“Major courses that faculty designed for intense, deep study”
These are easier to do in semester classes, especially STEM. One of the factors in deciding between say MIT/UCB, and Stanford/Cal Tech would be that the quarter system doesn’t allow as much depth. Anecdotal of course because it’s not like thousands of people can choose between colleges like those. Yes the semester system is more forgiving, as you can recover from a bad first test, quarter, not as likely.
“I find it interesting that freshmen at Cal Tech have to do a writing placement test and may get tracked to lower-level courses as a result. That doesn’t happen at Chicago, as those base skills are expected to be there”
Data10 debunked why these colleges have placement tests even for math, are you saying that MIT and Cal Tech don’t have the math base skills?
“When four papers must be delivered in four separate courses at the end of three 10-week periods during which that research and writing must be done while covering thousands of pages of text, the experience is, well, bracing.”
Sure, that is tough, no doubt. However guess what? MIT thinks their first year is so tough even for their students, the first semester is pass/no credit, the second is A/B/C, only sophomore year begins the A-F.
If UChicago is as tough as you say it is and the kids love learning, why not make the first quarter or year pass/no credit? Can you answer this without quoting anyone?
I think good people can disagree as to whether it’s reliable. The “fairness” part is silly. It’s a holistic admissions process with plenty of opportunity to cheat on pretty much any portion of it short of your LORs or counselor input. And guess what? You can cheat even more when you show up on campus (should you dare to). My hunch is that anyone who needs to hire a writing professional for their 600-word admissions essay to UChicago is really going to struggle once they get to campus. Much better to do so for those easy answers to the MIT/Cal-Tech questions
UChicago puts a lot of weight on those essays - we know that. They are assessing how your mind works and how well you write. Surely a well trained and practiced professional writer can imitate a 17 year old voice. Imitating a 17 year old mind might be a whole different level of expertise.
How does UChicago know that it is the mind of an independent 17 year old at work, not that of a well trained professional? BTW, there’re also 17 year olds whose minds work like adults. It wouldn’t be fair to blame them for their more developed minds either.
Thank you for sharing this as I was actually wondering about the definition. I was also wondering about how UChicago was cutting a week out of each of Winter and Spring quarters till I remembered that total number of instructional hours will not be changing. Reading periods and other down time will be condensed.
Yep. It’s all part of that mysterious admissions process. I’m willing to admit that I don’t have all the answers on this one, and that they might be better at their job than we all are supposing.
@1NJParent , an old prof of mine once cautioned against using loaded epithets like “delusional” (or “outrageous” or “unconscionable”) to describe positions with which one disagrees. He called that the “forcible feeble” mode of argument, usually resorted to by people who are absolutely certain they’re right but don’t want to have to support their belief. You are a little too fond of that word.
@theloniusmonk , there you go again - trying to make me say that Chicago is tougher than MIT - when I am saying nothing at all about MIT. I was speaking only of my personal experience with the quarter system in my own field of literary studies. You proceed to provide your own instance of toughness at MIT (pass/no credit in first semester; only A/B/C in second), which hardly seems to be in itself a proof of toughness, but yet you take it as such and make it a litmus test for the proposition that if Chicago is really so tough, it should have that same system.
Let me be patient. I say again that I was providing personal testimony of the toughness of a quarter system in literary studies. I was not addressing MIT at all and was not denying other forms of toughness. If you have something concrete to share about the toughness of MIT or anywhere else, I’m all ears.
If you don’t like arguments from personal experience, and you don’t like arguments that quote
authorities, what are we left with? --Epithets and bloodless abstractions.
I know it’s a strong word. It isn’t directed at anyone btw, but the widely held belief/claim. Such claim has been made here and elsewhere on CC without any proof. I’ve seen cases where such belief was shown to be unwarranted. I suppose someone would argue that there may be many more cases where AOs were able to tell the differences. However, the falsity of an absolute claim only needs to be established by a small number of, or even a single, counterexample(s).
Good minds can disagree with the first part of this. “In-depth” can have a variety of goals where longer is better in some cases and not in others. For instance, a year-long thesis project can have a spurt of intensity as you round out your topic and build your thesis, followed by longer periods of research that allow you to go deep once you’ve built that foundation. My D’s BA thesis, a two-part sequence spread out over a 12-month period, is designed exactly this way. Others might be several quarters long but with breaks in between. So I believe it’s pretty easy to go deep in a quarter system. Totally agree with part of the second statement. Many of the quarter-long courses actually have two midterms so it’s easy to recover there, but you have to be on top of your work at all times. Not much room for “down time.” Catching up might be easier in a semester system.
Not in the least! Schools will administer placement tests where they are useful, including placement in higher level courses. If Cal-Tech administers a writing placement test, that’s because Cal Tech believes that those provide useful information. Cal Tech might do so in order to address potential weakness or to advance a student to a higher-level humanities course. My college did that, btw, only the “placement test” was the AP Lit exam I wasn’t allowed to skip out of freshman writing but I could advance to higher level literature based seminar because my writing skills were capable of meeting that additional demand, according to the people in charge.
