<p>It was sarcasm, of course…</p>
<p>@John: Posts 54 and 55 are satirical.
Where is the brightline at which one goes from a good student to a “prodigy”?</p>
<p>I see what you’re saying, but it seems to me that even a less remarkable student taking upper-division undergraduate or lower graduate math courses might still benefit from having a professor who is an expert and is advancing knowledge in that area. I can’t prove that, and I can’t even supply anecdotal evidence given that I have yet to go to college. But I don’t think you can show the converse either. And if there is doubt as to whether professor quality is important, it seems to me that the safest option is simply to err on the side of superior faculty credentials.</p>
<p>In post #56, you argue that KU probably should not be ranked above Smith. Why not? On what grounds are you making that judgment?</p>
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Tons of experience, but I can provide statistical evidence as well. Middle 50% ACT Smith: 27-30 KU: 22-27. Number in top 10% of high school class Smith: 66% KU: 27% I have to say those numbers are not even close. Now let me be clear. What I am really saying is that Smith is a far more academically competitive school than KU. Is it a better school? Only if that is your criteria, or if it is clearly better in some other criteria that is important to you than KU is. If going to a school with a great men’s basketball team is a top priority, then KU is a better school. I am not being flip when I say that; going to college means different things to different people. Besides, even if it is academics, if a student would wash out of Harvard because they are not smart enough, then KU is a better school, for them, than Harvard. But in the conventional sense that people use the term “better school”, Smith is better than KU.</p>
<p>With regard to the whole prodigy thing and grad level classes, I think we are losing sight of the point. Most research universities, especially those considered among the top 100 by USNWR, have plenty of offerings through the upper undergrad/lower grad level to keep the extreme vast majority of undergrads challenged. The point, or at least my point, is that the undergrad experience consists of so much more than one’s major, plus that most departments as I just said have plenty to offer. Focusing on and comparing/using the grad school rankings in making a decision on where to go undergrad is misguided, IMO. Clearly, feel free to disagree.</p>
<p>But to me given the multiple factors that should be used in evaluating schools to maximize the odds of having a great 4 years in the school of your choice, picking one because of this criteria could be a big mistake. Besides, when you go to grad school you have “chosen” your major so to speak. It is far more like a job. What happens if you picked an undergrad school based on the criteria you all are espousing and you find it isn’t at all the major for you? Then what, if you don’t like the other things about the school? Sure you can transfer, but that should be totally avoidable if a person takes a far broader view of things.</p>
<p>
You asked what research quality has to do with professor quality. I’ll ask what student ACT scores have to do with their academic quality as peers. What makes an ACT score a good indicator of a student’s value as a peer in a learning environment?
I wasn’t talking about offerings. Let’s look at a quote from the UMaryland CS department undergrad site:
Do I know that there’s truth in that statement? Of course not. But it feels right intuitively, and while that is not enough to prove the concept true I think it is enough to validate it as a criterion for consideration in the search process.</p>
<p>Does that mean that a student should take on major debt to attend a higher ranked department? Of course not. Should they attend a school where they are socially uncomfortable because of slightly higher-caliber research? Again, no. But while holding other factors constant, I don’t see why departmental research strength can’t play a role in the search process. Do you?</p>
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<p>Actually, I don’t think it is that rare, and I’m not talking about once-in-a-generation “prodigies” but simply people who go on to do original research in mathematics and become, say, math professors at elite (or even just very good) colleges and universities. Look, not to boast, but I was really good in math in my small public HS, and I got top scores on the SATs and such, but I had no idea how good I was or could have been when I got to college. My adviser in the University of Michigan honors program took one look at my math scores and said I really should be taking some math classes, recommending the standard honors sequence “if you don’t want to be a mathematician” and an accelerated track that would have had me taking graduate-level courses within a couple of years “if you do want to be a mathematician.” As it happens, I had absolutely no interest in being a mathematician. But I suspect every year a fair number of students enroll at the University of Michigan who are very good in math but similarly clueless about where they stand—not proven “prodigies” but with some fair potential. Could I have gone on to do original math research, get a Ph.D. from a top grad school, and end up on a good math faculty? Well, I still don’t know, because I just wasn’t that interested in math (though I suppose in a way that answers the question). I did do very well in my own chosen field, went on to top grad schools, and became a professor, so maybe I did have the aptitude for it. Had I been interested in math, the University of Michigan (it turns out) would have been an excellent place to study it, because their honors math program routinely has top math students taking graduate-level math classes and doing original research beginning as early as their first or second year of undergrad, all in one of the top math departments in the country. Read about it here:</p>
