<p>I think wide spread smoking is a ‘thing’ at many of the more-intellectual, artier, quirkier LAC’s. This is not a problem that only Reed has - I would be surprised to hear that U of C or Swarthmore have significantly lower smoking rates. </p>
<p>I think peer pressure explains a lot of it and it doesn’t speak well of the ability of students to stand up for their own decisions and to use independent judgement.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, I wouldn’t as a parent make too big an issue of it. Some widespread college practices seem to me much worse (did you hear about the alcohol enemas used at a U of Tenessee frat to speed up the process of getting drunk?). I might change my mind about this attitude if one of my kids came home smelling of smoke, however…</p>
<p>Why does the smoking bother you while LDS doesn’t? Did you mean pot wasn’t a big deal? Smoking is actually much less popular at U of C (dunno anything about Swat), their students are trending towards more polished, preprofessional types while read certainly has a hippie vibe.</p>
<p>It’s my personal opinion that truly intellectual types tend to be very intense and focused in a specific area, meaning they may be fantastic at literature/humanities (better than people good at more than that) but weak at math; Reed’s attitude that must of the liberal arts and undergrad work get’s done in years 1 and 2 while junior year is for your major and senior year for your thesis makes well-roundedness not as important. Nobody cares if professors in non-math areas are good at math or good at testing in math – since Reed aims to produce those academic types, I think it’s fine for them not to care about the SAT math.</p>
<p>In terms of the legit math//hard science folk (Reed is one of the best and most difficult place to be for theoretical physics, by the way, meaning students obviously have to be wicked smart to succeed), the SAT math section measures ones ability to basically do algebra and freshman year geometry. If you’ve taken something like multivariable calc or complex analysis, you understandably get worse at performing on this simple and literal level. This argument just falls into the camp some others have been promoting, that the scores aren’t reflective of ability, and in fact can be inversely correlated.</p>
<p>Accepting people with lower scores might also be a product of the self-selectiveness of the school – fewer students apply because they’re afraid of the rigor and thesis, meaning admissions can’t nitpick about standardized test points. I think that gives you another problem to care about, but basically, the SAT scores are just symptomatic of it instead of what you should be objecting to first. Then again, the average 3.9 GPA is an indicator that people coming in are both smart and intellectual in terms of performance…</p>
<p>Also, I don’t think someone can be intellectual without being smart… It goes mostly the opposite way, with many smart people who don’t think deeply and/or outside of the classroom.</p>
<p>Intparent- My D was very interested in art, and she applied to at least one art program, however by the time she was considering Reed she was much more interested in the sciences. She liked that Reed didnt require students to be majors to use the studios.
However she did eventually find that pursuing drawing/painting required more time than she had to spare, and she switched her arts emphasis to choral music instead.
The choral director was even on her orals committee ( with chemistry degrees from Reed & Harvard, she was a good choice for a prof from another dept)</p>
<p>There are really only three colleges in the US that we have found that everyone talks about as truly “intellectual” – U of Chicago, Swarthmore, and Reed…
Are a lot of the Reed students not that smart?</p>
<p>Sounds like your family should visit and decide for yourselves.
;)</p>
<p>Pe is very serious at Reed. You don’t finish your PE requirement, you don’t graduate.
I think the classes are maybe 1/2 a credit per semester?
D took various forms of dance- salsa, swing, ballroom & tango. Also took self defense & weight lifting. I think she liked salsa & weight lifting the best.
