Ivy League... be prepared

or,

http://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwells-david-and-goliath-2013-10

And of course- there actually is no such subject as “STEM”. The mathematical capacity required to major in physics is not the same as the mathematical capacity required to major in math to become a middle school math teacher. Examining cohorts by “STEM” completely distorts the actual subject matter

My local community college tags all the allied health majors as studying “STEM”. True enough. But the intellectual horsepower required to become a phlebotomist or an ultrasound tech cannot be compared to what’s required to be a chemical engineering major, period full stop.

It’s a widely shared flaw here on CC, and very annoying to this never-had-any-interest-in-a-STEM-subject person (who wound up in a STEM-ey career nonetheless).

I’ve developed an active dislike for Gladwell. His message is far too simplistic and he demonizes elite schools in a way that’s undeserved and counterproductive. Fit is important. Self-knowledge is important. There is no one size fits all. Not every kid feels a need to be a “big fish.” Mine is quite happy to be swimming along with lots of excellent company. And there are different ways to be a “big fish,” not all of them academic. The kids at the so-called bottom of the class can be big deals in their ECs where they choose to concentrate their time and energy. It doesn’t seem to hold them back. Nor are elite schools ugly pools of competition with sharks and barracudas waiting for the weak kid to come along. There’s lots of collaboration and lots of support with multiple layers of advising that I certainly didn’t get from my state university.

In the drive to remind people that there are many high quality institutions of higher learning in the US, it seems that sometimes there is a rush to knock down the higher selectivity schools. I don’t normally feel the need to leap to the defense of any of these schools but the continued drumbeat of the negative messaging is a disservice to those who might actually flourish there.

I had 790 in SAT math and wanted to be a STEM major when I went to an Ivy. I found out I hated it, got close to 2.0 gpa in engineering, got a letter saying they might kick me out of the school and changed my major 4 or 5 times (I lost the count) until I graduated with English Lit. I didn’t love it (thought it was interesting) but at least I graduated with close to 4.0 GPA in English Lit major which allowed me to get into top 5 graduate school. I consider my UG education a success because I was able to explore many different areas regardless of grades I received, improved in my weak area and still get into a top graduate school. Basically, what I was good in, they didn’t teach in college. Lol

One good thing about going to a college for free (or nearly free) – which was the case in my case due to my parents’ poor financial situation – is that it’s easier to take this kind of “liberal” attitude towards one’s education and not sweat too much about getting bad grades. I would think if you were paying substantial money for UG, it might not be easy to have this kind of attitude. Now that my kid is about to head to Stanford as a fully pay, I did tell him several times not to be so serious about grades and focus on learning but I am not sure whether he will heed my advice. After I received a F, D and C in high school, it was a very liberating experience not to care too much about grades anymore. I am probably one of few people on CC who can say he received F, D, C, B and As in both high school and college.

@Dolemite : I have this feeling that Princeton ISP, like most very advanced renditions of intro. courses/sequences at other top schools is likely more lenient grading than standard versions of courses. Many students are just afraid of the additional workload or are uncomfortable with being challenged in certain ways so avoid those more advanced renditions even if technically qualified. Some really do believe their grade will suffer (they don’t know any better but usually such renditions come up with a grading scheme more likely to result in higher grades. Often this comes in the form of more non-high stakes exams/quizzes contributing to the grade than the standard course as well as a softer curve if the instructor chooses to give very challenging p-sets and exams). But usually it probably ends up about the same unless the student is way underwhelmed by the standard version so just blows it away and I think the latter is less common than folks think as discussed here in this forum. I went to Emory, and the general chemistry courses were made hard enough in most sections such that even most AP 4s and 5s got some sort of B (usually B/B+, occasionally B-. With the new curriculum adding significant doses of organic/conceptual chemistry, this is likely to be exacerbated. AP will afford a work ethic advantage but not too much of a content or problem solving advantage. This were also “boredom effects” among 4/5 students which is why I chose organic. Some gen. chem/bio/math, w/e students w/4s and 5s would expect it to be easy such that they had to do very minimal work and ace, but usually that would only be the case for maybe the first exam, and then that attitude would cost most of them dearly, and even many of those who adjusted still didn’t muster an A/A-). They were simply less likely to score a B- or something in the C range. Chances are, if those students had skipped to organic, they would have gotten roughly the same grade but would have felt more “uncomfortable” because of the competition and level of material. Students like comfortably making grades without feeling stupid. i don’t think most have a “growth mindset” as often HS teaches you the value of making things look easy and APPEARING “naturally” smart. Ego can be a part of education in both good and bad ways.

The typical high school grading scale (90% = A, 80% = B, 70% = C, 60% = D or similar) means that a typical high school course needs to evaluate with 70% easy test problems, assignments, etc. that C students (by high school standards) can pass. Most such problems and assignments would be quite easy for the A and B students who go on to college.

