Many great researchers are also good teachers. And I know of at least one couple at an LAC who both were tenure track - she got tenure he didn’t even though his teaching evaluations were much better than hers. They were frustrated to say the least - and they’d gone to this LAC because they were more interested in teaching than in doing groundbreaking research. (They had PhDs in bio from Caltech.)
This varies by school, college, and department a lot. At many places an inability to teach can mean not getting offered tenure especially in non-STEM areas. Giving a lecture on a topic is a general part of the interview process so it can effect the ability to be hired in the first place.
There is something to be said for having Teaching Faculty for the introductory and mid-level classes. The real benefit of being taught by an expert in the area/field is really only in the upper level and grad classes.
I went to an extremely difficult college, but it’s one most of you would not know. I was a top student at a very good high school, scored well on the SAT/ACT, took difficult classes … but then I went to college with a whole school full of students like me. The profs graded on a curve. We had to take a ridiculous credit load (18-23/semester). It was crazy hard. Lots of students flunked out. I had to work incredibly hard to figure out how to be successful. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Since we are throwing bad Ivy+ profs under the bus…
My S just had this guy: “PhD, Cambridge U, nmber theory and combinatorics” for a Math Theory course.
Worst teacher he ever had…so far! Talked about how lucky they were to have him. The grad student TA blew the prof away and English was not even the TAs first language.
I had this guy for Algorithms 1 and 2 (no other choice for either course). “PhD. Harvard CS” but was really a mathematician with this review from someone else which is very accurate IIRC:
“He was not a hard teacher. He was just weird. He was bitter about his schoolmate Bill Gates making billions while he makes peanuts. He spent two lecture days just talking about Bill and how he bought an ice cream for him (That BG never paid). Worst teacher. Worst class.”
Best Prof I ever had was PhD from Pitt (Undergrad in India). No one in a department full of Ivy/MIT Phds (including a TURING AWARD WINNER) could touch this guy for teaching. I saw him a few years ago at a Richard Stallman presentation and he couldn’t remember my name, but did remember what course I was in.
Yes, ability to teach lower level courses to students who may not have previous exposure to the general subject may be different from the ability to teach upper level or graduate courses to students who have extensive prior knowledge of the general subject through previous course work.
One thing I’d note about this is the assumption is that the course is tough because OP’s daughter is in an Ivy League college…but these courses are tough at pretty much every top 100 college…in some cases, they’re knock-out courses that are designed to wake up the kids who might not realize whether a major is right for them.
I so appreciate all the perspective(s) in this thread… definitely has filled in some misinformation I had as a parent.
Here are a few take-aways for success in stem/math/science classes:
- Do not just do the book problems make sure to rework old test questions on your own… not just in a group.
- Find a good study group
- Make sure to attend as many office hour, tutorials, as possible… from the beginning.
- Make sure you “know” where you stand in a class after the first mid-term
- Do not just rely on peer advisors meet with the actual professor to see how you are doing in the class
- Most top programs weed-out in the introductory courses… get a tutor asap if you are struggling
- Get solid advice on whether AP credit should be used before moving onto the next course
- Just because you made A’s in high school does not mean you will make A’s or B’s in college courses.
- Realize that test questions will require more than a chug and plug mentality… find sources that allow you to apply the math to real world type problems.
I am sure I have missed some other suggestions… thanks again for all the input.
Intentional weeding (often for capacity reasons) in terms of requiring grades higher than C or GPA higher than 2.0 or competitive admission to the major should be checked specifically for the college and major of interest, rather than making general assumptions.
Highly selective Ivy League type private colleges rarely have the intentional weeding ucbalumnus described above. Instead they often allow major capacity to grow to support student needs, offer a special programs to help students be academically successful, and give few lower grades in classes. Many encourage a collaborative atmosphere instead of competitive. Some have special programs that reduce the impact of freshman year grades, such as MIT’s first semester being graded P/F. This leads to highly selective private colleges often having low relatively low engineering attrition rates, far lower than typical colleges. Instead it’s often common for more students to major in engineering/CS than expected based on freshman surveys.
For example, in the Harvard class of 2017 freshman survey, 19% said they planned to study something in the school of engineering and applied sciences. In the corresponding Harvard senior survey the same 19% said they completed a degree in SEAS. In the entering Stanford class of 2017 survey, 25% of students said they were interested in engineering and CS. 39% graduated with degrees in engineering and CS. In the MIT freshman survey, 24% expressed an interest in CS, and 31% graduated with a degree in CS.
The only Ivy League school that I know of that does intentional weeding of engineering students is Cornell, with a 2.5 GPA needed for engineering students to declare a major. 2.5 GPA is not that high compared to some other schools, and one would expect that most students with strong enough academic records to get admitted to Cornell engineering in the first place can get a 2.5 GPA or higher if they made a reasonable effort.
