Ivy League... be prepared

Is it a surprise to anyone that the Ivies and the other top 20 schools are all difficult? If you major in chemistry, physics, engineering, or a few other especially challenging majors, your study time will be very high, and grades will be lower than in other majors. Doesn’t everyone know these things?

I think people see the average GPA at the ivies be above 3.5 think students get mostly As and Bs for if they put in a decent amount of work. They’re surprised for sure that freshman stem classes give Cs, and maybe they thought they were stronger STEM students than they actually are.

@theloniusmonk

“I think people see the average GPA at the ivies be above 3.5 think students get mostly As and Bs for if they put in a decent amount of work. They’re surprised for sure that freshman stem classes give Cs, and maybe they thought they were stronger STEM students than they actually are.”

I agree with this. The idea that the Ivies are only difficult can seem right from the outside, but the students who get in quickly learn that that is not an accurate picture.

Especially in the STEM courses, many of the Ivies give a lot of Cs, Ds, and Fs. The idea that the grades are too high does not exist on the inside. There are a lot of very stressed science, and engineering students at Cornell, Columbia, Penn, and Princeton. For example, may CS programs are either theory, or practice focused. However, the Ivies will tend to expect students to have an extensive knowledge of both. The CS tests may be theory focused and sometimes require an extensive math background (e.g., you can’t do it if you don’t thoroughly understand eigenvectors), while they also assigning time-consuming weekly hands-on projects with rather extensive requirements. You may not be able to tell from looking at any one assignment how strong the CS program is, you have to see the aggregate of what is expected.

The thing that all the Ivies know well is how to take outstanding students, humble them, and push them to their absolute limits. You will get a more accurate picture of the quality of their programs if you look at the average salaries and placement by major instead of the rankings.

@bluebayou you said: “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.”

The problem with this theory is that there are literally millions of graduates of Directional State U’s every year. Like I pointed out before, the SEC alone has over 300,000 undergrads, and that includes Vanderbilt. Many of those people at Directional State Us are very good students who chose to stay in state to save money, and statistically there are going to be some of those millions of graduates who are going to score well on the LSAT. Amherst, in contrast, graduates 450 students a year, and I suspect less than 50 of them per year choose to apply to law school.

There has to be more to the equation than just GPA times LSAT.

@Data10 you said: “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”

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."

Sure, but this is misleading. Most or all these schools have one student out of the 2000 currently at Harvard Law. And for every less selective college that does have one there, there are ten other less selective colleges that are not listed because they have zero students who got in. Meanwhile, every elite college has numerous, even scores, of students at Harvard Law.

I realize this is probably a stupid question, but how do you put someone else’s comments into a quote box?

It is rather easy to look up each SEC school on IPEDS and see what at the SAT/ACT quartiles are. For example the top quartile for Ole Miss is 29/1230. Of those, only a much smaller precent have the ability to ace the LSAT.

Perhaps, but as you rightly point out, many prefer to stay in state/in region for professional school, where a high LSAT is not required for admission. So, no need to prep for it.

At the smaller schools (Yale, Stanford, and even Chicago), yes, but the others are very numeric, including Harvard Law. Go check out any law school website, including that on cc.

Good CS major programs, not necessarily at Ivies, expect both.

Like this:

The current class of ~550 included students from nearly 200 schools. It’s not all just ivies or highly selective colleges. A significant portion of the class attended less selective colleges. It’s also important to note that the total number of students from a particular undergrad colleges is nearly irrelevant without knowing the number of qualified applicants who applied. As has been noted, HYP have a tremendously larger portion of top LSAT scoring students in their undergrad class than direction states, and for a variety of reasons the top LSAT scoring students at HYP are tremendously more likely to apply to H for law than the very few top scoring students at a far away direction state. It should come as no surprise that HYP… undergrads are tremendously over-represented in the H law class.

A scattergram for Harvard law admissions is at http://harvard.lawschoolnumbers.com/stats/1718 . If you click on the dots of the students who are getting in with lower stats than expected, the lower stat admission does not correlate with attending HYP… for undergrad, as would occur if Harvard Law was favoring students attending such schools. Instead it’s highly correlated with being a URM. And if you look at the minority who get rejected with stats in the usually admission region it is not correlated with attending a less selective college. Instead, the user often makes a comment about holistic factors like. “Looking back a lot of my stuff (personal statement, resume, optional essays) weren’t great. Hopefully I’ve improved them.”