College courses do not necessarily have that type of grading scale, so more of the test problems and assignments may consist of more difficult problems suitable for A and B students (by college standards).

“Not every kid feels a need to be a “big fish.” Mine is quite happy to be swimming along with lots of excellent company.”

Yes. I used to take tour groups into the Memorial Hall transept and look at this window:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Memorial_Hall_Harvard_University_YACHAN_-_1.jpg

To me, being a Harvard student felt like being one brightly colored fragment in that gorgeous kaleidoscope of a window.

Jumping in on Gladwell - I find him very entertaining (especially his podcast, although the title is abhorrent) but when he is speaking on a subject I am familiar with I find a lot of flaws in his logic, which of course makes me question everything else…

An example was his report on Bowdoin having better food that Vassar, therefore Bowdoin cares less about student need. A perfect “post hoc ergo propter hoc” argument that doesn’t examine any other real data for correlation, such as possible sources, better vendors or better chefs. There was certainly no comparison data, nor any analysis of how much more aid Bowdoin could give if they had crappier food.

But I still listen to him – just more critically now.

In this case it’s not. The students that can’t put the time into it and would most likely get a low grade or fail drop down to the regular classes. This past year around 60 students started the curriculum but only 18 are finishing. The final cohort probably does average around a B and the number getting an A (not A-) is probably counted on one hand with fingers to spare.

@bluebayou "*Law school is nearly all about two numbers: GPA+LSAT, so attending Directional State U and earning a 4.0 increases the chances for Harvard Law over attending say, Princeton, and earning a 3.5 (LSAT being equal0.

I’m pretty sure that is not the case. If it was, the top law schools would have a hell of a lot more students from Directional State Us than they actually have, because all of the Directional State Us have a huge number of students who want to go to law school, and many of them are very good students who chose to go to their state school to save money. Many thousands have 4.0 gpas and so forth.

Yet tiny Amherst College, which graduates 450 students a year, has more students currently enrolled at Yale Law School than the entire Southeastern Conference, which has 14 large universities and over 300,000 students. If your theory were correct, that would not be the case.

Sure, but directional State U has few folks able to score a 17x on the LSAT (the other ~half of the admissions equation).

And wrt Yale, its bottom quartile is 170, a number that the vast majority of Amherst students could achieve with solid prep. Only Vandy in the SEC has a similar quality of high testers. In contrast, most grads of Ole Miss could never hit a 17x.

Yale and Stanford are special cases, and can pick and choose from the cream of the crop, bcos they have such small classes…

But let’s look at the Harvard Law. To maintain its LSAT medians, HLS has to accept the vast majority of high LSAT testers (that the other top law schools do not take by offering $$$$ merit money). There aren’t just enough 17x’s to go around. So, a 4.0/173 from any U has an ~80% chance of admission to HLS. Sure, the Amherst app will get first read and first offer, but the directional state U app will get in as well, eventually.

Blue- so it is your contention that the 17X/ 4.0 scorers from directional state u’s who attend Thomas Cooley and other low ranked law schools are CHOOSING to go there vs. the other, better law schools they got into?

Methinks no.

Are there many/any 17x/4.0 students “choosing” Cooley? Based on the 25th and 75th percentile LSAT scores at Cooley, a 170 would be ~4 standard deviations above the mean, so a chance of 1 in ~100,000 chance of a Cooley student having a 170+ LSAT score in a normal distribution. Maybe a few higher scoring choose to go there for the 100% honors scholarship?

If you look at admission scattergrams for Harvard Law, there is a much stronger correlation between stats and admission than for the undergrad colleges that are usually the focus of this forum. However, there are also many exceptions. Sometimes students scoring in the 160s and/or having GPAs in the low 3s get in (may be hooks), and sometimes students scoring in a near all acceptance region get rejected. They say they consider a wide range of criteria besides stats, so exceptions are expected.

A list of undergrad colleges that Harvard’s recent Law School class attended is at https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/undergraduate-colleges/ . There are ~200 colleges on the list. Selective colleges are over-rerpresented as one would expect, but there are also plenty of less selective colleges like Grand Valley State, Montana State, Mississippi State, etc.

Actually I think you covered almost all the less selective colleges in your examples…

There are numerous others. Some that accept that majority of applicants are Arizona State, Fairleigh Dickinson, Florida State, Goshen College, Knox College, Mercyhurst University, Oklahoma Christian University, Pace University, Saint Louis University, Saint Xavier , Spelman College, Ohio State, UT Dallas, UT El Paso, University of Central Florida, University of Colorado – Denver, University of Kansas, University of Louisville, University of Nebraska, University of North Texas, University of Northern Iowa, University of North Dakota, University of South Carolina, Wheaton College, and many others.

