<p>"I have a friend attending William & Mary and she's finding it very hard to make friends. Keep in mind she definitely wasn't socially inept back in high school."</p>
<p>I dont blame her...when you mix socially inept people with other socially inept people...awkardness.</p>
<p>Some facts on William & Mary. It is the most selective public university in the US (higher SAT scores than Berkeley) and 4 US presidents attended: Washington, Jefferson, Monroe & Tyler. Yes, grade deflation is an issue but average GPAs have been creeping up in the past few years from ~2.9 to 3.2. However, graduate schools recognize that a 3.0 at W&M is equivalent to a 3.6 at Duke and other schools with grade inflation. W&M also has a b-school and is developing an engineering school under the "Applied Science" moniker. Current endowment is $500 million and moving up fast under the recent charter initiative towards eventual privatization.</p>
<p>macsuile- how do you know that grad schools see a 3.0 at WM as the same as a 3.6 at Duke? thats a pretty big assumption to make, so i was just wondering where are the facts to back that up?</p>
<p>Admissions to CWM appears to be very quirky. My son was accepted to UVA and VT (in-state), UNC-CH, Toronto, and the film schools at FSU and the University of Southern California. He was waitlisted and then rejected at CWM. I thought he would be a perfect fit for them as a liberal artsy type of applicant. Guess he wasn't.</p>
<p>Huskem55 - Check out an article on the UVa website called "Tuition Tainted Grades." I think it is in their Cavalier newsletter archives. It highlights the grading scale differentials between major US universities. They probably got the data from the Carnegie Foundation.</p>
<p>I just noticed MAcsuile blitzed a number of threads discussing how WM is basically the best school on the planet without backing any of it up, I would ignore most of what he/she says</p>
<p>Saying a 3.0 at WM, which is less competetive to get into and less respected by peers (going by peer reviews, where Duke is aligned with Dartmouth Columbia Brown and Penn and I'm not sure where WM is), is equal to a 3.6 at Duke is...well...haha don't know the words for it</p>
<p>That being said...WM is awesome andbeauuuuutiful</p>
<p>Haven't engaged in any unfounded hyperbole. All of my claims are objective. Check the SAT scores for public universities. I will back up any assertion. Trying to remove the hype from this forum.</p>
<p>The highest SAT score is misleading. Berkeley only takes the best score of one sitting. If this restriction were removed, I'd bet that the scores would rise considerably. William and Mary take combined (as does UVA).</p>
<p>There we go, 25/75 SAt scores according to collegeboard, I'm not sure what you were trying to prove but those are it, are WMs supposed to be higher than Duke's?</p>
<p>macsuile - the "Tuition Tainted Grades" article - from 1997 - appears to be beyond the publicly available archived articles for The Cavalier Daily. The snippet that is available through Google certainly seems interesting if you happen to know of an active link.</p>
<p>IDC - that's a totally wrong, urban legend. From link:</a>
[quote]
RUMOR: William and Mary has the highest student suicide rate in the nation.
STATUS: False.</p>
<p>The real problem with this most notorious of all campus rumors is that it reduces suicide to a mere statistic, ignoring the tragedy for the sake of mere shock value. That said, the legend fortunately wilts in the hard light of truth. Dr. Kelly Crace, director of the Colleges counseling center, notes that the most recent surveys on suicide place the annual figure at 10 per 100,000 15-to-24-year-olds. Reduced to William and Marys enrollment of 7,500, that would correspond to an average rate of 7.5 suicides every 10 years. But the College has recorded a total of 11 suicides since 1968 far below the national average.
The question of how the rumor got started in the first place is murkier. Crace notes that one possible origin could be guilt by association. The College has had in place for 30 years a proactive policy designed to intervene when students threaten to harm themselves. Now called the Medical Emotional Emergency Policy, it was once called the Suicide Policy, and received national attention for its progressive nature. Of course, its possible that many people assumed the College wouldnt have in place such a comprehensive policy if there wasnt already a problem hence the pervasive rumor.
<p>The fact that there is a suicide rumor speaks more about William and Mary than the actual statistics.</p>
<p>The reason the rumor was started was because of the complaints and stories coming from the social life and challenging academics. With that said, most people underrate William and Mary's intellectual student body. The kids there are usually very intelligent and hard-working. </p>
<p>"Haven't engaged in any unfounded hyperbole. All of my claims are objective. Check the SAT scores for public universities. I will back up any assertion. Trying to remove the hype from this forum."</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is that it is a highly-stressed atmosphere. More than the college norm.</p>
<p>I have a friend that needed four credits to graduate at W&M. She couldn't take it and ended up transferring and having to make up a bunch of credits at a different college. Its that stressful. Plus, its got an extremely low social life.</p>