<p>How intensive is the course work? I have heard a student, top rank in high school, got D's and C's in sophomore MIT.</p>
<p>Interesting place to ask this, tmp, considering it’s a 2.5 year old thread about subject tests. But think of it this way: every student at MIT was top ranked in high school, and many get D’s and C’s at MIT. So that’s not at all a shocking scenario. The coursework is very difficult.</p>
<p>Is it possible to select courses across majors, like from engineering side and business sides? As far as course rigorousness, is it doable?</p>
<p>Sorry, just picked up a random thread about MIT. </p>
<p>Then in regarding to career and graduate school application, I assume those D’s and C’s may not look that bad since it is from MIT?</p>
<p>I’ve moved this out to its own thread for more visibility.</p>
<p>tmp, students at MIT can indeed take courses outside their chosen majors. And the classes are certainly difficult and work-intensive, but not impossible – not all students receive D’s and C’s as final course grades, and relatively few students have D’s and C’s as final course grades for a large number of classes.</p>
<p>For graduate school or for jobs, a C here or there won’t sink you. But D’s are starting to get into not-so-good territory.</p>
<p>In 2008 the average GPA for sophomores was 4.2/5 which translates to 3.2/4 on the more familiar 4.0 scale (link here: [Removing</a> Pass/NR Improved Freshman Grades, CUP Reports - The Tech](<a href=“http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N5/cupreport.html]Removing”>http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N5/cupreport.html) I can’t find more recent data but if anyone has it I’d be interested in seeing it). I suspect that the average GPA has not changed significantly (there has probably been a small increase) in the past five years and that the average GPA for sophomores is close to the average GPA. The average MIT student probably had something like a 3.9/4 GPA in high school and there are extremely few if any MIT students with high school GPAs of 3.2 or less so it is clear that grading at MIT is much harder than at high schools. This data also suggests that routinely getting C and Ds at MIT is not common either. The general consensus is that for most classes getting a B is relatively easy but getting an A is reasonably challenging (~1/3rd of the class will get an A) although there are certainly some classes where getting an A is easy and some classes where getting a B requires work.</p>
<p>Most people find advanced courses outside their major to be more difficult so it is often inadvisable to take many challenging courses outside your major.</p>
<p>UMTYMP. Thank you.</p>
<p>Just to offer some perspective, university can be quite a bit different from high school. I am not an MIT student yet (accepted for transfer this fall), but I have been attending a Canadian university, University of Victoria, studying engineering.</p>
<p>At UVIC, first year engineering is sort of a “weeding-out”, where a significant percentage of people don’t make it to second year. I know several 4.0 GPA high school students who continually got Ds and Fs in university courses and some ultimately dropped out of engineering.</p>
<p>On the flip side, I have some friends who did poorly in high school (I’m talking like C average or less) who are doing quite well.</p>
<p>I, myself, dropped out of high school without graduating and got Bs in many academic classes. However, I maintain As in all my university classes without too much trouble (I don’t generally do school work on weekends, I make time for large-ish personal projects, and I’ll stop attending lectures if I find the prof to be ineffective).</p>
<p>I think fundamentally, while there is a lot of overlap between what it takes to succeed in high school and what it takes to succeed in university, there are also a lot of differences. Some people really excel in high school but don’t have the right mindset or work ethic for university, and vice versa.</p>
<p>In my experience, I found highschool emphisized:
-Rote learning
-Memorization
-Discipline
-Attendance</p>
<p>I am finding university to be about:
-Problem solving
-Independent learning
-Effective time management
-Team work/collaboration</p>
<p>Anyhow, like I said, no first hand experience yet with MIT but, I wouldn’t try too hard to extrapolate what university grades you will get based on anyone’s high school grades vs university grades.</p>
<p>I’ll point out that at MIT unlike many other universities there are no weed-out courses. Part of this is that unlike most other universities where students who start in science/engineering and don’t do well switch to humanities or social sciences that doesn’t really happen at MIT. Also most classes are pretty hard to fail unless you are either woefully unprepared or don’t do the work.</p>
<p>To update the average GPA from UMTYMP student’s info, 4.1 was the given number in this Tech article from December 2012: [The</a> premed stereotype - The Tech](<a href=“http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N59/liang.html]The”>http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N59/liang.html)</p>
<p>I have heard that the average freshman GPA is lower, so I wouldn’t be surprised if C’s and D’s were more common during the first year at MIT, especially during Pass/NR. Maybe D’s less so, since D is passing for upperclassmen but not for first year students.</p>
<p>The med school op-ed doesn’t cite any source for the gpa statistics so I’m not sure I entirely trust the 4.1 figure. The report discussed in the Tech article I linked to says freshmen grades are about 1/3 of a letter grade lower than the grades of upperclassmen so they are not necessarily inconsistent (although this difference partially disappears if Ds and Fs are not included in freshmen grades and may have disappeared during the spring semester when grades were introduced).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say good grades in high school translate to good grades at MIT, but not getting A’s easily in high school in math/science does not bode well for MIT.</p>
<p>There is some rote memorization in classes, but if thinks are naturally intuitive to you, you don’t need to rely on that. So you should do well in any high school math/science class even if they are just asking you to memorize algorithms.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Traditionally, 4.1/5.0 GPA is the average GPA I’ve always heard. There may be slight oscillations every few years.</p>