<p>^Using data on collegeboard, I just found that the SAT range for the enrolled students is 30 points lower than that for admitted students. So the range for enrolled SFS students is probably more like 1330-1530.</p>
<p>Sam Lee,</p>
<p>1)SFS does not publish its enrolled figure at the College Board so your figure is an estimate and if anything, since SFS is the preeminent school in its field, the enrolling class may well have higher SATs than the accepted group alluded to at the GU website. If logic is at play here, I think you estimate higher, but we each have our prejudices here and can’t know for sure.</p>
<p>2) Of top schools on the semester basis you are mistaken, four courses is the norm. I went to an Ivy League grad school and all my classmates from the institutions you mention who had semester classes did the same amount of work -generally a 20 page research paper and 2 three hour exams that I did at SFS, only I had to do it times five instead of times four.</p>
<p>3) I don’t know how you can state that a garden variety tenured PhD is superior to a person who rose to become one of 190 Heads of State in the world (which has 6.5 billion people) or one of about 20 cabinet members of an administration or one of 100 US Senators. The silliness astounds even someone like me who has encountered a lot of silliness in my lifetime.</p>
<p>would truman state university be considered academically pretty challeging???</p>
<p>^^ Is a professional scholar or a professional politician more likely to make a challenging college professor? There may be no correlation at all. Or, it may depend on the nature of the material and the kind of challenge the student wants.</p>
<p>Practical experience and theoretical knowledge do not necessarily coincide in the same accomplished person. Professional politicians typically do not have expert theoretical knowlege in the areas affecting their decisions. They have consultants who do. So to be successful, they must have pretty good BS detectors, which could make them formidable leaders in a classroom discussion. Many professional scholars tend to develop the same skill in addition to expert theoretical knowledge. They also need to be genuinely curious about new ideas and adept at pushing them to their limits. I would think that being overly accustomed to deference could be a liability for a professor … but I suppose it depends on what you think are the major aims of a college education.</p>
<p>^ I agree- also it depends on the major field. Academics ar every important in the hard sciences and people with industrial experience might not be that useful. However some fields might be biased towards people with practical experience in the field as opposed to pure academics. I know some fields of engineering are like that- where industry experience would be great for teaching a class, while academic experience would be better for teaching another type of class. I dont know where IR falls into.</p>
<p>But 9 out of 10 academics beat people with practical experience any day any time.</p>
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</p>
<p>My estiamte was a reasonable extrapolation. Your argument makes no sense. If SFS is such a “preeminent school” in its field as you said, it should follow that only those with even better options (i.e. the highest scoring group) would want to turn it down. Why would the relatively low scoring admits with fewer/inferior options turn down such a “preeminent schoool”? So enrolled stats of SFS should go down, not up. The admitted students’ SAT range is already not in the top-5 (as you claimed) or even top-10; the enrolled stats may even be outside the top-15 if it’s indeed just around 1330-1530. </p>
<p>
I’d think professors at top schools are among the leading experts, not just “garden variety”. You may be impressed with the intellectual capacity of Bush or Larry Craig; I don’t. Regardless, the “superior” ones don’t necessarily make the class more challenging.</p>
<p>
Muuuddd… MUUUUDDDDD… Harvey Mudd. </p>
<p>How could this school not be on either of your lists while schools like Swarthmore or Amherst make it? Mudd is at least as difficult as CalTech.</p>
<p>Quote:</p>
<p>“3) I don’t know how you can state that a garden variety tenured PhD is superior to a person who rose to become one of 190 Heads of State in the world (which has 6.5 billion people) or one of about 20 cabinet members of an administration or one of 100 US Senators. The silliness astounds even someone like me who has encountered a lot of silliness in my lifetime.”</p>
<p>vienna man,</p>
<p>Oh, Jeeez!!! I think most adults know what it takes to be a “head of state.” You think they “rose”? I think the majority sunk. Do you honestly think that to rise in politics requires honesty, integrity, sincerity, knowledge and ability? I think these qualities would be a hindrance. Do you think that, even if a politician managed to rise despite adhering to those principles or possessing those qualities h/she would necessarily be a good teacher?</p>