<p>[UM</a> Mathematics-About Honors](<a href=“http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/undergrad/abouthonors.html]UM”>http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/undergrad/abouthonors.html)</p>
<p>Notice the Michigan math department says they enroll 20-30 honors math students per year, people they deem eligible for this fast track. If there are 20-30 per year at Michigan there are surely several hundred per year at other top universities doing similar accelerated work in math—and possibly an equal number elsewhere who would be capable of doing math at this level, if they were enrolled in a program that had the resources to allow them to do so. For students who think they might fit into that category, the graduate rankings in math are a very good place to begin their college search.</p>
<p>@ noimagination -OK, now this is just getting silly. It has been long established that ACT scores and SAT scores correlate with IQ and performance in high school and college. Sure they are not perfect, but in aggregate they perform very well. Otherwise why keep using them? There are years of data on this and if you want to go to that level of challenging something that is so generally accepted, there is no discussion to be had.</p>
<p>
Ah, but that’s the rub. It would be exceedingly unusual for other factors to be constant in something as complicated as an entire university. But in the hypothetical of that situation, if one needed a tie-breaker? Sure, great. You win.</p>
<p>bclintonk - I will concede that under the conditions you describe, for math and maybe a couple of other areas, it could make sense. But it would still be a small minority, and I cannot see the same reasoning applying to most other subjects. Sure, the OP just asked about math, but I have seen this same question posed for biology, poli sci, chemistry, anthropology, economics, and a few others I am forgetting. So that certainly colored my answers. For the relatively narrow case you describe, it makes sense.</p>
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That’s a load of BS and here’s why…the top math students at state schools are fooled into thinking they are something special because their peers are vastly inferior(regular state school kids) and they can “rocket” through the math department and enter grad courses where they meet smart classmates for the first time.</p>
<p>If those 20 Honors Math students at Michigan went to Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Columbia, Duke, Stanford, etc., they would face much, much stiffer competition in their undergrad math classes and they would no exactly where their math ability lies relative to the top students in the country.</p>
<p>The idea of taking grad classes as a practice when you’re a junior or a senior is foreign and simply unheard of at the Ivies because you’re surrounded by such brilliant peers and the undergraduate classes are so challenging that it’s impossible to “rocket” through the math curriculum unless you’re REALLY a prodigy.</p>
<p>Take Harvard’s infamous Math 55, those Honors Math students at Michigan or Texas would drop out of the class and pick a different concentration after the first day when they realize they are surrounded by IMO medalists who are probably more talented than their state school professors.</p>
<p>^ What a load of BS. Looks like most Fields Medal winners are educated and teaching at public universities…Moscow State is quite prominent…;)</p>
<p>[Fields</a> Medal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Fields Medal - Wikipedia”>Fields Medal - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>Oh, spare me. Michigan’s got one of the top math departments in the country. The kids in the honors math program there come in with stats indistinguishable from undergrads at Harvard, Stanford, MIT etc., and compete against other honors math students in honors-only math classes until they move up to graduate-level courses where they compete against grad students, many of whom got their undergrad degrees from places like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc. They take classes from professors who got their Ph.D.s from places like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc. And a non-trivial fraction of the math professors at places like Harvard, Stanford, MIT etc got their undergrad or graduate math degrees from Michigan. Your gratuitous diatribe is just plain uninformed.</p>
<p>
You feel safe saying that IQ is important in a student’s peers but don’t want to conclude that a professor’s experience with their subject matters in the slightest? Why is a more intelligent classmate more important than a highly-recognized professor?</p>
<p>I feel like you ignored the fundamental question in my post #64 - is there value in having professors with more in-depth research experience with their field? If not, that would seem to imply that a prof’s lecture skills and personableness are what matter in a classroom environment with fixed content. If we accept that as true, a corollary presents itself: friendly, like-minded peers offer more in group-work settings than those who are very intelligent. This flows logically because you are arguing that a professor’s abilities in their field are irrelevant - in other words, that the content of their experience is irrelevant provided that they can convey others’ content well. This would be even more true with one’s peer group given the assumption that none of them are “prodigies” with experience already under their belts.
