<p>For those of you that are not Putnam fellows, Olympiad winners, etc. </p>
<p>Can a person with average to above average intelligence who is doing fantastic in high school achieve straight A's at a school like MIT with A LOT of hard work ? Or do you believe that there is a certain ceiling to a person's success in an elite college that is dependant on intelligence, no matter how hard he or she works ?</p>
<p>This applies not only to those who are admitted to MIT since the philosophy there is that if you got in you can handle the work.</p>
<p>This is interesting to see, and I would very much appreciate personal experiences.</p>
<p>The first question is whether by “average” you mean literally population average, IQ of 100, SAT score of 1500, or whether you mean something more like “smart person, top of his/her high school class, but without any national-level awards”. For the former, I think not – there is some baseline of natural talent that’s required to do well at MIT, even assuming that a person of genuinely average intelligence could be admitted, which is highly unlikely.</p>
<p>For the latter, it’s absolutely possible. Getting straight A’s at MIT is a rather difficult task, but one doesn’t need to be an otherworldly genius to do it. (And actually, many of the otherworldly geniuses don’t get straight A’s, because they are far more interested in taking heavy loads of extremely challenging classes and/or doing cutting-edge research than in something so petty as getting a perfect grade-point average.) The people I know who graduated with perfect GPAs (and it’s not many) were very smart and hard-working, but were not the smartest nor the most-hardworking people I knew.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s an interesting bar to set: the vast majority of students at MIT do not graduate with perfect GPAs, nor is it a goal of most of the student body.</p>
<p>Every year at admitted students meetings I meet at least one student who is convinced that MIT admissions has made some horrible mistake, that MIT exists to admit incredible geniuses, and that somehow the admissions office had screwed up and had admitted them. I understand that. To some degree nearly everyone admitted to MIT felt that. Indeed it is a very common experience for people to come back from Campus Preview Weekend surprised and thrilled that the other admitted students were just like them. That is when they decide to accept the offer of admission.</p>
<p>The MIT admissions office almost never makes mistakes. If you are admitted, then you have the ability to succeed at MIT, and to thrive, and if you really choose to, to get straight A’s. </p>
<p>That being said, I strongly feel that I got a much better education those terms that I did not get straight A’s than those terms that I did.</p>
<p>I think it’s important to encourage students who might not see themselves as the “[stereo]typical MIT student” to think about MIT. molliebatmit’s response seems very well balanced to me.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I think Mikalye needs to add some qualifiers to the statement that “If you are admitted then you have the ability . . . if you really choose to, to get straight A’s,” because it could give the wrong impression as it stands.</p>
<p>I think this is true for a some students. It’s true for others if they make unreasonably cautious choices of courses–so I think Mikalye is right about the last sentence of the post. It might be true for all students, if the comment is restricted to the later years of the undergraduate program.</p>
<p>It is almost certainly not true for the students who run into major difficulties with first-year physics, though. It doesn’t seem likely to me that they could have earned straight A’s throughout, and just didn’t really choose to. More likely, they had some filling in and catching up to do, in terms of background.</p>
<p>Just wanted to add: I would be concerned that Mikalye’s post could give a false impression to parents of MIT students, that a student could achieve straight A’s (if admitted), just by working very hard.</p>
<p>I hope someone who really knows something about MIT undergrad courses will respond to my posts #4 and #5 soon. Just my opinion, but it seems to me that Mikalye’s comment could about the possibility of getting straight A’s–if one really chooses to do so–could be setting some students up for a lot of pressure and grief.</p>
<p>Perhaps this is actually true of the international admits, whom Mikalye interviews? It seems very improbable to me for all of the American admits.</p>
<p>Well, there are people who will not get straight A’s, no matter what, for sure. </p>
<p>But there are mitigating factors at MIT that make it less difficult to get a high GPA than it might be otherwise, although most people don’t use all of them:
First semester is pass-no record, so the first adjustment to college is done in effectively a grade-free environment.
Plus/minus modifiers are not recorded on the official transcript or in the GPA, so A- = A. A student could get all A- grades and have a 5.0 GPA.
Students can drop courses until very late in the semester (about three weeks before finals). If you’re doing poorly in a course, you can drop it instead of waiting to get an inevitable low grade.