She had friends that did team sports, most notably rugby, but D isn’t really a team sports girl except for capture the flag.;)</p>
<p>I didn’t really notice smokers, and I am very sensitive to smells both good and bad. For instance the smell I noticed most is dog poo. Don’t know whose dogs, although the neighborhood does seem to use it as a dog park.</p>
<p>I too was a bit worried about smoking at Reed. Although I don’t think it has any connection to intelligence, it is definitely linked to many health problems and I lost my mom, who was a smoker, to lung cancer recently. However, I realize that my kids will have to make their own decisions and I only hope they make wise ones. Trust your student. My son did decide to attend Reed and it seems to be a good place for him. He is challenged academically and has made some great friends. He did have very strong SAT scores, especially in math, and is studying in the sciences, though he also enjoys literature and humanities and has been involved in art at Reed.</p>
<p>We visited Reed a couple of weeks ago, although we had to go during the fall break. So there weren’t a lot of students on campus. But we had a very good tour, and also spent some time talking to someone I know in Portland who works for the college. D liked it quite a bit, will definitely apply. </p>
<p>So I now have another question after the visit, though. Not really related to the first ones I had. One thing they mentioned in the info session we attended is that they do not use calculators in the level 1 Calculus class. D was a bit disconcerted by this… so, she wondered, what do they DO in class? Are they using slide rules? Proving theorems or something for the whole semester? This left us a bit puzzled. D is fine with the freshman humanities courses (they sound like fun to her), although she is starting to wonder just how much of a “throwback” place Reed is with both this Calculus approach and the “old, dead, white men” (Reed’s phrase, not ours) humanities intense freshman courses. Obviously they produce (or attract?) great thinkers given the PhD production. But D is starting to wonder if it ever feels sort of backwards there, a bit “time warpy” was her phrase. Can anyone comment on that?</p>
<p>So as a Reed student who has also taken a calculus class both here and in highschool, I think I can answer your question. </p>
<p>The fact that daughter is worried about not using a calculator is probably indicative of how she’ll feel within the course because I’ll just say this: Reed math is its own subject. We don’t do countless practice problems or copy down formulas… there’s very little repetition or application. The course I took was taught out of a bookstore published reader/course notes (instead of a traditional textbook, though I do think a class that utilizes one is available) and the only way to describe the course is looking at calculus from an entirely new perspective. There are a lot of generalized proofs and no slide rulers at all… you just don’t need them as you’re learning the concepts not doing a lot of number crunching, we actually very rarely used actual numbers in our problems. Also, it’s a lot of unconventional ways of arriving at standard calculus concepts. (For example, to introduce integrals, we found the area of a parabola using Archimedes’ triangle method and a general sum formula.)
Just to put the class into a little perspective: I completely aced AP calculus in highschool, and I would say I felt like I knew what I was doing in reed’s math 111 course about 17% of the time. It’s very hard and very different but I think that goes for most of Reed.</p>
<p>And about the time warpy/backwards worries… uh, no. Haha Reed is probably the opposite. She may be studying old dead white men, but she’ll go into conference and be able to freely rip apart and dissect their philosophies and ideas within a very progressive and intellectual atmosphere. Reed isn’t instilling classical education values onto us for the sake of just knowing them… students think about them, place them within a contemporary context and critic while making personal judgments and opinions. It’s fun I promise :)</p>
<p>Lastly, about the smoking thing, I would like to point out that Reed is definitively open-minded. As in, if someone wants to smoke, we don’t place judgments on them or their intelligence. I think that’s where the ‘attitude’ that someone else spoke of is coming from. This isn’t a place where it’s ok to push personal value systems onto other people. That being said, I think you and your D should take a step back and look at what Reed stands for, as I see a lot of inconsistencies in the questions you’re asking and the school. You ask about SAT scores, but there is an extreme de-emphasis on numerical scoring here. You place judgments on smokers, but that practice of taking what you think and applying it to everyone else is something reedies consciously avoid. You’re looking at the rate of students who go on to earn PhD’s as an indicator of the level of intelligence and wondering about what reed can do for your daughter, but I’m worried that if you guys don’t take a closer look at what day-to-day life at reed is like (and the ideologies present within the student body), you’ll be unhappy and surprised.</p>
<p>I just ran onto that link myself vonlost.
If it helps, my oldest ( both kids actually) have math related learning disabilities, and while she took calc, she didnt hit the wall until ochem.