Many people have said that if the average grade on an exam is 40% that means the professor is doing something wrong. For STEM type classes, I’d like to offer a different point of view. College STEM courses are typically not about doing “exercises” where you apply exact methods you learned in class, but about solving “problems” where you take the material you’ve learned an apply it to a novel and difficult problem. that requires not only knowing the material but a spark (or two) of novel insight into how one might approach it. And doing that can be hard even when you fully understand all the material. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a prof to write an exam that asks students to solve hard problems knowing that even if they fully understand the material, they’ll probably only be able to put the pieces together quickly enough to solve about half of them, and really only expecting that. And to me that’s a reasonable exam, as long as they’re planning to curve it. And actually having more options to find problems you can do some or all of is not a bad thing for the student. (I’d personally prefer to see those tests as take home exams where you have a week or two to work on it, but there are academic integrity challenges with offering exams in that format.) The exams where the average is closer to 20 are probably the ones where the prof underestimated how elusive that spark of insight would be.

Don’t assume that if the average grade on an exam is 40% that means that the average student only understood 40% of the material. These exams are not checkboxes of material understood, but challenging tests of application under time pressure.

But this change from rote exercises to challenging problems is a wake-up for almost everyone. The kids who have done things like a math contests or especially the math talent searches that let you spend a month working on problems have at least some insight into what it means to look at a problem where you know all the relevant math and still need to work really hard to figure out which parts to apply and how. I do think that if exams are going to be like this, then problem sets should be as well. That was where I got my first college wake up call – “omg I can’t do my calculus homework!”

At the end of my first semester, I looked back at some of the “super challenging” math competitions from HS and thought to myself, “wow, these were really pretty straightforward!” And that’s when I knew I’d really learned something, despite the fact that we’d all been required to re-start back at Calc 1 “to make sure we’d all be on even footing.”

Problem solving may be an important aspect of stem classes, but its also a teachable skill. A test with a 40% average looks more like and ambush than a teachable moment. Why weren’t the students being asked to solve these kinds of problems all along? Why weren’t they part of the homework sets? That would give students an opportunity to practice and avail themselves of help in advance.

Hard problems might very well be part of homework sets, but the difference between exams and homework is that for homework you can go to office hours. The TA or professor might help you with the concepts or, especially if it’s a TA, straight-up guide you through the problem. For exams you’re on your own.

Chiming in super late here. I don’t think this is unique to an Ivy league experience. My ACT 34, #10 in her class had pretty much the same struggles in first year engineering. Failure to go to “all the things” i.e. office hours, the homework and tutoring labs before the very first round of tests was the common factor in bombing the first round of tests. As parents, we did what we were told to do, dropped her off, hugged her, made sure she had a thick mattress pad and a loaded up meal plan and then went kind of hands off. She assured us she had it. She thought she had it. She had no idea what was about to come. She recovered, put in a monstrous amount of time and prep and managed to pass it all but it was hard to watch. I wish I could say she was partying her butt off and was distracted. That was NOT the case. 17 hrs of physics, calc, chem, coding and seminar is a lot!

We are proud of her resilience and her perseverance and she did pull her GPA up a bit. But she found first year core engineering classes to be rather brutal as did most of her engineering friends. She learned to go to “all the things” but even then went into the Calc 2 final with an 89 average and encountered a brutally difficult final that she bombed and when you combine that with the obscure rule that determines one’s final grade = ended up with a C+ in the class and thankful since it could’ve been so much worse. She has friends who entered the final with a B, failed the final and ended up with a D in the class. Much frantic scrambling followed release of the grades because they will have to repeat the class.

She loves what she is learning though and will persist. She excelled in some areas but has learned what her weaker areas are for sure. We knew going in that she was an average smart kid, kind of a grinder who probably outworked her fellow classmates vs. outsmarting them naturally. Those characteristics will serve her well in the future hopefully. We also have come to realize (although we try not to point blame) that her high school was not very rigorous in STEM preparation. Solid, but not nearly as rigorous as she has learned others have had.

