The difficulty- from personal experience...

Colleges and Universities A-Z Cornell University
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<p>Before anyone calls me ignorant or says that 1/5 of the threads here are about Cornell being the most difficult Ivy- I KNOW there are a lot of threads out there about this!! But, none of the answers I have seen (and I've read several threads now) do it for me and they all seem to tangent out onto some other topic of conversation... I would like someone to tell me from experience (as in, I don't want a Harvard student to answer this) about the difficulty at Cornell. Do you see a lot of straight A students from high school not making honors? I've been told the curve is set to a C average, does this mean that most students make Cs? Are the geniuses the ones who score above the mean, or do a lot of people stop working as hard? Do you feel as though people you know at other top school don't work as hard? Etc. These are the type of questions I would like answered - personal stories and observations, if you don't mind sharing them. Oh, and I also know difficulty varies by program/major, but for my sake, just tell me about your OWN personal experiences. Don't go off on other topics like private v public school, and how much fun you can have at Cornell, etc. etc....
Thank you, and sorry if there IS a thread just like this one sitting in a dark corner of the Cornell forum that I missed, but like I said, I haven't found the sort of answers I was looking for.</p>

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<p>The curve is set to a B average (usually B- at lowest, all the way up to the occasional A), which I think is VERY generous compared to many other schools. With work ethic, it is very possible to do well.</p>

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<p>Not at all. In most non-science classes, especially in ILR, PAM, AEM, and the humanities, in fact, I would argue that it is too easy to get an A with a certain amount of intelligence, work ethic, and abillity to BS your way through a question.</p>

<p>You have to understand that there is a large amount of variability in intelligence and work ethic at Cornell. While we have more students with 1500+ SAT (M+V) scores than most other colleges have students, we also have a lot of 1200- kids who are trying to do the same exact work.</p>

<p>Now the later group is just as capable of doing the work, it is just that it will require more time/effort/patience, especially if you didn’t come to Cornell with the best study skills.</p>

<p>By the way Resurgam, why did you change your screen name?</p>

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<p>Lol he got banned for harassing mariambaby, I think.</p>

<p>Funny, cuz now his screenname backwards is “MariamsDildo”</p>

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<p>There are many factors that go into this:

  1. Many people matriculate into the Ivies only because of the reputation,
  2. many people will do the bare minimum to get a degree from an Ivy because they assume that the prestige of the degree alone will carry them ahead in life,
  3. many people assume that their study habits which got them into the Ivy is well enough for them to succeed there, and
  4. grade inflation isn’t as big in some Ivies, versus others. </p>

<p>I’ve taken summer courses at Cornell, and I might be attending Penn or Yale next fall.</p>

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<p>I didn’t get bellow a B freshman year in engineering and I don’t consider myself particularly brilliant. I didn’t get that many As either, a few though. I did get zero A-s though my grade range skipped from B+ to A, kind of weird.</p>

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<p>^^haha something like that happened in my junior year
B in physics, A- and A in everything else with no B+.</p>