No, not at all. Human beings are rather adaptable creatures, and there are very few schools in this country that are so unique that they have no peers with similar environments. If a student were to examine the top 50 NRC-ranked math schools and select perhaps six that were fairly well matched and affordable, how is that a bad way to make a list?</p>
<p>You are mixing two different discussion points in the first part. You asked why was Smith, as it applied to refuting the Gourman rankings, is a better school than KU. I answered that, and it has nothing to do with professors’ experience in their subject matter. That is not quantified anywhere that I know of, and we were talking about the whole school in that case, not a particular department. Try to keep the arguments straight, please. Oh, and technically I didn’t say IQ in the way you are using it, I said the test scores were a well accepted proxy for the quality of the student body. I also cited class rank. Come on, please argue based on what I said and common sense, otherwise I will assume you are just trying to be antagonistic for the sake of it.</p>
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You had a whole argument with yourself there. I have no idea how to respond, other than to say you are taking my points too far. I wouldn’t say that a professor’s ability in their field is irrelevant, but it is way down on the list for the typical undergrad. Because again, most undergrads are not going to do cutting edge research. They may participate in some fashion, but they won’t be primary and it certainly won’t be anything other than part part time if they are taking a normal schedule of classes and they have a normal social life. There are always exceptions, and if someone knows they are an exception they can ignore everything I am saying. I am talking about the 98+% of students out there.</p>
<p>In fact, if you really want to get down to nitty gritty stuff, my anectodal experience is that by going to an undergrad school that had a limited graduate program compared to the powerhouses, I was able to do some research (chemistry) that actually got two papers with my name on it, and it wasn’t because I washed dishes. I was doing a senior thesis, the prof’s hypothesis was shown to be wrong after only 1 month of work, so I was left with a bit of a problem. He challenged me to take a week to think of something else to research (I had taken 4 grad level courses by then), I stumbled on a weird idea, he said it was worth a try but suggested a different element for one of the steps, and sure enough we had an amazing result that has also been cited in numerous textbooks on spectroscopy, specifically electron paramagnetic resonance. Is my point to brag? Well yes, but the larger point is that this school that was WAYYY down on the Gourman list compared to many, had those upper level courses, allowed me to do research, and was way more than adequate to prepare me for a top 5 grad school. Going to a school with a higher ranked department (according to Gourman) could not have prepared me better, and in fact there were NO undergrads doing chemistry research in the labs at the high powered school, only those on work-study to wash dishes. That is how I know, besides many years working with these colleges and seeing a lot first hand.</p>
<p>As far as people being adaptable, well of course they are, most of the time. Although you don’t have to read many posts on CC to know it often is not true. In any case, most people have fairly strong opinions about preferable size, weather, the quality of the dorms and food, the prominence of the Greek scene, the sports scene, etc. For this to be a total match at two schools is very unlikely. People might have trouble deciding because of the “unknown” aspect of going to college, but that would be equally true of the whole professor and their ranking issue. It tells you nothing about how nice they are, how good a teacher they are, how much they even teach, etc. As you say you have little experience with this. You will see.</p>
<p>Duke is not a mathematics powerhouse either. Once again someone is placing the Duke name in with HPMS where it doesn’t belong.</p>
<p>NRC Rankings in Mathematics</p>
<p>1 Princeton 4.94
2 Cal Berkeley 4.94
3 MIT 4.92
4 Harvard 4.90
5 Chicago 4.69
6 Stanford 4.68
7 Yale 4.55
8 NYU 4.49
9 Michigan 4.23
10 Columbia 4.23
11 Cal Tech 4.19
12 UCLA 4.14
13 Wisconsin 4.10
14 Minnesota 4.08
15 Cornell 4.05
16 Brown 4.04
17 Cal San Diego 4.02
18 Maryland 3.97
19 Rutgers 3.96
20 SUNY Stony Brook 3.94
21 Illinois 3.93
22 Penn 3.87
23 Texas 3.85
24 Rice 3.82
25 Purdue 3.82
26 Washington 3.76
27 Northwestern 3.71
28 Ohio State 3.66
29 Johns Hopkins 3.65
30 CUNY 3.65
31 Brandeis 3.64
32 Illinois Chicago 3.58
33 Indiana 3.53
34 Duke 3.53</p>
<p>hawkette should be so proud. Her Alma Mater is rated higher than Duke in mathematics too!</p>
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The connection is actually pretty simple:</p>
<ol>
<li>You conclude that Smith is superior to KU based on the “quality” of the students.</li>
<li>You measure that quality based on test scores and class rank, which attempt to quantify both academic ability and academic experience.</li>
<li>So, you are arguing that the ability and experience of one’s fellow students with regards to academic inquiry are relevant to their ability to foster a good learning environment.</li>
<li>Departmental peer assessment rankings (ie NRC) are a proxy for the “quality” of the natural abilities and research experiences of the professors in those departments.</li>
<li>My question is simple: why aren’t the academic abilities and experiences of one’s professors relevant to their ability to foster a good learning environment? If it’s true for one’s peers, wouldn’t it be even more true for the people who you are paying tuition $$$ to learn from?</li>
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<p>Your second paragraph is a very high-quality anecdote that contributes a good deal to the discussion. I appreciate your willingness to offer it.
