<p>Bemidji State University accounting graduates pass the CPA exam at a higher rate than the state average, and the campus includes a 240-acre private forest.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure what your metric of “fair” is, but colleges probably want people who are going to impact the world. This isn’t idealism - people who impact the world (be it do something Nobel-worthy or start a big successful company) will be noticed, and that boosts the institutions they’ve been part of, and they’ll probably also make a good amount of money that they can give back. </p>
<p>You could be a genius sitting in your mom’s basement playing video games all day, I don’t see why that would make one deserving of admission to a top school. I’d love to hear your reasoning here :P</p>
<p>I have many friends from MIT and Caltech, and most of us aren’t geniuses. We do have some geniuses, but most people are just above-average smart and willing to do some amount of work (in varying degrees). I’m not convinced geniuses tend to congregate in one place.</p>
<p>When I think “intelligent students”, the first college that comes to mind is Deep Springs College.</p>
<p>UCLA Engineers.</p>
<p>It is hard to measure genius as there are probably several kinds. Think painters, poets and composers as well as math/physics. The painters might end up at RISD. Math/physics types might end up at Princeton/Harvard and MIT/CalTech. CS types I’d just be guessing at Stanford/CMU. Poets and composers, no idea. Then there are the folks who can play games of strategy better than others (chess or poker). Some are probably equivalently gifted.</p>
<p>I doubt that kids who are very smart but haven’t demonstrated it by hard work of some kind are getting in to these places. However, it may be easier for some to excel than others.</p>
<p>“I really don’t think that we should go there, given that there is no solid way to test the intelligence of the student bodies of universities. If I were forced to guess, I would probably go with some place like Harvard, but getting accepted there is mostly hard work from what I can see. There are all kinds of problems even if we do this, because we could go with MIT if we think that STEM students are smarter than liberal arts students, but are they? How are we defining “smart?””</p>
<p>This, exactly.</p>
<p>There are many different types of intelligence, and so the “smartest” people can be found, really, anywhere. Also, financial limitations could also prevent some of the brightest people from being able to attend their “dream school,” or some may not even want to go to a top university to begin with.</p>
<p>Saying only one school has the smartest people is fallacious reasoning.</p>
<p>So, is the question “What college has the most under-achieving ‘smart’ students”?</p>
<p>In that case, I’d look at the local community college, trade schools, and the military.</p>
<p>Because places like MIT, Caltech, Princeton, etc, have plenty of very smart students who <em>did</em> put in the work.</p>
<p>(btw, I’m not making implying any negative judgements, here - I’d be a poster child for what you describe - I always tested at the very top, yet my academic record was a disaster - I was bored, no doubt had attention-deficit issues, and, yes, was easily tempted to laziness. Some of us just aren’t equipped for ‘traditional’ educational delivery methods. But I thrived in tech school and military schools, where I’d spend 8-12 hours a day on a single subject.)</p>
<p>As the scare quotes betray the idea of inside the OP, the answer depends greatly on one’s definition of “smartest.”</p>
<p>Frankly, I think sub-genius hard workers deserve to get in more than genius slackers, and I’m closer to the latter category. Predictably, I’m going to my safety school.</p>
<p>In most schools, it is very easy to maintain a 4.0 with very little effort (my public school is nationally ranked and its still easy as hell). Honestly if they can’t even get reasonable grades with minimal effort I would not call them brilliant, unless they skipped most days of school.</p>
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I’d love to know how to get an A in APUSH without ever reading the textbook. Or maybe your idea of “very little effort” is different from mine.</p>
<p>I admit, history classes take more time than any other class. 2 hours per week outside of school as opposed to 0-.5 for other classes. Foreign language, math, and science generally are very easy to get good grades in without studying. But really I wouldn’t consider 3 hours a week “much work”</p>
<p>How does one measure how “smart” a person is? How does one define “smart” at all?</p>
<p>Probably UChicago. Just my guess.</p>
<p>Another one of these truly stupid CC threads. No really smart person – neither a lazy genius nor a mere hard worker – would actually list a single school as a serious answer to this utterly bone-headed question. My goodness, folks! Get jobs!</p>
<p>The real answer: no ONE school has the smartest students.</p>
<p>The most brilliant people I’ve known, those truly breaking new ground, walked away from academia early in the process because even the best schools are woefully restricted in what they are able or willing to explore.</p>
<p>So, you’re not going to find the real geniuses in classrooms or institutional research labs.</p>
<p>Also, keep in mind that a lot of people, by financial or family circumstance, can only go to a local public college. Their brilliance remains intact, despite not having the stamp of approval validation. I’ve met quite a few of those types, too.</p>
<p>For as smart and sophisticated as everyone on this forum likes to think they are, I think there’s an almost child-like fear of complexity on here and a need to categorize everybody into simple boxes - the smart kids only go to X, Y, or Z. The dumb kids go over here… And it is largely based on one of the most ineffective measures of intelligence: testing.</p>
<p>There was a thread a few weeks ago where people were gushing over a new ranking of private prep schools, not realizing the entire site doing the ranking was this bizarro Christian cult / for-profit online school promotion. The participants in that thread were so eager to categorize and rank another level of schooling that they ignored the source entirely.</p>
<p>It’s just a very dangerous mindset that is going to cause many people on this forum to overlook true brilliance in favor of credentials. I used to be guilty of this myself before my eyes were forced open.</p>
<p>Any problem that can be formulated properly can also be solved efficiently. So the first thing to do is to formulate the problem here.