There are a few options for upperclassmen with regard to hiding grades – sophomore exploratory subjects, junior/senior pass-fail.</p>
<p>Most people aren’t interested in getting a 5.0 to the degree that they regularly utilize all of these options. And of course some majors give lower grades than others, and most people like their majors well enough not to bail to (e.g.) Sloan when things get tough. But if getting a 5.0 were your only goal at MIT, there are ways to go about doing it.</p>
<p>Does that make sense? I don’t think getting a 5.0 is an option for everybody at MIT, and it’s absolutely not an option for everybody in every major at MIT. But if getting a 5.0 is the only goal, and one is willing to sacrifice huge amounts of time/effort/class choice/progress through one’s degree program, it’s certainly possible for larger swaths of the student body.</p>
<p>Intelligence has nothing to do with academic success at MIT (assuming you pass the threshold to get admitted in the first place) It’s all about how much work you put into each class, and how well you spend your time. After all, each person has only 24 hours in a day, no matter how smart he/she is.</p>
<p>Let me try a different tack: When you are in college, a “perfect” GPA tends to be less important and less attainable than it was in high school. This is not to say that GPA doesn’t count at all, but that the most important things are what you took, what you did, what you learned, and what you accomplished. These form the principal bases for evaluation of your college work, when you are going on to the next stage.</p>
<p>There are some GPA cut-offs that would be good to stay above, in order not to limit your options. For example, if you are interested in medical school, it would be useful to know that the average GPA of an MIT student who was admitted to medical school was x.yz, whatever those numbers are. Some employers have an initial cut-off that corresponds to 4.50 on the MIT scale. </p>
<p>However, molliebatmit has commented in previous years that she did not devote herself to racking up the highest possible GPA at MIT, but rather to gaining laboratory research experience. She is at Harvard now as a grad student, and I am sure that her letters of recommendation played the major role in her acceptance into the top program that she wanted.</p>
<p>If I were evaluating a transcript, and I saw a student with a 5.0 GPA who had surprisingly light course loads for some of the semesters, I’d wonder whether the student was following the old adage, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going” --except interpreting “get going” to mean “drop the course.” That isn’t a quality you want in a young co-investigator. Exploratories and some pass/fail, I wouldn’t mind, but it’s not helpful to a student if the transcript conveys: cautious course choices to maximize GPA.</p>
<p>Perhaps your notion of intelligence is different from mine, but I don’t think this is true when I go with mine…not just for MIT, but for virtually any school.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say intelligence is the only factor, but to say it plays no role once you’re into MIT seems insane. Even if we define intelligence that way, why should we? MIT challenges you to think, not just to regurgitate, or so the rumors say; I’d guess intelligence does factor in a lot, and some people can pull off things others can’t.</p>
<p>I think to avoid ridiculous uses of words like “intelligence,” one should be more specific (e.g. Person X’s abilities to do something or the other in so and so area propelled her to achieve extremely impressive things in that area)</p>
<p>Yes, but only if you are able to primarily restrict yourself to taking courses you care about. I find that a lot of success in challenging university work has to do with really caring about what you’re doing. If you find a class tedious and uninteresting, and are of average ability within MIT itself, you probably won’t ace it. On the other hand, it is possible for someone of the same profile to perform stunningly when putting the full heart into the area. </p>
<p>Ultimately, you are not judged on how smart you are, but how well you understand and discuss the subject at hand. </p>
<p>Extremely sharp people may even under-perform when faced with material they don’t really care to go all the way with.</p>
<p>Yet at the risk of resurrecting an old thread, mollie has herself admitted that her GPA would likely have made her uncompetitive for most top MD programs. She might have gotten into an average MD program, but not a top one. Delicious irony - she can be admitted to a biology PhD program, arguably the best PhD program in the world for her topic - and at Harvard Medical School no less - but she probably wouldn’t be admitted to the MD program at HMS because her grades are “subpar”. </p>
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<p>But apparently it is a quality that you want in a young MD. Or at least that’s what the med-schools would have us believe through their admissions choices. The same could be said of law schools.