I agree with what others posted. Something is wrong with a system or the teaching when more than half the kids fail a test or the average on a test is a 50.

If students got accepted to Ivy schools. the average test should be higher maybe in the 80s. But if you have classes that are taught in Ivy schools that have a low average test. Then there’s problem

I found that with my child utilizing office hours and study groups was most helpful. I did hear that many parents complained as kids didn’t do well…only to find out that the kids were out partying and not studying the way they should (definitely appeared like poor time management). I think 1st year is a real learning curve, in so many ways.

Even when all of those things are the case, as they typically are, the exam might have a low raw percentage for an average. It’s like a math competition where only the very very few are expected to get a high percentage of the problems correct, and getting half of them puts you at a very high percentile and is to be lauded. Writing an exam that hard isn’t an ambush, it’s an opportunity for the very brightest of the bright to show it. The “normal level of brilliant” kids still get out of there with As and Bs after the curve. Again, getting only a small raw percentage of the problems correct in a limited time is not a sign of a lack of mastery of the topic. Problem solving can be taught, yes, but you can’t really “master” it – every hard problem requires one or more bursts of insight, and sometimes they just elude you. With practice, you get better at finding them, you can learn common patterns, and so on, but still, sometimes a problem will elude you. A test having a low raw average does not mean problem solving isn’t being taught/learned. It just means that even then, problem solving is still really hard, when you are presented with hard enough problems. Being given the opportunity to struggle with those super-hard problems is a great learning experience.

Every kid at a top school was at the top of their class in HS. They’re all very bright kids. But they’re not all going to be A students in a tippy top school. There are now kids even brighter than they are. As my DS11/15 said after his first midterm in his first calc class in an Ivy engineering program,“here, I’m just average at calculus.”

The point of a college class isn’t to make it so everyone who goes to class does the homework can get a 95+. A grade doesn’t have any inherent meaning outside the context of the school and program it was earned in. It’s easy to think that “all these kids are totally A students and shouldn’t get anything below an A unless they goof off” but that’s not the way many top schools see their mandate for assigning grades. It’s not a direct measure of “amount of mastery” – it’s also a comparison to other students in the school and the program, and sometimes, when you have reached for a challenging school/program where you’re really going to learn and be challenged, often you’re not the top of the class anymore. And that’s in no way a bad thing or a sign that anyone is doing anything wrong. As long as grades are understood in the context in which they’re earned, there’s no harm in earning Bs and Cs.

My son graduated 3 years ago without any honors, and has gone on to excel in his field. He’s very happy with the education he got and the opportunity to work with professors who were innovators in their fields, and students who were as smart as himself, and then some. When asked if he would recommend the (often stressful) experience to his younger brother, he said “yes” with surprising speed and conviction. Once kids escape the expectation that they “should” be able to get all As, they can appreciate truly being challenged for the first time, and really learn something.

Those exams with a 40% median score, where you look back once you see the solutions and realize that you could have solved every problem, if you’d only thought of the clever approach that now seems obvious… it reminds students that just because there isn’t an obvious solution doesn’t mean that there isn’t one, or that you don’t know enough to find one. Sometimes you just have to keep looking for that clever insight that will break it open. And… the struggle under pressure to try to find those solutions is part of developing a mind that gets better and better at it. (And you just don’t get the time pressure aspect with problem sets.) It’s not only an evaluation, it’s part of the process. As long as the prof is ultimately fair about assigning grades, the low median score isn’t an indicator than anything is wrong, and is often an indicator that everything is just as it should be, and that students are being asked to really stretch in ways they aren’t yet accomplished at, but will get better at because of the ask.

Why does there seem to be the expectation that all college tests must adhere to the high school grading scale (90% = A, 80% = B, 70% = C), so that they must consist of mostly easy problems that C students can do, with very little of the test to distinguish C versus B versus A students?

@LvMyKids2 At the risk of sounding like “one of those parents” I can 100% assure you that was not the case here. There were times I WISHED she was out partying and having more fun.