<p>Coming from a high school who has experienced this before (we had a five suicides in a span of two years), I also agree that MIT isn’t doing enough. I’m not blaming the Institution though - I think the students are also not caring as much as they should. And the problem is… I don’t know where to go where I can share my opinions.</p>
<p>This is not the best place to put it, but I hope MITChris sees this and recognizes this as well.</p>
<p>My question to you guys - what do you think MIT should be doing?</p>
<p>Stop grading on a curve. Supposedly we don’t, but I don’t know what else to call it when the final grade is determined by the average and standard deviation. It’s not okay to pit MIT students against each other, because half of us inevitably wind up miserable. I’ve never had a class before this term where the grade breakpoints were determined before the final. It would take away a lot of stress to know where I stand before the final grades come out.</p>
<p>One of my HASS professors once told us that he’ll give us a B as long as he knows we’re doing our best, because he’s there to teach us, not to keep us out of grad school. It’d be nice if non-HASS classes were more like that too. “Yadda yadda, MIT classes are <em>supposed</em> to be hard!” Right. Hard doesn’t have to mean work your butt off for a C. I’m here to learn. I’d still do every p-set and study just as hard, if not harder, if I didn’t feel screwed.</p>
<p>No more B-/C centered bio classes.</p>
<p>Tell us first semester freshman year if and how much grades matter. For grad school and for jobs. I have no clue what’s going on. I’ve heard:</p>
<p>“Oh, I have a 5.0. But you don’t need a 5.0 to be successful!”
“I have a high paying job but I had a 4.2. You don’t want a 4.2, trust me.”
“Oh, you got Cs? Are you sure you want to go to grad school? Grad school is hard. Maybe you’d be better off being a writer or something.”
“Oh come on, Lydia, grades don’t matter. You won’t get into Stanford or Harvard or MIT, but I’m sure you’ll get in <em>some</em>where.”</p>
<p>^ I’d rather not have strict cutoffs known from the beginning. We need classes to calibrate to test difficulty and such.</p>
<p>In any case, I meant specifically with respect to a response to suicide, which doesn’t seem to be what you were going for. Correct me if I’m wrong.</p>
<p>Then they can set strict minimum cut-offs, and push them up if they need to.</p>
<p>It is what I’m going for. If we had fewer miserable students, we’d probably have fewer suicides.</p>
<p>I want more people to get help if they need it, be it through weekly trips to Medical (whose sources may need strengthening) or taking time off, or any other options in between. Whatever they need to do, they should do it. The school masking the problem by easing up the curriculum helps neither the intended party nor the rest of the school.</p>
<p>(I struggle through every single one of my classes, I’d never get into grad school, and I am neither miserable nor socially deprived. I don’t think the majority of the student body is, either.)</p>
<p>They shouldn’t water down the classes. The grading…well, it’s worth examining–even caltech recentered its grades recently. They might do better making minus and plus modifiers mean something in the GPA but give higher grades across the board. Because frankly it’s not fair if a C+ MIT student can’t get into grad school when a B+/A- Harvard student has no trouble. The C+ MIT may be at the same or higher level.</p>
<p>Still, there is something more to it than people struggling in classes. That kid who was the son of the Nobel laureate–I’ve read enough about him to conclude that it’s doubtful he was struggling in the GIRs, especially a month into them like that. </p>
<p>Especially for the guys here, the MIT living experience is pretty chaotic. MIT values the chaos–to many, it’s freedom. But personally, my experience at MIT was pretty disjointed. I think to some of the people who lose their way at MIT, the experience just becomes one firehose after another and their life loses meaning. </p>
<p>One thing is that it would help if the MIT administration would admit, at least behind closed doors, that MIT has a higher incidence of suicide than is normal.<br>
It would help if the MIT medical was run by an MIT alumnus, and more than that, someone who either had some personal experience with friends going through depression or went through it themselves at MIT. The problem is that the alumni profs who are lifers at MIT, or the people who stick around to take administrative positions at MIT, often had fantastic experiences at MIT and consequently may not really be able to empathize or understand what is going on with the subset of undergrads who are depressed. Incidentally, the last big push to reform MIT psychological services was spearheaded in the early 2000s by an MIT undergrad (Keith Winstein), who did it because he felt MIT was in dire need of this reform and that no one in the admin was stepping up to the plate.</p>
<p>I would suggest required dorm meetings (or hall/tower) once every other week to touch base. I also think the Head Resident (or whatever it’s called) should do spot checks on the students…particularly freshmen or loners. It could be organized differently- perhaps one is assigned to a group when he/she arrives on campus, and that group meets somewhere with a facilitator. The gruop could play silly games and compete against other groups at various times throughout the year. I realize there are time constraints, so this would need to be built in somehow…perhaps for people not doing sports during that time slot. Lastly, in reference to the above posts, maybe there could be a longer “drop” without penalty period, or a handful of P/F options to be utilized throughout the 4 years to alleviate fear of ruining a GPA. I also think however, that success isn’t always guaranteed. Life just doesn’t work that way…there is always uncertainty and failure, and some folks need to learn this lesson. (hopefully before taking one’s life) Obviously there are chemical things going on in some cases that need medication but I am concerned because I just read a Columbia article on how more liberal environments have lower suicide rates. Could this explain why Brown students are considered the happiest in the US?</p>