That could be for several reasons. And actually, P/NP/NC etc is an increasingly popular option at many colleges and universities. Does that mean all of them are tough, too?
You are kidding, right? There’s a simple answer to this, in case you weren’t: grades are correlated with learning the material. Schools may have all sorts of reasons for imposing P/NP and we saw example upon example of that last spring during the Covid Semester (UChicago, in contrast, continued with their grading policies, tweaked a bit for genuine hardship cases). Grades are important information; at UChicago they are crucial. What works for MIT - or whatever reasons MIT has to impose P/NC the first year - has little to do with UChicago.
IMO, it depends on what the essay prompt is. I wouldn’t disregard the possibility of some pretty good UChicago alums out there who can be hired to assist in crafting an essay of this type. As long as they can keep it entirely original for each of their clients so that the admissions office can’t sniff out the underlying similarities to other essays - hats off to them, they probably make pretty good money. But I suspect this is quite rare. The UChicago essay prompts are wacky and numerous. Some will be runaway favorites and those get replaced. Sure, you can resurrect it, but do so at your own peril; if your essay resembles too much what they’ve already seen then that might hurt your chances. Professional writers might have certain essay questions “nailed down.” And that might work - elsewhere. Not sure it’ll work at UChicago.
Here is what UChicago says about writing your essays. One is a general set of tips (completely non-controversial) and another is on writing the personal statement. CBOs coaches and essay writing courses are all fine! The difference will be whether it’s your essay or theirs. Like any talented athlete, musician or whatever: help is fine. But the work is yours.
When taking my dog for walk, I’ve now seen twice, in the same backyard, two people fencing. Of course, I heckled them by saying that fencing is NOT a sport. And that Stanford cut the sport.
I live near Stanford and there’s lots of alumni and Stanford employees in the area. If I yelled “Brown dropped the sport,” I’d probably get confused looks.
So let me get this straight, @1NJParent . Chicago says it gives great importance to the essays, and nobody (including you, I presume) doubts this. Many on this board would say that it makes the essential difference between applicants who are otherwise similarly qualified. You say that it is easy for an applicant to buy a killer UChicago-type essay somewhere, present it as his own, and gain admittance to this highly selective school from AO’s who accept that essay as a valid demonstration of the applicant’s own creative, ingenious, UChicagoish spirit.
You must then necessarily believe that many of the admits to UChicago have none of these desirable qualities at all and that the weight given to this aspect of the application encourages frauds and pretenders. That’s the logic of your assertion, and it’s a pretty serious one. The onus is on you to provide the proof for it, not to shift that onus of disproof on to others. Disproving a negative is notoriously impossible in any event, and here we are dealing with the general reliability of a longstanding system and the judgment of Admissions Officers with every motivation to detect frauds.
l have been reading this cc board for a long time, and I do not remember hearing any anecdotal accounts of applicants who gained admittance to Chicago through that kind of chicanery. Some must have, but you would think some of those would have bragged about it and that we would have heard about that. Rather, what I read here is from kids who desperately want to try to figure out the magic so they can work it themselves. I once received a pm from a kid who asked for my comments and recommendations on his essay. I was pleased to give these in a general way. He thanked me, but I presume my advice didn’t help him much: I never heard from him again, which didn’t surprise me given that his essay was really not very good in the deeper sense we are talking about here. He must have failed to get accepted. It was, however, an honorable effort, as I believe almost all are.
@ucbalumnus does the difference in quarter hours noted between UChicago and NU suggest that a UChicago student transferring to NU might have more credits recognized by the other university than the reverse? I realize that registrars probably have individual say on such a matter, but theoretically would it mean that a UChicago student transferring to NU could have available credits toward graduation bumped up by 25%? And a NU student transferring to UChicago would only have 80% of available credits that can transfer? I know both schools are accredited by the same organization and they would both (likely) have similar contact hours for classroom, lab and so forth.
A Northwestern student taking normal course loads of 4 courses per quarter will complete 24 courses = 96 quarter credits after six quarters.
A Chicago student taking course loads needed to graduate in twelve quarters with the equivalent of 210 quarter credits will complete three 4-course (overload) quarters and three 3-course (normal load) quarters for 35 courses = 105 quarter credits.
So a Northwestern student who transfers to Chicago with 96 credits would be behind on credits and need to complete 114 credits, or 23 courses at Chicago over the next six quarters – i.e. would need to take 4-course (overload) quarters for at least five of the remaining six quarters. Subject credit could be another issue. How does Chicago handle incoming transfer students who presumably did not have the same core courses at their prior colleges? Science and math for majors are probably reasonably similar, but the humanities core sequences may not have exact equivalents at many other colleges.
On the other hand, a Chicago student who transfers to Northwestern with 105 credits would be ahead on credits to graduate, although not necessarily ahead on subject credit.
You seem to be suffering from that bunker mentality I mentioned upthread. What part of that discussion about essays was directed at UChicago? The comments by me and others were about admission essays generally. You need to get a pair of new glasses. And take a class in logic too.
I wasn’t allowed to skip out of freshman writing but I could advance to higher level literature based seminar because my writing skills were capable of meeting that additional demand, according to the people in charge.