For the purposes of MD and JD admissions, you are better off not even taking a difficult course at all than taking it and receiving a subpar grade. Sad but true. </p>
<p>Hence, the person who inquired whether he could obtain a 5.0 GPA at MIT with sufficiently hard work should ask exactly why he wants such a high GPA in the first place. If the goal is to enter an MD or JD program, then it is entirely rational to maximize his GPA by taking easy courses, but if that is then case, then maybe he shouldn’t be going to MIT at all. Anybody who can get into MIT can surely be admitted to plenty of other prestigious schools with far easier grading.</p>
<p>I will also agree with molliebatmit that you don’t need to be a super genius to get straight A’s at MIT (it helps though). It is a lot of hard work and one certainly would/should ask one’s self if its worth it. </p>
<p>One of my classmates and fellow varsity athlete got all A’s and not by taking a soft schedule. There were three places you could find him; the library, the practice field or at his fraternity parties. He did everything at full speed. I was amazed by him but did not envy him. I did not and could not emulate him. </p>
<p>I see, from another of his posts, that the OP is a high school student applying to MIT. He is probably wondering if he can hack it at MIT. I’ll go with the standard, if you can get in, you can do the work thought process. In my time at MIT, I never met anyone who couldn’t do the work. Some didn’t, however, for various reasons; mostly emotional issues.</p>
<p>You do have to realize that at MIT, as well as all good schools, the expectations of the student are different from high school. HS is mostly understanding the material presented, with a little thought thrown in, and then repeating that material back on a series of tests and quizes. College students typically have fewer tests and quizes and are expected to understand the material and draw conclusions from that understanding and demonstrate such on those tests and quizes. A high school student can be a “lone wolf” and do great by working hard. College students are better served by forming study groups to discuss the material and therfore begin to form a better understanding of the material. So, that elusive A is much more work to obtain in college, which is why a lot fewer students get all A’s.</p>
<p>After re-reading my prior post, one thought to add. I was a manager at a major aerospace firm doing very high tech work. I interviewed many college applicants including several that had straight A’s at top tier schools. Didn’t make an offer to any of the straight A students. A small sample to be sure and you can’t draw any major conclusions, but each of the straight A students gave me the impression that they thought they were God’s gift to the company and had egos to match. They would have been extremely, extremely hard to work with and therefore worthless to my company.</p>
<p>Ended up hiring a lot of high GPA people but with a good ability to “play well with others”.</p>
<p>How many of these had done significant school-external work in aerospace? I don’t think a straight-A student need be so naive, unless there is no evidence they’ve struggled with anything else. Stuff is a lot harder to work out in practice than it is to do in a course, and while being very smart helps tons, even many of the smartest people are routinely puzzled when they work on the real stuff.</p>
<p>mathboy98, As you say, everyone gets stumped once in a while. You have to work as a team to solve problems. It wasn’t any kind of lack of inteligence that made me reject these guys, they would have been very hard to work with. I don’t recall that any of them had any experience outside of their required senior projects.</p>
<p>My H’s niece is highly intelligent, straight A HS student, who developed some interesting projects and experiements as a HS student but did not win any prestigious science awards - she was admitted to MIT about 7 years ago. Freshman year was VERY tough for her - she had to learn to accept that she would NOT be making straight A’s. Fast forward to today, she graduated from MIT in aerospace engineering, completed her MS at Cal Tech, and is now a teaching grad student working on her PhD in aerospace sciences at CalTech. </p>
<p>She has been extremely successful without getting straight A’s at MIT. This whole discussion about the importance of a 4.0 at MIT to ensure success depresses me terribly.</p>
<p>I also hope that nothing I have said implies that success is dependant on getting all A’s. I have known a lot of very bright and successful MIT grads and only a couple got straight A’s; most did not. My GPA was far from straight A’s and I consider myself to have had a very successful career (I took early retirement and do some occasional consulting).</p>
<p>While it is not necessary for success in all graduate programs, having very high grades does tend to be important for some professional/graduate programs. But by no means is a 4.0 any magic number - generally showing high ability with challenging work is more important. It’s just the GPA standards may be more emphasized by some career paths than others.</p>
<p>Like suggested above, if one wishes the safest path to a high GPA, there are some career paths where that helps, but a lot of other paths would prefer some risk-taking to the safe way out.</p>