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<p>Fair point, I think I may have misread lidusha’s suggestion from before. (That said, I’ve felt my grades at MIT have been fair despite being low, so it didn’t occur to me that this was the point.)</p>
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<p>Could you expand on this?</p>
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<p>See, the trick here should be to create a space for students to go to, or to create the social inclination to get help at Medical, etc, rather than force students to have an additional time commitment and essentially be parented by the Institute.</p>
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<p>You sound unfamiliar with MIT’s process - our drop date (without showing up on your external transcript) is three weeks before the end of classes. Sophomores can take up to two classes, receive the grade, and then decide to drop the class if they wish. Juniors and seniors can take two classes P/D/F.</p>
<p>Listen to these ideas non defensively.</p>
<p>lidusha: 8.02 is not curved, at least this year. <a href=“http://web.mit.edu/8.02t/www/dowell.pdf[/url]”>http://web.mit.edu/8.02t/www/dowell.pdf</a></p>
<p>FWIW, at neither Caltech nor MIT have I ever felt pressured to not help another student due to classes being curved.</p>
<p>It is important to remember that suicide, the vast majority of the time, is linked to clinical depression or bipolar disease; in fact these diseases have a extremely high lifetime incidence of associated suicide</p>
<p>OMHD|AMH|Factsheets|MentalHealth
Suicide as a Public Health Problem -
80 to 90 percent of people who die by suicide are suffering from a diagnosable mental illness</p>
<p>I lost my younger sister to a suicide when she was a college student. She was 21 years old at the time.</p>
<p>She was at a state flagship school that was not a high stress environment. I know, I graduated from the school and usually felt ‘less than challenged’ there.</p>
<p>She was doing well in classes and had a part time job and was not struggling financially in fact she’d been saving money to buy a car.</p>
<p>A high pressure environment does not cause suicides. Most people who are suffering that level of stress find other means to cope. Some will find help with classes, some will consider transferring schools, but those that seriously contemplate suicide as the solution will most likely do so no matter what the environment because those people for whatever reason are not able to utilize other coping mechanisms.</p>
<p>A school can only do so much. Students can not be watched over every minute of the day nor would we want that. Part of the college experience is for students to learn independence for students to learn to take responsibility for their lives.</p>
<p>Schools can only offer resources. Offer counselling services. Offer academic assistance. It is up to students to take advantage of those opportunities if they need them. </p>
<p>Students can try to be aware of their classmates and take time to offer a helping hand if someone seems overwhelmed, but unfortunately there is a limit to what anyone is able to do to.</p>
<p>I think clear grading can be both a good and bad thing; frequently, I think when they make the class and requirements sufficiently hard, it can simply be hard to predict how exactly students will do, enough to set a strict scale for scores and all that. Personally, I find that assigning problems for homework that make it clear what level your understanding should be at is the best way to tell someone roughly what’s expected.</p>
<p>The real problem is to decide somewhat independently whether students who clearly know the material very well are still doing poorly. At that point, the system is more about bashing students against each (maybe in a more subtle way than can be expressly called competitive - see below) other than developing a sophisticated understanding that will actually be useful.</p>
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<p>Defintely; in fact, those additional time commitments may even feed the stress that one is attempting to combat.</p>
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<p>This is a common argument given, and I fully imagine it’s valid in the sense it is meant, although the question of whether people who really shouldn’t be failing/doing poorly are doing just that unfortunately still stands.</p>
<p>I have no connection to MIT, but this topic concerns me as I am sure it does many other parents who expect to send their loved ones off to high pressure college environments within the next few years. I see that it is often stated that a “high pressure environment does not cause suicides,” but I wonder whether continuous exposure to a high pressure environment over time can damage the coping mechanisms of some, if not most, individuals. I may be totally off, but, in examining the effects of stress in a different context, I also wonder whether there is some connection between the long-term exposure to stress of veterans and the currently high suicide rate of veterans.</p>
<p>There is something called situational depression–depression caused by the environment or an event. This can be exacerbated in those individuals which are predisposed to depression either genetically or by the way they were brought up.</p>
<p>But the notion that external stress cannot cause suicide is wrongheaded. In the simplest sense, external stress can push someone over the edge. Maybe some people start out closer to the edge than others, but MIT certainly has an effect.</p>
<p>I see two prevalent attitudes among the administration:
<p>2) People who commit suicide at MIT must have been predisposed to do so. Some use this to argue that MIT’s unique characteristics did not induce the suicide. I think there is too much blaming of the students here.</p>
<p>PiperXP,</p>
<p>yes, thank you. I was not aware of the options Sophomore, Junior and Senior year…only the P/F Freshmen year. Perhaps I’ll learn about all this when I attend the Campus Preview Weekend. Could you please enlighten me further…can I assume that the D means “drop” in P/D/F?</p>
<p>^As far as I know, the “D” means the letter grade “D”, not “drop.”</p>
<p>collegealum314, why would one choose a grade letter “D” over a “P”? I was responding to PeperXP’s thread #70.</p>
<p>P/D/F just means you have three possible outcomes: pass the class, earn a grade of D, or earn a grade of F. </p>
<p>I don’t actually know why it’s P/D/F rather than just P/F.</p>