<p>Astounding silliness indeed.</p>
<p>I’ve heard Case Western is very challenging academically, right after MIT. It was some article I read a while back.</p>
<p>Sam Lee,</p>
<p>I am indeed impresed with the intellectual vitality of people like Madeliene Albright or Anthony Lake or Durao Barrasso or Michael Oren or Robert Galluci or Jose Aznar or Alvaro Uribe or George Tenet or Chuck Hagel or too many to be named former practicioner-scholars that are found at SFS. While people may hate politicians or past political appointees, I think they bring an extra measure of value to the larger coterie of pure and mind you extraordinarily distinguished scholars that teach there. That is why many of the indisputably most brilliant students in the nation choose to enroll there.</p>
<p>Also, many of thee people would and did qualify as pure academinicians before entering into political life.</p>
<p>Sam Lee,</p>
<p>Since you choose to make a series of unsupportable speculations, I think I am entitled as well. I think that if you were to attend any first year SFS class and offered to pay $50 a piece for any freshman who could write home and produce an acceptance letter from any of the US News top 5 schools you would be one very poor and hugely embarrased person.</p>
<p>^But Sam Lee,if you did stick around for the class, you would probably learn something.</p>
<p>And WilliamsDad if he attended class with one of these practicioner-scholars like Uribe or Hagel might lose his prejudice against politicians as a class.</p>
<p>Learning for everybody.</p>
<p>
So when you can’t refute an argument, you ignore it and accuse the other person of making “unsupportable speculations”. I also don’t see how those acceptance letters got anything to with what I said about SAT range for admitted students compared to enrolled students. Almost 50% of the SFS admits matriculated elsewhere; I hope you are not so impressed with your school that you actually thought the yield is 100%! </p>
<p>Speaking of making “unsupportable speculations”, you’ve been the one doing just that.</p>
<p>Sam Lee</p>
<p>If I have any degree of unconscious arrogance, please blame it on my Ivy League graduate degree since you have been flailing at SFS too much in one day in my opinion.</p>
<p>There is this urban legend about grade inflation at Harvard because the average GPA there is over 3.4. Why should that be surprising? The median GPA for admitted students is 3.9. To earn that 3.4, Harvard students have to keep up in class with classmates who push the pace and expectations of in-class settings to the limit.</p>
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</p>
<p>So you get most of the top applicants in the world to all apply to the same school and then turn down 93% of them. The remaining 7% have known nothing but success in their academic lives and have rarely gotten Bs. They were hand-picked because they fit a profile for success. Why would you expect any of them to flunk out? Ever?</p>
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</p>
<p>You’re making a series of stereotypical, faulty assumptions about Harvard:</p>
<p>1) Kids admitted to Harvard aren’t as ‘elite’ as you’d like to think. Many of them are great students, no doubt. Top SATs, top grades, top boarding schools. But you can’t deny that a lot of these kids were privileged students from rich families/schools that make them prep for the SAT like crazy. They’re not naturally intellectually inclined, so once they’re out of the crazy college prep process driven by their parents, you’d expect many of them to start fading.</p>
<p>Also, haven’t seen an intellectually mature high school student. Ever. And the results come out rather randomly. Many kid geniuses don’t grow up to be terribly successful, for instance.</p>
<p>2) What you said about Harvard could also be said about Caltech, which has higher SATs than Harvard. Then why does Caltech have such a low graduation percentage while Harvard has such a high one? There’s a difference in educational difficulty, that’s why.</p>
<p>But this shouldn’t be a surprise. Harvard has commented that its curriculum is made for students who achieve around 500-600 on each section of the SAT. Harvard’s goal isn’t to educate.</p>
<p>
The same is true for Berkeley, UCLA and dozens of lesser universities.</p>
<p>Their students don’t have a whopping 3.4 GPA average. Grade inflation in Harvard is real.</p>
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</p>
<p>completely disagree, it’s one thing to give your students C’s and punish them for being lazy, entirely another to have them drop out because they couldn’t cope. Caltech’s lower graduation rate is more likely to be due from a lack of support for students fairing poorly. You can have a challenging curriculum and still have a very high proportion graduate, just lower the average GPA a little (for example), but kids not being able to graduate tells me Caltech isn’t doing it’s job at educating it’s students. </p>
