that the entering frosh has had calculus in high school and emphasizes proofs and theory, so it is not really the same as a typical calculus 1 course where the expected prerequisites is precalculus.
^^one of the smartest kids I ever met went to Caltech. (1600 on SAT as an 8th grader, 44 on mcat). He aced variable Calc + another math course at a local UC while in HS.
Caltech would not accept any of those courses and required that he take Calc 1. Boom. First non-A test grade the kid had ever seen in his life. Ended up with an A- for the semester, but an A in every other course.