<p>What the heck is the ivy shark analogy? I've never heard of it.
I've heard of the Stanford duck analogy though...</p>
<p>Ivies generally have cutthroat competition.</p>
<p>bump .</p>
<p>fuzzylogic, you mean competition of admission, right?
i've seen many articles about private school grade inflation, some even published by the school's student newspaper talking about its own institution's low standards of grading. i wouldn't think ivies would have cutthroat competition once you get there.</p>
<p>oh and i think the shark analogy goes something like ivy leaguers are like sharks and they don't let anyone else swim in the pool. or something like that.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Ivies generally have cutthroat competition.
[/quote]
I don't think you get a lot of students who actually go to Ivy league schools or other top tier schools who will support this statement ... are some of these schools tough; yup ... but cutthroat nope; when things are tough it's more like the students against the big bad prof than student against student</p>
<p>As I understand it, students at ivies are willing to do anything to pump up their grade- even create fake study groups to throw people off. This may not be true at Harvard or Yale but is supposed to be true at the grade deflating ivies like Princeton and Cornell.</p>
<p>I'm not sure how far this is accurate since it is all hearsay.</p>
<p>I'd suggest you ask on the forum of those schools. Are there anedotal stories of cutthroat behavior (stole the reference book from the library so no one else could use it)? sure ... but the vast-vast majority students are not like that at all. Did grads of these schools tell you this? Or is that what people have heard about these schools? Ask the people who go there. </p>
<p>3togo ... Cornell grad undergrad ... the ultimate grade deflated environment ... whose main selling point of Cornell is how great the fellow students are.</p>
<p>Hm, at UPenn, I saw a bunch of cutthroat individuals.</p>
<p>Then again, at UPenn, you had the people all competing to get the same internships and etc.</p>
<p>So yeah. They're nice people though, at the end of the day -- and I was told that everyone understands that competition was competition.</p>