@ucbalumnus - I don’t know where you are getting your information about Cornell.
COE’s 4 year graduation rate is 86% ( https://www.engineering.cornell.edu/admissions/undergraduate-admissions/student-experience) and Cornell University’s 4 year graduation rate is 87%.
Most of my kids’ friends who went into Engineering at Cornell graduated with with an engineering degree. Not that many people transferred out of COE.
Doing a bit more research I found:
“The average GPA for SENIORS in engineering is around a 3.4, and it tends to increase over a student’s four years…”
I don’t know why schools would want to admit students and then weed them out.
Information comes from Cornell’s web site:
http://courses.cornell.edu/content.php?catoid=31&navoid=7878
Looks like some engineering majors do have GPA minimums less than 2.5, but only three out of thirteen are open majors (2.0 minimum).
@Dolemite the funny thing about my son’s school is that General Chemistry 1&2 are taught by experienced faculty (1 section is taught by the Chem department graduate advisor and the other by the undergraduate advisor) and those classes are considered well taught by the students. Even then it takes about an 80% average to get an A in the class. Although most students don’t complain and feel that they actually learned how to apply chemistry to their future classes.
Organic Chemistry in the same school is hit or miss at the same school with most students required to know the concepts, but the resulting curves are pretty low.
@cheetahgirl121 An addition to your list from post #126.
Just like your daughter took Calc and repeated the course in college it may be that some students knew the material from the next course in the sequence. My children attended a competitive high school that taught a significant amount of Linear Algebra during Sophomore year. When they took the course in college one half to two thirds was material they had already mastered.
High school education is not flat. My children and their friends met fellow students that still wrote 4 paragraph essays at top schools. Uff da.
@ucbalumnus - yes, they do have minimum requirements, but it doesn’t mean majority of students do not meet those minimums. It also doesn’t mean the school is not supportive of its students in meeting those requirements. COE of Cornell has 4 yr graduation rate of 86%. Their objective is not to weed out engineering students.
Those highly selective schools want to admit students who are going to succeed at their schools. Considering they have so many applicants, there is no reason why they would want to admit students who may not do well.
Exactly. The STEM professors are happy to have all the A, B (and C) students that they can get, as long as they work hard. But the point is that they are not trying to weed anyone out, its just that they will not just grade a class with only A’s and B’s, at least in lower division courses. Curves just go with the STEM territory, just like at every college.
I dunno, the B- I got in Calc 3 was a total gift. I suspect that I’d have gotten a D at a state school, based on how clueless I was. My three-dimensional visualization skills left something to be desired.
Seems like a lot of Cornell engineering majors get weeded out into Engineering Management, and yes, while that is an engineering degree it is the easiest.
In many lower division classes Ivy-type colleges, grades below B are quite rare, including some larger STEM classes. For example, the edulsa reported Stanford grades I linked earlier shows a few lower division STEM classes with all students reporting A grades, such as https://edusalsa.com/course?c=ENGR%20110 . However, such all-A classes usually either have a small sample size or are less techy STEM fields that involve subjective papers and such… I took a lower division class like this that related to renewable energy,. The professor mentioned that he didn’t like giving grades below A because he felt that the lower grades discouraged students .
If you look at more typical larger freshman intro STEM classes in objective fields like math and physics, then you generally do have some C’s, but they are often a small portion of the class. For example, I mentioned the advanced freshman physics series that I took at Stanford earlier in the thread. You can see an example reported grade distribution for the class at – https://edusalsa.com/course?c=PHYSICS%2061 . The distribution is approximately 65% A, 33% B, 2% C or lower. The last course in the sequence has no C or lower grades reported. This roughly matches my experience with the class grading as well. It makes sense to me that a class full of exceptional students like this would have few students earning C grades, so you would see few C grades. However, many of the most popular freshman STEM classes are not that different. In many years, Stanford’s most popular class is CS 106a. The fall enrollment is often near 1000 students. Students from a wide variety of majors take it, far more than just top CS students or even just STEM majors. Instead the top CS students are likely to skip over this class and start out at 106b or 106x. Nevertheless, the grade distribution is not that different from the advanced physics series – approximately 64% A, 32% B, 4% C or less.
In classes where a large portion of students get A grades, professors can indicate exceptional students with the A+ grade. Some reserve the A+ grade for doing something special/rare that goes beyond just high scores on exams and problem sets. I only received a few A+ grades, and each one related to something special like this. Some examples are:
– Finding solutions on an EE exam that the professor hadn’t considered
– Original ways of solving problems in a stat class instead of just following textbook (HS teachers used to penalize me for this)
– Winning final project programming competition in a CS class