<p>Princeton for example has a rigorous curriculum in most majors, with some level of grade deflation, they still manage a very high graduation rate.</p>
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</p>
<p>But that’s not what happens - at least, not regarding Harvard vs. Caltech. Harvard did not lower its average GPA while still providing a challenging curriculum - let’s face it: Harvard has one of the highest average GPA’s of any school in the country, certainly higher than Caltech’s. That indicates that Harvard may not be running the most challenging curriculum. </p>
<p>But there’s an even more important factor at work. See below. </p>
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</p>
<p>Well, actually, most of the problem doesn’t seem to be specific to Caltech, but is rather a consequence of the nationwide difference in grading between technical vs. nontechnical majors. For almost surely unjustifiable reasons, hard science, math & engineering courses are, on average, far more likely to flunk out students than are courses in the social sciences and (especially) the humanities. Hence, any school that has a high percentage of science, math and engineering students is going to (sadly) experience a lowered graduation rate. </p>
<p>This is especially salient at a school such as Caltech where there truly is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: even the rare nontechnical majors must nevertheless pass the Caltech undergraduate science/math requirements that all students, regardless of major, are forced to complete. On the other hand, plenty of Harvard and Princeton students major in social sciences and humanities in which it is practically impossible to actually fail. {They might get mediocre grades, but they won’t actually fail.} </p>
<p>Now, granted, you might argue that technical majors in general do not properly support their students - and to that, I would heartily agree - but that’s a fundamentally different stance than simply singling out Caltech. After all, that then leads to the cynical conclusion that any school who wants to boost its graduation rate can do so by simply reducing the number of students majoring in technical subjects, or by not even offering certain technical subjects at all. {Many top private schools do not even offer engineering at all.} Yet somebody has to educate the aspiring science, eng, and math majors in the country. </p>
<p>Consider what happens at Duke with regards to the different grading schemes in the engineering school vs. the social sciences: </p>
<p>*Q.</p>
<p>You argue in the report that grading disparities between science/technical fields and less technical ones are scaring off American students: is there evidence for that? My sense is that most people (certainly including graduate schools) know which disciplines are harder and take that into account when comparing students. Or were you seeing students at Duke who were planning on studying applied math, were scared off by B’s and B-minuses, and switched to art history instead? — Abigail, Calif.
A.</p>
<p>Duke is actually a good example of the loss of talent in science and technology that happens in college.</p>
<p>Unlike most colleges and universities, Duke’s undergraduate engineering school has a separate admissions office. Every year it has to oversubscribe its admissions because many students will leave the engineering school and transfer into arts and sciences after a year, typically majoring in the social sciences. When you ask students why they make this move, they often say it’s because of the workload and grading.</p>
<p>There is also significant attrition across college campuses when it comes to potential biology majors, typically those who initially wanted to go into medical fields. Again, the driver for this attrition is workload and grading.</p>
<p>There are those who argue that this attrition is a good thing, and I would agree to some extent. We don’t want mediocrity in the design of our bridges and machines, or in a hospital operating room. But some of this attrition is undoubtedly unnecessary.</p>
<p>I don’t want to dwell on Duke, but many of those who move out of engineering have the talent to excel. In conversations with them, I have heard a common story about seeing people in dorms partying away and wondering, “Why not me?”</p>
<p>That’s what I mean by unnecessary (and harmful) attrition. I don’t believe that the sciences and engineering should demand less of their students. Rather, the social sciences and humanities need to demand more.*</p>
<p>[Grade</a> Inflation: Your Questions Answered - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/grade-inflation-your-questions-answered/]Grade”>Grade Inflation: Your Questions Answered - The New York Times)</p>
<p>How is Brown on these lists when 2/3 of grades given are A’s? Students can basically do nothing and get at least a B. I think you guys are just listing prestigious schools and leaving out schools that are the most challenging like Harvey Mudd, Georgia Tech, and Olin</p>