I’m not convinced that most students are so certain of their opinions about all conceivable factors that they wouldn’t adapt nicely to multiple schools. More to the point, if they find schools that are a good fit within a highly-ranked group it hardly matters whether they might also have done well elsewhere.</p>
<p>I want to be very clear about something:
Due to my lack of personal experience with this issue, I am not necessarily averse to changing my current opinions. Your argument that professor experience is of limited importance may very well be true - it certainly makes sense on some levels. I think it is acceptable to then conclude basically the same about one’s peers, following the logic in my points above.</p>
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<p>Can both of you please explain Michigan’s poor performance in the Putnam Math Competition (the most prestigious intercollegiate mathematics competition then)?</p>
<p>[William</a> Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition - Wikipedia”>William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>MOST TOP 5 FINISHES SINCE 1990
Harvard: 19
MIT: 14
Princeton: 13
Duke: 12</p>
<h2>Waterloo: 8</h2>
<h2>-</h2>
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<p>Michigan: 2</p>
<p>MOST FIRST PLACE FINISHES AS OF 2009
Harvard: 27
Caltech: 9
MIT: 6
Toronto, WUSTL: 4</p>
<h2>Duke, MSU, Brooklyn College: 3</h2>
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<p>Michigan: never had a first place finish</p>
<p>I guess even MSU has enrolled more “top Math scholars” than Michigan in the past.</p>
<p>With regards to enrolling the TOP math students in the country, Duke DOES belong with HPMS.</p>
<p>Sorry bclintonk, but it’s an outright lie that Michigan’s best math students are on par with those that enroll at Princeton, MIT, Stanford and Harvard. They would be at the latter four schools if they had been accepted.</p>
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<p>First of all I think your name is completely wrong. You have a very creative mind, clearly. That is a sincere compliment, btw.</p>
<p>OK, so I think the “flaw” in those two statements is that the NRC rankings are not a proxy for the natural abilities of the profs, unless I am misunderstanding which natural abilities you mean. But in any case, the bigger point is then in #5. I am afraid, very unfortunately, that these abilities and research experiences often do not foster a good learning environment. Often they do. It is far more based on the personality of the professor than on if he is close to winning a Nobel Prize. In fact the one that I mentioned earlier that had won one was a complete SOB. Also, quite often the more famous they are the less they actually teach, especially at the undergrad level. They are just in such high demand by their grad students, by professional societies, by corporations for whom they consult, etc. etc. Not to mention the time they spend writing up the research papers and grant proposals in many cases. Sometimes post-docs do it, but they still have to review it all. It is a lot to take on.</p>
<p>In a perfect world your #5 would be true. But I found that profs at most “decent” universities were perfectly competent at least, and that their fame and research rep had little bearing on anything. When you get a famous one that is also a great teacher, it is magic, that is true. But that is rare enough for an individual that is attending any one school that you shouldn’t base a decision on it. Another way of looking at it is that you are actually spending far more time with your peers that the profs, and so in many ways their impact is more significant. I in fact would strongly argue that a huge factor in what makes one school “better” than another is the quality of your peers. Certainly a school must have competent profs (and I mean competent in the strict definition, not in the “faint praise” way we usually think of it). What really helps make one school a far more challenging experience is how much your peers challenge you. I cannot tell you how wrong I think the statement “that if the prof experience is of limited importance then so are one’s peers” is. It just is out of step with the reality of day-to-day life for most undergrads. Profs can challenge you of course, but that is independent of their research reputation. Most of these profs are pretty smart, even if they are not famous researchers. They are plenty capable of teaching the material and even challenging their students from time to time in most cases, but you are competing against your peers all the time as well as being far more involved with them. In my experience, that is a far more significant factor than how highly ranked the grad department is.</p>
<p>Oh, and can we please get off the Duke thing?? Take it outside, lol.</p>
<p>You are pretty much dead wrong. It’s up to your profs to challenge you and be your mentor if you are special. There are a myriad of ways they do this, invite you to take their grad class, invite you to work on research with them, set-up an independent study, research project, and or thesis with you. If the name you work with is more famous the recommendation will carry much more weight than one from Joe Prof. Any good large school has plenty of good students around to be a challenge and to hang out with. and just as often the not so good ones are the most interesting. Book smarts are 90% grinders anyway. Hardly the interesting type.</p>
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<em>emphasis mine</em></p>
<p>Okay, if professor personality is more important than experience, why is the same not true for peers? You explain why peers may be more important, but that doesn’t really answer the question of why their abilities/experience should be relevant. Or perhaps I misunderstood…?</p>
<p>
The same reason why Chicago, UCB, Yale and Harvey Mudd have the same “poor” score, and why Columbia, Brown, NYU and Penn are not even on the map; same reason why no LAC’s other than Harvey Mudd made the list.</p>
<p>Would you rather have Harvard math wiz grad Steve Ballmer or a Reed dropout running your tech company??</p>