Op’s Question:
</p>
<p>The question can be formulated as two distinctive points.
- What we mean by ‘smart people’?
- Which school has a large concentration of such people?</p>
<p>** Let’s first formulate what we mean by ‘smart people’? **</p>
<p>A smart person is the one who not only possess knowledge but also is able to use or apply it to unknown situation effectively. So first and foremost smart people are the one who are problem solvers.
Hence one can quantify the problem as
- Knowledge
- Formulation of problems
- Applying effective solutions efficiently (speed to get to the correct solution)</p>
<p>]B]Let’ formulate the second part i.e. which school has a large concentration of such people? **</p>
<p>A school that provides a breeding ground for smart people has to have a large concentration of such smart people. What constitute a breeding ground?
- A place with ample resources to carry out research.
- A curriculum that enhance problem solving techniques provide challenging problem as part of any subject matter
- A large number of smart faculty members and peer group to provide conducive environment
- A collaborative culture that promotes creativity, intelligent solutions</p>
<p>** Now let’s see who smart people are to begin with. **
- Knowledge – Students from all stream qualify to be smart
- Formulation of problems – Since I’m positive that non STEM field doesn’t encourage much of problem formulation this narrow the field to STEM
- Problem solving – Most of the STEM fields encourage problem solving but Physics, Math, or Engineering has more than others in the STEM fields narrowing it further.</p>
<p>**Now let’s see which schools actually can be narrowed when answering the 4 questions in the 2nd part. **
- Top elite universities are in much better position than other so it provide handful of schools to concentrate on i.e. Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, U Chicago etc.
- Not all Ivies and top universities have curriculum that can be considered as challenging and with grade inflation doesn’t seem to encourage creative problem solving. The schools that come to mind with this are Caltech, U Chicago and MIT.
- The faculty at all 3 schools in #2 is more or less equal but MIT and Caltech should have a slight edge over U. Chicago but the yield of MIT is far greater than Caltech and U. Chicago so the peer group at MIT should far exceed the other two.
- The environment at MIT is very collaborative and the curriculum is very challenging. The PSET (Problem Set) of MIT courses are very creative and the PSET from the same course from one semester to another is not same. The courses are graded to distinguish solutions from nice to super innovative. </p>
<p>** So from 1 and 2 it can be seen that MIT seems like the most appropriate school to have a large concentration of people that can be identified by part 1 as ‘smart people’. **</p>
<p>I hope the explanation makes sense to both ‘smart’ and ‘not so smart’ people on CC.</p>
<p>^
That’s a long ways to go to make a bad joke:</p>
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<p>We’ll just let Pollack, Twain, Hemingway, Rodin, Confucius, Rumi, Kierkegaard, Plato, Dante, and Michaelangelo know they didn’t make your cut for being smart.</p>
<p>So much ignorance on this forum.</p>
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osmosis explains good grades and test scores, but even then, strength in different subjects varies.
but osmosis still doesn’t explain ECs. there is no way you can have excellent ECs without putting in a good amount of effort. sure, some people use more effort than others, but no one can get good ECs with little effort.</p>
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<p>Certainly, being famous doesn’t make someone smart. There are lots of people who are famous because they can ‘dunk a ball’, ‘use a brush’, ‘play an instrument’, ‘ sing a song’, ‘govern a country’ etc. but not all famous people are smart.
I defined the term ‘smart people’ and answer according to that definition. I stand by my problem formulation and the explanation.
You can try defining the term ‘smart people’ as ‘artistic’ and provide the solution.</p>