@Dolemite : Attrition in top level freshman renditions is common regardless of the overall grading distribution that will result. I had it in my frosh ochem class, but let us keep it real and recognize that many will quit when faced with the potential with a failing grade of B, B- or C+. Trust me, this is more than enough to send a bunch of formally perfect freshman packing. They kind of expect the instructors to go easier because they are just freshman, and then they don’t. Again, folks are wrapped up in their egos, and some think they have control over the instructor (I remember when many students in my cohort complained: “You focus on exceptions to the rules which is a bad way to teach”…this was really code for:“I expected to memorize reactions and not have to think through high level applications and build models to explain exceptions because I am just a freshman” The sad fact is, many sophomores expect that type of learning too). All it takes is discomfort and worry about one non-A or lower than a B+ grade and students will withdraw or not return the following semester. Students are sensitive about maintaining appearances of perfection and feeling as if something is relatively challenging. And perhaps some are rightfully sensitive, though I think many take it too far.

@ucbalumnus : I’m talking more of a cultural thing. For example, people often get discouraged from pursuing math because they are not paid much attention when they work hard for the achievement in HS, but the person who appears to make it look easy is the only one rewarded. The fact that neither party has usually not been truly challenged is a different issue, but certainly feeds into a lot of the discomfort students face when a college instructor decides to challenge them. A challenging course in college often looks a lot different from the class everyone called hard in high school (at many high schools, the course may just encompass lots of busywork and a high graded workload and relatively simple or no higher than “medium” level exams. In college, there may be some work to keep up with, but the instructor is writing exams that put items that will ultimately separate A from B, and B from C, etc. And this is exacerbated in challenging instructors at many elites because writing an exam with an 80+ average is just not that informative if you are trying to get students to reach for the upper tiers in Bloom’s taxonomy).

People are complaining about instructors who design difficult exams, but the fact is, in STEM, they reflect the fields. You just don’t know everything, and it is about relative knowledge, and a group who can think of a way to gain important knowledge or come up with a great model before others is rewarded (and some models published do end up being wrong). I have never seen folks rewarded with a Nature paper for reproducing something that has already been fleshed out. This could be asking a bit much from early university students, but I think some exposure to the idea is nice even if uncomfortable. Usually instructors who put lots of higher level items in free response questions are trying to just gauge whether students have a great enough grasp of material to sort of think outside the box or at least apply to a more complex scenario and then reward the students who can with something between a B+ and A.

Others who are average and can only consistently do portions of the exam requiring mostly memorization and sort of basic understanding get B-/B at most elite publics and privates, and to me this makes sense because their high achievement in HS usually indicates that they are already great at just being obedient and addressing problems and problem types they have essentially seen before. Some professors just say: “I want to get you to the next level as early as possible”. I personally don’t like the concept that small differences in performance on a low level exam should make big differences in grades. If the exam is memorization based, chances are students will not retain information after the course. When instructors demand something far beyond that, students who want to succeed will use less surface learning and are more likely to retain content, and even if not that, they will take away the problem solving and analytical skills gained from the course. If not anatomy or physiology, students at elites (or anywhere) should be doing more than just memorizing, even if it makes exam means in the 50s or 60s. Some shock therapy needs to be applied to shake folks out of the idea that science’s answers are just known and that only simple contexts are relevant for them because “I’m pre-med” or “I’m a freshman”. They also should say: “But I am at a highly selective school, so this is what I should expect or embrace”. Plus most have robust tutoring, peer mentoring, and other support systems associated with those courses. I know some under-perform because they do not like asking for help or indeed believe “I should be able to get away with doing book problems and memorizing notes” even though higher level p-sets (graded or not) and old exams are released by instructors.

Say what? Is there any data source anywhere that shows a 17x/4.0 attends Cooley? (That would just be foolhardy since many T20 schools would throw big merit money at such an applicant, including a possible full tuition at some of the T14…)

Again, Harvard enrolls 550-600 students every year. To keep its median of 173, it HAS to accept nearly every high scorer; simple math. (There just ain’t that many high scores to go around.)

I love to use chemistry visuals:
Thank you Berkeley for these publicly available resources!
https://tbp.berkeley.edu/exams/1235/download/

Would one like grades in a university level organic chemistry course at a highly selective school to be decided based upon performance on a test only comprised of items 6b and 4, or would one be more comfortable using items like the other problems to to draw distinctions (Sadly, even many instructors at top tier schools design exams mostly full of 6b and 4 and really none like the rest or the rest is so low weighted that it has minimal impact) between student performance. I mean, getting a B because you forgot to fill in some reagent that the reaction schemes of an actual research paper would tell you to use, versus being able to propose explanations or mechanisms for things you haven’t directly seen before? If I am training future chemistry majors (as are most instructors teaching a freshman organic section) or potential science majors/students who will do undergraduate research, I will take the latter for 500 please! Although I am sure the former pettiness will lower a lot of students’ blood pressures.