But calculus was fine. ( although she didnt take it freshman year- she had taken a year off after high school so her math wasnt fresh, she retook pre- calc the summer before sophomore year- she was already taking bio, chem & hum110, & we decided that was enough for her first year)</p>
<p>Originofother, I’m sorry if you don’t like my line of questioning. But Reed is a VERY expensive school given the SAT scores ranges and ranking (yes, I know they don’t “play” in the ranking space, but I also have no way of truly judging where they would come out if they did and if the school is really worth the expense). With no merit money, I am going to poke and prod at all of the weaknesses I see before being willing to shell out over $200,000 for an education there. Vague assurances that everyone there loves it are not enough for me… Don’t be too defensive, as I am also following up on lines of questioning at other schools that ask about what seem like possible weaknesses. I do appreciate your description of the calculus class. That is sort of what I though the answer would be, but it helps to have it confirmed.</p>
<p>I can say that the person I talked to who works at the college said that Reed students can be quite obtuse about whether their behaviors are hurting other individuals. This person said they have seen frequent examples where students use the honor principle as a shield when in fact the student’s behavior has been damaging to someone else. This person was actually quite complimentary of the intellectual abilities of Reed students, but did have this criticism. The defensiveness about smoking on campus seems like an example of this, as smoking does hurt others (second hand smoke illnesses, increased health care costs for the whole society, etc.). </p>
<p>As I said, my D liked it quite a bit and will apply. But as the person who pays the bills, I am going to ask a lot of questions before making a commitment if she is accepted.</p>
<p>So I didn’t look at all of the Pluralistic Ignorance results, but clicked through a few of them. General impression is that Reedies think they are “above average” compared to fellow student in almost all categories. They gave themselves better rankings than they gave Reed as a whole in most cases. That is probably more human nature than specific to Reed, but interesting. “Where all the children are above average”. :)</p>
<p>Yeah I read through the study and thought I saw a trend in the opposite direction as well… I even thought about warning you that it created a false sense of humbleness from the student body because… that’s not actually the case most of the time lol.</p>
<p>and I apologize if I seemed defensive, I was actually just trying to bring up some points that I think anyone here should be aware of before comitting (or shelling out the bucks, but I’ll let you know, the financial aid department is pretty fantastic. I come from a very low income family and not going into too many specifics, after all was said and done, we ended up paying about 4,000 a year. So while there isn’t a merit based, Reed really does try to meet demonstrated need from what I can tell.) In other news… the honor principle thing you heard about? I completely agree with what you were told… there’s a lot of twisting the honor principle to defend your actions without thinking of others. I’m still not agreeing with your views on smoking, as we try to be aware and there are spots that smokers gravitate to on campus that non-smokers can stay away from. But one example I can think of is the issue of graffiti we have, put simply: students use the honor principle to back their decision to tag, and the administration uses it to defend covering it up. It can get a little sticky, but I think over all, it creates a self-awareness that is a nice change from the usual rules/consequences method.</p>
<p>Hmm, the paradox page is interesting (and actually helpful in sorting some of this). Regarding the Pluralistic Ignorance, I was looking at the Moral & Legal Issues section… Reedies think they steal less frequently and cheat less frequently than others in the community, and they think they value the honor principle more than others. That is where my “above average” comment came from. I didn’t review all of the sections, some probably reveal other things.</p>
<p>Need based financial aid works well, obviously, for those with financial need. For those like me paying out of our own pockets, this is likely the biggest expenditure than I will make on any one thing in my life except a house. I didn’t save from the day my kid was born to waste the money… so am going to do a lot of digging and questioning. Reed’s calculator, by the way, shows zero financial aid for us. Some other schools do not. And my D is a very good candidate for merit aid at other schools. Obviously this is a choice that a lot of students have to make about Reed. I am not completely unwilling to do so, but it needs to be a compelling case in favor of the school to do so. And, of course, she has to be admitted. :)</p>
<p>Originofother, once you get past the initial calculus class, what are math courses like after that (if you have taken them)?</p>
<p>Well, I think it really depends on who you take math with. There are more traditionally taught math courses offered, but the two I took (calc, and then multi variable) were taught by the same scatter brained, philosophical, ‘lets look a little deeper’ professor who had a thing for giant proofs and not using numbers. My advice would be to just ask around when you’re picking out classes… each professor comes with their own bucket of commentary and students are normally very excited to tell you what’s to love or hate. Personally, I adored my year of math, it just happened to blow my mind.</p>
<p>Admissions is need aware, so there’s that in your daughters favor, although it is interesting that similar schools found need and Reed did not.
Although since that is just using the site based calculators and not comparing packages, I think that the jury is still out as to the accuracy.</p>
<p>As another example, NYU is FAFSA-only which routinely shows more need than PROFILE, but NYU doesn’t usually meet full need. So a Reed full-pay may indeed get some need-aid from NYU, and another student may get more need-aid from Reed than from NYU.</p>
<p>Although my D may get a small amount of need based aid her first year at some schools because my business has had some issues this year, odds are good that she will not after that. So I am really working under the assumption that I am probably paying pretty much the whole bill. </p>
<p>Thanks to everyone for the input… we will see where the admissions chips fall, and I may be back with more questions later. :)</p>
One thing they mentioned in the info session we attended is that they do not use calculators in the level 1 Calculus class. D was a bit disconcerted by this… so, she wondered, what do they DO in class? Are they using slide rules? Proving theorems or something for the whole semester? This left us a bit puzzled. D is fine with the freshman humanities courses (they sound like fun to her), although she is starting to wonder just how much of a “throwback” place Reed is with both this Calculus approach and the “old, dead, white men” (Reed’s phrase, not ours) humanities intense freshman courses. Obviously they produce (or attract?) great thinkers given the PhD production. But D is starting to wonder if it ever feels sort of backwards there, a bit “time warpy” was her phrase. Can anyone comment on that?</p>